through Thursday and then on Fridays he came in an hour early and left an hour later. Maybe that had created a perception of tardiness, but he wasn’t sure why he had to explain that to her.
He added, “I’m friendly. I like people. Since when is that a crime?” It was actually the main reason he loved his job. He got to interact with both people in the office and out in the field. It was an industry of meetings, social gatherings, sporting events and fund-raisers. He covered them all, and enjoyed all of it. He may have lost his spot covering sports over a little press-pass snafu, but in the end he had given a longtime buddy who had cancer a once-in-a-lifetime shot at meeting the Cleveland Browns football players, and so he couldn’t regret his demotion.
If anything, writing his arts and entertainment column had opened up a whole new part of the city to him. And he was doing a damn good job, thank you very much. None of that seemed to matter to Emma, though.
It bugged the crap out of him that she made it sound like he was on the verge of violating sexual harassment laws. “And I don’t flirt with you,” he pointed out.
Her gasp of outrage indicated that wasn’t perhaps the best argument he could have used. The woman standing in front of him, who had originally been in line behind Emma, gave him a look confirming this. She shook her head slightly in what was clearly a friendly warning.
“Because I respect you,” he added. Usually that response could get a guy out of a veritable ton of trouble. It was akin to whitewashing graffiti in his experience.
“You’re a douche bag,” Emma said succinctly. “Respect that.”
So Emma definitely wasn’t like other women. While most ladies he knew thought he was charming, Emma read it as bullshit. That was something he wasn’t sure how to fix. Nor was he sure why he cared, but for some reason he did. For months it had been bothering him that Emma hadn’t warmed to him, and now it felt like a twofold mission—to force her to appreciate his good qualities and to determine why she thought work and fun had to be mutually exclusive.
“Maybe I don’t flirt with you because you’re mean to me,” he told her mildly, figuring arguing back was a tactic that wouldn’t work with Emma. It would just give her an excuse to stomp away from him indignantly. If he were calm, maybe it would calm her down.
She snorted. “I am not mean to you.” Weighted plastic hit him in the back. “Hold my bag,” she demanded.
Kyle figured that was an invitation to turn around.
So he did.
And was so glad he did.
Emma was fairly quivering with outrage from their conversation, goose bumps all over her skin, her eyes wide and snappish. The bag she was shoving at him no longer covered her breasts. They jiggled from her movements, free from their bra. Yes, he was looking. Yes, he felt zero guilt for looking. He just took the bag and waited with great interest as she stood, arms out, to receive her coating of green paint.
“You look ridiculous,” she told him, jumping with a shriek as the first spray of cool paint hit her.
“You don’t look so elegant yourself,” he told her. Only she didn’t look ridiculous. She looked delicious. Bouncy and juicy and flushed. Even her annoyance was hot. He liked to think that passion would translate to the bedroom, that when she let her cool mask of professionalism slip, she would tear a man up. She would be bossy and demanding, pushing him down while she drew his cock into her mouth...
“Why are you wearing your hat?” she asked him.
“Huh?” Kyle wished more than anything he could adjust his underwear. Things were really starting to become painful down there. All this up and down. It wasn’t good for a guy. “Because my keys are under it. I’m not sure I trust this whole numbering system.” He’d left his wallet and phone in the car, but he didn’t want his keys getting mixed up with someone else’s.
“You can’t wear that in the shoot.” The woman who was spraying Emma, a heavily tattooed girl in her twenties, gave him a look of disapproval. “Ian doesn’t allow any props.”
“I know. I’ll take it off before it’s time to shoot.”
“You’re wearing your keys on your head?” Emma asked him, stepping forward as the handler deemed her fully painted. “You look really silly.”
She was walking like Frankenstein, wet arms out in front of her, knees locked, her face shiny and very, very green. Some of the paint had strayed into her hair so that she looked like she’d been caught in an angry game of paintball and lost. Her nipples could have passed for a couple of undersize Brussels sprouts given their color, and she had scratched her nose, so the flesh peeked through the paint. Just for the record, he wasn’t the only one looking silly.
“If you call me a silly goose I’m going to make fun of you. Just a warning,” Kyle said.
She stuck her tongue out at him, a pink moist thrust through her green lips. It shouldn’t have been sexy, yet somehow it was. He couldn’t help but imagine that tongue on various parts of his body, sliding along, flickering over his flesh to torture him.
Kyle shifted uncomfortably. He needed to get away from her before the story here became him pushing her against the nearest wall and entwining his green body with hers in some sort of alien porno.
Fortunately, he was saved from potentially enormous embarrassment by a man speaking into a microphone. “All participants, you need to start moving into the warehouse where volunteers will show you to your spots.”
So they started shuffling forward, dozens of people in shades of green ranging from moss to emerald, and others in variations of brown. Emma hesitated. Kyle leaned forward and murmured to her, wanting to reassure and relax her. “Has anyone ever told you that you look good in green?”
Emma snorted. “No. It’s not on my color wheel.”
“Maybe they never saw you in head-to-toe green. Because it’s working on you right now.”
“Uh-huh.”
When she was directed to a spot against the wall of the warehouse with a cracked window above her head, Kyle said, “Work it, girl. Make love to the camera.”
Her lips twitched, like she was actually considering laughing. He took it as a good sign.
“Hat off!” A burly woman with a do-rag on her head and a clipboard in her hand snarled at him.
Kyle stripped off his hat, dumped his keys into it and thrust it behind his back as he moved into position beside Emma. He let the hat drop to the ground, his keys making a reassuring clinking sound. They had a way out of this place, that’s all he cared about. After the shoot he planned to interview some participants, but for the most part, he had all the necessary facts from the press release the artist’s team had released to the Journal. An opinion column was his favorite kind.
“How are you doing?” he asked Emma.
Her hip was bumping into his. “I don’t feel like art. I feel like a big naked emerald idiot. Do you even see the photographer?”
“No.” All he saw was a bunch of green butt cheeks as the people in front of them were instructed to lie on the floor on their stomachs. “I’m glad we get to stand. This building is probably radioactive.
