Needing to do something, anything, to escape his visual dissection, she turned the knob to the high setting on the autoclave so the tattoo iron would be sterilized in fifteen minutes, then set about tidying up her work area. Always be moving.
“I’ve been in Paris for the last couple of years, working with Fran?ois Bernet. He’s a well-known tattoo artist and he’s taught me a lot.” Both in and out of the sack, when he wasn’t being a controlling French jerk, but Beck didn’t need to hear that.
Too late. The crimp creasing his forehead said he’d read between the lines and come away with “Darcy did Paris” in more ways than one.
After some first-rate glowering, he found his voice again. “I knew you loved art, but . . .”
“You had no idea how much?”
“I’m pretty sure Skin Ink 101 is not an elective at Harvard.”
She sighed. “I dropped out my sophomore year. The expectations . . . well, they got to be too much.”
“Was your engagement part of those expectations?”
She had wanted to study art, but there was no room in her father’s plans for a foolish girl’s dreams. A Chicago media and real estate tycoon, Sam Cochrane had a rather feudal attitude when it came to the family’s fortunes. For years he had treated his children as cogs in a plan to consolidate power without dirtying his hands with outright politicking. The front lines were of no interest to him, not when playing puppet master suited him better. The Collinses were a wealthy Connecticut family where everyone over the age of thirty was a U.S. congressman and had numbers after their names. Preston was the dynasty’s most eligible bachelor.
“I met Preston at a political fund-raiser my father encouraged me to attend. We dated for a few months and he asked me to marry him. I was only nineteen. I thought it was what I wanted, but every day closer to the wedding I became more panicked. I bailed two weeks before the big day.”
Darcy had stared down a lifetime of bruncheons and getting her hair ombréd, and realized this was not how she was supposed to go out. Finding out that Preston and her father held regular powwows with agenda items covering everything from how many children she should push out in the next five years to whether a political wife actually needed a college degree had woken her up from the Matrix-like life she’d been sleepwalking through. When she asked for her father’s help canceling the wedding, he told her to play ball or be cut off.
“Let’s just say I didn’t want my life to be mapped out for me.”
On a grunt, Beck flipped open one of the flash books, the shop’s equivalent of clip art for people who wanted a tattoo but had no imagination beyond the initial impulse.
“Last night you ran out on me,” he murmured.
“You ran first.”
Electric eyes snapped to hers. Jaw muscles bunched. She longed to bite back the hastily spoken words. Not supposed to care, Darcy.
“Ancient history, princesa.”
“And you can cut that princesa shit out, for a start.” For a start? No, no, no. Nothing was starting here because he was right. They were ancient history and dredging up the whys and whats was about as useful as Matthew McConaughey’s shirt collection.
“Why are you here, Beck?”
“You ran out on me,” he repeated, the edge in his voice hitting the hollow between her lungs. He shut the flash book, the sound a brutal echo in the tense silence, and skirted the counter, devouring the ground with long, measured strides. She backed up into the remaining inches available until her butt met the chair.
“And now I’ve found you.”
She took those words as more than mere acknowledgment that he had located her at this point in time, in this particular place. The underlying meaning, that she had been rediscovered and would be at his mercy, thrilled through her despite her best intentions not to be aroused.
“And now you can be on your way.”
He placed a big palm on either side of her, hemming her in against the chair’s armrest with his feral, male heat. So sexy, so dangerous. That damn pirate’s jaw!
“Do you think I’m stupid?” he rasped.
“Well—”
“Let me rephrase, because right now you might have something there. Standing this close to you makes me feel incredibly stupid.” He sucked in a hissed breath. “Do you think I’m going to let you go now that we’ve reconnected?”
Her heart thudded insanely fast. “I’m thinking you don’t have a say in the matter, Beck Rivera.”
Shit. She needed to stop using his last name like that. Or his first name. It smacked of a lover’s familiarity and a level of comfort she did not want to indulge in. Last night, the ease between them as they teased and flirted had filled aching gaps in the cold corners of her mind. Not to mention what had come after. All day, she had savored X-rated visuals of his hard body fusing to hers, that in-out rhythm as he entered her so deeply she felt him clear to her heart. Tasting him had been such a boneheaded move she wondered how she was still standing. Shouldn’t her brain matter have squeezed out of her ears? Shouldn’t she be collapsed somewhere in a fetal heap of regret?
He inched closer, invading, conquering her body and soul with his quiet intensity.