The Finished Masterpiece Boxed Set - Pepper Winters Page 0,13

again from the use of my name.

It drenched me in memories of adolescent moments. Of simpler times. Of excruciating times. Where a crush had the power to erase the world and forsake all others. Where affection had the magic to make you believe in fairy-tales.

He cursed something I didn’t catch. Marching away, he dragged both hands through his hair while glowering at the ceiling. For a moment, it looked as if he’d rather throw himself off a cliff than return to me, but then his hands fell from his hair, his back straightened, he retraced his steps to stop beside me.

His voice was brittle with tightly reined temper. “Look, if you’ve gone shy, then leave. It’s best you go. I don’t know what I was thinking, asking you to come back.” His green gaze shot to the door, his shoulders tensing. “I...this was a mistake. You need to—”

“No.” Taking a deep breath, I undid the belt and wriggled out of the comfy warmth. “I want to stay.” Letting the robe hang off my wrists, it cascaded down the back of my thighs.

My stomach quivered as Gil’s eyes stayed resolutely on mine.

He didn’t look.

Didn’t devour.

We stood at an impasse.

Me desperate for him to want me.

Him desperate to show no signs of caring.

His jaw clenched as he arched an eyebrow, settling his features into cool indifference.

I wasn’t half-naked before him for the very first time. I was merely a piece of parchment stretched on a wooden frame.

“You really should have left.” His voice became tumbling rocks, heavy and threatening.

“I need the money.”

“Some things are worth more than money.” His veneer cracked a little. His jaw twitched. Bracing himself, he dropped his gaze from my eyes to my chin, to my collarbone, breasts, belly, thighs, and toes.

He noticed everything.

The slight scar on my kneecap. The belly button ring I’d recklessly done on my sixteenth birthday. The way my hipbones were a little too stark for my otherwise svelte frame.

He stayed in front of me.

Which I was glad.

My back was where my secrets lay.

His body locked down as if he enlisted every muscle not to reach for me. The freezing warehouse suddenly became a furnace. Deceit couldn’t exist in the blistering awareness that things weren’t over between us.

They could never be. Not when our souls still belonged to the other.

“Gil...” My heart drummed against my ribcage. “I—”

He bit his lip, shaking his head furiously. Backing away, he rubbed his mouth as if giving himself time to get runaway desire under control. Slowly, difficultly, he shoved away all hints of need, shutting himself down.

With his body rigid, he nudged his chin at my sports bra with its highlighter peach crisscross straps. “I can’t paint you with that on.” He dropped his stare to my black G-string. “Nor that.” Swallowing back the gravel that’d appeared in his throat, he turned and yanked open a drawer on his mixing table. Another packet appeared, this one smaller than the bathrobe but just as new and untouched. “Put this on and take the bra off.”

“Here?”

He crossed his arms, a tortured lash of need vanishing beneath bleak determination. “Do you have a better place in mind?”

When I didn’t answer, he added, “You read my advert. You know what this job entails.”

“I know.”

Tension etched its way across his face. “I made a mistake asking you to come back. Maybe you made a mistake applying for—”

“Why did you change your mind? You didn’t want to do the commission before.”

He froze, every hint of him vanished behind a careful wall. “I don’t need permission to switch.”

“Was it because of the phone call?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Search for things that don’t exist.”

“You say that as if you’re hiding things you don’t want to be found.”

“You’re right.” His face darkened as a flash of agony highlighted his gaze. “If it was up to me, you wouldn’t be here. You would be as far away from this place as possible.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s—” His lips snapped shut.

He made no effort to enlighten me.

“You’re acting as if you’ve been forced into this.” I cursed the goosebumps dancing over my skin.

He twitched as if I’d struck him. His temper slipped. “Stop it, Olin.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Enough,” he groaned.

“But—”

“But nothing.” He vibrated with ruthless energy, grasping onto it after splintering before me. “Make your choice. Stay and do what you’re told. Or leave and never come back.”

“If I stay will you talk to me?”

“No.”

“If I go can I see you again?”

He shook his head.

I fell quiet, shooing away the tension that’d sprung from nowhere,