someone who needed color like other people needed to breathe. Carrick would get used to her clothes and if he didn’t...
Tough.
She’d changed for one man, toned down her clothes, swallowed her thoughts and opinions and designed her life around a man who’d repaid her by having numerous affairs with everyone from her cousin to her masseuse. She would never dim her shine again, not for anyone.
Sadie looked past Carrick’s very broad right shoulder to his stupendous view. The afternoon sun was starting to sink and the light held a touch of the same rose-pink Degas used for the dancers’ tutus in his work Dancers in Pink. Or was it closer to the color of that rose Renoir painted in Gabrielle à la Rose?
Ooh, now she saw a hint of orange...
Carrick’s knuckles rapping on the window brought her back to the present. She expected him to look annoyed, so his amusement was a surprise.
“Something happening on the common I should know about?”
Sadie took a moment to make sense of his words. She shook her head and waved at the window. “I have this habit of seeing colors in terms of art.”
Confusion flashed in those grape-green eyes. “I don’t understand.”
Normally, she didn’t try to explain, but for some inexplicable reason, she wanted Carrick to understand her obsession with color. Maybe if he did, they’d have something in common, a connection.
Something other than sex...
Seeing his interest, she looked down onto the busy street, trying to find an object to make her point. A woman cut across the common, wearing a yellow coat.
Sadie gripped Carrick’s sleeve, her fingertips digging into the corded muscle of his forearm. She wanted to let go, but she could feel his heat, smell his clean, fresh skin.
“That woman, the one wearing yellow, do you see her?”
“Yeah.”
Her fingers remained on his arm, as if stuck there with superglue. “Name the first painting that comes to mind where the artist used that color.”
Carrick didn’t hesitate. “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers.”
“Too easy. Try again.”
“Andy Warhol’s banana on the sleeve of The Velvet Underground’s record?”
“Nope, try again,” Sadie suggested.
“Jeez, you’re tough.” Carrick’s brow furrowed in concentration. “Gustav Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer?”
Okay, that was a really good answer. “Better,” she reluctantly admitted.
Carrick’s laughter was low and rumbly. “Think you can do better?”
Please. “It reminds me of that untitled Mark Rothko work sold in New York a few years back.” She cocked her head to the side. “Or maybe it’s the color of The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis by Rembrandt.”
She felt Carrick’s eyes on her profile, and she couldn’t look at him, not sure if she wanted to see whether he was impressed or not.
“You know your art,” Carrick said.
“I have a PhD in art history, so I should,” Sadie replied, her tone crisp. Then she realized that she was stroking Carrick’s arm like he was a cat with a particularly luxurious coat. She looked down at her hand, blushed and yanked it away.
“Sorry, along with color, I’m also a textile freak. And your suit is so soft, so...touchable.”
Yeah, sure, the fabric was wonderfully soft, but that wasn’t the real reason she was touching his arm.
Stop thinking about that night, Slade, and take your hand off his arm.
Sadie moved away from Carrick, folded her arms and hauled in a deep breath, telling herself to act like a professional.
Carrick stared down at the Common and they silently watched the Boston residents taking advantage of the cold, clear afternoon. After a minute of silence, Carrick pointed to a woman dressed in a fuchsia-colored coat and walking two elegant, very well behaved Great Danes.
“The pink coat of the woman walking the Great Danes is the same color as the floor in Matisse’s The Pink Studio,” he said.
“Or the pink in O’Keeffe’s It Was Yellow and Pink.”
They could talk about art, thank goodness. It was a neutral subject, something they were both passionate about. And far safer than their other mutual interest: their fascination with each other’s bodies.
“I also think it’s the same color as your nipples after I lave them with my tongue.”
It took Sadie a few seconds for his words to sink in and she flushed, immediately catapulted back to that night and the shooting, aching ribbons of pleasure running through her, heating her from the inside out. Sadie couldn’t look at him; she knew that if she did, if she saw the passion in his eyes, she’d fly into his arms and curl herself around him.
Not exactly appropriate behavior for a conference meeting. His clients might feel slightly in the way.
Sadie placed her hands on the glass and stared down at the small cars and tiny people. The dog walker was gone but the pedestrians below often tipped their faces to the weak sun, enjoying the little heat on offer.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that night.”
Sadie groaned and placed her forehead on the glass between her hands. She couldn’t stop thinking about it, either, but she didn’t want to admit that, didn’t want to continue this conversation because Carrick’s observations both bemused and befuddled her.
The only thing she was sure of was that she couldn’t talk art and paintings and forensics while memories of that night swirled around her overheated brain.
“Carrick, please stop talking about it.”
Carrick moved closer, and Sadie could feel his heat. “Why? Because you regret it or because talking about it makes you hot?”
This wasn’t the behavior of a man intent on avoiding her. After he left and didn’t call or text, she’d assumed he considered her as just another casual hookup and had moved on. His comments suggested he wouldn’t mind a repeat.
Neither, dammit, would she.
But that would be foolish and Sadie wasn’t generally a foolish woman. Except she had totally lost her head when she allowed Carrick Murphy to push her up against the wall in her apartment and kiss her senseless.
She could lie to herself and say she wished she hadn’t slept with him, but she couldn’t force herself, even mentally, to issue such a whopper. She didn’t regret what they’d done, the hot evening they’d shared, but she had to move on. Now, immediately.
But man, when she
