Ian Rhodes glanced over at his boss, who was staring out the front windows of Dermamania. Following Brian’s gaze, Ian watched the lithe brunette stalk across the street toward their establishment. He didn’t see any spiraling there. He just saw a tall, beautiful woman with a purposeful scowl on her face, whose stride was so forceful that her hair lifted in quick bursts of wind with each step. Big, dark sunglasses shielded her eyes in the late-afternoon glare.
“Who is that?” he asked.
Brian had been drying his hands after finishing his last piercing job. He threw the towel in the bin behind him now with a sigh. “My sister.”
“The one you said got jilted at the altar a few months ago?”
“Do not f**king mention it.”
“Or she’ll scratch your eyes out,” Ghost supplied from the computer at the counter.
Okay, that might be cause for spiraling. “Understood,” he said, unable to look away. The closer Gabriella came—he knew her name because Brian had mentioned it before—the more apparent it became that whoever the bastard was who subjected someone so gorgeous to such abject humiliation was a damn fool. Unless there were some severe character flaws there—but then they shouldn’t have gotten as far as the altar in the first place if that were the case.
“And it’s apparent she’s spiraling at this moment because…?” Ian asked as she drew closer. There didn’t seem to be anything too outwardly alarming about her appearance.
“Because she’s here. Hey, Gab!” Brian called brightly as the door flew open and she rushed in.
Damn. Damn.
Brian had never mentioned his sister was a knockout. But then, that might’ve been a little weird. Her hair was a warm chestnut brown, long, thick and silky enough to catch the overhead lights. She had a dancer’s body, and it was shown to its full effect in a skintight tank and cutoffs.
He didn’t dare glance at her legs. If he did, he knew his gaze would get trapped there and she’d catch him looking, and that wouldn’t be good. Especially in front of her brother. His boss. What he really wanted to see, though, were her eyes.
As if reading his mind, she pushed her shades to the top of her head. Dark green stunners swept over Ian then, assessing and dismissing in one smooth motion. His breath nearly choked him in that split second.
“This makes, what, exactly once that you’ve graced us with your presence?” Brian grinned and boosted himself up onto his counter.
“You’re the one always bugging me and Evan about getting some ink,” she said. Now that Ian could see her face in its entirety, he knew the only thing marring that gorgeous skin was the dark circles under her big eyes. She held out her slender, inkless arms. “Here I am.”
“Are you shitting me right now?” Brian asked. Ghost watched the exchange with amused interest.
“No. I’m not shitting you.”
“What brought this on?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah.”
Gabriella rolled her eyes. “After all these years, and all your smart-alecky bullshit, you’re actually going to balk when I finally give in?”
“Well…” Brian seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and when he began saying them, they sounded rather pointed. “It’s kinda like a one-night stand. It might seem like a good idea in the heat of the moment, but the consequences are yours to deal with for the rest of your life.”
She stared at him for a couple of seconds and burst out laughing. Her even, white teeth were a striking contrast to her dark-cherry lips. “Jesus, Brian.”
“Seriously. I don’t want you to do it now while you’re…” He trailed off, at a loss.
“While I’m what?” she demanded.
“Obviously pissed off about something,” Ian interjected, unable to hold his tongue any longer. Brian cast him a warning glance, and Gabriella turned the full force of her piercing eyes on him. A lesser man might have wilted under that stare. It only made his blood pump hotter.
She gave him more regard this time, not even attempting to hide it as her gaze danced down over the ink on his arms, then back up to his face. “It’s that obvious?” she asked.
Ian shrugged, trying to seem uninterested. “You were stomping pavement out there like it was someone’s face. Someone you really don’t like.”
Yeah, he was inching ever closer to the edge, and Brian and Ghost looked like they were preparing for a nuclear explosion, but she only took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Looked back at her brother. “I’ll have to work on that, then.”
“And you seriously want ink.”
“I do. I’ve always thought about it, you know. I haven’t been as dead-set against it as Evan. Now seems as good a time as any.”
“And you aren’t going to hate me later for letting you do it?”
“I’ll only hate you if you tattoo ‘Kick Me’ across my back or something.”
“Oh, I’m not going to do it,” Brian said. All heads snapped toward him, and his sister’s expression fell.
“Why not?” she asked.
“You must be out your damn mind if you think I’m gonna be any part of this.”
“But you’ve always—!”
“I’ve always teased that you should get ink. I’ve never said you should let me give you ink. Hell, I probably would write ‘Kick Me’ across your back.”
She stepped forward to smack him on the arm. “You would not.”
“Nah, but still. You can get it here if you want it, but I’m going to recuse myself. Sorry.”
“Then who would do it?”
“There are two more than capable candidates right here—”
“No way, dude,” Ghost cut in. He shook his head at Gabriella. “No offense, but from what he’s told me, you scare the shit out of me. And you’re the boss’s sister. That’s pressure I don’t need.”
“—or Tay or Starla or Janelle would be more than happy,” Brian finished.
“They’ll probably say the same thing,” she fretted.
Ian had been enjoying the back-and-forth without giving much thought to the matter, focusing mostly on her mouth as she spoke. But it slowly began to sink in that he was likely the only candidate to do this for her. The new guy. He really liked his coworkers, but there’d been no small amount of hazing since he started three months ago. And it was apparent now that he would probably get tossed the jobs everyone else would rather not do…and no one else who worked here and vaguely knew Gabriella Ross would want anything to do with this project, it seemed.
Was she really that scary?
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“There you go,” Brian said to his sister. He leaned over far enough to slap his hand against Ian’s back a couple of times. “He’s your guy. Go hash it out.” The dude looked thoroughly relieved.
“Brian, I really wanted you to do this.” Gabriella’s voice sounded tight, and she glanced at Ian. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“I only work with the best, Gab.” Brian hopped off the counter, turning his backwards ball cap forward, usually the sign he was declaring himself off for the evening. “I leave you in good hands.”
“Then I’m not doing it.”
“That’s up to you. But stop being a baby about it, whatever you decide.”
“I’m being a baby?”
Before a real sibling spat could erupt, Ian straightened and stepped forward. “Hey, now. Gabriella, right? I’m Ian. If you want, I can take you over to the display and show you some of the work I’ve done. If you like it, I’ll be happy to do yours. Anything you want. And it’ll turn out great. I promise.”
“I look forward to seeing what you come up with, man.” Brian slapped Ian’s back again as he headed for the back, leaving Ghost snickering and Gabriella glaring. Bastard.
“Fine,” she sighed after her brother had gone. Then she mustered a smile for Ian and followed him to the poster displays, standing without comment while he flipped through some of his flash. After a few minutes, though, she stopped him.
“These are great, but they’re all really small,” she said.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You’re wanting to go big?”
“Very big. And actually…I already know what I want.”
“Lay it on me.”
“A phoenix,” she said. “I want it on my back. Just big and flowing and”—she made some downward wavelike motions with her hands—“beautiful. Shades of blue and green. Turquoise and teal.”
Hmm. Most people wanted the mythical bird rising from the flames after going through some sort of hardship. Brian had mentioned her spiraling…so this must really be what it was about. Already, he was picturing the phoenix in his mind as she imagined, flowing in aqua magnificence down what would no doubt be a gorgeous expanse of smooth olive skin. There couldn’t be anything stark or hard about the design. Fluid. Soft and feminine.
“I can pull in some violet to give it depth,” he mused, almost to himself now. “No black outlines,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Don’t you think?” He shooed Ghost away from the computer and brought up their most recent photos, clicking to the one he wanted—a cluster of pink, no-outline roses he’d done just last week.
She gave a gasp of happiness at his side. “I love that! Yes. It makes it look…soft. Almost painted on.”
He found himself smiling at her, finding her enthusiasm infectious.
“He’s good at those,” Ghost said as he moved back over to his station. “I don’t like them. You might have to get it touched up a lot.” He aimed the remote at the TV until he found the History Channel and an episode of Counting Cars.
“I cater to my client, dude,” Ian said. “Whatever she wants.”
“I don’t care, I want that. Definitely,” she said.
“Cool.” He lowered his voice. “Just between you and me, Brian doesn’t like them either. So you’re getting the better deal sticking with me.”
“I heard that,” Ghost called, “and I’m telling him. Holy shit! Look at that Chevelle. Daaaamn, man.”
Gabriella laughed, a clear, lovely sound that couldn’t have been tarnished in any way by her emotional suffering, or else it would’ve been positively angelic before. “Don’t worry about my brother,” she said conspiratorially to Ian. “I can handle him.”
Ian figured he could handle Brian too, if it came to that, but he let her go on thinking she was the authority on the matter.
“So when do we do this?” she asked. “Do you go draw it up, or…?”
“I’ll freehand it.”
“You draw it on me?”
“With markers. Yep. I do both freehand and stencils, but I think freehand would be best for yours. It can follow your natural contours”— it was all he could do not to sweep his gaze down her body when he said that—“and plus it saves a shit-ton of time. I’ll draw you a rough draft to give you an idea of what it’ll look like before we start, though.”