“Because we need to think, and we need to eat.” She lifted the egg, set it carefully in its padded form. “You’re doing this because you loved him. He was a pain in your ass, sometimes an embarrassment, often a disappointment, but you loved him, so you’re going to do what you can to find out why this happened.”

She looked over at him now. “You’re grieving, and there’s a violence in the grief. It’s not wrong to feel that.” To reach that grief, she laid a hand over his. “It’s natural to feel that, even to want to punish whoever did this yourself. But you won’t. You have too much honor for that. So I’m going to help you, starting with lunch.”

She walked into the kitchen, dug into the groceries she’d yet to put away.

“Why aren’t you telling me to get out, get away, stay away?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because I brought into your house—”

“Not mine.”

“Into your work,” he corrected, “an object potentially worth millions which was certainly obtained by unethical means, if not illegal ones. Whatever my brother was involved with prompted someone to break into your friend’s apartment—looking for you or information about you, and it’s likely that as long as you associate with me that person, probably a murderer, is keeping tabs on you.”

“You forgot the tragic loss of my friend’s shoes.”

“Lila—”

“They shouldn’t be discounted,” she said as she put a small pot on to boil pasta. A quick pasta salad seemed like just the thing. “And the answer to all that is, you’re not your brother.”

“That’s the answer.”

“The first part,” she qualified. “Maybe I’d have liked him. I think maybe I would have. I think, too, he’d have frustrated me because it seems like he wasted so much potential, so many opportunities. You don’t, and that’s another part of the answer. You don’t waste anything, and that’s important to me—not wasting things, or time, or people, or opportunity. You’re going to stand up for him, even though you believe he did something not just stupid, not just dangerous, but wrong. But you’ll stand up for him anyway. Loyalty. Love, respect, trust? All essential, but none of them hold strong without loyalty—and that’s the rest of it.”

She looked at him, dark eyes open, so full of feeling. “Why would I tell you to go?”

“Because you didn’t know him, and all this complicates your life.”

“I know you, and complications are life. Besides, if I kick you out, you won’t paint me.”

“You don’t want me to paint you.”

“I didn’t. I’m still not sure I do, but now I’m curious.”

“I already have a second painting in mind.”

“See, nothing wasted. What’s this one?”

“You, lying in a bower, lush, green, at sunset. Just waking up, your hair spilling everywhere.”

“I wake up at sunset?”

“Like a faerie might, before the night’s work.”

“I’d be a faerie.” Her face lit up at the thought. “I like it. What’s the wardrobe?”

“Emeralds.”

She stopped stirring the pasta she’d just added to the boiling water to stare at him. “Emeralds?”

“Emeralds, like drops of a magic sea, looped between your br**sts, dripping from your ears. I was going to wait awhile before telling you about that one, but now I figure it’s cards on the table while you still have time to change your mind.”

“I can change my mind anytime.”

He smiled, stepped closer. “I don’t think so. Now’s the time to cut and run.”

“I’m not running. I’m making lunch.”

He took the pasta fork from her, gave the pot a quick stir. “Now or never.”

She took a step back. “I need the colander.”

He closed a hand around her arm, pulled her back. “Now.”

It wasn’t like on the sidewalk—that light and casual brush of lips. It was a long, luscious, lingering possession with electric jolts of demand, shocking the system even as it seduced.

Had her legs gone weak in his studio when he’d looked at her? Now they simply dissolved, left her uprooted, untethered.

It was hold on or fall away.

She held on.

He’d seen it in her, the first time he’d looked in her eyes. Even through his shock, even through the layers of raw grief, he’d seen this. Her power to give. That glow inside her she could offer or withhold. He took it now, that dark, dreamy center inside the light, and let it cloak over him like life.

“You’ll look like this,” he murmured, watching her eyes again. “When you wake in the bower. Because you know what you can do in the dark.”

“Is that why you kissed me? For the painting?”

“Is this—knowing this was here—the reason you didn’t tell me to go?”

“Maybe it’s one of them. Not the main one, but one of them.”

He brushed her hair back behind her shoulders. “Exactly.”

“I need to . . .” She eased away, stepped back to take the pot off the heat before it boiled over. “Do you sleep with all the women you paint?”

“No. There’s intimacy in the work, and usually sexuality in the work. But it’s work. I wanted to paint you when you sat across from me at that coffee shop. I wanted to sleep with you . . . You hugged me. The first time I came here, you hugged me before I left. It wasn’t the physical contact—I’m not that easy.”

He caught the quick smile as she dumped the pasta in the colander.

“It was the generosity of it, the simplicity. I wanted that, and wanted you. Maybe that was for comfort. This isn’t.”

No, not comfort, she thought. For either of them. “I’ve always been attracted to strong men. To complicated men. And it’s always ended badly.”

“Why?”

“Why badly?” She lifted a shoulder as she turned the pasta in a bowl. “They’d get tired of me.” She tossed in the pretty little tomatoes, some glossy black olives, chopped a couple of leaves of fresh basil, added some rosemary, pepper. “I’m not exciting, not especially willing to stay home and, well, cook and keep the home fires burning or go out and party every night. A little of both is just fine, but it always seemed not enough of one or too much of the other.