The bodies may have been different but she was, he was sure of it, painting him.

What. The. Actual. Fuck.

Heat flushed through his system, building rapidly to a simmer and then a boil. The flow of his blood washed loudly through his ears. Why on God’s green earth was she painting him? Why? And, also, fuck that stalker shit. He planted his hands on his hips, becoming more and more incredulous at her audacity. He hadn’t given her permission to paint him.

She couldn’t just…do that, could she?

“Grady?” His name coming from a distance barely disrupted the red mist fogging his brain. The second time pierced it like a bloody great anvil. “Graaaady!”

It sounded like she was in motion, and he was sure he could hear her feet on the flagstones getting closer, and then she burst through the door, skidding to a halt on the rug, her gaze taking in his closeness to the paintings and, if she had two functioning eyes in her head, the rigid set of his jaw and the expression of absolute fury on his face.

“Grady.” She took a couple of steps closer, but his gaze flashed over her in a beam of hot rage and she pulled to a halt. “I can explain.”

Oh, she could, could she? Well…he’d like to hear that. “Explain why you’ve been over here all this time painting me like some stalker.” His knuckles whitened as he dug his fingers almost painfully into his hips and stared at her, waiting for her explanation.

Her eyes darted to the paintings and back. “To be fair…I haven’t really been painting you.”

Heat crept up Grady’s neck. She was going to equivocate now? “Yeah,” he insisted, his jaw throbbing from how hard he was clenching it, “you have.”

She shook her head, her blue eyes large in her face. “No…I’ve been painting David and The Creation of Adam and Atlas—”

Grady stabbed his finger at the nearest painting, pointing to his face peering out from beneath the golden curls of a cherub. “Me.”

“The faces, sure,” she said, hastening forward but stopping abruptly again at his glare. “But the bodies aren’t.”

That was true. And really fucking true for certain parts. A less educated, less secure man might have felt emasculated looking at nude paintings of micro-dicked men that were not him. But Grady had been to an art gallery or two; he knew tiny weenies were a thing.

Also, he wore size fourteen boots. How about them apples.

Grady stabbed another finger at the paintings, pointing directly at the bullet wound on Adam. “Me,” he repeated, his voice as deep and earthy as dirt.

Her cheeks, which were already flushed, seemed to get even rosier, but she stared him straight in the eye and jutted out her chin like the day she’d arrived when she’d called him a cowpoke. “This is none of your business.”

“The hell it’s not, lady.” He didn’t raise his voice, choosing instead to inject it with a high level of do-not-fuck-with-me. It was the voice he only ever used in war zones. Or on recalcitrant bulls. “You can’t paint me without my permission.”