Ashlynn allowed him to put her in his car before she felt her brain slowly flicking back on, thoughts like daggers plummeting through her quickly waning bliss.
As the engine hummed to life a few moments later, logic was beginning to seep back in. She would owe Marlene an explanation, but worse, she was going to owe herself one. She knew better.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked, her throat dry as she stared pointedly out the window, her thighs pressed tightly together.
She could hear the smug grin on his face, though she refused to look over at him. "Your apartment. Hayden mentioned there was something I needed to see there, besides, you'll need to grab your things and we could use some privacy. . ." he replied, running through a mental checklist, that had her heart through the floor, but she was a little more concerned about the intimate images that wrote like a diary across her living room.
Heart dropping through the floor, Ashlynn blanched. "No, I really don't think. . ." but even before the words could slip free, Ashlynn felt the car slow in front of her house. There was no point asking how he knew which one was hers; such was the curse of falling for a mangy mutt. It had taken many crazy careful steps to get out of state lines without being tracked. She had been intensely cautious about carrying items that could conceal her scent, to the extent of heavily infusing all of her body scrubs with scented oils, crossing multiple waterways, and transferring transportation with overly-cautious frequency. As he was already out the door and halfway to hers, she had far more pressing concerns.
"Blaise, I really don't think I want you to. . ." The door was already open as she scrambled through the door after him, and nearly rammed into him as he made it into the living room, where all the floor space was littered with canvas.
The visions that haunted everything from her best dreams to her hardest nightmares. Wolves, proud, graceful, and at times garish, but more importantly, the amber and auburn blended wolf that was Blaise was in every one. Fierce and bold, Ashlynn couldn't help but find him in every image she painted. Like the lens of a camera forever focused on a single muse, she felt trapped. She held her breath as she watched him take it in: the beauty and the ugly she had already come to know of him. Trees, cityscapes, blood, and even lust lurked in her lines, the colors, and every brush stroke.
"This is the reality of what I am to you? A subject to your artwork in place of a partner to your life? Can you really see me as such a villain?" Blaise's fire burning in fuming embers. His fingers running over the angry wolf from the alley that she'd seen that first night.
"It's not all so dark." Ashlynn wandered around, her fingers taking sheets off more canvases, unveiling more scenes, many of which showed the longing in those wolfish eyes that she'd been trying to forget. "I see you as a beautiful raging nightmare, Blaise, but I also see you in my daydreams. You are every image that haunts my imagining, both good and bad. When I used to paint, I painted to show people what could be, what is, and what never will be. I painted paradise and hell in a young girl's tears. My art would have been famous, but now I only paint one thing, and that is what I meant when I said you ruined me. My heart, you might have had, but you took my gift so unintentionally, and so thoroughly."
"You only paint me?" he asked, as he slowly noted the volume of the work, and took a closer look at one painting in particular. One with a girl in a red dress pressed up against a wall by a wolf. "We keep ending up this way, don't we?" he said grinning.
Fierce blush warmed her cheeks as she slowly backed away. Blaise rose and each step toward her resembled his wolfish side stalking her down. Knowing it was useless, Ashlynn turned and ran toward the front door. Her hand barely clenched the door knob as his large hands rested their weight on the door, his broad chest, hot against her back.
"Honestly, you'd think I was trying to hurt you," he huffed, and her muscles pulsed for want. His hand swept down, tucking her hair behind her neck. Beside herself, she lengthened her neck, baring it to him, relaxing before she heard a rough growl exit his chest.
"What is this?" he growled, finding the spindly black circle tattooed across the back of her neck.
Ashlynn locked her lips tighter than a clam's shell. After all, what would he do with that information once he knew? Ashlynn shook her head.
