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PAINT OF PASSION 4
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Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 5
‘THOUGHT YOU MIGHT be thirsty,’ Daniel said, handing Clare a vodka on the rocks. He looked as if he had been crying. ‘What did you paint?’ he asked. Clare had thrown a sheet over the wet canvas at his approach. ‘Nothing good. It went wrong,’ she told him. He was almost lifting up the corner of the sheet. ‘Don’t look at it,’ she implored him softly. ‘You know I hate letting you see stuff that I’m not happy with.’ ‘I’m sure I would be impressed,’ he assured her but he let the paint-splashed sheet drop again. The next day, Clare decided, she would have to get rid of her latest masterpiece. ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ Daniel told Clare as he stood with his back to her, surveying the mess of his own ruined painting. ‘No worries. It was my fault too. The fickle muse, eh?’ Clare replied, knowing that his temper tantrum should be far outweighed in the guilt stakes by what she had just found herself doing. ‘Let’s go into the other room.’ Even covered by a sheet, the portrait of the lover s
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 6
‘GET THE DOOR would you, Clare?’ Daniel screamed. Clare was painting in the studio, he was painting at their bedroom window, finally deigning to take some inspiration from the quaint little houses which spread out below. The doorbell chimed again. Clare and Daniel were engaged in a battle over whose work was less important, who could afford to put down their brush on the off-chance that it wasn’t the Jehovah's Witnesses. Clare lost. Clare opened the door to a petite blonde, about her age, but considerably better dressed, in a pastel blue suit. She offered Clare a hand which wore two subtly expensive rings and smiled to show a row of equally expensively cared-for teeth. Clare wiped her hand, complete with bitten nails, clean on the seat of her jeans and they shook. ‘Clare?’ she asked. The dark-haired girl nodded. ‘I’m Francesca Philip. I saw your paintings in the Dragon Gallery. I do hope you don’t mind my coming here. I'd like to commission you to do a painting for me. Graham gave
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 7
AFTER FRANCESCA HAD gone Clare stood at the window for a long while, just looking out across the houses to the sea, thinking. That evening the sea was very calm. Just a few wispy, cotton-wool clouds crossed the pinky blue sunset and were echoed by the tiny white horses riding the waves. The beach was deserted but for a boy and his dog. The boy threw a stick and the dog barked, the distant noise carried up to the window by the wind so that it mingled with the calling of the gulls constantly wheeling overhead. The view from the flat where Clare and Daniel lived was almost the same as the view from Steve’s hotel, though their flat was a little lower down the hill. Steve, Steve, Steve. What had Clare been doing? She had never slept with a married man before and had always thought of the guys who had affairs as rats. In fact she had decided never to do the dirty on another girl right after the birthday party where Susie Powell stole her man and her pre-pubescent self-esteem. But at the sa
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 8
CLARE STARTED WORK on Steve's portrait the very next day. She chose to work from the picture of him sitting on his car outside the ivy-clad house, his family home. She chose it because he was wearing a forced, for-the-camera smile. It wasn’t an expression Clare had seen on his face in the flesh and thus it was the nearest she could come to finding a picture which didn’t remind her of his naked flesh every time she referred to it for her preliminary sketches. After an hour or so Clare had produced a vague, compositional outline. She stood back and appraised her work. She felt no urge to slip her hand inside her blouse today. The picture wasn’t working. It wasn’t Steve. But so what? Francesca would think it was him, Francesca would see the jumper and the car and remember snapping the shutter on that strained smile and for her it would be Steven. Daniel wandered in and out of the studio with cups of coffee as Clare painted. He wasn’t painting. He was having another off day. ‘Mmm, nice
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 9
FRANCESCA CAME TO see how the painting was getting on just a couple of days after Clare started to paint it. Clare was alone in the flat, Daniel having driven back to London for a couple of days to try and persuade some galleries to display his work there. Francesca explained that her husband was in the area on family business, turning some houses into flats for the tourists. She could only come down to see him occasionally because she had a business of her own these days, a boutique in Chelsea. Bought to keep her out of the way, Clare thought unkindly. She could imagine what it was like. Full of the kind of peachy pale clothes Francesca was wearing now, populated by bored housewives who giggled like schoolgirls and snatched up sequinned numbers for parties while their husbands were seduced by girls who wore jeans. Francesca stood behind Clare for a while as she painted. The blonde girl had one arm wrapped protectively around her body so that her hand caressed her hip, while the othe
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 10
LIFE IS WHAT happens when you've made other plans. The next day, when Francesca had finally gone back to London, Clare wandered down to the harbour, diligently avoiding the fatal café on her way. Since she couldn't find her foldaway stool in the chaos of the flat, Clare doubled up her jumper to make a seat on the cold, grey stone wall, and balanced the board she used for an easel on her knees. Graham wanted still more sea scenes. The woman in America was ordering them to be sent all over the place for Christmas. Clare mixed up a job lot of sea-green on the inside of her paint-box lid and began to work on three small scenes at once, like a factory production line. She hadn’t got much further than three wishy-washy horizons when he appeared. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’ 'Yes, fancy.’ Clare replied. Steve was swaddled against the cold in a huge cream fisherman’s jumper. He sat down beside her on the harbour wall without being invited and cast an eye over the paintings. ‘Hmmm,’ he said.
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 11
STEVE WAS DISAPPOINTED when Clare told him she couldn’t make it to Barcelona after all. When she said that she was going to Paris, on a ticket won in a raffle, with a friend from school that she couldn’t let down, he remarked, ‘That's a real coincidence, my . . . friend is going there as well this weekend.’ He told Clare that he could cancel the tickets anyway and that he could always use some golf practice. Daniel was far less happy. Francesca, as promised, had telephoned the flat pretending to be an old girlfriend from school. Daniel was confused as to why Clare should want to spend a weekend away from him with a girl that she hadn’t spoken to for four years. Clare assured him that they had actually kept in touch. But to Paris? he moaned. He asked why this schoolfriend couldn’t drag up some willing man to see some of the most romantic sights in the world with. He begged Clare not to go. Promised to take her there himself one day and when she refused to give in he went into a sulk w
Wild Desire PAINT OF PASSION 12
Francesca continued to tongue her lover’s nipple, by turns biting it teasingly, but her hands had another purpose now. They were creeping up Clare’s stockinged legs, under the fluid jersey hem of the dress. Francesca reached Clare’s suspender belt and moved her hands beneath the lacy straps which held her stockings up. For a moment or two she savoured the pleasure of having Clare’s beautiful, firm thighs beneath her hands, before moving higher still. A small laugh escaped Francesca’s lips when she realised that, once again, her companion was not wearing any knickers. She twisted her fingers in the silky hair, traced them down the warm, waiting labia, then up again, to Clare’s aching clit. Lazily she circled the little bud with a finger, watching with great pleasure as Clare closed her eyes and bit her painted lip. ‘Carry on,’ Clare breathed. ‘Please carry on.’ She let her legs fall more widely apart. Francesca traced a languorous path between Clare’s swollen lips, making her lover s
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