Artistic License (3 page)

“I’m no good at this.”

The miserable exclamation startled them both.

Mick slowly hooked a booted foot around the leg of the vacant chair and pulled it toward him. It creaked alarmingly as he sat down, obviously designed for the more softly-knitting-grandmother variety of visitor. He was back to that façade of singular blankness that made him look like a baddie in a Bond film, the ones who stood silent and square-jawed behind the master criminal and kept one hand on their gun. If he had a weapon, he at least kept it holstered. His hands draped casually between his knees, the fingers loosely interlocked, while he watched her with faintly curious grey eyes. 

“No good at what?” he asked finally.

She pulled her gaze from his and flushed.

“Talking to people,” she said, her voice stilted. “People I don’t know well. I’ve never been able to talk to strangers. I get nervous and I can’t think of what to say, and if I
do
speak, it’s never the right words.”

Sophy. He doesn’t care. Be quiet immediately.

She jumped when he reached toward her, but he tactfully ignored her jumpy reaction and touched a fingertip to the sketchbook.

“But you get people,” he said, and she looked up, confused.

Mick’s voice was level and his expression serious, but a slight smile quirked the corner of his lips. There was a hint of what might, with a full-fledged grin, be a boy band cute dimple in the world’s least boyish face.

Worse and worse.

She had a weakness for men with dimples. If he produced a pair of glasses next, she was going to start finding him sexually attractive as well as a-art-artistically attractive and things already seemed sufficiently awkward.

“What?” she asked brilliantly.

“I had a look at your other drawings. Sorry,” he added, not sounding remotely apologetic. “It’s obvious in every line that you understand what makes people tick. That might not be particularly comfortable from your subject’s perspective,” he went on dryly, “but on the whole it seems to me that empathy is more important than verbosity.”

Sophy’s fingers went absently to her neck and she twiddled a loose strand of hair as she stared at him, not knowing what to say. The conversation had gone from reluctant small talk to soul-searching depth in about thirty seconds. She’d had less intimate moments with her cognitive therapist.

Mick suddenly looked equally uncomfortable. He shifted as if to rise, and despite having wished him gone from the opening “ahem”, Sophy found herself rushing into speech.

“Um, did you come all the way here just to return my sketchbook? Because it was very kind of you, but…”

They were both staring at the hand she’d instinctively flung out as if to catch hold of his own and halt his departure. Hastily, Sophy withdrew the offending limb, and tucked it under the bedcovers for good measure. She was obviously going into belated psychiatric shock.

“Hell.” Mick sounded disgusted, but his derision was evidently self-directed so she didn’t bother to take offense. “No. I was going to leave that for you at the hotel reception, but I wanted to have a word with you about your witness statement.”

Oh. Well, that – ought to be reassuring. She supposed.

The impersonal security guard was back, having sent the more approachable man away in disgrace, probably to receive a stern lecture on correct conduct with bedridden witnesses.

“Was it really a bomb?” Sophy asked, just as another voice shrieked in atonal horror, “Oh my God, you would not
believe
the size of his – ”

She almost had another asthma attack on the spot. Hastily, she snatched up the remote and turned off the forgotten TV. And proceeded to will away the heat in her cheeks through sheer Jedi mind power.

Mick cleared his throat and earned her eternal gratitude by merely continuing, “It was a minimal-impact explosive device, yes.”

So in normal-people terms, a bomb.

“Thanks to your information, we were able to locate the device and bring in an expert team to diffuse the situation. The subject of your sketch was identified as Maria Harper, the wife of the man we apprehended at the scene, William Darvie. She was arrested late this afternoon.”

“Do you know why they did it?” Sophy asked, taking that in.

Mick made a non-committal noise in the back of his throat.

“I don’t have all the information as to motive as yet. I understand that the couple have a past connection to an early and unsuccessful Ryland business venture. To a certain extent, the whys and wherefores are not our concern. Once we’ve ascertained that the suspects are not likely to be a future threat to Ryland Curry, the matter will rest in the hands of the New Zealand police. At the moment, both Darvie and Harper are in custody and they seem to have acted without accomplices.”

“So they, what, lost money on a Ryland investment, brooded about it for years and then peevishly decided to blow up the travelling contents of William Ryland’s living room?”

He shrugged, and adjusted his chair to avoid taking a hit of late sunshine directly in the eyes.

“People do insane shit for inadequate reasons all the time.”

Which, when she thought about it, ought to be adopted as the official tagline of the Ministry of Justice. It said it all and did so with style.

Her oddly light-hearted mood took a nosedive when he went on, “You’ll probably be called to testify in court, since you can positively identify Harper and place her at the scene.” Mick paused at the look on her face. “Is that going to be a problem?”

Yes.

“No,” said Sophy firmly. She wasn’t a complete weakling, for God’s sake. Every minute of evidence to the contrary on this particular day. “It won’t.”

Mick reached out and briefly squeezed her free hand, igniting a thread of memory from the last minutes in the hotel. She resisted the compulsion to squeeze back.

“It won’t be a big deal.” His voice was calm and reassuring, the competent, practiced tones of one used to dealing with outbursts of panic and stress. “Nothing like the dramatic courtroom scenes you see on TV. It’ll be dull as hell and you’ll spend most of the time in a waiting room. Take your sketchbook.”

He gave her a flashing grin, a proper smile, teeth and everything, and God, yes, there were dimples. Plural.

She placed sole and entire blame on those dimples for the loss of her remaining wits.

“Do you think… Would you possibly… Would you please sit for me?”

The impulsive question echoed into an appalled silence.

***

It was a moment before Mick’s intellect, floundering under the siege of his hormones, managed to register and decode the stammering request.
Sit
for her, as in model for another sketch.

She was so damn pretty that he
almost
regretted his immediate reaction of, “Hell, no.”

Fortunately she looked as horrified by the prospect as he felt. For a woman of few words, she seemed to have little to no control over the ones that did make the journey from that quick brain to the unsuspecting world.

A miserable pink tinge was seeping up her rounded cheekbones, sliding under a sparse smattering of pinpoint freckles. Strands of dark, stick-straight brown hair escaped a long ponytail to catch on the corners of her glasses, the lenses of which did nothing to disguise a pair of mortified brown eyes. When he’d first noticed her in the exhibition hall, before the asthma attack and his reaction of unprecedented panic, he’d placed her in her late teens, a fact that seemed to be substantiated by her nose jewellery and obvious student status. However, when he’d contacted the kid detective in charge of the case and intimidated him into an update on her health, he’d discovered that Sophy was twenty-four, seven years his junior, lived locally and was enrolled as a postgraduate student at the art school.

And she was beautiful in a wholly feminine way that was acres apart from the overt brash sexiness he was used to encountering in female colleagues and business associates. These days, frankly, the latter posed considerably less temptation than a cold beer and a good night’s sleep. Sophy, on the other hand…

He shifted in his seat.

The last time a woman had made him feel that his tongue was too big for his mouth and his hands were awkward appendages with no proper resting place, he’d still had some of his milk teeth.

He realised she was watching him with the agony of a wounded dog waiting to be put of its misery. Searching the depths of his limited supply of tact, he was about to counter with a more polite refusal when she pulled a restless arm from beneath the quilt and he saw the mottled bruising around her elbow. In his mind’s eye, he saw her fall, a fact he’d barely assimilated at the moment of impact, all his attention then on the dickhead about to pop smoke in an art gallery.

Despite the doubts harboured by his nearest and dearest, he didn’t particularly enjoy using force against anyone. He certainly never employed it against a woman. It was the first time he had ever put a bruise on a woman in a violent situation. Looking at the marks standing out against Sophy’s pale skin, he felt a physical response in his gag reflex.

And propelled by guilt and momentary nausea, he lost his bloody mind.

“When would you want me to sit?”

***

It wasn’t like he would be walking around
sans
pants, Sophy reminded herself the following morning as she got out of Lisa’s car and waved the other girl off. And there was no need to speculate on what that might look like, either. He would be shirtless for a couple of short sketch sessions. He was doing her a favour, for reasons she hadn’t quite gathered but for the sake of her new sculpture piece had chosen not to query. She had been drawing from fully nude life models since she was fifteen and she enjoyed a…well, a sporadic but perfectly adequate sex life when the opportunity arose. There was absolutely no reason why she should be mortified by even the vocal combination of the words “Mick” and “partial nudity”.

She was in such trouble.

She paused on the crooked paving stones that bisected their front garden and shuffled her sketchbook to the opposite arm to free up her key hand. The January sun was already a tingling heat on the backs of her upper arms and it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning. Another scorcher of a day ahead. Glorious.

Unlocking the front door, she pushed it open. Jeeves, her black-and-white Spoodle, immediately came running, backside aquiver, sadly mauled toy duck clutched between his teeth, her own personal version of a rose-bearing suitor. Bending to rub his ears and his back, she went through the usual routine of greeting: thrice repeating her queries as to who was the good boy, admiring the duck and making a token swipe to take it away, always a crowd pleaser.  She herded dog and duck back through the small carpeted hall to the living room, which they liked to call “open plan” but which was really a throwback to fifties architecture and a kitchen so small they’d had to divide the living space to build a new one. Throwing the sketchbook and her bag down on the kitchen counter, she dropped onto the smaller couch, a superbly uncomfortable brocade relic from Melissa’s student flatting days. Jeeves abandoned his coy courtship with the duck, jumped up beside her and leaned.

“Honeys, I’m home,” Sophy said, and yawned hugely.

From the plushy depths of the better sofa they’d bought two years ago, the one that had resulted in their eating cheese and vegemite sandwiches for dinner for the better part of a month, Melissa smiled at her.

“The heroine of the hour returns,” she teased. “How are you feeling?”

“And tell us,” said the lazy sprawl of lean muscle and impish grin at her side, holding up the morning paper. “Is it true that you single-handedly took on five masked assailants before succumbing to a
grand mal
seizure? Because considering that the closest I’ve seen you come to mortal combat is when that bee went down your dress at Christmas, I’m impressed. Truly.”