My gut twisted in horror as I slammed my bedroom door shut, blocking our view of her. “Oh my God, I’m sorry.”
KC snickered and rested his hands on his hips, which of course drew my attention to his beautifully defined obliques. His stupid skintight T-shirt seemed designed to highlight those muscles. My tongue wanted to roll out of my mouth like in one of those old cartoons.
“So, you talk to your mom about me?” His eyebrow ticked upward.
“I work with Barber and see you sometimes, and sometimes he talks about you. You’re in the rotation of topics, but it makes sense, don’t you think? I do.” I rubbed the back of my neck, wincing at my clammy skin.
He took a step closer and tilted his head. “How come you’re blushing? It looks good, by the way.”
“It stops me from spontaneously combusting. If I didn’t blush, I’d die.”
He snorted.
For a few spiraling, awful seconds, I felt like I was going to float away when the scent of his deodorant and whatever woodsy cologne he’d sprayed on after his shower teased my nose. How did he smell so good?
“Were you actually going to show me some of your artwork or were you just trying to get me away from your mom and all the intriguing things she has to say about me?” He glanced at the door like he might go back out there, and my heart tried to break free of my body, hammering away at my ribs.
“Why would I need to do that?” I meant to sound stern, but my voice was breathy.Kill me now.
“Whywouldn’tyou need to do that?” He waggled his eyebrows.
In a panic, I scanned my room for a safe sketchbook to share because there was no way I could actually answer that question. I snatched a black spiral-topped pad off my desk and thrust it at him.
“What’s in here?” he asked, then lifted the cover.
“Some finalized artwork.”
He hummed and flipped pages. “This is really good.”
Sighing, I flopped on my bed and bounced there, immediately transported to the hell I’d been in when I’d shown that work to PD.
“Really good.” He smiled at me, and I rubbed my hands on the comforter, equal parts wanting to hug him and snatch the pad away. He was so nice all the time and I never knew what to do with it.
“PD says some people don’t do art that translates well into tattoos. He says he can tell just by looking at my stuff I wouldn’t do well tattooing. Something about how it’s clear I had to fix my final product a bunch of times. And I like to use a drawing tablet, which I thought was useful because it would teach me to havea light touch with the needle pen, but he said it was too easy to change things digitally. Ink is forever.”
“PD sounds old,” KC said with an eye roll.
“I don’t know about that. But it doesn’t matter because he’s the one I gotta convince to let me apprentice at his shop.” I rubbed my hands on my jeans and nervously watched KC flip through the pad.
His eyes widened, and I groaned. “That’s the book with the guys in it, isn’t it?”
His lips quirked into a smile. “Lots of beefcake.”
Energy surged through me and I hopped to my feet, only to come to a stop near his elbow. He was looking at a muscled man with blond hair and blue eyes in an old-fashioned sailor’s uniform. The man’s shirt was slung over his shoulder. I’d given him obliques that matched the ones peeking at me from under KC’s shirt. God, what would they feel like?
“So.” He flipped to another page.
“Huh?”
He elbowed me lightly. “Why the thirst-trap guys?”
“Oh!” I scrubbed my cheeks with my palms, but they still burned. “People get tattoos of hot women all the time. Why not men?”
“Good point. So, you enjoy stuff like this?” KC stopped and pointed at a drawing of a lumberjack with his red-and-black plaid shirt open and an axe slung over his shoulder. Now that I was looking at him, he was a few details away from being KC’s clone.Fuck.I bit my bottom lip. “Or like this?” He flipped the page and a willowy male elf, half stripped out of his gauzy purple robes, smoldered at us from the page.
Around that time, I realized the front of KC’s jeans were a tent for the hefty pole hiding beneath them.Oh wow.
My voice wouldn’t work and my tongue pressed to the roof of my mouth as I simply flipped the page back to the redheaded lumberjack.
