Picture Perfect Cowboy Read online

  “We can.”

  She looked at him again, another long searching look.

  “If you want to call the whole thing off, say the word,” she said.

  “What word?” he asked, a dumb joke to hide his nerves.

  “Hmm…” she said and smiled. “You own a horse?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I retired from bulls, not from horses.”

  “What’s your horse’s name?”

  “Ah, the one I usually ride around the farm, he’s called Rusty.”

  “Great,” she said. “Rusty can be your safe word. Anytime you want to call the whole thing off, say ‘Rusty’ and I’ll turn my back and you’ll get dressed and leave right away, no hard feelings. It’s only April and we don’t have to get the photos to the printer for months. We can find another guy to take your slot if you decide this won’t work for you.”

  “It’s real nice of you to say all that,” he said. “And I appreciate it. But I’d like to just get on with it if you don’t mind.”

  Simone raised her hands in surrender. “You’re the boss.”

  She stood up first, and a second later he followed.

  “Bathroom’s down the hall if you need to go. Nobody wants to be naked and have to pee at the same time. I’ve got a changing screen right here,” she said, pointing at a three-panel screen set up in the corner. “There’s a towel back there you can wrap around your waist. I’ll turn my back while you drop the towel and get into position. I’ll photograph you at this angle,” she said, demonstrating with her own body the position he’d need to stand in while she took pictures. “Side view with your thigh kind of forward. If we’re careful, I might not see anything you don’t want me to see. Although I hope you won’t be upset if I do. It’s just a human body. We all have them. Our bodies are nothing to be ashamed of.”

  He gave her a slight smile as he went behind the screen. He felt stupid hiding to change when she’d be seeing what the good Lord gave him in two minutes anyway. Still, nice of her to try to make him feel more comfortable.

  As he unbuttoned his checkered red and black shirt, he heard her giggle. It was a nice laugh, pretty and girlish. He didn’t expect women with nose rings to laugh so cute. Clearly he needed to adjust his prejudices.

  “Something funny?” he asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said.

  “You sure?”

  “I thought it was funny that I said ‘Rusty’ could be your safe word,” she said.

  “And why’s that funny?”

  “Because,” she said, “you didn’t ask me what a safe word is. You already knew.”

  Two

  Simone knew immediately she’d made a mistake by saying that. Behind the screen, Jason was silent. She couldn’t even hear him moving around anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to imply anything. I just thought it was funny that, thanks to certain books and movies that will remain nameless, even cowboys in Kentucky know what safe words are.”

  Simone held her breath and listened, hoping and praying Jason was still undressing back there.

  “Takes a lot to offend me,” he said at last. “You’re gonna have to try harder than that if you want to.”

  Simone breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Good. And really, I am sorry. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable. Just the opposite. I’m used to joking around with my models. I forgot there for a second you’re not the typical model I work with.”

  “It’s all right.”

  Simone shook her head. Nice. Very nice. She was trying so hard to make the man more comfortable and she’d accidentally insinuated he was a secret freak. As she was a not-so-secret freak she had a bad habit of doing that sort of thing. She tended to assume most people were kinky in one way or another until proven vanilla. But if there was any man on earth who was vanilla, it was Jason “Still” Waters. Hell, the man was probably a virgin. That might explain how intense and uptight he was. She couldn’t quite believe he’d agreed to pose nude for the calendar. His friend Luke had probably twisted his arm, guilted him into it. Hard to say no when your best friend calls you from his hospital bed and asks you to take his spot in a charity calendar.

  She busied herself adjusting the lights and the drapes and everything she’d already adjusted to perfection as she waited for Jason to emerge. And she swore to herself she would not make this any weirder for him than it already was.

  “This is a really pretty library,” Simone said to cover her nervousness. “Old Carnegie Library. One of the few left in the country still used as a library, I saw. It was nice of them to let us shoot here.”

  “Can’t believe they said yes,” Jason said from behind the screen.

  “I didn’t quite tell them the full nature of the calendar. What’s that old saying? Better to ask forgiveness than permission?”

  “Something like that,” he said. “Is this your first time in Kentucky?” He had a nice voice, low and steady without much of an accent. And unlike a lot of the athletes she’d photographed for last year’s calendar, he didn’t seem to have any interest whatsoever in talking about himself. Or talking much at all.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s nice here. So many horse farms. You’re new here, right? Luke said you left Montana a year ago. What brought you to Kentucky?”

  “Those horse farms,” he said. “I’m a trainer now. Easier to do here than in Montana.”

  “More horses here?”

  “Warmer winters,” he said simply. “Longer training season.”

  He stepped out from behind the screen with the towel wrapped around his waist.

  “Where do you want me?” he asked.

  Simone caught herself staring at him.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. “Like I said, just get my good side.”

  Jason had a surgical scar on his torso about a foot long, a ragged V-shape that curved from underneath his left bottom rib down to his left hip.

  “Wow,” she said. “Bull riding is even more dangerous than I thought.”

  “It’s my shark bite,” he said and smiled. “Kind of looks like it, right?”

  He traced the V with his fingertip.

  “Kind of,” she said. “I’m guessing it wasn’t a shark.”

  “Just a mean old bull with a nasty sharp horn.”

  “You were gored?”

  “A little. They sewed me up all right. Where do you want me?” he asked again. Subject raised. Subject discussed. Subject dismissed. She’d had longer conversations with baristas when ordering coffee than she did with this man about his life-threatening injuries.

  “Um…here,” she said and stood on a taped X on the floor, “if you want to stand. If you decide you’d rather sit, we can pull the chair over. And you’ll need a book. I picked out a few from the shelves. I went for a Western theme. I’ve got The Ox-Bow Incident. I found a hardcover of Lonesome Dove. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. Any of those sound good?”

  “I’m a Kentucky boy now. Let’s see what they got here,” he said and walked over to the bookcase. They were in the Kentucky Room of the library, a private study room that had to be reserved in advance. Nice room with a fireplace and glass-front barrister bookcases. But it wasn’t the nice room Simone was staring at as Jason studied the bookshelves. Apart from the large scar, Jason had a gorgeous body. He was lean and wiry and, unlike her, had almost no body fat. Straight dark hair short enough to behave and long enough to run her fingers through. And his eyes—bright turquoise, intelligent and serious. She would have paid money to see what his eyes did when he laughed. Simone’s grandmother would have called him a long drink of water. Simone never quite understood what that meant until the moment Jason raised his arm to take a book off the top shelf and Simone saw every single muscle in his long strong back shift under his skin. A long drink of ice-cold water on a hot day. She would drink that glass empty and then lick the sweat off the sides.

  Professional, she reminded herself. St
op ogling the models.

  “This’ll do,” Jason said, turning around with a book in his hand. “Thought I ought to pose with a book I like in case someone asks me about it.”

  He had an old leather-bound hardcopy of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in his hand.

  “You’ve read it?” Simone asked.

  “I have,” he said. She was ashamed of herself for being impressed. She hadn’t expected a bull rider, even a retired one, to read novels, much less American classics. Showed what she knew about the price of bourbon in Kentucky.

  “What’s it about?” Simone asked as she helped move Jason into position. She posed him sideways, leg forward, so that even when he dropped the towel, the camera would just see his side, hip and thighs. Although she’d heard of the book she wasn’t dying to read it. All she wanted was to get Jason talking and distracted, to make it easier for him to be naked in front of her.

  Simone picked up her camera and placed it to her eye to find the best angle for the shot.

  “A man who works for the corrupt governor of Louisiana has to dig up dirty secrets on a judge he respects. Then he finds out more than he wanted to find out about the judge and his own family,” Jason said.

  “I like family secret books,” she said. “Seems like every family has a dark secret.”

  “Do they?”

  “My grandmother had a baby before she was married and gave her up for adoption. She never told anyone. We only found out after she died. Not a very dark secret but it really upset my mother to know she had a sibling out there she’d never met. What about you?”

  “If we had a family secret, I wouldn’t tell it to anyone.”

  Simone shook her head and smiled. “I’m just going to shut up now and take the pictures.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I keep putting my foot in my mouth around you.”

  “It’s my fault. I’m just out of practice. I’ve been hanging out with horses for months. Forgotten how to talk to women.”

  “You’re doing fine.”

  “So are you.”

  “Good. Ready to take the towel off? It’s okay if you aren’t. I have all day.”

  “Might as well get it over with.”

  “You can drop it right on the floor. I’ll be shooting from the thigh up. And the door is locked, so don’t worry about anyone walking in on us.” Simone turned around to give him some privacy. A few seconds passed.

  “Can you help me?” Jason asked.

  “Taking your towel off?” she asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

  “Not that.”

  She turned around. He still had his towel on. He seemed to be trying to take off the little gold chain he wore around his neck.

  “You got smaller hands than me,” he said.

  Simone went to him, happy to oblige. She stood behind his back and quickly and easily unclasped the chain. Being that close to him was a heady experience. He smelled like Ivory soap from a recent shower. His nervousness had raised his body temperature. She could feel the heat radiating off of him. Had he been a friend of hers, Griffin maybe, she would have pressed herself against him or slapped his ass to make him laugh. She wasn’t sure she’d heard Jason laugh yet. She wondered if he ever did. He really was nothing like the other men she’d photographed for these calendars. The baseball player—Mets catcher—she’d photographed last year had hit on her the entire time, teasing her about how she ought to take him out to dinner before getting him naked. The Broadway star two years ago had regaled her with hilarious backstage gossip the entire time. And the real estate mogul had tried to sell her a condo. Jason was different. So polite. So quiet. Especially for a man who’d won millions of dollars on the professional bull-riding circuit. She’d expected a cocky cowboy, not this quiet, humble, solemn man.

  No wonder they called him “Still” Waters.

  “Thank you,” he said, turning to face her. She held up the necklace.

  “Pretty cross,” she said. “I’ll put it with my things so it doesn’t get lost.”

  She set it carefully inside her camera bag.

  “Mom would kill me if she knew I was doing this,” Jason said. “She’d kill me twice if I was wearing that in the picture.”

  “I guess she’s pretty religious?” Simone asked.

  Jason nodded as he moved back into place.

  “Dad, too. Even more than Mom. Well, maybe not more than Mom. But he’s…tougher about it.”

  Jason said “tougher.” Simone heard “meaner.” She wondered if maybe there was more than milder winters that brought Jason to Kentucky from Montana.

  “What about you?” Jason asked as he dropped the towel onto the floor. He didn’t wait for her to turn her back again. He seemed over the nervousness now.

  “What about me?”

  “You got a cross tattooed on your arm.”

  “Oh,” she said, smiling as she raised her camera’s viewfinder to her eye. “That’s not for me. My family celebrates Christmas and Hanukkah but we’re not all that religious. The cross is ah…long story.”

  “I like long stories. Takes my mind off being buck naked in the damn library.”

  Simone got off a couple good shots. Jason was handsome, yes. Strong jaw, straight nose, soulful eyes, which you’d expect on a man who’d regularly faced death for a living. But he was also photogenic, which was different from simply being attractive. Some people took good pictures. Some didn’t. Jason did.

  “It might offend you,” she said.

  “Call my horse ugly and you might offend me. Nothing much else is going to do it.”

  Simone laughed. Jason still didn’t. But he smiled. Sort of.

  “I’m a part-time photographer,” she said. “And a part-time pro-sub.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know what a dominatrix is?”

  His brow furrowed. “The lady with the whips and chains and leather boots?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “I’m kind of the opposite of that. Professional dominatrixes top men for money. Pro-submissives submit to men for money. Or women. Although it’s almost always men.” Simone kept shooting. Jason was doing a very good job of keeping his face impassive while he pretended to read his book, as he said, buck naked in the library. “I had a few very special masters in my career. The cross is a tribute to one of them. He’s a very religious man. Very devout Catholic. Even when he was flogging me, he could make it…what’s the word? Sacred?”

  “Sacred?” Jason asked. “Nice.”

  Simone nodded, surprised. Surprised and impressed. She didn’t think he’d take the news of her other career this well. He really was hard to offend. Rare to find a man who was exactly what he said he was.

  “Exactly,” she said. “That’s the word.”

  “And you liked him so much you got a tattoo for him?”

  “He’s a special guy,” she said. “And he was very good to me.”

  “Must have been. I never had a girl so impressed with me that she rolled right out of bed and got my name tattooed on her arm.

  Simone laughed. So much for her theory Jason was a sweet, innocent virgin. Although there was something about him, something she couldn’t put her finger on. He wasn’t a virgin but he was…something. Maybe lonely?

  “We never slept together. Pro-subs don’t have sex with their masters. It’s a different thing. Hard to explain. Certain people, even if you’re not lovers or in love or whatever…I don’t know, they can leave a mark on you. Can you shift your right leg forward a little bit and your left hip back?”

  Jason moved his leg. She could see a little too much Jason Junior in the shot.

  “I hope that doesn’t freak you out,” she said. He didn’t seem freaked out. Didn’t seem all that fascinated, either. He was just making polite conversation.

  “Didn’t know that was a job is all,” he said.

  “In New York it is.”

  “How you get that job? Hang a shingle?”

  Simone grinned at
the idea of a little storefront with a hanging shingle sign that read “Simone Levine - Professional Whipping Girl.” Her logo could be a picture of a hand spanking a bare ass.

  “Not quite,” she said. “I know I don’t look the part, but I was actually one of those super annoying overachiever kids. Started college at seventeen. Graduated at twenty. Started a PhD program five minutes later mostly to make my parents happy. Masochist, right?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I needed a job that could help pay the bills but had flexible enough hours I could still handle school. I’d hung out at this kinky club for a couple years, and I asked the owner if he’d let me go pro. I started working for him the next night. Got more out of the job than I did school. Eventually I quit school and have been doing it ever since.”

  “So how’d you get to be a photographer?”

  She laughed. “Advertising my sub services online,” she said. “I could never find anyone to take good fetish pictures of me so I started taking them myself. Turned out I was good at it. Now I’m a part-time pro-submissive and a professional freelance photographer. Between the two I can pay the bills.”

  “You still do it?” he asked.

  “Not as much as I used to. I travel so much now taking pics that I don’t get to do it as much as I’d like.”

  “So you ah…you really do like it?”

  “Love it,” she said. “It’s not for everyone, but it is for me.”

  Simone got off a few more shots. Sexy as Jason was, she almost wanted to take a couple pictures just for her own private collection. Maybe a nice back shot. The man’s back side was nearly as nice as his front side. She didn’t take a picture of his ass, but she did commit it to memory.

  “That’s good,” she said. “You can put your towel back on.”

  Jason wrapped up while she flipped through the pictures she’d taken.

  “Good news,” she said. “Your shots turned out great. We’re done.”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s it. I know. Kind of anti-climactic. All that stress and it’s over in ten minutes. But you take great pics. You can get dressed whenever.”