And that had always been the place where she’d struggled so much. She’d never known what to let people see.

She still had her father’s voice in her ear, telling her there wasn’t anything in her worth seeing.

Beside her, Rylan nodded. “So it’s more about the interpretation instead of just about what they saw.”

He’d said something similar before, hadn’t he? That one time she’d showed him her sketchbook?

“Yeah,” she said.

They stood there for a minute before he raised their joined hands and gestured at the images surrounding them. “What made you want me to look at these pieces in particular?”

It was hard to put her finger on. “I don’t know. This is technically Postimpressionism, and it’s just . . . it’s my favorite, I guess. Things started getting all blocky, and he was playing with . . .” She stumbled, looking for the right words to describe what it felt like Cézanne had been trying to do. “With the shapes of things. Deconstructing the forms. But it was all still real, you know? That’s clearly a rooftop”—she pointed at one picture and then another—“and that’s a man.”

“A funny-looking man.”

“But a more real man for all that he’s impossible.” The idea suddenly gripped her, fervent in a way she couldn’t quite explain. “You’re seeing what he looked like and getting this idea of who he was, or who the artist thought he was.” The thick strokes of paint split the man’s face into planes, hinting at where Cubism was heading without quite getting there. They broke him up. Disassembled him, and put him back together, more whole than he could have been if he’d been rendered any other way.

“I don’t know,” Rylan mused. “I see Cézanne’s style more than I see a personality. Am I seeing who the subject was or am I seeing who the man behind the easel wanted him to be?”

“Hard to tell, isn’t it?”

He let go of her hand, but it was only to shift to the side, moving to stand behind her and wrap his arms around her waist. With his lips beside her temple, he asked, “What do you want me to see?”

And she didn’t know if he meant as a tour guide, showing him the works that had moved her in the past. As an artist in her own right, or as a—whatever she was to him, sharing his days and his bed in this finite slice of time they had.

Something shaky fluttered inside of her, but she pushed it down, folding her hand over his. “I guess I’m still working on that.”

chapter THIRTEEN

Rylan set the key to their hotel room on the table beside the door with a heavy hand. The quiet slap of plastic on wood echoed more loudly than it had any right to. Kate had entered ahead of him, and she stood with her back to him, gazing out the window as she lifted her bag over her head, sending the loose tumble of her hair falling across her shoulders. His mouth went dry.

In the past wasted year, and in all the time before, he’d chosen his conquests for a variety of reasons. Most he’d liked the look of. Drawn to full breasts or sultry lips or legs that went on for miles, he’d introduced himself. Turned on the charm and flashed his credit card around.

And then there was this woman. She was beautiful enough, but she was smart and funny and she saw the world in a whole different way than he ever had—talking about art like it could save the world. She was trying to do something with her life, and if they’d met on another continent, in another universe, he would have run screaming from the way she made him feel.

Love was a weapon. People used it against you to get you to do things you didn’t want to do, to steal from you. They took it and they threw it away.

But this wasn’t love. This was a few days of connection. This was lust, for her mind as well as her body, but lust all the same.

He wanted her so much it hurt to breathe.

“Come here.”

She turned at the sound of his voice, and the low roughness of it took even him aback.

“Come here,” he repeated.

She quirked one eyebrow up, but as she twisted her hair between her fingers, she did as he’d asked, advancing on him. She’d taken off her shoes, and God, even her feet were dainty and lovely, and the lines of her legs from under that skirt made him even harder.

As soon as she was within reach, he struck, reeling her in and pulling her tight against his body. He’d been so patient with her the past two nights, and part of him was aching to take what he really wanted. He could bend her over the mattress the way he had so many girls before, and shove her skirt up and—

“Rylan?”

Torn from the fantasy, he looked down at her. She pressed a hand against his chest, not quite pushing him away but not far from it, either, and while there was arousal in her gaze, there was something else, too.

Fear.

The same fear he’d cursed other men for daring to put on her face.

He closed his eyes and filled his lungs, once, twice, then made his mouth and his hands both soft, holding her instead of gripping her. “Sorry. Just—” The emotion he’d felt, standing in the middle of a museum, listening to her as she described why an image of a man reading a book had moved her so deeply swept over him. A helpless smile stole over his lips. “You look so beautiful when you talk about the things you love.”

Her cheeks bloomed, and she glanced away, but he wasn’t having any of that.

Taking hold of her chin, he tilted her head up, all gentleness in his motions. He darted his gaze between her eyes. “You are,” he insisted. “The whole time you were talking, I wanted to . . .”

He’d wanted to stay there, listening to her forever. She was the exact opposite of him, full where he was hollow, caring so deeply while every choice he’d had stripped from him had fed a growing, gnawing apathy. Her vibrancy was shaking his soul to life.

But he couldn’t say that. Without the words to describe how she was confusing everything, he showed her the best he could, dipping down to capture her mouth. He’d wanted to do that, too, in the museum. Wanted to kiss Monet and Degas and Picasso from her lips, until they were nothing but brushstrokes and canvas and air.

Deconstructed, precisely the way she’d said. And reassembled by an artist’s knowing hands.

Feeling like he was the one being taken apart, he gripped her more tightly, with none of the possession of a few moments before but with an intensity that he couldn’t quite explain. She held him right back, though, curling her hand around his nape and threading her fingers through his hair. He took control of the kiss, trying to push all these thoughts she’d been awakening inside of him into the possession of his mouth.

She made him feel things, dammit, in places that had been so cold and empty for so long. Made him want to be better.

He swallowed down the lonely throb that thought evoked in him—the undeniable knowledge of all the ways he was lacking, especially now.

He’d left all of his responsibilities behind, had discarded the life he’d been forced into after his father’s bullshit had been exposed. He’d been directionless ever since. But here, with her, he had a purpose. Clutching at her hips, he crushed her closer to his chest, bending his will to the warm pleasure of contact. The needy thread of desire pulsing just beneath his skin.

She moaned and opened wide to him, letting him lick into her mouth. The scratch of nails against his scalp set the low burning inside of him thrumming hotter, and everything came into a sharp kind of focus. He wanted inside—wanted to fuck and touch, and be touched, but more than that he wanted to give her something.

With his heart hammering and his own need a dull, dense ache, he walked her backward toward the bed. He pressed on her shoulder until she sat, and then he dropped to his knees. Her legs fell apart with the barest of prompting. Dragging both palms up the curves of her calves, he licked his lips. Looked up at her for permission as he skimmed his hands up her thighs, rucking her skirt up higher. When he slipped his fingertip along the elastic of her underwear, her breath stuttered in her chest. The fabric was damp and hot, the perfume of her cunt a soft presence in the air, one that made him even harder.