Shame.
Instinctively, he reached for a towel and dragged it into the tub to cover himself. The water turned it translucent. Well, it was something, at least.
Her gaze didn’t flinch as she watched his paltry attempt at modesty. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I’m fairly certain propriety demands it.”
Propriety.
When had they ever given a toss about propriety?
“That’s not why you covered yourself, Bran.”
Oh, this woman.
They’d never stopped knowing each other, had they?
She stepped closer.
He should stop this—now.
The glint of another emotion entered her eye—intention.
He should definitely stop this.
Before it was too late.
Or was it already?
Or … how could anything betoo latewhen they existed together outside the bounds of time?
“You don’t have to hide yourself from me.”
Oh, but didn’t he?
Didn’t he need to establish some distance?
Too late.
She lowered to her knees.
“Artemis,” he said, all too aware of his left hand balanced on the lip of the bathing tub. That hand was only inches from her.If it liked, that hand could reach up and take her silken hair between its fingers and caress the side of her face.
“Yes?”
“I’m not one of your wounded sanctuary animals.”
Though a flash of hurt passed behind her eyes, it felt important to say this—to establish a boundary by all but stating a simple fact.
He was still very much a man.
And the rigid cockstand straining against translucent linen attested strongly to the fact.
Slowly, deliberately, her gaze roved over him, pausing here and there to take in a part of him that was forgotten and remembered—the line of his jaw—or new—the scar on his right cheek. Down, her eyes drifted, too … down his throat, following a bead of sweat … across the width of his shoulders … down his chest … his stomach, ridged with tension … Every place on his body her gaze touched, he felt viscerally.
And what he detected in her eyes was neither disgust nor pity, but appreciation.
He was, indeed, very much a man, her gaze acknowledged.
