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“Faith—”
“I knew it.” She cuts away from me and walks into the studio.
Fuck.What does she think I found? What the hell am I about to find out about this woman that I don’t want to know? I follow her inside the room, but she isn’t headed to the office. She’s standing at the painting she started last night. She stares at it. “Do you know why I painted this?”
I walk toward her. “Faith,” I begin again. “I didn’t—”
“Look at this?” She waves her hand in front of it and turns to face me. “You came up here, and you didn’t look at my work?”
“I am intrigued by your work, Faith. I was drawn up here, but I got here and realized it was a mistake. I knew this was your private domain, and I—”
“A liar is not a better shade for you than fear, Nick Rogers. No. Tiger. Because that’s who you are.” She grabs the easel, struggling with it, and I move toward her, but before I can get to her, she’s flung it around until it lands in the space left between us. My gaze lands on the painting of myself, and I suck in air, a reaction I’m not sure I’ve had more than a few times in my life.
“Do you know why I painted that,Tiger? Because I was trying to figure out why I want to trust you but can’t.”
Chapter Sixteen
Tiger
The painting of me lays between Faith and me, our eyes meeting, hers still alight with anger and betrayal. And I want to call her reaction over the top, but she clearly senses I came to her without pure motives. “Faith,” I begin, and for once in my life I’m not even sure how I’m going to finish the sentence. But I never get the chance.
“Leave,” she orders, her voice as strong as her evident will. “I want you to leave.”
I reject her demand not in words she won’t hear, but actions. I’m around that painting before she can blink twice, pulling her against me, all her damn soft, fuckable, perfect curves pressed to my body. “You want to know me? Look into my eyes, Faith. See what’s there, not what you choose to paint.”
Her hand settles on my chest, elbow stiff. “You are such an asshole,Tiger. You are—”
“I know what you think of me,” I say, cupping the back of her head. “But I don’t accept it anymore.” I lower my head and kiss her, licking into her mouth, the taste of anger and the betrayal I’d seen in her eyes on her lips, and it guts me. Iambetraying her, and I have no way out of where I’ve gone or why I can’t tell her the truth. “And my name is not Tiger,” I say, tearing my mouth from hers. “I’m Nick to you, Faith.”
“You had no right to come up here,Tiger. You had no right—”
“You’re right,” I say. “I was wrong, Faith, but I swear to you, I didn’t look at any of your paintings.”
“Liar.”
She’s right. I am. Just not about this. “Ididn’tlook.”
“The best liars are the best actors.”
That play on Beck’s words hits a nerve that I reject like her command for me to leave, cupping her face. “I didn’t look at your work, Faith,” I say again, and because I won’t lie where I don’t have to lie, I add, “but I wanted to. And I wanted to because I, too, want to know who you are. I want to know your secrets. I want to know what the hell you are doing to me that no other woman has done.”
“You barely know me.”
“But I want to. That’s the point.”
“You are—”
“Obsessedwith you,” I say, and this time when my mouth closes down on hers, I let her taste those words on my tongue. I let her taste my hunger for her. I let her taste how much I want her and how much I don’t want to want her, and yet how high I am on this addiction. Maybe it’s the forbidden. Maybe it’s her. I don’t know. And in this moment, I don’t care. And this time, she doesn’t, either. She answers every unspoken word I deliver on my tongue with conflicted need.
I pull her shirt over her head, and I have her bra off in seconds, touching her breasts, teasing her nipples, my mouth devouring her mouth. And her hands—talented, gifted hands—are pressed under my shirt, burning me where they caress my skin. I unbutton her pants, fully intending to strip her naked. “Your meeting,” she breathes out, grabbing my hand.
I pull back to look at her. “Are you actually thinking of my meeting right now?”
“Yes,” she murmurs. “But with regret.”
“I moved it to two,” I say, scooping her up and carrying her toward the office, my steps tracking a path that doesn’t stop until we’re at that oversize chair, where I set her down.
I’m on a knee in front of her in an instant, and we’re both removing her boots with hurried hands. The minute I’m over that obstacle, I pull her to her feet, unzipping her pants, my lips on her belly, and the male in me, the man who is obsessed with every inch of this woman, revels in the trembling that quakes her body.
