“Would you rather have a stranger?” The question was genuine. “A man you do not know, in a room alone with you, undressed?”
Chapter Twenty-One
“I…” she began, but she did not have the words to refute him.
“I thought not,” he said, and there was no smugness in it, or she chose not to hear it. “I am the appropriate choice. Unless your reluctance is not about comfort with the subject but about…” He paused, fractionally. “Something else.”
She pressed her lips together. “You are extraordinarily arrogant, you know,” she pointed out to him.
“So, I’ve been told,” he drawled, and then, with an exactness that suggested he knew exactly what he was doing: “Besides, I suspect the view will not be a hardship.”
She turned on the stool with the intention of delivering a response commensurate with that, and found she had nothing to say. Or rather, she had several ideas, and each of them conceded the thing she was attempting not to share.
“You are the only man,” she said, with dignity, “with whom I am sufficiently at ease for this undertaking. That is the only reason. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly,” he said, but there was a smile in his voice.
“Good.” She turned back to the canvas. “Tell me when you are—When I may look.”
There was a silence that took longer than she expected, and it unsettled her, so slowly, she turned just as he dropped his breeches. Her eyes widened instantly, her palms turning clammy as blood rushed to her face. She turned away immediately, fanning her face with the bristles of the largest brush.
Outside the door, the faint sounds of the house continued, entirely indifferent to what was occurring in this particular room, and she found this both reassuring and somewhat surreal.
“Turn around,” Anthony said.
She turned around slowly, taking the time to prepare herself and set her features in the professional, studying expression of someone approaching an artistic subject.
None of it was sufficient.
He was sitting on the green velvet sofa with the relaxed, unself-conscious quality of a man entirely at ease in his own body,which he had, she acknowledged, every reason to be. The sheet from the arm of the sofa was arranged across his lap with the particular elegance of something that had been positioned with thought.
Everything else was…undressed, present.Exposed.
His shoulders were wide, an expanse of solid muscle, tapering down to a waist so lean it seemed impossible he possessed such strength. His skin glistened in the light, and for the life of her, sheachedto touch him.
There was a rugged trace to his body, faint lines of old scars, the slight dusting of dark hair across his chest that disappeared beneath the white sheet his hand sat atop.
Caroline found her gaze tracing the columns of his thighs, ribbed with the strength of a man who spent his days breaking horses. He was a masterpiece of masculine grace that made the very air between them pulse with something unspoken.
He was watching her face, which she was now aware had done something for which she could not perfectly account. His expression had the contained, careful quality of a man managing his own amusement with considerable effort.
“Well,” he said.
She looked at her palette and the pigments. She selected the broad brush she had been examining earlier and began, with great deliberateness, to sketch an outline on the canvas.
“You have not said anything,” Anthony observed.
“I am working,” she said, her throat working as she swallowed, heat fanning her cheeks and the tip of her nose.
She could barely breathe. She had never seen a nude man before, but she could tell Anthony was exquisite, if she could call him that. Heat flushed crimson across her face, and she fought to concentrate, fought to keep her mind from wondering how he used his…instrument.
“You haven’t even looked at me properly yet.” He sounded very amused at her expense.
“I have looked at you perfectly adequately,” she said. She had, in point of fact, looked at him in the three seconds before she had redirected her attention, and had received an amount of information she wasstillprocessing. She would need to look again. This was simply the technical reality of the undertaking. “Hold still.”
“Iamholding still,” he drawled, watching her work with an attention she was soon realizing was very different from the one he gave to everything, and she was aware of it the way she was aware of sunlight through a window; constant, and much warmer than she wished to acknowledge.
She took a deep breath and looked at him properly. She made herself do it: to look at the breadth of his shoulders. He was muscular in an elegant way, in his chest and arms, and for a second, she wondered how they would feel wrapped around her bare body.