Page 59 of While You Sleep

“I thought I might look for a painting for my office today and wondered if you’d tell me who chose your paintings?”

“I did.”

I blinked up at him, I definitely hadn’t expected that. “You have a great eye.”

“I know nothing about art,” he said.

“But the paintings in this house, they’re all so beautiful.”

He stilled, just a split second, but I noticed it. “I had a certain criteria.”

“And what was that?”

“Does this make me think of my sleeping beauty,” he said.

“What?” My voice came out barely more than a whisper.

“That’s why they’re all bright and colorful. Why when you look at them from a distance the brushstrokes look deliberate, but when you get closer, you see that they’re not at all, they’re more wild and haphazard, free.”

Sleeping beauty.

I stared at him in shock. Is that truly how he saw me? “You think I’m wild and free?” I whispered.

“I know you are.” He tucked his shirt in. “You just don’t let many people see it.”

But he’d seen it, hadn’t he? He made me wild, and despite this life that had been forced on me, he’d made me feel free. I didn’t know what to say.

“I have a couple meetings, but I shouldn’t be late.” He slid on his belt, doing it up, still aiming all that intensity my way—then he strode toward me. Like often happened when he took me off guard like that, I kind of froze. He was just that…overwhelming.

He stopped right in front of me. “When I get home, you can choose what we have for dinner, okay?”

“O-okay…” I cleared my throat. “Okay,” I said again sounding less like a demented toad.

He frowned. “Everything all right?”

I nodded. “Yep, you’re just…really, really intense and also really, really hot, and sometimes I forget to breathe and get a little dizzy,” I said, because what the hell, it wasn’t like I was hiding shit from the people around us, and since my new husband seemed to have trouble reading emotions, he was at a disadvantage. It was only fair I filled him in as well.

He blinked, those thick dark lashes coming down over moss-green eyes once, twice, then they were burning down at me—and he smiled. Not just a minor curling of lips, this was deeper, with a flash of white teeth and, god save me, a dimple. Declan had the same one, but on the opposite cheek.

“You have a dimple?” I said.

“Do I?”

“You don’t know if you have a dimple?”

He shrugged.

“You haven’t smiled in the mirror before?” I said, then scoffed. “Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to there for a moment.” I shook my head. “You realize that’s a large part of what makes your brother so endearing, that wicked grin of his. If you flashed that dimple around a bit more, maybe you’d be a little more approachable.”

“I don’t want to be more approachable.”

I studied his lips. They were far too pretty for the O’Rourke monster, but add in that smile, those white teeth, and the dimple, and it all made sense. It all worked.

“You think my brother’s endearing?” he asked, an odd look on his face.

“Well, yeah, he’s kind of sweet. Your face isn’t meant to be so stern all the time, refusing to smile the way you do. You’ve been hiding major components of your face.”

He did the blinking thing again. “Apparently not, you just saw all my…components.”

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