It left her feeling empty, but not unpleasantly so. How could it, after what he had given her?

After what he had shown her how to do?

And yet, as he held her, wrapping both arms around her chest, he was the one to murmur, “Thank you.”

Shaking, she curled her hands around his forearms. Wonder pounded through her, the way arousal had moments before.

“No,” she said, the words choked. “Thank you.”

chapter TWELVE

Another day, another museum.

Rylan gazed at the painting in front of him, trying to come up with something insightful to say about it. His mother had given him some of the language to talk about art, but he was drawing a blank now. Of course. If only he’d known back when he was a kid that he was actually going to need that kind of stuff someday.

He snuck a glance to the side. After more than a little cajoling, Kate had consented to spend the day with him again. It burned him that he’d had to dangle a visit to the Musée d’Orsay in front of her to get her to agree. He was pretty sure he’d paid for the pleasure of her company in orgasms the night before, but apparently, that wasn’t valuable enough of currency for her. What she really wanted was Monet and Van Gogh.

He didn’t mind, exactly, but there was still something petty niggling at the edges of his thoughts. Like he was torn between loving how she got so into all this modern art stuff and being annoyed that she was scarcely paying attention to him. He frowned. Even more annoying was that her preoccupation bothered him at all.

She was staring at a different piece, her head tilted to the side, and he could just about see all the art history knowledge running through her head. She took a small step back and into a beam of light streaming in from the window. It made her hair glow, and God. He really really wished he had something intelligent to say.

He straightened his shoulders, shaking off the plaintive, insufferable tone to his own internal monologue. Ridiculous. His mother wasn’t the only one who’d taught him anything, and there was more than one way to get a conversation going. His father had instilled in him that much.

People loved to talk about the subjects that interested them—whether or not the people they were talking at knew a goddamn thing.

Biting the bullet, he sidled over to stand beside her, and nudged her with his elbow. “So. Teach me about art.”

Tearing her gaze from the painting she’d been staring at, she raised an eyebrow at him.

Right. Because she always saw through him.

Speaking slowly, voice colored by both distraction and skepticism, she asked, “What do you want to know?”

He shrugged. He had to do better if he wanted her to actually talk to him. “Everything. Teach me about . . .” He squinted at the placard on the wall. “Eugène Boudin.”

The thing that killed him was, he did actually want to know. Maybe not about Eugène Boudin in particular, but about why she looked at the picture the way she did. What drew her in about all this Impressionism and Cubism and Fauvism?

“Funny.” Her tone was desert dry. “The man who paraded me around the Louvre showing off his favorite painting is looking for an art lesson now?”

“I’m serious.” More serious than he’d realized a couple of minutes ago. And besides . . . “I may know the Louvre pretty well, but—” The next words took him by surprise. He cleared his throat to hide his pause. “Mother never really cared all that much for this place.”

If she caught his hesitation, she ignored it in favor of her incredulity. She flung her arm out as if to encompass the museum as a whole. “Who doesn’t care for this?”

She had a point. The building was gorgeous, with warm light pouring in from all the windows, and the statuary and paintings were undeniably masterpieces.

He shrugged, sorry he’d brought it up. “It was still the ‘new museum’ when I was a child. Mother was more interested in showing us the classics.”

She’d appreciated modern art as much as any cultured woman of her social status should. Hell, she’d let that interior designer fill her apartment with the stuff. But it was the work of the old masters that made her seem alive.

Made her eyes light up, the way her husband and children so rarely seemed to manage to.

Of course, what Kate latched onto after all of that was “‘Us’?”

“Me and my brother and sister.” The Bellamy children. Something in the back of his throat tasted sour.

She pursed her lips. “I didn’t know you had siblings.”

“We’re all scattered. Doing our own things.” He’d scarcely spoken to either of them since the trial.

“Let me guess. You’re the oldest?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“You were probably super bossy, too.”

That made him grin. “There I plead the fifth.”

“Uh-huh.” She leaned in closer to inspect a corner of the painting, and he half thought she’d decided to drop it. But then she turned to him, arms crossed over her chest. “You never volunteer anything, do you?”

He frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Every time it’s your turn to talk about yourself, you answer questions. Barely. But you never offer anything.”

Her accusation took him off guard.

He’d volunteered plenty, their first couple of days. He’d shown her that painting and told her about his childhood visits to the Louvre. About his father’s ring.

He’d volunteered things he’d never volunteered before.

And besides. “This all started with me asking you to tell me more about what we were looking at.”

It had started with a question he hadn’t even cared about until it had come out of his mouth.

“But it evolved into us talking about your family. Or at least me trying to.”

She wasn’t wrong, but nothing about it seemed fair. “So you can be evasive and I can’t?”

“I wasn’t being evasive. I was just trying to figure out what you wanted.”

“To get to know you.” He spat it. “Is that such a crime?” He heard what he’d said—heard the hypocrisy in it about a second after it was out in the air. He tried to backtrack, spinning wildly. “That’s not the same thing at all. Stories about dead artists versus my whole . . .” Clusterfuck of a family. He was practically pleading now. “It’s not the same.”

“If you can’t tell me anything about who you are, then what are we even—” She cut herself off, eyes shuttering. He’d never seen her so pissed off before, and a ball of dread formed in his stomach when she waved a hand at him and turned, heading toward a sculpture on the other side of the room.

It left him alone, standing there beside a fucking Eugène Boudin, watching her walk away from him. An instinct surged up, telling him fine. If she wanted to be like that, what did he care? It was only a matter of time until she walked away in any case. If not now, in the middle of a museum, it would be in a matter of days, disappearing behind airport security, never to be heard from again.

But . . . but . . .

Fuck.

Forgetting the people surrounding them, he jogged across the gallery. Came up behind her and took her shoulders in his hands, spinning her around until they were face to face. She gazed at him expectantly, like everything that would happen after this point revolved around what he said now.

Maybe he should cut his losses and go. There were a hundred other women just like her, tourists on their own in a beautiful city, waiting to be shown a good time.

Only none of them were her. None of them would see through all his lines or make him work so hard for it. None would come to him so innocent and yet so fiery. She was the one he wanted to give up his empty days to walk around museums with, and take to quirky restaurants, and kiss and touch. The one he wanted to spread out naked on his bed.