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“If I can handle a bear, I can handle you.” Setting it on the counter, she turns it so I can read the label.
Bear spray.
Gorgeous, smells great, knows how to make coffee, and she’s ready to fight a goddamned bear.
“You fell asleep on the porch and....” she prompts me back into my account of last night’s events.
“And apparently almost got a face full of bear mace.” Laughing even though I’m pretty sure it isn’t funny, I shake my head. “After that, I came in and went upstairs but couldn’t fall back to sleep so I came downstairs to get some work done.” Remembering her dig about the lights, I sigh. “I need light when I work so I turned them all on—and must’ve passed out on the couch at some point.”
“And the mostly naked part?” She blushes when she says naked like she’s thinking about what I looked like without most of my clothes on.
“I can’t explain that except to say that I usually sleep all the way naked so let’s just be grateful I had the forethought to leave my boxers on,” I tell her, liking the way her blush deepens and spreads when I say it because now she’s thinking about what I look like without any clothes on. “Your turn.”
Fingers still gripped around her backpack, I watch her jaw shift beneath cheeks stained with embarrassment. “I came in and every light in the house was on and the house runs on solar so... anyway, I started turning off lights, turned around and there you were. I wasn’t staring at you,” she tells me, gaze fixed on her hands. “I was admiring your tattoos.”
Somehow, I manage miracle number two by resisting the urge to point out that, last time I checked, my dick wasn’t tattooed. Instead, I gently pull her backpack across the counter toward me, so she can’t grab it and run away. “My tattoos?” I resist the urge to cover my forearm when her gaze shifts toward the ink that covers it.
“They’re beautiful.” As soon as it leaves her mouth, she winces and squeezes her eyes shut like she just bit her tongue. “I mean—lots of hands around here have them but—”
“Hands?”
“Ranch hands—like your brother,” she explains. “Mostly either the brands they ride for or jailhouse tattoos. None that look like that.”
My tattoos are the first thing people notice about me. If I had a therapist, they’d probably tell me that I covered myself in tattoos so I can hide behind them. Inked armor into my skin to shield myself from prying eyes. Separate myself from the people around me. The expectations I’ll eventually be forced to live up to. They’ve been called disappointing and distasteful. Fucking hot and an obvious cry for help.
But I’ve never heard them called beautiful before.
“Look like what?” My voice sounds weird. Like someone punched me in the stomach.
“Like art.” She says it quietly. Like it’s a secret and it knocks me off balance.
Jesus.
So much fucking trouble.
“I was watching you study because I’ve never seen someone do it before and I liked the way you looked while you were doing it,” I say, telling her the truth because I guess that’s what we’re doing now—telling each other the truth. I skip the part where I was mentally drawing her in my head because I already told her she didn’t have to model for me if she doesn’t want to and I regret it.
“You’ve never seen someone study before?” she says incredulously. “Didn’t you go to school?”
“My mother traveled a lot. I was homeschooled until I was fourteen,” I tell her, glossing over the fact that the Astrid Hawthorne version of homeschool involves opulent penthouse suites and a small army of tutors and instructors that traveled with us whenever she decided to pick up and move from one hotel to the next. “When I got old enough to tell my mom that my sister and I wanted to go to an actual school, we went to live with my grandparents so I could go to high school.”
She shakes her head, frowning slightly. “So, you have seen people study before.”
“Not like that, I haven’t,” I say with a shrug, suddenly embarrassed.
“Like what?” she asks suspiciously, sure there’s an insult hidden in there somewhere.
“Like it matters.” There’s no way of explaining to her that I went to a private high school with a bunch of trust fund babies who never took their education seriously because it never mattered. Most of them were going to be multi-billionaires before they hit twenty-five. No one cared about their GPA. “Like you take it seriously.”
“Yeah, I did.” For some reason, my assessment, twists her mouth into a hard, bitter line. “For all the good it did me.” Before I can ask her what she means by it, she shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter.” Reaching for her backpack, she pulls it out of my grip and I have the insane urge to fight her for it because even though I apologized, she’s still going to leave.
“You don’t have to leave, Sunshine,” I tell her, reluctantly letting her go of her backpack because I promised Damien to at least try to behave and even though I've done a shit job of it so far, I don’t think getting a face full of bear spray qualifies in his book.
“My name is Kaitlyn,” she informs me with a frown while she shoulders her backpack. “You can call me that or you can call me Kait.” It dawns on me that she thinks I either forgot her name or don’t care enough to remember it.
“I know what your name is.” I give her a crooked grin. “What’s the matter—no one’s ever given you a nickname before?”
She makes a noise in the back of her throat and shakes her head. “Not someone I barely know and they usually fit.” Before I can ask her what she means by that, she throws a quick look over her shoulder, aiming her gaze at the row of sketches I lined up on the couch last night. “I thought you drew.” Looking back at me, her eyes drop to my left hand, skimming over the tattoo that covers the back of it, finding the tips of my fingers that are perpetually stained black, no matter how hard I scrub. “When you said you needed a model, I thought you meant for drawing or painting—not photography.”