He’d just wanted to draw her.
Gavin reminded himself of this, as he lay half-awake (but pretending to be fully asleep) in the early dawn light, so dim that Ciara’s milk-white skin seemed a continuation of the silk sheets, like something liquid taking faerie form. Ciara. He squinted at her, his own heavy lashes concealing his consciousness, trying to remember how he had ended up in bed with his subject. The sketchbook on the bedside table was practically blank – an expressive, heavy-handed line that terminated suddenly after a startled scribble was the only mark to mar the ivory page. But after that...Gavin could remember only a blur of perfect skin, the brush of silk, warm breath. Her searching eyes were garnets in his confused dreams.
The commotion outside barely phased him, fixated as he was on quietly observing her, but it was not long before she stirred and broke the spell. His eyes squeezed frantic-shut. How had they gotten here? How would she react when she remembered the stranger tangled in her sheets? But she seemed undisturbed as she returned to bed, draped over the coverlet like some goddess of beauty. His eyes blinked open, made brave by the fall of her hair. And then they widened with surprise as something attacked his foot through the blankets.
Gavin was expecting a cat. His first thought, as he sat up to glare at the creature tackling his toes, was that this was the strangest-looking cat he had ever seen. So when it looked up at him with an accusing stare, he couldn’t help but flinch in alarm. Cat with a man-face..!? he thought, horrified, until he noticed the deft fingers and long tail that said, unmistakably, monkey. He sighed, slipping his feet over the edge of the bed to the floor, and ran a hand through his disheveled mop of hair.
From his more-or-less upright position, he surveyed the room, finding none of it familiar. Clothes littered the floor in heaps of satin and lace and glinting jewels, a mess that would normally disturb him if it were not for the artful way everything had been discarded. His own clothes did not immediately present themselves, so he proceeded to wander around, searching.
An ominous thud behind a closed door stopped him in his tracks.
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