Kathleen O'Reilly - Intoxicating!

Nudity was private, and sitting there bare-assed-naked while she sketched him…all while he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about sex?

Hell.

“You don’t have to. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’m around pictures of naked people a lot more than everybody else, and sometimes I forget,” she muttered, her eyes resigned.

“All right,” he said, throwing away every piece of dignity he’d ever had. The exuberance rushed back in her eyes.

The sheet went off, and she adjusted his thighs, his butt, his currently aching cock, and he gritted his teeth until she told him that he needed to relax his jaw.

Easy for her to say.

But eventually she quit touching him and went to work, sitting in a chair across from him, the sun at her back. Actually, it wasn’t as bad he thought, because he got to watch her while she sketched him.

She was pretty. Really pretty, but it took someone with a careful eye to see it. The sun flashed gold in her hair, and when she got frustrated with herself, which seemed to be often, she would comb her fingers through the long strands.

At times, she looked, stared, watched him impassively, and he tried not to be affected. Unfortunately, when a woman watched his currently unclothed body with such single-minded focus, he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t had sex in a very long time and…well, there was a completely logical reason for a man to be aroused.

Heavily, painfully aroused.

Catherine didn’t seem to notice, thank God. When she sketched, she got caught up in some other world that he wasn’t a part of.

Her hand moved to the lower edge of the paper, and she leaned forward, the robe gaping an inch, almost enough…

If he moved his head only a fraction lower, he’d be able to…

She leaned forward even more….

His head followed, and he could almost make out…

“Oh,” she muttered, and then snapped up from the chair, regretfully pushing the robe back into place. Her busy hands were back at his jaw, twisting, her brown eyes all business, studying him again.

“Sorry,” he said, wondering what she would think if he pulled her down to the bed for a momentary intermission. A break to stir her creative juices…maybe.

She shook her head. “The look in your eyes. It’s wrong. Can we put the sadness back?”

He looked at her in surprise. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve got you half-sad, but I’m not quite finished with it, and you look, well—” the nervousness was back in her face “—not sad.”

“I’m very sorry, but you make me…completely not sad,” he said.

That brought her out of her reverie.

“Really?” She looked at him, a pleased smile stretched across her face.

“Really.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t worry about the sad look. Maybe I could draw you like this,” she muttered, looking lower, and then faltering for a second.

Daniel felt his patience coming to an unrepentant, crashing halt, and he was a patient guy, but this was flat-ass weird. “You want the sad back? Keep staring at me like that and stay about four feet away. That’s sad.”

“Wow,” she breathed.

“‘Wow’ was not the word I would use,” Daniel said, fighting the urge to cover himself. Dammit, some things couldn’t be helped, and he wasn’t going to apologize for it.

Her mouth pulled into another smile, equally pleased as before, but a little bit wicked, and she slid the robe off her shoulders and climbed on top of him. He showed her exactly how “not sad” he felt.

THEY DID EVENTUALLY make it outside. The late-summer sun burned down on her fair skin, the air was sticky, the sand hot, and the water looked too cool to ignore. Daniel was a good swimmer, not as good as she was—she, who had been the breaststroke champion at St. Ignatius, until Mrs. Crawford, the evil school nurse, had told her that swimming made her body look too much like a boy’s.

Thank you, Mrs. Crawford.

But Daniel didn’t seem to care. He caught her a few times, pulling her under the surface, touching her in ways that told her that he liked her body fine.

Take that, Mrs. Crawford.

Although one thing Catherine did notice was that he was never overt, never committing too much, always watching the lawyers next door with a careful eye. Daniel and Catherine appeared to be two swimmers in the sea, not two lovers lingering on the beach, but she decided that it wasn’t going to bother her. After all, she wasn’t the demonstrative type, either.

As the afternoon sun moved low they came out of the water. Daniel told her more about himself. He talked about his job at the accounting firm, about his brother’s bar. He asked her questions about where she worked, and this time Catherine was the careful one. Normally she loved to talk about Montefiore’s, but with all the talk in the back hallways of the auction house, she needed to be extra careful. So she told him she was gainfully employed at an art gallery in Soho where she did appraisals.

Catherine was always cautious.

Daniel listened, asking her polite questions about the business, and she gave her carefully constructed, socially acceptable tales of the canvas, and he didn’t seem to notice.

She avoided checking her watch, but eventually the sun started dipping lower in the horizon, and she knew it was close to time. Not wanting him to bring it up first, she glanced pointedly at her watch…once—but it was enough.

He met her eyes, and the loneliness returned. Odysseus was back on his travels. “I should get packed.”

Catherine sighed, then stood, dusting off the remains of the sand from her legs. “I’ll call you a taxi.”

“That’d be good,” he said, in a voice best described as emotionless.

This was it. That awkward moment when nothing more is going to come about, but everyone is expected to be adult. Catherine was supposed to pretend she hadn’t given her body to a man who was virtually a stranger, yet she’d never felt a stronger connection with a stranger, never felt a stronger connection with a non-stranger, either, for that matter.

Not many men understood a woman like Catherine. She’d spent so much of her life staring at art, studying art and drawing art. She lived in a quiet, inanimate world and at some point, the world became her, and she became the world. And actually, Catherine was happy in that quiet, inanimate world.

Daniel, with his lonely eyes. She’d thought this man understood her, but with every second that passed she felt him putting distance between them. Yes, she wanted to see him again, but she wasn’t going to ask, and put herself out there. This was one weekend only. A limited engagement.

Daniel followed her into the house and headed for the bedroom where his things were. The unused bedroom.

After Catherine called the cab, she stood over the kitchen counter. Her hands gripped the cool granite. Some part of her didn’t want this to end, but what choice did she have? Eventually, she spotted a bottle of water, helpful for his train ride back to the city, and her genetically propagated social skills came to the rescue.

With the travel refreshment in hand, she went to the bedroom. He didn’t notice her at first because he was engrossed in something entirely new and different—the heavy gold band sitting on top of his duffel bag.

A wedding ring.

Okay, that explained it. Catherine ignored the shooting pains radiating up from her gut to somewhere near her heart. She did hand him the bottle of water. In times of crisis, always best to remember one’s social skills.

She tried to not look at the small circle of gold. However, like the Mona Lisa, it drew your eye like a magnet.

A wedding ring.

Not quite what she had imagined.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, easily reading her mind. Catherine didn’t have the patience to hear excuses, not when she suddenly understood why he hadn’t cared if she talked much.