It was written so clearly across the page—couldn’t have been more clear if she’d spelled it out. Love shone from the curve of his cheek and the fall of his hair and the tender softness of his earlobe. So many tiny details, and he was going to see.

God, he was going to want to look at this and he was going to know everything.

Beyond her tunnel vision, he stirred, the rustling of sheets a low murmur of a sound, lost beneath the roaring in her ears and of her heart. Warmth on her shoulder, then blunt fingers making a dark contrast against the snowy white of her page as they tipped the book down.

It broke the spell.

She dropped the book, looking up. With the sheet draped around his waist, Rylan stood in front of her, concern twisting his frown. “Kate? You went all”—he waved his hand at her—“pale. You sure you’re okay?”

She wanted to laugh.

No. She was the furthest possible thing from okay.

She’d burned her savings on an idiotic trip to Paris. Had gotten her purse stolen and had spent her days ignoring the work she’d come here to do because a man was paying attention to her. Was taking care of her and charming her and teaching her all sorts of things she’d never known her body could do.

So like the sad, naïve idiot she was, like her mother’s daughter, she’d fallen for him. And she knew it. Without a shred of doubt, she knew.

He was going to break her heart.

She sucked in a breath like she was drowning. If the outcome was the foregone conclusion, what the hell was she doing here? She should grab her things and run back to her nice, safe hostel with its awful roommates and communal baths.

Or she could dig her feet in. There wasn’t anything to lose.

If she wanted anything from him, she should go for it. Now. While she still had the chance.

chapter EIGHTEEN

If it hadn’t been so scary, it would have been hilarious. Because, seriously, Rylan had driven plenty of ladies out of their minds with his cock.

But he’d never done it quite so literally before.

He stood there, wrapped up in a sheet, trying to pull Kate out of whatever sinkhole she’d fallen into. She stared at him, emotions breaking like waves across her face. Humor and anguish and resignation. One by one, they all ceded until there was only resolve.

“Kate?”

“Do you want to see?” She flipped to the first page of her sketchbook and held it out like an offering. She was still looking at him so strangely, and he wanted to shake her. To make her snap out of whatever had taken hold of her.

But in the end, he just nodded. “Of course.” Extending his hand to accept it felt like stepping out onto a ledge somehow. He curled his fingers around the binding and paused, a whole new kind of apprehension taking hold. This entire thing had started when he’d asked her how she saw him. He was about to find out. But did he really want to know?

With a flash of false bravado, he cleared his throat. “You didn’t make me ugly or anything, did you?”

“You tell me.”

Her tone stopped him cold, because there was dread there.

Christ, what the hell had she drawn?

Unable to put it off any longer, he took the book and sat down on the edge of the bed.

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.