He snapped the shot, then held it out so she could see. He expected the requisite look of embarrassment all girls gave him when he showed them images of themselves, but instead she simply nodded. “Nice composition.”

It made him pause. She had been planning to spend her day sketching, had been swayed by his offer to take her here of all places, so the comment shouldn’t have surprised him. But his estimation of her rose. When she looked at something, she looked deeper. Saw more.

The idea of wandering around a museum with her suddenly took on a whole new kind of charm.

He glanced at the picture again before flicking back to the camera app. “Easy when there’s a pretty lady in the frame.”

She cast her gaze skyward and was just starting to move away when he caught her arm.

“What?”

“One more.”

“The one is plenty,” she argued.

“One more for me.” With that, he reeled her in, wrapping his arm around her shoulder. It was a cheap ploy, but he couldn’t resist the chance to get her close. Her scent wafted over him again. He took a second to breathe her in, to really feel her against his side before he held his arm out for the selfie, shooting his own best ladykiller grin at the lens.

Her laughter sounded more indulgent than charmed, but he could work with that. “Does this move usually work for you?” she asked.

He pressed the button on the screen to take the shot. “Better than the tour guide offer, even.” He snapped his teeth playfully near her ear. “Because this one gives me an excuse to touch you.”

Making a show of mock-growling at her, he gave her one rough squeeze and let her go. She took only a half step away, but the loss of her left his ribs cold. He mentally shook his head at himself.

Before he could give in to the urge to tug her back in, and without a pretext this time, he turned his attention to the screen. A pang fired off inside him. They looked good together. Like a real, happy couple—the kind he’d been taught didn’t exist. Her eyes positively danced, her smile as wide as her face.

And so was his. Not a thing about his expression was forced or fake. The contrast alone made his throat tighten. This wasn’t one of the usual selfies he took with girls. Not one of the awful pictures snapped on the courthouse steps. Or the others. The ones from before.

His hands curled into fists, and he had to forcibly relax them.

Shutting that line of thought right down, he turned off the screen of his phone. “You’ll have to tell me where to send them later.”

Oblivious to where his mind had gone, she raised a brow. “Ah, now I see your game. You want my email address.”

“Yes,” he said dryly. “It’s all been a clever little ploy so I could subscribe you to all sorts of mailing lists for natural male enhancement.”

She arched a brow. “Am I going to need that?”

Nicely played. “Not if you take me home tonight.” He threaded his arm through hers. “Come on. The masterpieces await.”

“Are you sure we’re still even in the museum?” Kate spun in a circle, looking around in awe. “How can this place be so huge?”

The vaulted archways seemed to soar above her, and the ceilings were almost as gorgeous as the paintings. The whole place smelled of art somehow, even though the works were all hundreds of years old, the oils dry and the varnishes cracking. The figures within the canvases glowed with how masterfully they’d been rendered, and something inside of her felt like it was glowing as well.

She’d thought the Met had been amazing, the first time she’d been there. But she’d had no idea. No clue.

She finished her slow circle, coming around again to face the center of the room. To face Rylan. He stood there, arms crossed over the expanse of his chest, gaze hot and heavy on hers, and a tremor coursed its way down her spine.

Then again, she’d also never wandered around the Met with a man like him by her side.

To think, she’d been worried when she agreed to let him take her here. She hated being rushed through museums, and she’d been resolved to take her time. But Rylan had stood by patiently as she looked her fill, had been waiting to take her hand at the end of each set of paintings. Big, strong fingers curled firmly around her palm, and the warm, male scent of him mingled with the wood and polish of the gallery to make her head spin.

Swallowing hard, she checked herself. He was practically a stranger—it shouldn’t be so easy to fall into step with him like this. And yet she felt more comfortable with him than she had doing this with any of her other friends. Definitely more comfortable than she ever had with Aaron. Maybe because he was a stranger. There was no point pretending to be anything she wasn’t. She never had to see him again if she didn’t want to. So she had nothing to lose.

Catching her eye, he tilted his head toward the next room, a silent invitation, asking her if she was ready to continue. She nodded, moving into his space again. The heat of his hand seeped into the base of her spine, but she didn’t flinch. Ridiculous, how quickly she was getting used to all these little touches. What had it been? A couple of hours?

A couple of amazing hours.

They’d seen a bunch of the highlights already. The sweeping statuary of Winged Victory, which had been so much bigger and more imposing than she’d expected. Tiny, lovely Venus de Milo. And much to Rylan’s frustration, they’d even stood in line to see the Mona Lisa nice and close. She’d shoved him when he’d asked with that odd mixture of amusement and derision if she was satisfied. She’d known going into it that that particular piece had a tendency to underwhelm, but she hadn’t cared. She’d seen it. In real life.

In her head, she was rearranging all her plans for the week she had left in Paris. She had to come back and spend a whole day here alone with her sketchbook and her pencils and pastels.

“You are having a total art-geek-gasm, aren’t you?” he asked, releasing her so she could get closer to one of the paintings.

At this point, they were in one of the more remote galleries, one he’d insisted they make the time to visit, full of big, classic pieces done up in vivid colors, depicting scenes from legends and myths. None of it was what she’d really come here to see, but she found herself getting lost in them all the same.

She was about to tell him as much when she glanced over at him, and he had that expression on his face again. It made her pause.

She didn’t have any illusions that he was here for any reason other than to humor her. He was going above and beyond as far as the amount of time and energy she expected any guy to put into a pickup, but it was still a pickup.

Only, he kept looking at her like this. Like somehow, despite his worst intentions, he was seeing more than just her breasts.

She let a grin curl her lips as she turned her attention back to the walls. “It’s amazing.”

“It gets even better.”

Hard to believe, but how could she resist?

“So the thing that really gets me,” he said over his shoulder as he meandered forward into the next gallery, “about European museums is the scale.”

She followed, craning her neck as she passed through the archway and—wow. He wasn’t kidding. The whole room was full of paintings that stretched from floor to ceiling. The canvases must have been twenty feet tall, some of them maybe double that in width.

“Holy crap.” In awe, she turned, trying to take in everything. She pointed to a painting at the end of the room. “That one is bigger than my apartment back in New York.”

It might have been a tiny studio apartment, but still.

“Don’t see this kind of thing in museums in the States, huh?” he asked.

He was standing behind her now, his breath warm against her ear. It felt . . . nice. But not nice enough to distract her from trying to memorize the images surrounding her.