Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(32)
Author: Erin McCarthy

The materials felt good in his hands, and he flipped not to the first page, but to the middle of the book. At the window, he only needed a minute to shift from photographer to artist, and then his lines appeared, swift and sure, outlining Sara’s body, the scratch of pencil to paper urging him on. As he worked, glancing up and down, manic in his need to emulate her juxtaposition of tension and relaxation, she shifted in her chair, and released her skirt from its prison under her legs.

She must have been getting hot in the sun, because she took the hem from where it hit at her knees and shook it up and down to fan her legs. Then, still reading, she hitched the skirt up toward her thighs and dropped her knees apart, one foot moving off the chair to the ground.

Gabriel’s mouth went dry.

It was sexual, but unintentionally so. She was concentrating on the papers in her hand, the relaxing of her legs a signal of her absorption. But that was part of what was so sexy, knowing she wasn’t trying to seduce. She just was.

Flipping to a clean page, Gabriel started over, wanting this new frame captured, this sense of abandonment from Sara. Her sensuality. The length of her neck, her slender legs. It was stunning, and he raced to draw her, wanting it down before she moved, before she became aware of him, before the sun shifted. His fingers remembered, even though it had been a hundred and fifty years, and he embraced the memory, the moment, the gift he had been given.

Sketching standing up had never been natural for him, and in impatience, he gripped his pad and climbed onto the window ledge, the sill providing a narrow seat for him. He dangled his feet over the side of the brick house and spread his legs to make a surface for his sketchbook. And went back to work, satisfied with the progress he was making, entranced by the quiet of the courtyard, no sound but the rustle of leaves in the trees and bushes and the sound of Sara flipping through the pages in her lap.

She tugged her skirt up higher, exposing a delicious expanse of thigh on the leg that was still stretched across the chair.

He wanted to touch her, to slid his hand up that warm, firm limb and move underneath her skirt and stroke her intimately, watching her face to see her relax, capitulate, accept pleasure at his hand. He wanted to hear her sigh for him. See the full extent of her beauty.

Outline of her form down on his pad, he studied his raw sketch in comparison to the living, breathing woman below him. It was good, and he was pleased with it.

It had been worth the risk, worth breaking a personal rule.

This was his, to keep.

He was smoothing out the line of her shoulder with his thumb when he heard her scream.

Sara was soaking up the sun, enjoying the feel of it on her face, her arms, even as it heated up her skin and made her start to perspire. The courtyard was peaceful and it had beckoned to her. The table and chairs were a little rickety, or maybe it was that the ground was uneven, mossy bricks that had settled and crumbled. But it felt good to sit enclosed by the vine-covered brick walls and read the remaining stack of police reports from the Donovan investigation in solitude.

She was nervous about seeing Gabriel again. She had been weird on Saturday and she knew it. But sleeping in the same bed with him, overreacting both on the street and then again in his apartment when she’d thought he might be dead, plus getting that random e-mail suggesting her guilt—it had all been too much. Embarrassing. So after lunch she had ditched out, and now she was a little nervous about seeing him.

Not that Gabriel was exempt from eccentricities himself. He was a little more abstract than the average person. So she knew intellectually she shouldn’t worry about his reaction, knew he probably thought nothing at all about her behavior, but she was still grateful for the few minutes in the sun to collect her thoughts before she saw him. Maybe if she was lucky, he would look out his window and see her, and come down to say hi. Then she could greet him sitting down wearing sunglasses instead of standing there shuffling her feet as he opened his front door, her eyes darting all over the place.

It wasn’t a very solid plan, and was in fact highly wimpy of her, but she couldn’t face everything straight on all the time. She was allowed to avoid once in awhile, and she hadn’t even considered not showing up at all. She wasn’t that big of a wimp.

Something out of the corner of her eye moved and she glanced up.

And screamed, leaping out of her chair. “Jesus Christ, what are you doing?”

Gabriel was sitting in the open window and half of his flippin’ body was actually out of the frame and dangling into the ether. Her first thought was that he was trying to jump, but he was just sitting there, with a big pad of paper in his hand.

“Hey,” he called down, waving.

Very casual. Like sitting in the goddamn window forty feet above brain-smashing bricks was normal.

“What are you doing?” Sara clutched her papers and eyed him, waiting for him to lose his balance and come pitching forward. She honestly didn’t think she could catch him, given he had a foot in height and forty pounds on her.

“I was inspired,” he said, showing no signs of retreating inside. In fact, he swung his legs back and forth and held up the pad of paper for her to see.

“Inspired to do what? Fall to your death? For God’s sake, get back inside! Carefully.”

“I’m not going to fall. And I was inspired to sketch. Come up and see.”

Sara was intrigued and pleased that he had felt the urge to sketch, but at the same time she couldn’t fully appreciate the implication because fear was choking her. “I’m not leaving until I see that you’re safely inside.”

His head tilted slightly and he smiled. Then he just nodded and said, “Okay.”

She clutched her papers to her chest as he turned and pulled his legs back into the bedroom. But she didn’t really start breathing again until he was standing up inside and pulling the window closed.

Good grief. What the hell had that been all about? She didn’t think his sense of survival was well honed. He didn’t lock doors, he strolled into dark doorways at two in the morning, and dangled out of third-floor windows.

Yet another good reason why she shouldn’t get involved with him. She would constantly be worrying about him, and frankly, she had enough to worry about without adding him to the mix.

Not that he was trying to get involved with her. She had to remember that, too.

Prepared to reprimand him yet again, Sara went up the stairs and through the wide open door of his apartment. She sincerely hoped he had just pulled it open in anticipation of her entrance and that he hadn’t been home all day with the front door gaping open. Though she would bite her tongue before she said something to him about the door and sounded like a nag. Driving the point home about dangling in the window was one thing, but add the locked door issue on top of that and she’d sound like a freak.