ring. The women will think you’re some sleazeball. It’s three days, Daniel. What harm can three days be?”
Sean and Gabe, he could handle, but he’d never liked saying no to a woman. It didn’t feel right. They were forcing him to say no to a woman. It was his Achilles’ heel, his fatal flaw, and they knew it and were exploiting him mercilessly. It was there in Sean’s smug, merciless smile, and Gabe’s way-too-innocent puppy-dog look.
Three days. It was only three days at the beach.
Daniel stared at them—all that was left of his family, all banded together to put him through their own version of Hell in the Hamptons. And they thought they were doing him a favor?
Fine.
He’d go—with his ring well-buried in his duffel. If he went, it’d make Tessa happy, make Sean and Gabe happy, and then he could return to his well-ordered life, and they would all think things were getting better.
Not a problem.
THERE WAS A Greek god sitting on her beach. He’d been there for hours, nearly motionless in stark contrast to the MTV-worthy volleyball game being played out on the sand next door. In Catherine Montefiore’s current dreary mood, maybe she was more open to twenty-first-century classical eye-candy, she couldn’t be sure. But, as she sat there, glued to the window of her grandfather’s beach house in the Hamptons, the visual was as arresting as anything ever painted by Hopper, Dali or Picasso.
From her angle, she could only see him in profile. A hard jaw that looked chiseled instead of real. He had forgone sunglasses, staring sightlessly into the churning gray waters of the Atlantic, with the sun burnishing him in gold highlights. His hair was short and dark, with a few pieces curling waywardly at the neck, daring any stylist to mar its perfection. Thick black lashes were clearly visible, even from the distance. Lean, angular cheekbones cast shadows on the hard lines below.
And that was only above the shoulders—and what shoulders they were. In Catherine’s profession she saw nude men by the crateload, and she knew sculpted shoulders when she saw them. The hard plane of the trapezium sloped down to a marvelously projected deltoid. His forearms were balanced on his knees, showing off rounded biceps and triceps, not in the wimpy expressionistic manner, but crafted in the more vivid Hellenistic style. Stalwart, capable and brutally real.
With busy eyes, she studied all of him, tracing over the sinews and the tendons that visibly flared when he moved.
Her hands flexed, aching to study, and even more daring, to touch. Eventually, she was unable to resist any longer, and she pulled out her sketch pad and pencil, and her fingers flew, guided by equal parts artistic endeavor and lust.
As his shape began to reveal itself on the paper, she knew she was wrong. Gods were unmarred perfection. No flaws, no scars, all-powerful, all-seeing. This man wasn’t a god, but a mortal, complete with the scars that sprang from humanity.
This man was Odysseus, searching for home so far across the sea. Feverishly she sketched in the face, drawing from perfect memory now. The forehead cast a shadow over the rest of his features, sadness inherent in his brow. She left the eyes for last because she couldn’t imagine the loneliness that echoed there, desperate to see his family, the broad, capable arms so uselessly empty.
Her quick fingers sketched out his body, a warrior’s body, but with him sitting in the deck chair, the anterior view of his chest—along with the complete view of his lower torso—was obstructed. Conventional wisdom said that she needed two yards between her and the subject. In this situation—solitary woman ogling strange man—two yards was too close, but she could do better than her current spot behind the windows. Quietly, she opened the French doors that led out to the wooden deck, careful so that he wouldn’t hear and be disturbed.
The deck was small by Southampton standards. Four wooden Adirondack chairs, a green-and-white striped umbrella that shaded most of the area and a few plants scattered here and there. The plants had to be replaced on a regular basis because although there were many talents in the Montefiore family, a green thumb was not among them.
After settling herself under the umbrella and adjusting the chair to the locked and upright position, Catherine picked up her pad and pencil and stared out toward the western horizon. It was the innocent picture of a woman sketching the sun over the ocean—not a woman fantasizing about the man that was parked on her beach. Catherine tilted her head a mere twenty degrees westward, achieving the perfect view.
Her sigh was louder than she intended, but really, it couldn’t be helped. His chest was powerful and broad, a sheltering bulkhead in any storm, delineated down the long axis by rippling abdominal muscles. His skin nearly bronze in the sun. Dark chest hair formed a narrow line down the sternum, leading to…Catherine smiled to herself. There was art, and then there was man art.
Guiltily, Catherine wiped away the drop of damning saliva that had dripped onto the sketch.
Catherine was nothing if not a product of her environment—her work environment, actually. Her grandfather was Charles Montefiore, owner of Montefiore Auction House, one of the nation’s premier art and antiquities auction houses, thank you very much, and Catherine had worked her way up through the trenches. Starting as an assistant appraiser, then appraiser, and now she was an assistant to her grandfather on special projects, mainly high-profile auctions.
Not that she coasted on the family name, no way. Catherine had graduated with honors from Columbia with an undergrad and masters in art, yet in many ways she knew she was the disappointment in the family. She didn’t have her mother’s style, or her grandfather’s showmanship. Catherine had attended Manhattan’s most elite private school, summered in Europe, but a classical education didn’t solve personality defects. Her mother called her an introvert; Catherine preferred the more elegant “reclusive artist,” but technically both of them were right.
She studied the sketch in her hand with a critical eye. As an artist, it was the male form that captured her imagination. The power behind it, the strength of it, but unfortunately, most of the men she worked with were either gay or nearing retirement. Her exposure to rages of testosterone was limited to twodimensional figures, flat and lifeless, and she liked the safety of the one-way relationship where she was in complete control. In the past eight years, she’d had two relationships in the accepted sense of the word. The one with Leon, which had sadly fizzled into abject nothingness because he was, well…blah, and the relationship with Antonio, which ended when he realized he was a woman trapped in a man’s body.
After the Antonio fiasco, Catherine was faced with a choice. To be aggressive and search out single men in their natural habitat—bars—or resign herself to days spent appraising the male torso and nights spent dreaming about it. Catherine had wisely stuck with two-dimensional men on a sketch pad, or a canvas. It was easier on her ego.
While she was busy on her sketch, a bikinied blonde approached him. Catherine frowned because Odysseus should not be bothered by the obviously fake melons that were bobbing in front of his face. Thankfully, his expression didn’t change when tempted by this modern-day Nausicaa, and the loneliness in his eyes stayed constant.
Classical baroque art would have been altered forever if some Hamptons Hussy had turned Odysseus into Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky Melon-Grabber.
No, Odysseus was worthy of so much more.
The blonde, not appreciating the rare masterpiece on the sand, waved blithely and then flitted away. Eagerly, Catherine went back to her work, shading, erasing, sketching, correcting, until, at last, the piece was finished.
For a moment she was caught breathless by the image on the paper. It was good. Really good. A smile curved her lips because it wasn’t something that she thought often. Even Grandpa would be proud of her for this one. Her sketches were a sideline brought on by too much exposure to great art, and too little talent to do anything serious with it. When you dealt with Van Gogh on a daily basis, Catherine’s pictures of the male form resembled a kindergartener’s. A talented kindergartener, but still—a kindergartner.
But not this sketch. This sketch was special. She had captured the solitariness of