Donovans 01 - Amber Beach

polished.”
    Jake took the shade off a table lamp and held up the amber. She bent her head and went back to work.
    He tried not to notice that there were shades of gold buried deep in Honor’s hair, that her mouth was just full enough to tempt a saint, that the slim fingers holding the pencil would have felt good inside his pants, and her mouth would have felt even better. But nothing would feel as good as watching her come apart when he was buried to the hilt in her.
    The direction of his thoughts was echoed in the hard length of his erection. He was grateful that she was too busy drawing to notice.
    “You’re making me nervous,” Honor said after a time.
    “Afraid I’ll drop the amber?”
    “Nope. I’m feeling like Little Red again. Dinner-ish. Think the salmon is done, Granny?”
    “Do I look like your grandmother?”
    “Well,” she said without looking up, “you both have a nice mustache . . . .”
    Shaking his head, smiling despite the hungry ache in his crotch, Jake handed Honor the amber and went to check on the salmon.
    As soon as he was out of sight, she let out her breath and looked at the place where he had stood. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke curling up from the floor. Or from her own chair. The way he had watched her was hot enough to cook both of them.
    She told herself that she didn’t need the kind of complication that an affair with Jake would bring. She didn’t have the emotional energy for it. And her emotions would definitely be involved. Without that, sex was more trouble than it was worth.
    Face it, she reminded herself briskly. Even with emotion, sex is more trouble than it’s worth. At least for a woman it was. Men did just fine on autopilot. Wham, bam, I’m outta here. No fuss, no muss, stuff it back in your pants and see if there’s a good game on TV.
    With an impatient movement Honor set aside her sketch pad and closed it. Yet the face locked within amber haunted her, calling silently to her. No matter how she felt about its living model, she couldn’t leave the face caught forever within time.
    Unfortunately she didn’t know how to free it. She only knew that her normal approach to designing sculpture wouldn’t work for amber in general and this piece of amber in particular. She simply hadn’t worked with amber enough to understand it the way she did harder stones.
    When Jake came back into the room carrying a platter of salmon, Honor was sitting and frowning fiercely at the amber. Her glass of wine hadn’t been touched.
    “I’m not the only one in a bad mood, am I?” he asked neutrally, setting the salmon down on the table. “Did you get another call while I was watching the fish?”
    She jumped, wondering how much time had passed. It was often like that when she started thinking about a design. The world simply went away.
    “No calls. I was just thinking about that face. If I try to design my usual bas—relief . . .” She shook her head and stood up abruptly. “It just won’t work. I’m sure of it.”
    “What about intaglio?”
    Honor stopped in the act of reaching for her wineglass. What she knew about intaglio could about be summarized very briefly: the opposite of cameo.
    “I’ve never tried designing something to be viewed through the gem rather than on its surface,” she said.
    “Why? Don’t like the result?”
    “It’s not that.” She put her wineglass on the table and went to the refrigerator. “I’m usually designing for quite small pieces or stones that aren’t translucent enough for intaglio to show through. Sometimes the gem is simply too hard for Faith to carve that way. Plus I never designed with amber until a month ago.”
    Honor set out the pasta and salad. Her eyes had a distant look in them that told Jake she was thinking about amber and intaglio.
    “Intaglio was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,” he said, “especially for amber. In some cases the internal carving would be backed with gold foil. When viewed from above, through the amber itself, the result is very striking, almost alive.”
    “How do you polish the carved area before you add the foil?”
    “Same way you carved it—carefully, with itty bitty tools.”
    When he leaned past her to pour wine for himself, his arm brushed hers. She jumped.
    “Sorry,” Jake said. What he didn’t say was that even when she was thinking about her work, she was strung so tight she damn near vibrated. “Didn’t mean to startle