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I wonder if he remembers last night. I hope he does and yet it’s better if he doesn’t. His pencil scratches against paper while I sit and watch a new day dawn over London.
nineteen
December 24
I peered at Ambri from behind the canvas, then sighed. “You have to stop doing that.”
He blinked innocently. “I’m not doing a thing. Isn’t that preferable?”
“Yes and no.”
I raised my brush again and then let it drop. He’d resumed his pose, but the jackass was holding unnaturally still, like a living statue or a wax sculpture at Madame Tussaud’s.
“Ambri, I swear to God…”
“You’re a harsh taskmaster, Cole Matheson.” A grin toyed at his lips. “If only you had a whip, perhaps you could make me behave.”
Instantly, my face flushed red, and I had to give myself a mental cold shower. Again. Over the past few weeks, they’d been a daily necessity.
Daily? Try hourly.
“Hold still but just be…normal.”
“Normal is boring.”
“You know what I mean. Breathe.Blink, for fuck’s sake.”
“Don’t paint angry.”
I smothered a laugh. “I’m going to give you a unibrow.”
“You wouldn’t dare.” He let the cane pivot back and forth. “I must do something to entertain myself. How is it you can paint my other self all night, every night, by memory, yet I must stand for you forhours?”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” I said, keeping behind the canvas. “It just is.”
“That answer is unsatisfactory.”
I smiled. There were few things more adorable—or sexier—than Ambri when he was being a brat. Which was frequently. It was a battle to focus on the work and not stride over and silence his constant griping with a hard kiss.
No kissing allowed, remember?
That was the fastest mental cold shower of them all.
“Hellooo?” Ambri called. “Are you still back there or have you fallen asleep too?”
“You can’t sleep, dummy,” I teased. “To answer your question, the demon paintings are for Jane, and the show, and my career, I guess. But I don’t actually have a career yet, so I have nothing to lose. This portrait is for you. It’s important. I have to get it right.”
Silence on the other side of the canvas. I peered around, expecting to see Ambri in that uncanny freeze again, but his gaze was down, his expression full. Human. Like he’d looked when I’d been sick.
If I have any kind of talent, that will make it into this painting.
I couldn’t tell Ambri that I’d begun to think of the demon paintings—that I worked on in my room every night, sometimes until the early morning hours—were only reflections of my imagination. With every passing day, it grew easier to pretend he was just a man. We’d fallen into an easy companionship, talking late, joking around, and flirting. (If you considered his constant barrage of indecency “flirting.”) As far as I could tell, he never left at night to do whatever he was supposed to do. It was almost as if he weren’t a demon at all. The light in him was growing brighter by the day.
Be careful that kind of hope doesn’t someday bite you in the ass.
