Page 12 of Illicit Illustration

“It’s not that big of a deal.” It kind of was, but I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. Just because I’d given them my phone number didn’t mean they’d follow through with texting me. The ball was in their court, and I was suddenly nervous that neither one of them would respond and I’d feel even more like a loser than I already did.

“Yeah, I see what you’re doing.” She gave me the side eye as she started gathering up the question sheets and table numbers from the ladies’ side of the room. I could hear a few people milling around on the other side of the screens, but all the other womenhad already left out the front and Charley had escorted the men out the back door before she’d come back in to interrogate me. “You’re trying to convince yourself that you didn’t have fun. That this idea wasn’t awesome. And now you don’t want to acknowledge that maybe this was exactly what you needed.”

“Wow, humble much?” There was absolutely no way I was confirming anything, because she was already feeling smug about how the event had gone. And if best friends were good for anything, it was keeping you grounded when your ego was at stake of getting obnoxiously large. “I wouldn’t go bragging about your success until the end of this thing.”

“It’s okay. I’ll wait to say I told you so until after you meet the love of your life at the party. I might even wait until after your wedding to say it. Just to be extra humble. But I’m expecting Charlotte as the middle name of your first-born child.”

“Just looking for someone to punch my v-card, Char, not looking for a soulmate. Not everyone has to be in love since you are.”

She frowned, and I felt a little bad about raining on her parade, but I wasn’t holding out for a soulmate anymore. I just wanted to feel wanted by a man for once. To be the center of someone’s attention—even if it was fleeting.

I wasn’t gorgeous and curvy like her. I wasn’t confident like her. I wasn’t the object of a man’s obsession like she was. And that was okay. I would be okay if that never happened for me. But for the next few weeks, I wanted to pretend it could.

“You’re up late.” Myhand jerked at the low voice coming from behind me, but thankfully digital illustration had made it so mistakes, like the dark line now marring the face of the woman I was drawing, could easily be erased. Luckily, I had theimage zoomed in close, so Reid couldn’t see the rest of it, but I still slammed the magnetic cover over the screen of my iPad and laid my hand on the top before I turned to face him.

“What are you still doing here?” I asked, my pulse skyrocketing as I turned on my barstool to face him. His hair was a chaotic mess, like he’d been running his hands through it. Under different circumstances, I would have automatically assumed it’d been someone else’s hands who’d made the mess, but I knew he’d been with my brother all night playing poker with the cooks.

“Was just helping break down the extra tables for Char. She and Hudson just took off. Wanted to make sure everything was locked up before I left.” Glancing up, I noticed the kitchen was dark, the bar surrounding us quiet, but the air around us felt charged. “I thought you’d be upstairs asleep by now.”

“Hmm.” My fingers absently tapped at the cover beneath my palm, my usual nerves around Reid surfacing. But I was trying to fight the urge to flee, like I normally did. Maybe Seven had been right, despite my unwanted feelings for him, maybe I could be his friend again. “Knew I’d never be able to sleep, so I was working.”

“Didn’t want to use that fancy new workspace upstairs?”

Reid and Hudson had been the ones to set up my new desk while I hid downstairs in the bar sketching, so I wasn’t tempted to drool over Reid using power tools. Once they were done, I’d been surprised to walk in and see they had set up the desk pad I’d been waiting to cover the surface with. And there was a fresh box of pencils I liked to use sitting on a brand-new leather-bound sketchbook. The only issue was, the sketchbook had metallic embossing on the front cover, clearly a joke from my best friend because it was in the outline of a cartoonish looking kitten. I’d wanted to call them out for getting me such a childish gift, but it was cute, and I’d kept it next to my bed to doodle in when I woke up in the morning.

But it also cemented in my mind that they still saw me as the awkward little girl who spent more time with her face buried in a sketchbook than anything else. Which was the last thing I wanted Reid to think of when he looked at me.

“What are you working on? Not forearms this time, I see.”

“No,” I scoffed, hoping he didn’t press me for details, because while the face of the woman with her eyes closed on the screen was unassuming, if I zoomed out, he’d get an eyeful of where she was supposed to be straddling a man’s face. Explaining that it was my latest romance book commission was the last thing I wanted to have to do right now. Never mind that it was unfinished while I was still trying to get the positioning right.

“Care to share?”

“No.” My palm flattened on the case covering the screen, hoping he’d take my answer and move on.

“What are you so secretive about suddenly? The last few weeks, anytime anyone asks you what you’re drawing, you slam the cover closed on your tablet.”

“Maybe I’m just protecting the privacy of my clients.”

“I wasn’t aware that illustration commissions were such heavily guarded secrets.”

“Well. They are. I like to maintain the integrity of my work, and some things I’ve been drawing aren’t ready to be shared publicly yet.”

“Hmm. And what are these things you’ve been drawing?”

Maybe I’d been listening to too many of my client’s books lately, but I could have sworn that Reid’s eyes darkened as they slowly tracked from where my hand held the cover of my iPad in place to my eyes. If I didn’t know any better, I’d guess he knew what I’d been drawing, which seemed impossible, because even Charley didn’t know all the details.

And after being caught by her, I’d started keeping my sketchpad full of dicks locked in the bottom drawer of my new desk along with all the source material I’d printed out. Just because I lived alone didn’t mean I could risk leaving cocks lying about if I had any surprise visitors. Because my mother would give me a talk about being safe—which seemed laughable with all the sex I was so clearly not having—Charley would tease the shit outof me, and Hudson would go all protective older brother on me, and he did that enough.

“It’s private,” I muttered.

“What?” He grinned, leaning in closer. “I didn’t hear you. Did you sayit’s privates?”

Since I couldn’t refute his question because that’d be lying to him, and I was trying not to do that, I just did the only other thing available in my virginal arsenal. I blushed. Hard.

Reid cocked one eyebrow, and my face flamed hotter, but I maintained eye contact, determined not to back down. He could tease me all he wanted, but I was proud of my commissions, and my growing list of clients, and nothing anyone else said about it would make me stop.

If drawing fictional naked people was my happy place, then everyone else could fuck themselves, Reid included. Although that thought just had me picturing him doing exactly that. Fucking himself with…Stop it.

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