As I checked my skin for blood, I caught her gaze roving over me.
She inched closer. “How bad did he get you?”
I pulled down my shirt. “I’m fine.” Just how many men? And why the hell did that matter to me?
She left me to call to the cat. “Gizmo, c’mon, buddy. You okay?” She stopped at the kitchen island and pulled a treat bag out of a canister and shook it. “Treat?”
The cat came bounding back into the room, took one look at me, and zipped right back out to hide in the hallway.
She sighed. “Sorry about that. We just had a situation and had to have maintenance guys in to redo the flooring and trim.”
I didn’t care, but I was admittedly relieved it wasn’t a bunch of men she was dating. Again, that shouldn’t freaking matter to me.
Her space was very much her. Classy with pops of color everywhere. A muted gray couch looked surprisingly comfortable instead of streamlined, but then she had a pillow in cherry red decorated with stark graphic flowers.
Wait, were those also bats in the design? Unexpected.
A few more dark touches explained why she may have been attracted to the Gothic attributes of my new house. The stained glass rose in an ebony frame on her dining room wall, the trio of candle holders on the sideboard in wrought iron with red tapers. A vase of flowers in black and red with a deep violet tulip that shouldn’t belong.
Not a typical decorator’s house.
A lived-in house.
So many of the artistic people I’d known in Los Angeles lived in showcase houses. All about the outward appearances, with very little individual substance.
Dahlia’s place had cat toys on the floor, a scratched-up ottoman with a stack of magazines on a tray, and a discarded iPad on the arm of the couch, with a forest green throw blanket dripping off the edge of the cushion like she’d tossed it aside.
“Are you coming?”
My gaze tracked to her in the hallway, the cat behind her swishing his tail.
“I have my office in my bedroom.” She and the cat left me in the living room as she disappeared.
Did she bring just anyone into her bedroom? Didn’t she realize how unsafe that was? I paused at the end of her hall. That damn peach and honey scent drew me forward.
An unreasonable anger brewed with each step.
I could be anyone and she just invited me in? Did she have no self-preservation? She didn’t seem stupid, but now I was beginning to wonder. My chest tightened as I stepped inside her space.
If it was possible, this was even more her than the living room.
I expected a made bed, but the sheets were twisted as if she’d had a rough night’s sleep like me. The simple gray of the sheets looked soft and probably smelled like her. If I stuck my face into her pillowcase, would it be all peaches or more of the honey?
Fuck.
My face would never be in that pillow.
There was an army of decorative pillows stacked beside her bed as if she did, in fact, make her bed up daily. Was she restless for a reason?
My restless night was partly due to this capricious woman, but I’d also taken a trip into the city to speak to Donovan Lewis and had left without my sculpture again. He would not be swayed from me buying it back, even when I offered him five million for it.
I wouldn’t tell Maeve that—she’d lose her damn mind.
But I wanted it. Wanted a piece of that man I used to be.
“Nolan?”
I turned to Dahlia, and my breath backed up in my lungs at the wall of drawings and photos. Every angle of my house was on display. Some sketches, some photos, some old schematics from what seemed to match photos from the damn 1800s. Swatches of fabric, paint samples, and glossy pictures of furniture were pinned beside more sketches.
All of it embraced the darker tones and the emerald green of the original paint of the building.
But the windows had been replaced with a mix of stained glass and leaded glass. All of it to lean into the Gothic.
She even had notes for 3D printed pieces to replace the old stone. I stepped over and snatched those off the board.
She gasped. “Hey!”
“No 3D printed shit on my house.”
“It was only to recreate the stone.”
“A stone mason will.”
“I planned on using a man—”
“No, I have an artist friend who will be doing it.” Where I was all metal and the occasional melted glass, one of my few friends in this world could create any damn thing in stone. I’d been a blowtorch to his chisel.
At least that had been us once upon a time.
