But Rosa was shaking her head. “These paintings were just supposed to be between you and me. Not you, me, and your sister.”
“Other than an oath signed in blood, I don’t know how I’m going to get you to trust me when I say that she’s not out to hurt you.”
“What did you tell her about me?”
“Only that we’d just met and I wanted to paint you.”
“Was she horrified?” Rosa didn’t wait for him to answer. “Of course she was. No one would want their brother to get mixed up with some reality TV trash in a nude photo scandal.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “If you’re trying to piss me off by insulting both yourself and my family all at the same time, it’s working.” Her eyes widened. “The only thing she’s horrified by is what happened to you. She told me she wished she could write a program that would erase the pictures off the Internet forever—that she’d been thinking about ways to protect people from cyber harassment for a while now.”
“She really said that?” When he nodded, Rosa said, “I didn’t mean to insult her. It’s just really hard for me to trust people right now.”
“You have every right to be cynical. If my sister were going to be a problem, I wouldn’t hide it from you. But,” he warned her, “if you ever call yourself trash again, you’re going to find out just how dangerous I can really be.”
Chapter Thirteen
Rosa was almost positive Drake hadn’t meant to say what he’d just said in a sexy way...but her body didn’t seem to get it.
It was just that she’d never met a man like him before. Not only breathtakingly gorgeous on the outside, but on the inside too. He looked amazing whether clean-shaven or covered in facial hair, well rested or sleep deprived, even wearing paint-spattered jeans with smudges of color all over his hands and hair.
But it was the way he’d repeatedly defended her—even from her own harsh words about herself—that rocked her to the core. And when she was standing this close to him, especially after zinging so many heated words back and forth, it was all she could do not to frame his gorgeous face in her hands and kiss him the same way he’d kissed her in the motel room. With ravenous, desperate passion.
She wanted to rip off his clothes and learn every inch of his body with her hands, her mouth.
She wanted to wrap herself around him again and beg him to take her.
She wanted to lose herself in his intensity, his desire.
And, most of all, she wanted to believe that he was right about her...and that she wasn’t trash.
Only Oscar stealing the sandwich from her hand in a deft move that defied his general air of laziness stopped her. “Your dog is eating your sandwich.” Her words were heavy with unquenched desire. “I’ll make you another.”
Her heart was pounding a rough beat in her chest as she headed back to the kitchen and tried to regain at least a tiny bit of composure.
For the past five years, she’d learned so many tricks for how to change the mood in a room, whether at a press conference or at a party, but being with Drake wasn’t like being with anyone else. Mostly because he didn’t see her the same way the rest of the world did, as nothing more than a vacuous sex symbol who’d “lucked” into a fortune on TV. But was he right? Was she more than that? Had she always been more?
In any case, she badly needed to find some way to drop the intensity level between them. Otherwise, she was very much afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from giving in to the desire that only ratcheted up every time they went deep.
Fortunately, the smacking sounds Oscar was making as he licked the rest of the sandwich from his muzzle helped her pull focus. “Tell me more about your sister,” she said as she took food out of the fridge for another sandwich. “You said she writes computer programs?”
“Suzanne founded her own company when she was twenty. She can do pretty much anything when it comes to writing software, but digital security is her specialty. Her company is based in Manhattan.”
“She sounds brilliant.”
“She is. But I worry about her sometimes, that she doesn’t get out enough or see enough of the real world outside her rooms full of computers.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“Nope. Like I said, she spends most of her time with her computers.”
“Would she tell you if she did have one?”
“Sure, why wouldn’t she?”
“Because as soon as I said the word boyfriend, you got this protective-warrior look on your face.” And her heart had melted even further at how much he obviously cared for his sister. “Is she pretty?”
“Very.” He nodded to the hallway. “There’s a picture of all of us on the wall.”