already have some.” She pulled on the gloves, wincing as her fingers burned from the cold.
Garrison resituated his gloves on his hands. He watched her, his face expressionless. No smile, merely his eyes hungrily moving over her, like a visual devouring. It left her with a strange feeling, that voracious gaze. Not unpleasant...but not exactly warm and fuzzy, either.
She stared back at him, refusing to look away.
They were hardly alone. Occasional skiers and snowboarders blew past them, whipping up snow and stirring up the cold in the air. But it felt as if they were isolated together on the mountain with only the sky and sun to look down on them. She didn’t want to feel that with him. Reyna deliberately turned away from Garrison. “What do you want?”
“You didn’t use my business card yet.”
“I’m not going to.”
Snow crunched, and the air moved as he came closer to her. Over the crispness of the pine trees and the cool bite of the snow, she smelled him. Sweat and a faintly woodsy cologne. The tang of sunblock. His gray jacket brushed her bright yellow one when he sat next to her. Although she knew it was impossible, it felt as if their skin touched.
“So, be honest.” There was amusement in his voice, although his face did not change. “Do you plan on hating me forever, Ms. Allen?”
“I don’t hate you.”
She sat with him, unable to get even that simple fact out of her mind. She was sitting with Garrison Richards. The man who she perhaps may not have hated, but had strong and poisonous feelings for. On that first day in his office, receiving the brunt of his cool and arrogant stare meant to unnerve her and make her give up everything else she had, she’d wanted nothing more than to rush from the conference room and out into the sun, letting it burn away the ice-cold bath that had been his gaze.
And now he was here with her in the snow. Under the burning sun, asking her about hating him forever. The world was a strange place.
“Isn’t there some sort of ethical problem with you being here with me?” she asked.
“You are the wife of a former client. Ian Barbieri doesn’t have me on retainer, and he and I have no business dealings. I see no conflict of interest here. But I can check if that makes you feel any better.” She heard the smile in his voice again. Bastard.
The only real conflict was probably in her. She remembered the past much too vividly and irrationally blamed him for what happened to her during the divorce. More so than even her ex-husband.
Reyna squirmed at that uncomfortable realization.
She wanted to get back to her sketching, but her hand hurt too much from the cold. She must have made some motion toward her sketch pad because Garrison looked over at it. Too late, she remembered that she had been working on a sketch of the snowboarder—of him!—just before he sat down. She didn’t justify his curiosity by trying to hide her work.
He took off his thick gloves, revealing thin black leather that clung to his fingers like a second skin. His hands were big, she noticed, but graceful.
“May I?”
She clenched her teeth against refusing him. Maybe the sooner he saw what she was doing, the sooner he would leave. His fascination with her was...distracting. She ignored the rational part of her that chimed in about her own unwanted fascination with the ruthless lawyer.
“Sure,” she said in response to his question. “Just don’t get my stuff wet.” Reyna froze and almost bit her tongue off at what she just said.
He arched a dark, slashing eyebrow. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a woman say that to me.”
She stared at him in shock. But he was reaching for her sketch pad, and his austere grace seemed even more so beneath the brilliance of the early-afternoon sunlight. Except for the reflective goggles crowning his head, he could have been in any boardroom in the world. Removed and critical. His powerful hands carefully handled her sketchbook, flipping through its pages, pausing at one or two before moving on. Yes, definitely critical.
“These sketches are wonderful.” He flipped another page of the book, going from the images of the snowboarder she’d captured more thoroughly, to her earlier on-the-fly doodles of the mountain, the snow, the dots of people winding below her toward the lodges. “You’re very talented.”
“Thank you.” She hid her surprise at his unexpected compliment, not quite knowing what else to say in response. If this was part of his campaign to satisfy his strange curiosity about her, he was choosing the wrong way to go about it. She didn’t respond well to insincerity.
But a brief look from his hawkish eyes made her realize that this wasn’t a man who said something he didn’t mean. An unwelcome warmth began to unfurl in her belly. Reyna hissed quietly and braced her gloved hands against the rock, glad for the dull pain that distracted her from his compliments, his nearness.
This was Garrison Richards, she reminded herself. Again.
“My mother draws, too,” he continued in his low and compelling voice. “And don’t tell her I said this, but your work is much more interesting, more fluid.” He flipped back to the sketch of the snowboarder. Of himself. “I admire the way you capture the image in a personal way. You’re there with the subject instead of just watching. The intimacy is very seductive.”
Was he playing with her? Didn’t he know he was talking about himself? But he turned to the sketches of the mountain that she’d begun to fill in with long strokes of the pencil. Craggy slopes, white snow, a feathering of trees. The wide and low-hanging sky that kissed the mountaintop just so. “It’s like you’re a nature sprite sitting in the cloud here.” He tapped the page at a cloud she had half drawn. “Watching this world that you love.”
Heat touched her cheeks at his suggestive and unexpected comments. She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.
She looked away from the sketchbook in Garrison’s hands, the white paper held between fingers that were an odd mix of rugged and refined. They were almost a working man’s hands, but the way he handled her work, even through the thin leather gloves, was like a curator touching something delicate and easily damaged. A contradiction she didn’t want to notice but was helpless not to. It made him even more interesting than she had first thought. Now he was more than his dangerously sexy looks, more than the unpleasant history between them. She forced her gaze away from his hands.
“It’s just a hobby,” she said finally, training her eyes on the vast mountain view spread out before her. The thick clouds tumbling through the skies promised another bout of snow.
“Somehow I doubt that. Talent like this has to be more than a hobby.” He nodded toward the sketch pad. “Do you do this for a living?”
She flinched when Garrison carefully replaced the sketch pad on the rock next to her. Reyna smelled him as he leaned behind her, the tang of his aftershave, sweat and sunscreen overwhelming her senses. She closed her eyes briefly to savor the scent of him, then snapped them open when she realized what she was doing.
What did he just ask her? She drew a steadying breath. “I’m a tattoo artist, so I guess I do. People occasionally ask me to do original sketches and portraits for their body art.”
“Really?”
