She breathed in and out with measured breaths as her bleary eyes roved over the intricate details of his face.

It could have been him, standing there, staring at her.

Or his head anyway. The body wasn’t his. Her muse, inspired by the mudroom, had demanded she paint him as she’d found him—half-naked. But Suzanne had flat-out refused. As inspiring as she’d found Grady stripped to the waist, it didn’t feel right to paint him any kind of naked. He had to be clothed. But her muse was a determined little vixen, and they’d waged an internal war for hours as Suzanne had worked.

In the end, Suzanne had been so damn mad with that persistent little voice, she’d deliberately attached Grady’s head to Michelangelo’s David—the big marble dude with the tiny weenie in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence.

She wanted naked? She could have naked.

And Suzanne had painted enough replicas of the statue over the last decade to make it an easy job. She’d been faithful to the statue, too, much to her muse’s chagrin. Except for one addition—a knot of raised scar tissue just under the right collarbone.

Suzanne’s breath went all funny remembering that moment. Remembering how still Grady had been, his face impassive as her fingers had explored the soft ragged pucker of the wound. Remembering how she’d been compelled to map it, to know its dimensions, its depths, and its boundaries.

Her pulse had skipped madly at her wrist and temples and washed through her ears at her daring. She’d felt jittery and short of breath, and her hand had shaken a little, but she’d not been able to stop the impulse. She’d half expected him to spring away at her tentative touch, but he hadn’t. Not at first anyway. He’d just stood and let her explore, heat pouring off him despite the arctic feel of his skin.

Seeing that wound had made her hot and cold all over. The implications had rocked her to the core. What if it had been lower or to the left side of his chest? Or higher, getting his neck? Or his head? What if it had sliced through a vessel or ricocheted off bone?

She had to breathe in and out deeply and slowly to quash the spurt of anxiety.

Forcing her thoughts back to the painting—to her baby—she assessed it critically. For damn sure it wasn’t art. Her mother would not be impressed. Simone St. Michelle had very definite ideas about what constituted art and what did not, and she’d waste no time pointing out that Suzanne’s portrait was more…caricature than anything else.

But none of that mattered right now because, to Suzanne, this portrait was 100 percent Grady and very, very real.

And with the joy of that accomplishment swelling in her chest, she flicked out the lights, padded to her bedroom, stripped out of her paint-stained clothes, and collapsed on her unmade bed, burrowing her chilled body beneath the down duvet and falling headlong into sleep.