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“How are you feeling?” he asked abruptly. He sounded both genuinely concerned and also as if he’d rather be getting a root canal or a colonoscopy than having to talk to her.
His palpable discomfort actually eased her nerves.
Social misfits unite.
“I’m fine,” she said, and hoped that her voice conveyed reassurance and polite welcome. She suspected that her reluctance to play nicely was about as evident as his own. “It’s always pretty scary, but not a new experience, unfortunately. And you got help to me so quickly. I was hoping that I would get the chance to thank you.” From a distance, in a nice card. “I should have had my inhaler in my pocket, but I just didn’t even think about it.”
“It was my fault.” He moved his shoulders like he was shaking off a cramp. He had ditched the gorgeous but unseasonable leather jacket at some point, she noticed, and was now down to the Henley shirt with the sleeves pushed up. It was obscenely tight. A light scattering of hair dusted the corded muscles in his forearms. Not for the first time, she realised how disconcerting it was to see a person that…large outside of a comic book or a televised boxing ring. What would it be like to have that much physical presence, to never have to be intimidated by anybody?
Fantastic, probably.
Sophy realised that he was now offering a rather stilted apology for steamrolling her into the hall floor. She immediately, vehemently, shook her head.
“Absolutely not,” she stated. “You were doing your job. I was – I don’t know what I was doing. I should be apologising for getting in your way.” She could feel the pink flush deepen in her cheeks. “Um, my reflexes aren’t always so hot.”
He looked as if he was about to agree before tact belatedly caught up with him. One hand went up to his collar, turning an incipient nod into an unconvincing neck rub.
A genuine smile tugged at her mouth.
“So, I’m sorry, Mr…” She trailed off, looking at him questioningly.
He looked a bit taken aback for a moment – and, really, he should have come by earlier when the media had been pestering for an interview, because the sheer inanity of this conversation would already have put any eavesdroppers into a coma.
“Hollister. Mick Hollister.”
Mick put the bag of temptation on her bedside table, where it could silently mock her own feeble dinner, and extended a hand to her. As her fingers were enveloped by a cool, callused hold, she noticed the object tucked under his left arm. His gaze, fixed on her face with an unreadable expression, followed her line of sight. His left brow rose again in that familiar quirk. Releasing her, he neatly flipped the sketchbook from the curve of his elbow into his hand, and offered it without a word.
Damn it. He’d looked at it.
She felt the same awful rush of embarrassment that she’d experienced as a young teen, when she’d suffered some kind of brain aneurysm and written a fairly explicit love letter to a cute boy at the bus stop without even knowing his name. She hadn’t been so far gone as to actually give it to him, but putting it in her suitcase instead of the nearest rubbish bin had resulted in her mum finding it as soon as she’d gone home for the school holidays. Her mother had thought it adorable; she had considered it the biggest invasion of privacy since the Watergate scandal. She felt similarly nauseous now. In this case, it was compounded by the fact that the privacy infringed upon was his, really, and she felt like she’d been caught with an eye to a peephole.
She winced as she looked up at him, her fingers absently tracing the doodles and snatches of sketches on the cover.
“I suppose I ought to apologise for this too.”
Mick’s features were naturally severe, but she thought they softened slightly as he looked down at her. One shoulder lifted in a half-shrug.
“I can’t say I’d be thrilled to see my face hanging in a gallery,” he said evenly, “but I can’t fault the skill behind the drawing. I think you got me in every unfortunate detail.”
Unfortunate?
After a lifetime of agonising over every second sentence before it left her mouth, to the point where she usually ended up saying nothing at all, Sophy chose that moment to speak without thinking.
“I think your face is beautiful.”
The statement was honest, sincere and absolutely mortifying.
She wanted to drop through the floor.
Mick’s expression was difficult to interpret, but the emotions involved didn’t come close to pleasure or gratitude. A slow suffusion of anger snuffed out a mere flashing hint of hurt and surprise. Sophy thought he looked a bit like a predator reluctantly intrigued by a harmless creature of prey, only to have it leap up and unexpectedly bite him on the nose.
Oh Lord, this was why she shouldn’t be let out to interact with the public.
He clearly thought she was making a mockery of his looks. And she was a bit astonished by how very much it mattered that she had hurt him, however unintentionally.
She didn’t even know him. She didn’t want to know him. She wanted him to take his horrible paper bag of deliciousness and leave her alone to a cringing inner replay of their encounter.
“I’m in a hospital bed,” she instead heard herself saying. “Because I went to an art exhibition, almost caused the escape of a lunatic would-be bomber and had an asthma attack on the evening news. This has not been a good day for me. And yet telling a total stranger that he has a beautiful face is probably the most embarrassing moment so far. But I wasn’t making fun. I only draw people whose faces I find attractive.”
