Page 27

I move one hand to the armrest and try to relax my face. “Better?”

She comes closer and puts her hand on my other arm, moving it until my forearm rests across my lap. Her fingers stay against my skin for a moment before she steps back again. “There. That’s the pose.”

I should have known sitting for a portrait would mean being stared at more than I’m comfortable with. Romy looks at me, the canvas, then back at me. She starts with quick strokes that don’t look like much of anything from where I’m sitting. I try to stay still, but after a couple of minutes, my shoulder itches.

“Can I move?”

“Of course.”

“Then why do you keep glaring at me angrily every time I do?”

She shakes her head. “I’m not angry. I’m concentrating.”

I relax a little farther into the chair. I’ve watched her paint enough people by now to know this takes time, but it feels different when I’m the one sitting here. Every time she looks up, her eyes move over my face before settling on another part of me. My horns. My nose. My jaw. She looks at all of it.

After the transformation, I would have done just about anything to stop people from staring at me. For months afterward, every trip outside meant someone doing a double take. Even here in Screaming Woods, where half the population looks stranger than I do, it took me a long time to stop noticing when someone looked at my horns for too long. Romy has been staring at them since the day we met, but the difference is that I like it when she does it. She looks at them with a sort of hunger, not disgust.

A little crease has formed between her eyebrows. She keeps pushing a loose strand of hair away from her face with the back of her wrist because her fingers are covered in paint. After a while, she puts her brush down and comes toward me.

“I need to see your other side.”

I grin. “You’ve seen my other side.”

She laughs. “I’m not talking about your ass, Otis.”

She puts her fingers under my chin and turns my head slightly toward the window. I let her position me, but instead of stepping away, she reaches up and runs her fingertips along the base of one of my horns.

“Romy, come on. You know what that does to me.”

“I’m just looking at them.”

I arch an eyebrow. “You don’t need your hands for that.”

“I do when I’m trying to figure out the shape.”

“Right.”

She traces another inch of my horn before finally taking her hand away and pressing a light kiss to my lips.

“Now this, I don’t do with any of the other models,” she says before walking back to the easel.

Damn, she can turn me on with nothing more than a featherlight touch and a look.

I arch an eyebrow. “Keep teasing me like that, and you’ll have something else to paint.”

Her gaze lands on my pants, and she lets out a giggle. She doesn’t do anything about it, though. She doesn’t come back to kiss me or let me take my clothes off. This woman is ruining me in the best way possible, that’s for sure.

For the next half hour, she paints without talking much. The room grows quiet except for the occasional scrape of her brush against the palette.

I watch her look at me. Not once does she hesitate when her attention reaches the parts of my face that haven’t looked human in years. She studies them for a few seconds and puts whatever she sees onto the canvas.

After a while, my thoughts drift away. Before I realize it, Romy tells me she’s done with laying down the basic shapes and colors.

“Can I look?” I ask.

“You can, but it’s not the finished version yet.”

I get up from the couch and look at the portrait she’s painted of me. It’s unbelievable. There’s so much of the old me in there. How did she manage this?