His mouth was nearly on hers when the sketchbook he’d put on the counter fell off and hit the floor, the metal rings holding the sheets together making a surprisingly loud slap on the wood floor. Loud enough, anyway, to startle Oscar into barking. Which, of course, sent Rosa jumping from Drake’s arms.
She bent down to pick up the sketchbook and was about to put it on the counter when she stopped with it still in her hand. “Can I see?”
Most people didn’t wait for his answer. But though Rosa should have felt his sketches were fair game given that her face and form were inside, she obviously wouldn’t look if he said she couldn’t.
“Sure.” The lone word was raw with unquenched desire from coming so close to tasting her mouth...but not nearly close enough.
She opened up the sketchbook on a drawing he’d done a few weeks back of Oscar having a moment of silliness rolling on the moss outside and laughed. “You’ve captured him perfectly!” Her laughter was such a pretty sound that it actually made headway into Drake’s frustration. “And wow...” She’d turned to a sketch he’d done of the rolling ocean waves. “How are you able to make everything come so alive with only a pencil?”
But before he could answer, she was turning to his first sketch of her, when she’d sat on the leather seat in the corner looking wary and unsure about her decision to let him paint her. He couldn’t read her expression as she went to the next drawing—her laughing while a too-big Oscar tried to climb into her too-small lap. In silence, she turned the pages one by one on which he’d wanted to show all her different sides—her joy and empathy, her bravery and fear, her strength and her softness. But it wasn’t until she reached the final sketch that he realized he’d also captured desire, the flush that had been in her cheeks before she’d popped up to take the lasagna out of the oven mirrored by the flush that colored them now.
“You really are an amazing artist.” She closed his sketchbook and put it back on the counter. “And your lasagna is probably getting cold, so we should eat.”
Drake had always been the rare kind of artist who was confident enough in his own vision to not particularly care what other people thought of his work. But, yet again, things were different with Rosa. “You don’t like my sketches of you.”
She was halfway to the folding table when she stopped and turned. “It’s not that.” She shook her head. “You see so much. Too much. Even things I’m not sure I see myself.” She seemed to battle with herself for a few moments before finally turning to meet his gaze. “I’ve spent years in front of cameras and endless hours in editing booths watching myself on screen, but what you drew on those pages is really different.” She ran a hand through her hair. “God, I’m doing it again. Tripping over both your dog and all my words. It’s probably best if I fill up my mouth with some of your great-smelling lasagna instead of continuing to say all the wrong things.”
He wanted to tell her she wasn’t doing or saying anything wrong, wasn’t feeling anything she shouldn’t. He wanted to admit that he was falling for every one of the facets of her that he’d drawn. He wanted to say that he already knew fifty years wouldn’t be enough to capture them all.
But, unfortunately, he also knew just how fast—and far—she’d run if he did that. Especially when just looking at his sketches had made her so uncomfortable. Hell, he should be uncomfortable too, shouldn’t he? Wasn’t this exactly the kind of connection he’d been fighting his whole life—one where it already seemed far too likely that creative interest could spin into obsession?
Thankfully, as she sat down and tucked into her food, she seemed to forget all about his drawings for the moment. “This is so good.” She forked another bite into her mouth before she’d even finished chewing the first. “Did you get it at the general store too?”
“I made it.”
She stopped with another forkful halfway to her mouth. “How?”
He knew she wasn’t asking about sheets of dried pasta and meat sauce. “My dad wasn’t much of a cook. If we wanted to eat a meal that didn’t come out of a box, we made it ourselves.”
“All of your siblings can cook?”
“Alec and Harry are the oldest, so of the four of us, they’re the best cooks.” Alec, in particular, liked to use his kitchen prowess as an ace in the hole with women. He often bragged to the rest of them that nothing made a woman hotter than a billionaire who turned out to be even better in the kitchen than his French chef. “But Suz and I can hold our own when we need to.”
Whenever he talked about his siblings, Rosa got a wistful look on her face. Her current situation was so off-the-charts crazy that he needed to tread carefully, but since she hadn’t been shy about asking him questions, he figured it would be okay to ask one. “How many siblings do you have?”
“You really don’t know that I have two younger brothers?”