Bryce Schoene wasn’t having much luck getting her paper written and the knock on her door wasn’t a welcome interruption.  On her doorstep was a very strange woman who called herself Percy and who insists on dressing Bryce in her “uniform” - a linen sheet and a strange charm bracelet.  Then Percy disappears, leaving Bryce to extricate herself from the uniform and the strange visions it seems to induce.

Her attempts to remove the toga and bracelet instead result in her falling through some rose bushes and landing on the patio of her handsome neighbor – the very one she’d constantly been watching and fantasizing about.  And he’s out on the patio.

Galtero (Walt) Diaz has been lusting after his next-door neighbor for months but she’s barely given him the time of day, always seeming to be in a hurry to get away from him.  Now Bryce is naked on his patio.  Maybe he could convince her to let him paint a portrait of her – nude.

Reluctant Muse is a hot and fast-paced story that brings two people together who previously only watched each other from afar.  Both Bryce and Walt have baggage that threatens to leave them lonely and alone, but the intervention of the mysterious Percy changes the way they view the world and their own future.

I found some of the premise of Percy and exactly what caused her to appear, as well as her mythos to be a bit confusing, but Bryce and Walt’s characters and interaction quickly distracted me from that.  At one point I was so irritated at Walt that I yelled at him – always a good sign of immersion in a story.  Reluctant Muse made me wish I could find a hunky local artist to paint me!