“Standard—”
“If you say ‘standard onboarding’, I’m going to throw this very expensive ink bottle at your very expensive head.” She unscrewed a cap and sniffed. “These are perfect, by the way. Don’t let that go to your ego.”
Too late. He’d already straightened his spine two inches. His wolf was basically strutting.
Workingsix feet apart changed the physics of the room.
Shared work surface. Ten hours. Passing reference materials hand to hand—their fingers brushing over pages, the contact accumulating like a debt neither was paying down. He handed her an ink bottle and her thumb grazed his knuckle. She leaned across to compare a panel layout and her sleeve caught his forearm. Small touches. Constant. Each one a wire stripped of insulation.
He tracked her habits without deciding to. The brush tucked behind her left ear when she shifted from painting to planning. The lip-biting when she concentrated. A streak of blue that migrated from her paints to the inside of her wrist during the second hour, tracing a vein he kept noticing.
“Your color theory is wrong.”
She looked up from the panel she was washing. “Excuse me?”
“You’re going dark too fast. The claustrophobia needs to build. Right now, you’re starting in the cage instead of locking the door.”
“I’ve been using this technique since Volume Two?—”
“I know. It worked in Volume Two because Sable’s isolation was already established. Here, the villain hasn’t earned his cage yet. The reader needs to feel the walls closing, not arrive inside them.”
She set her brush down. Stared at him. “That’s annoyingly correct.”
She picked the brush back up and adjusted the wash—lighter, more transparent, letting the underneath show through. “Better?”
“Better.”
“You could say ‘much better.’ You could say ‘excellent, Lumi, your creative instincts are extraordinary.’”
“Better.”
She made a sound that was half laugh, half exasperation, and turned back to the panel. Her sleeve rode up as she worked. The inside of her wrist—bare skin, blue veins, the cerulean streak crossing the pulse point.
His gaze locked. The room narrowed to that three inches of exposed skin. Her mouth was still moving—she was explaining the color shift she wanted for the climax—and his enhanced hearing captured every word while his conscious mind abandoned its post entirely.
She snapped her fingers in front of his face.
“Earth to Villain King.”
He blinked. Recited her last three sentences back to her—word for word, every detail she’d said about the color choices.
She tilted her head. Her eyes swept from his face to the brush in his hand—upside down, dried ink on the wrong end—and the corner of her mouth curved.
“That’s impressive recall.”
“I pay attention.”
“You pay attention to everything except the fact that you’ve been holding that red pen upside down for ten minutes.” She plucked it from his fingers, flipped it, placed it back. Her fingertips pressed against his palm for a fraction of a second.
Warm. Paint-rough. The contact sent a jolt up his arm that his wolf amplified into a full-body response—heat flooding through him, a muscle in his jaw flexing, his breath catching.
Her hand pulled back a half-second faster than casual. Her cheeks darkened.
“You’re welcome.” She turned to her station. Her voice was steady. Her scent wasn’t—it had gone warm and sweet beneath the paint thinner in a way that lit a restless heat behind his ribs.
He set the pen down. Correctly, this time.
The door no longer existed. He’d open it himself on the way out and stand there a second, surprised it still had a handle.
