My heart raced but his face hid any sign of being anything but professional as he reached out with a small sponge and dabbed my breasts with blackened purple.

I stiffened as the wet intrusion of colour made my skin hyperaware of him. It took everything I had to pick a dirty spot on the ceiling and keep my eyes locked on it.

I hoped he’d move onto other areas like he had before, but I wasn’t given a reprieve. He stayed painfully close, his frame huge and hulking, his eyes narrowed and calculating, his energy casting waves every time he touched me with his medium.

My eyes closed despite my command to stay open. My chest heaved while he worked so close he could’ve pressed his nose into my cleavage. An utterly, miserably long eternity passed while he painted flesh that hadn’t been touched in a very long time, unwittingly wrapping me up in barbwire desire until I could barely think, let alone remain standing.

The longer he bowed over my breasts, tracing the arm looped between them, the shallower his own breathing became. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. The careful cruelty on his face flickered with seconds of barely restrained violence.

Violence for me? For us? Our past? His work? His injuries? His business?

I didn’t know.

I’d probably never know.

All I knew was my body didn’t care what Gil had done to me in the past. It wanted him, and this was a new level of unbearable torture.

I’m glad this is a one-time deal.

If I had to stand like this again for him, I’d burn through my self-restraint and end up pushing him to the floor with need. I’d ruin everything all because being with him brought the past to life and nullified the worries of my future.

I breathed him in, learning his scent of citrus, paint thinner, and moody colours. I exhaled just as quickly. He drugged me. Confused me. Hurt me.

He stopped breathing altogether as he swapped his sponge for a delicate brush and did his best to make me collapse with the fine bristles. At one point, self-preservation took over and my chin dropped and shoulders rolled to inch away from his artist’s touch.

But he clucked his tongue, pressed paint-smeared fingers under my jaw and coerced me back into place. “Never break the position.”

His voice was odd. Thick as oil and dark as charcoal. He cleared his throat as our eyes met. The undercurrent of electricity made me burn alive and freeze to death in equal measure.

“Okay,” I strangled as he dropped his fingers and cocked his head, utterly regal and terribly callous. His gaze darted down my mostly painted form with a frown. In a flash, his heavy hand angled my hip closer to him, twisting me this way and that like some store-bought mannequin with plastic in her veins instead of blood.

“Don’t move again.” With his bitten command, he resumed painting as if fire hadn’t sparked and crackled between us. The hair on my arms prickled beneath his colours. My scalp tingled. My tummy clenched. All because I found him beyond attractive as he worked in his element.

His face slipped a little, revealing a wash of lust. Then it was gone again, drowned by the impenetrable artist. “Arch back. I can’t get a part of your ribcage.”

I shuddered as his knuckles nudged my shoulder, pushing me. “Do what I say.”

Trembling, I called on muscles to brace me as I reclined backward, feeling my breasts rising, my arm slipping, my stomach flattening—every part of me elongating to balance.

It felt like a dance.

A frozen in time chorography.

My heart leapt for joy.

My back twinged with agony, warning me not to go too far.

A black noise rumbled in his chest as I settled into this new back-breaking position. For a second, no brush or sponge touched me. Gil stood beside me, his body heat scorching, and I wondered...just for a moment...if he’d snap.

If he’d give into the fog of desire that’d grown so thick around us.

I wanted him to throw down his tools, wrap his fist in my hair, and yank me into a murderous kiss.

But he cleared his throat again and stepped closer, searing me as he dabbed paint on the underside of my breasts.

It didn’t take long.

Merely a few seconds, but in those few seconds, my heart was visible beneath my rainbow-hued skin. It pounded for freedom. It thudded for more. Gil ceased to be the boy who broke me. The boy who vanished without a whisper and became the most skilled chemist—blending colours and chroma, somehow using both to infiltrate my very being.

He jerked back, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he stormed to his worktable with slightly shaky steps. He kept his back to me as he mixed and diluted his next layer of pigment. “Stand up straight,” he ordered over his shoulder as a flash of silver and navy blended with something metallic in his hands.

I did as I was told, maintaining the original pose as he attached the air gun to a new compressor and returned to me.

He refused to meet my gaze as he tested the trigger with a quick press into his palm, frowning at the consistency and coverage.

After a few tweaks of the pressure valve, he crowded me again.

Strength ran from my limbs. I was wobbly and weak and woefully unprepared to continue. I wanted to ask how much longer this nightmare would last, but he ducked to his haunches, his face between my legs, his unruly hair tickling my thigh as he held the gun over my knee and pressed the trigger.

God...

I jolted at the tickle.

He dragged the hissing sensation up my leg, higher and higher until the puff of air found the part of me throbbing for attention. He was too close, too near, too much.

I couldn’t do it.

I stumbled.

My arm fell from around my breasts, automatically seeking purchase to stop my fall.

My prettily painted fingers landed on his head for balance, those same fingers sinking into his thick, messy hair.

A flashback of running my fingers over his scalp when we were teenagers assaulted me. The texture of his strands hadn’t changed. Still coarse but silky. Soft but strong. The heat of his head and the sudden menacing glower of his eyes made my heart relocate into my palms and skip a beat.

“Sorry.” I tried to pull away, yet I couldn’t seem to order my fingers to let go.

He didn’t move—frozen on his haunches before me, his very presence lashing around me.

Shoving aside heavy want, I managed to untangle my fingers and raise my arm into position. My chin soared up, and my gaze locked onto a poster across the room promoting the benefits of a particular type of latex for prosthetic work.

For an eon, Gil didn’t move.

He breathed hard and shallow. His teeth clenched audibly.

Then, slowly, methodically, he leaned forward and pressed the trigger as if nothing had happened.

The burst of air and stream of paint made me shudder. My stomach leapt as he slipped over the tiny scrap of underwear hiding me and worked on my inner thighs.

I throbbed.

I wanted, wanted, wanted, but somehow, I kept the pose.

It took all my willpower not to arch away, but my mind filled with images of tongues licking me, tasting me, leaving behind sticky coverage in the form of colour that masked my own.

The room stayed deathly silent as Gil gradually covered every inch. He switched his method from soft shading to slashing me with ribbons of paint and harsh bursts of air.

The sensation teased me, made me wet.

I bit my lip.

I locked my toes onto the smoothness of the podium and pressed my arm tighter to my chest, giving my body something else to think about.

The whir of the compressor and the faint hiss of the air gun decorated the stretched silence.

I could’ve come from the airbrush alone.

But then he was gone, moving onto more tolerable areas, adding finishing touches.