Lies. He cared about his body. He treated it like a goddamn temple. Yet another thing for him to control. “Oh, goodie. I haven’t done any naked women in a while.”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
Always so confident. “How do you know?”
“I know you.”
The three words had her swallowing around the lump in her throat. No, he didn’t really know her. She was hardly the same pigtailed kid who’d tagged along behind him and Paul, eager to play with them. Or the young woman he’d swept off her feet, whose virginity he’d taken in a luxurious hotel room a few towns over.
Everything had seemed so easy then. Perfect. They’d been a magical couple, young wealthy royalty destined to unite two powerful families.
Then it had been over.
“You don’t know shit,” she managed, then grabbed a Sharpie from her workbench.
He was silent for a bit. “You’re probably right.”
She uncapped the green Sharpie and bent overhis arm. A blank canvas. A tingle of excitement ran through her, the same tingle any artist would feel if they’d theoretically been given carte blanche.
“What are you doing?”
“I draw my designs first,” she lied. She tended to freehand most of her work, unless her client wanted to see it in advance. Then she used transfer paper, like a temporary tattoo.
There was no way she was actually piercing Nicholas’s virgin skin with a needle, though. Otherwise she would have prepped the area properly by shaving and cleaning it.
“Naked lady it is,” she said lightly, and bent her head to draw a woman’s head on his inner wrist, making it deliberately big.
She didn’t have to steady him—he was unmoving—but she kept her finger right on his pulse. Its regular tempo reminded her of all the times they’d lain curled up around each other, their heartbeats synchronized. Nothing frazzled him, not even his childhood sweetheart and former lover putting permanent marks on him.
Livvy bit her inner cheek when she sketched in huge boobs, waiting for his yelp of outrage. When she glanced up, though, his eyes were shut, head tilted back, thick lashes flaring against his cheeks. It wasn’t fair for a man to have eyelashes like that when she had to wage a war with her mascara brush every morning to turn her short lashes into any kind of flirtatious arcs.
Was there anything she didn’t like about hisface? Nope. It wasn’t perfect, but she lusted after all of it, from his fierce eyebrows to his twice broken nose to his high cheekbones to those aforementioned lashes. She wanted to drown in his eyes and be revived by his cruel lips.
She drew the female’s legs coyly bent to preserve some modesty—Livvy would happily draw a vagina, but she wasn’t sure what level of detail she could manage in a hasty doodle on an arm, and she hated to half-ass a vagina—and continued sneaking peeks up at the man. There were new lines on his forehead and around his mouth, like he frowned a lot more now. He was thirty-three, hardly ancient, but silver threaded through the hair at his temples.
“Why are you really in town?”
She concentrated harder on her dumb drawing than she needed to. “My mom broke her hip. Where do you think I’d be?”
At his silence, she looked up. His lips were compressed tight. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How is Tani?”
At least he could say her name. “She’ll be fine. She just needs someone.”
Not entirely true. Tani wasn’t totally alone. She lived with her sister-in-law, and she had other people who could look out for her.
But Livvy wanted Tani to need her.
Livvy had managed to avoid spending more than twenty-four consecutive hours in this town or in her mother’s company for longer than a decade, since her beloved father had died and everythinghad come crashing down around her. Her self-imposed exile had felt like protection back then. Not so much anymore.
In a fit of whimsy, Livvy added two large wings to the back of the voluptuous female.
“Did your brother come back too?”
Her hand jerked at the bite in the words, the first real, non-lusty emotion Nicholas had clearly betrayed.
She knew Nicholas probably had ten thousand unresolved feelings toward her late father but she didn’t really think he actively hated her or her mother. She didn’t even think he’d despised Paul, though Paul had been eaten up with bitterness toward anyone named Chandler. Nicholas probably considered them collateral damage in the sequence of events that had happened after the tragedy, people who were simply too painful to be around or think about.
But her twin? Yeah, the guy who’d been arrested for burning down the very first Chandler’s was a pretty easy target for his anger. “No,” she said shortly.
