While You Were Writing: Watkin's Pond, Book 2 by Virginia Nelson

back to her impromptu art studio to find the piece she’d created of Mina and gazed at it for a while, awed that she’d captured the character so well using just paints when it’d taken him the better part of a hundred thousand words to say as much.
    Then back to the stairs, looking up as if she’d appear simply because he willed it.
    An inner debate started, one that shouldn’t have surprised him. He did, after all, spend the better portion of most days talking to himself—usually in multiple voices. It was his job to create dialogue.
    This debate, however, involved whether or not he should wake her up.
    On one hand, it suggested an intimacy he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to encourage. If he woke her, all sleepy and rumpled and sexy as hell, wasn’t it akin to saying there were no barriers between them? An overstep of the roommate agreement, so to speak, although they had no such contractual clauses to their unusual circumstance.
    On the other hand, it was his house. She’d chosen to invade it. If he wanted her company, shouldn’t he be allowed to demand it? Hell, she’d practically invited such intimacies with her invasion of his personal space. If she wanted to know more about him, how better to do so than to let him use her for a sounding board when he practically burst, like some overfed tick, with words?
    Then again, sleepy and rumpled offered up temptation. In his present state of mind, he wasn’t sure if he was far enough removed to ignore the sweet delicacy of her lips if she licked them, as she was prone to do, and looked up at him with those intelligent eyes as if he were the center of her galaxy and nothing could distract her from her calling to save him from himself.
    But wasn’t he above such carnal and physical demands? He was an artist, so was she, so she’d no doubt understand on some level this kind of frustrated need to share while the story was rich and palpable in his head.
    Besides, she’d interrupted his sleep. And again, his house…
    Decided, he took the steps two at a time only to pause outside her door, hand poised to knock, but unable to make contact.
    She saved him from having to make the decision, opening the door to peer up at him—as warm and sleepy-looking as he’d expected—and stretching her face into a jaw-popping yawn. “Is the house on fire?”
    He blinked at the question, shifting from foot to foot. “No.”
    “You pounded up the stairs like there was an emergency. Are you okay?”
    Another yawn erupted on the last sentence, garbling the words, but he understood them well enough. “I’m fine.” He wanted to dance out of his skin. He needed to tell her about the story she’d inspired.
    She seemed to be coming more awake by the second, eyes squinting as she considered him. “You’ve showered?”
    “Yes.” And if she kept asking such banal, stupid questions, he might scream at her. Where was her curiosity, her probing questions which seemed to sink right to the marrow of a matter?
    “I take it you’ve been writing the past couple days?”
    He resisted rolling his eyes, but barely. “Yes.”
    “Well, good for you. I’m tired so…”
    She started to close the door in his face and he almost screamed in frustration. Instead, he snapped a hand out and stopped the door from shutting. “You wake me up when I’m sleeping.”
    She blinked at him, as if not comprehending the meaning of his words.
    He waited.
    “So because I’ve woken you up when you’re sleeping, you can come wake me up? What, are you bored? Require company? Mister Hermit has decided it’s social time so I’m supposed to jump because you’ve remembered I’m here?”
    He didn’t answer. When she put it like that, it seemed far less reasonable than it had in his inner debate. She waited, glancing once at his hand still holding the door open.
    “Well, you’re the one who wants to talk to me.” It grated that he was the one to point it out.
    Her lips, the full and tempting curl of them,