All It Takes (Romancing Manhattan 2)

“I’m not worried,” I reply with a laugh.

“Have you ever been pulled over?”

I look at her, then start to laugh from deep in my gut.

“More times than I can count.” I grin as she gets the seat situated just so, adjusts the mirrors, then pushes the start button and eases onto the road.

Then she guns it, and we’re off, speeding through the residential streets of the Bronx.

“You do love to go fast,” I say, watching her bite her lip in excitement.

“This car is just . . . so good.”

“You can drive it whenever we’re together, if you want.”

She giggles, glances over at me, then giggles again. The next thing I know, we’re parked at her house.

“We’re here,” she announces, taking her belt off and climbing out of the car.

“We drove less than a mile,” I say in surprise.

“Yep. This is where I wanted to go.”

Before she can walk into the house, I catch her wrist and pull her against me, thrilled at the way her body molds against mine, as if she was made just for me.

“You’re incredible. You know that, right?”

“I’m pretty okay,” she agrees with a grin, gazing up at me with happy eyes. “Let’s go inside.”

I follow her into the house. She drops her bag and keys in their usual places. The rest of her house is in order. It’s not perfect, the way it would be if she were a crazy neat freak, but most everything has a place.

“Do you need to pick something up?” I ask, but she shakes her head, leading me down to her bedroom. “Or did you just want to get naked?”

“Neither,” she says with a laugh. “I want to take you to my studio. I need to change my clothes. Do you care if those that you’re wearing get messy?”

I glance down at my usual weekend attire of cargo shorts and a T-shirt and shake my head. “No, I have a million of these.”

“Excellent.” She slips into her closet, and less than a minute later, she returns in a tiny pair of cutoffs and a white tank, both with paint spatter on them. “This is my painting outfit.”

“Jesus, Sienna, I’ll have you naked before we get to the top of the stairs.”

She grins and shakes her head, and I can’t stop staring at her.

Her feet are bare, her strawberry-blond hair is twisted up in its usual casual knot, and she’s wearing her glasses, which immediately makes my dick hard.

Add in the paint outfit, and I’m ready to fucking explode.

“I want to do this with you,” she says as she takes my hand and leads me up the stairs and to the studio. Natural light is flooding the space. She has tarps thrown on the floor, protecting it from paint.

And she has two brand-new canvases set up on easels in the middle of the room.

“Did you plan this?”

“Maybe,” she says with a grin. She has two clean paint palettes set on a table and begins to load them with the same colors of paints. “We’re going to work on the same painting today. I’d like to teach you, if you want to learn.”

“I’m all yours,” I reply. Jesus, she’s gorgeous, confident in every move she makes. Her motions are swift and precise, and before long, she has both palettes ready.

“Okay, here are your paints. I have brushes and water already set up at the easels.”

“You’re quite prepared.”

“I haven’t had a chance to paint much lately, and I was hoping we’d wrap it up early today. Besides, you’ve taken me several times to share what you enjoy, and I realized that I haven’t done the same for you.”

“I enjoy just being with you.” She stops and turns to me, a happy smile spreading over her lips.

“That’s a sweet thing to say.”

“It’s true. If I can race, or zip-line, or paint, or just breathe with you, well, it’s all bonus.”

“You’re charming,” she says as she preps both of our canvases.

“No, I’m not. I don’t spew bullshit. I don’t say what I don’t mean.”

“That’s not what I was saying,” she replies calmly. “I just meant that you’re kind, and sweet, and it’s quite attractive.”

I blink, staring down at her as she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her little nose.

“Seems you don’t spew bullshit either.”

“Nope. Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

My lips twitch as I mimic what she’s doing with her paints on my own canvas. “Am I doing this right?”

“Perfectly.”

She starts to explain why she’s preparing the canvases in a certain way. Why she chose these particular paints, and what she has in mind for us to paint today.

“I’d like to paint a skyline,” she says. “It sounds simple, but it’s not.”

“None of this is simple,” I reply, already frustrated and feeling like I have two left thumbs. “Who says it’s simple?”

“I’ve found that many people brush the arts off as being easy. ‘Oh, you write? I have an idea for a book.’ ‘Oh, you paint? I thought about doing that.’”