He tossed her blouse over his shoulder and bent to the hard nipples that had been driving him crazy since dinner. Just as he sucked one of them into his mouth, he felt the cool breath of the room on his back as she peeled off his shirt and threw it aside.
The feel of her hands on the fly of his jeans made him flush with heat.
“Condom,” he managed.
“Where?” she said against his bare chest, biting him with tiny little movements of her head.
“Back pocket.”
“I was hoping for the front.”
His laugh became a groan as one of her hands opened his fly and the other hand fished slowly for a condom in one of his back pockets.
“You’re a tease,” he said.
“You’re worth teasing.”
The approval in her voice and her hand stroking him almost made him lose it right there.
“Other pocket,” he said hoarsely.
Her hand slid inside his underwear and emerged a few seconds later wrapped around him. He said something low and rough as her fingers and then her mouth caressed him.
“That’s it,” he said. “School’s out.”
A few seconds later Jill found herself naked and on her back next to the fire. Zach went to his knees between her legs, slid the condom into place, and tested her heat with his finger. Her liquid response and the scent of her arousal made him glad he was already on his knees, because sure as hell she would have brought him there. She was slick and hot and tight, her skin flushed with passion, her hips lifting to meet his touch.
He tried to push gently into her, but it was too late. She was way too hungry for any more play and so was he. He flexed his hips and entered her in a hard thrust, filling her.
Jill’s breath came out in a throaty cry that made Zach go completely still.
“Too soon?” he asked through clenched teeth.
When she didn’t answer, he started to withdraw. Then he felt the rhythmic contractions of her release around him, caressing him, taking him with her over the edge of passion. He thrust hard, deep, fast, then shuddered, pumping into her until the world went black.
Zach didn’t know how long it was before he became aware of the fire crackling nearby, the feel of Jill’s palms stroking his back, the softness and strength of her body beneath him.
“I’m crushing you,” he said.
She laughed breathlessly. “Yeah, but I like it. Good thing, because there’s a lot of you to like.”
He nuzzled against her throat, then rolled onto his side, taking her with him, still buried inside her. “Sorry. Usually I’m not so quick off the mark.”
“I rarely get off the mark at all,” she said, stretching out against his chest with a sigh. “I’m still wondering what happened. And how to make it happen again.”
Lazily he ran his fingertips down her spine and between her tight, sexy cheeks, then lower, where she was still hot and wet.
Her breath broke. “Zach?”
“Mmm?”
“Isn’t it too soon?”
“Not for you.”
She started to ask what he meant but found she couldn’t breathe. She could only respond to the sleek probe of his fingers, the pressure, the rub and glide and tug, the fire burning up from his touch to consume her whole body.
He smiled at the feel of her climax. When she finally stilled and lay like a steamy rag against him, he slid slowly out of her.
She made a grumpy cat sound.
He laughed and hauled her to her feet. “Time for bed.”
She yawned. “I like it here better.”
“Come morning, you’ll be thanking me.”
“I’m thanking you all over the place right now.”
Zach grabbed his jeans, scooped out more condoms, and looked at her. “Hope you’re not too sleepy, because I’ve got some tasting and licking in mind.”
Jill gave him a sideways, lazy kind of smile. “Where?”
“All over the place.”
SEPTEMBER 15
11:07 P.M.
Garland Frost sat surrounded by paintings, brooding over the collection. Dunstan’s catalogue raisonné was open on the desk. As comparisons went, the photos were nearly useless, but it was all he had to work with besides his own two paintings.
The more he looked at the unsigned canvases and the catalogue raisonné and his two Dunstans, the more convinced he was that Jill Breck’s canvases were indeed Dunstan’s work. Despite the female figures, despite the Indian Springs painting with its now-quaint gas station, despite the lack of signatures.
The paintings simply had to be Dunstan’s work, or the work of a forger so brilliant that there was no meaningful difference between forgery and art.
An artist’s true signature was in the brushstrokes, the energy, the choice of colors, the feel of space or the lack of it, the feel of peace or the lack of it, all the thousands of small artistic decisions that added up to one uniquely Dunstan canvas.
These were Thomas Dunstans.
All Frost had to do was prove it.
Exhilaration bubbled through him, giving him the kind of charge that he thought he’d lost to age. But it was all there, all waiting, needing only the introduction of something worthy of interest into a life that had slowly gone stale.
He felt like waking up Zach and hugging him. But he suspected Zach wouldn’t welcome the interruption.
Smiling, Frost did what he’d done many times in the past few hours. He picked up each canvas in turn and examined it front, back, and sides. He was missing something important. He knew it.
He just didn’t know what it was.
With an impatient sound he opened the laptop that he used for research. He scanned again the mentions he had found of Dunstan, the old photos of his work, the learned words describing the indescribable.
“Idiots and fools,” Frost muttered. “Especially Lee Dunstan. Man no more knows art than horseshit knows heaven.”
Absently Garland ran his fingertips lightly over the side of the Indian Springs canvas, thinking about Dunstan and art and life and the unknown. When he realized that his fingertips returned to the same spot on the canvas stretcher again and again, he stopped, then repeated the light movement, this time conscious of what he was doing.
Definitely a different texture.
He flipped the canvas so that it was bottom side up to look at what he’d felt. It could have been just an extra-thick bit of paint that intrigued his fingertips, but he couldn’t be sure in this light. He took the canvas over to his desk, angled the bright light, and frowned over the bottom edge of the canvas wrapped around the stretcher, a part of the painting that wouldn’t show after the canvas was framed.
He switched to black light and turned off the desk lamp. He looked at the result for a minute, then began going over the bottom edge of each painting with the black light.
Halfway through the examination, he was grinning. By the time he was done, he was laughing with the sheer exuberance of having discovered something fresh and wonderful at a time in his life when everything had seemed old and flat.
“Zach, my boy, you’re going to kiss me on all four cheeks in the morning, and what’s more, you’ll thank me for the opportunity.”
Still grinning, Frost started nailing down the truth with some online research.