The first picture told him very little. It was a series of quick sketches—no detail. Just the outline of his body. He raised an eyebrow at the suggestion of his anatomy in one of them. But he really wasn’t learning anything here. The second page was much the same, but the third . . .
His breath stuttered in his chest, and he jerked his head up. She was watching him look at her work, worrying her knuckles and chewing on her lip. The instinct to tell her it was amazing welled up in him. The whole thing—it was incredible. But he knew better than to spit those words out before he’d thought about it. He dipped his head again, studying the image of his own nude body, splayed out across pale sheets.
The likeness alone was remarkable, but there was more to it than that. It didn’t just resemble him. It felt like him. Like the man he looked at in the mirror every morning, only better. If he’d questioned how she saw him, this was the answer.
She saw him too fondly. In a light he didn’t deserve. From the scraps of his messed up, cobbled-together life, she’d made something beautiful.
All that time he’d spent secretly convinced that if you took away the trappings—the money and the clothes and the name—he’d be nothing. He’d taken them all off for her. Since the moment he met her, they’d all been off. And this was what she’d seen.
“It’s good,” he said at long last. “Like the one from Montmartre.” He gazed up into her eyes. “Your perspective is all over it.” It made him feel things, just looking at it. Things he still wasn’t sure he was ready to feel.
Her expression didn’t lighten any. “Keep going.”
He frowned, peering down again. He wanted to keep studying this one. There were treasures inside of it. All the detail of musculature and fabric and space.
“Keep going,” she insisted.
He shook his head, hesitating. If that was what she wanted . . .
His stomach flipped as he turned the page. She’d gone back to quicker sketches, not quite as vague as the first ones had been, and she’d narrowed in on just his shoulders and his face.
But the images were angry. Frustration bled through the marks. Some of the portraits looked just like him, while others only held the faintest resemblance.
What had she told him about Cézanne the day before? That he played with the shapes of things, making them more real by making them wrong?
It put him off balance. Did she think he was a monster? A puzzle to be figured out?
“One more,” she said.
He turned the page, fearing the worst.
Only he shouldn’t have.
The drawing staring out at him through the page wasn’t like the others. But that didn’t put him back on solid ground. If anything, he listed further in his mind, because this one wasn’t angry.
This was unbearably, achingly sad.
“Kate—”
“This is how I see you.”
God. It was a web of delicate lines, silvery wisps of pencil marks. The image they created was a perfect likeness, only it evoked the exact opposite response in him as the last one had. It opened a new pit in his stomach. He wasn’t so noble or so . . . so unapproachable. He was just a guy. Flawed and scared sometimes. Irresponsible and inconsiderate and so many other things his sister and his father and all the men who ran their company would have called him.
“I don’t look like this,” he said, quiet and unsteady.
“To me, you do.”
He huffed out a wry little ghost of a laugh. “You’re too kind to me.”
“I’m not. You’re just . . . you’re gorgeous.” She hesitated, as if waiting for him to say something more. When he didn’t, she took his hand, lifting the sketchbook from his lap and setting it aside. Her voice was more restrained. “Thank you for letting me do this. You didn’t have to, and it meant a lot to me.”
“It’s no problem.”
“No. It was. This was hard for you.”
That was an understatement, but the best he could, he shook it off. Still reeling from the vision she had shown him of himself were he a better man, he looked down at their hands. How they intertwined, her dainty, soot-stained fingers against his larger ones. His were stronger, but they were clean. They made nothing, they did nothing.
Except touch her.
When he met her gaze again, her eyes were dark, her full lips parted.
As he watched, she rose up higher on her knees, sliding a hand into his hair and pressing her lips to his. An intensity colored the edges of the kiss, an intent. He tried to give himself over to it, to the warmth and to the taste of her. But in the back of his mind, he was fixated on what she had made of him, and he didn’t deserve it.
He didn’t deserve the way she lifted her own shirt over her head, baring all that soft, beautiful skin. The way she unbuttoned her jeans.
It struck him all at once what she was doing. His body, already primed by her closeness and his nakedness, went instantly, shockingly hard.
“Kate—”
The look in her eyes as she pulled back left him no doubt. He swallowed, throat working against a tightness that didn’t make any sense.
She slid her palm down his chest to rest over his heart. “I want this.”
She couldn’t possibly want it as much as he did.
And yet, for all his experience, there was something inside of him that trembled. “You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.” Her fingers splayed out wide across his ribs, and she looked at him with eyes that were so deep. So bold, where before they had always held fear. “Do you want me?”
His mouth went dry. “More than you know.”
Gaze steady, cheeks warm, she said, “Then please. Rylan. I’m ready.”
He hadn’t seen it.
Even when confronted with the most obvious, incontrovertible evidence of how she felt, Rylan had let it slip right past him. The whole time he’d been staring at the lovesick drawings she’d done, he’d had those ghosts in his eyes again, and her heart had hurt. For her and for him.
There’d only been one other way to let him know. One way to satisfy the emptiness that came with the thought of holding back from him now.
It hadn’t been a hardship, beginning to match his nakedness with hers. They’d been together like this enough times by now. It hadn’t even taken much to offer him what she knew he’d always wanted. After alclass="underline" This wasn’t that one-night stand she’d had that once. Rylan wasn’t drunk, and he’d proven he wasn’t selfish. This wouldn’t be painful. It would probably feel good.
And she’d get to keep it. Later, after she’d left him and gone back home, she would always have this to look back to.
Rylan’s throat bobbed as he covered her hand with his, pressing it harder to his chest. He flicked his gaze from her eyes to her breasts to her hips and back. “Are you sure?”
Just like he had considered her drawings before rendering a verdict, she gave it the thought it deserved. Nothing in her heart wavered or changed.
Then she pulled her hand free of his. Reached back to unhook her bra and let the straps slide down her arms and hoped that was answer enough.
Dropping his gaze to the hollow of her throat, he placed a fingertip there and traced it through the space between her breasts, down to her navel, where he stopped. He looked her in the eyes again. “You change your mind and you tell me. Anything that makes you uncomfortable. If anything I do, if I touch you wrong or . . .”
She took his hand and brought it to the gap where she’d undone her jeans. He licked his lips and nodded. Together, they pushed the denim off her hips, taking her underwear with it. She grasped the sheet he’d draped across his waist and set it aside.
And then they were naked. Together. She shivered, because it was different this time, with her offering him everything. Knowing how deeply he’d affected her in this handful of days.