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of his hormones, managed to register and decode the stammering request. Sit for her, as in model for another sketch.
     
    She was so damn pretty that he almost regretted his immediate reaction of, “Hell, no.”
     
    Fortunately she looked as horrified by the prospect as he felt. For a woman of few words, she seemed to have little to no control over the ones that did make the journey from that quick brain to the unsuspecting world.
     
    A miserable pink tinge was seeping up her rounded cheekbones, sliding under a sparse smattering of pinpoint freckles. Strands of dark, stick-straight brown hair escaped a long ponytail to catch on the corners of her glasses, the lenses of which did nothing to disguise a pair of mortified brown eyes. When he’d first noticed her in the exhibition hall, before the asthma attack and his reaction of unprecedented panic, he’d placed her in her late teens, a fact that seemed to be substantiated by her nose jewellery and obvious student status. However, when he’d contacted the kid detective in charge of the case and intimidated him into an update on her health, he’d discovered that Sophy was twenty-four, seven years his junior, lived locally and was enrolled as a postgraduate student at the art school.
     
    And she was beautiful in a wholly feminine way that was acres apart from the overt brash sexiness he was used to encountering in female colleagues and business associates. These days, frankly, the latter posed considerably less temptation than a cold beer and a good night’s sleep. Sophy, on the other hand…
     
    He shifted in his seat.
     
    The last time a woman had made him feel that his tongue was too big for his mouth and his hands were awkward appendages with no proper resting place, he’d still had some of his milk teeth.
     
    He realised she was watching him with the agony of a wounded dog waiting to be put of its misery. Searching the depths of his limited supply of tact, he was about to counter with a more polite refusal when she pulled a restless arm from beneath the quilt and he saw the mottled bruising around her elbow. In his mind’s eye, he saw her fall, a fact he’d barely assimilated at the moment of impact, all his attention then on the dickhead about to pop smoke in an art gallery.
     
    Despite the doubts harboured by his nearest and dearest, he didn’t particularly enjoy using force against anyone. He certainly never employed it against a woman. It was the first time he had ever put a bruise on a woman in a violent situation. Looking at the marks standing out against Sophy’s pale skin, he felt a physical response in his gag reflex.
     
    And propelled by guilt and momentary nausea, he lost his bloody mind.
     
    “When would you want me to sit?”
     
    ***
     
    It wasn’t like he would be walking around sans pants, Sophy reminded herself the following morning as she got out of Lisa’s car and waved the other girl off. And there was no need to speculate on what that might look like, either. He would be shirtless for a couple of short sketch sessions. He was doing her a favour, for reasons she hadn’t quite gathered but for the sake of her new sculpture piece had chosen not to query. She had been drawing from fully nude life models since she was fifteen and she enjoyed a…well, a sporadic but perfectly adequate sex life when the opportunity arose. There was absolutely no reason why she should be mortified by even the vocal combination of the words “Mick” and “partial nudity”.
     
    She was in such trouble.
     
    She paused on the crooked paving stones that bisected their front garden and shuffled her sketchbook to the opposite arm to free up her key hand. The January sun was already a tingling heat on the backs of her upper arms and it wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning. Another scorcher of a day ahead. Glorious.
     
    Unlocking the front door, she pushed it open. Jeeves, her black-and-white Spoodle, immediately came running, backside aquiver, sadly