by Nora Roberts
“Mmm.” She swallowed and gestured toward the stand. “Terrific.”
“I’ll pass.” Reaching down, Shade picked up her warming soda and took a long pull. It was orange and sweet. “How the hell do you drink this stuff?”
“I need a lot of sugar. I got some shots I’m pretty pleased with.” She held out a hand for the can. “I want to make prints before we leave tomorrow.”
“As long as you’re ready at seven.”
Bryan wrinkled her nose as she finished off her hot dog. She’d rather work until 7:00 A.M. than get up that early. One of the first things they’d have to iron out on the road was the difference in their biological schedules. She understood the beauty and power of a sunrise shot. She just happened to prefer the mystery and color of sunset.
“I’ll be ready.” Rising, she brushed sand off her bottom, then pulled her T-shirt over her suit. Shade could’ve told her she was more modest without it. The way the hem skimmed along her thighs and drew the eyes to them was nearly criminal. “As long as you drive the first shift,” she continued. “By ten I’ll be functional.”
He didn’t know why he did it. Shade was a man who analyzed each movement, every texture, shape, color. He cut everything into patterns, then reassembled them. That was his way. Impulse wasn’t. Yet he reached out and curled his fingers around her braid without thinking of the act or the consequences. He just wanted to touch.
She was surprised, he could see. But she didn’t pull away. Nor did she give him that small half smile women used when a man couldn’t resist touching what attracted him.
Her hair was soft; his eyes had told him that but now his fingers confirmed it. Still, it was frustrating not to feel it loose and free, not to be able to let it play between his fingers.
He didn’t understand her. Yet. She made her living recording the elite, the glamorous, the ostentatious, yet she seemed to have no pretensions. Her only jewelry was a thin gold chain that fell to her breasts. On the end was a tiny ankh. Again, she wore no makeup but her scent was there to tantalize. She could, with a few basic female touches, have turned herself into something breathtaking, but she seemed to ignore the possibilities and rely on simplicity. That in itself was stunning.
Hours before, Bryan had decided she didn’t want to be dazzled. Shade was deciding at that moment he didn’t care to be stunned. Without a word, he let her braid fall back to her shoulder.
“Do you want me to take you back to your apartment or your studio?”
So that was it? He’d managed to tie her up in knots in a matter of seconds and now he only wanted to know where to dump her off. “The studio.” Bryan reached down and picked up her camera bag. Her throat was dry, but she tossed the half-full can of soda into the trash. She wasn’t certain she could swallow. Before they’d reached Shade’s car, she was certain she’d explode if she didn’t say something.
“Do you enjoy that cool, remote image you’ve perfected, Shade?”
He didn’t look at her, but he nearly smiled. “It’s comfortable.”
“Except for the people who get within five feet of you.” Damned if she wouldn’t get a rise out of him. “Maybe you take your own press too seriously,” she suggested. “Shade Colby, as mysterious and intriguing as his name, as dangerous and as compelling as his photographs.”
This time he did smile, surprising her. Abruptly he looked like someone she’d want to link hands with, laugh with. “Where in hell did you read that?”
“Celebrity,”she muttered. “April, five years ago. They did an article on the photo sales in New York. One of your prints sold for seventy-five hundred at Sotheby’s.”
“Did it?” His gaze slid over her profile. “You’ve a better memory than I.”
Stopping, she turned to face him. “Damn it, I bought it. It’s a moody, depressing, fascinating street scene that I wouldn’t have given ten cents for if I’d met you first. And if I wasn’t so hooked on it, I’d pitch it out the minute I get home. As it is I’ll probably have to turn it to face the wall for six months until I forget that the artist behind it is a jerk.”
Shade watched her soberly, then nodded. “You make quite a speech once you’re rolling.”
With one short, rude word Bryan turned and started toward the car again. As she reached the passenger side and yanked open the door, Shade stopped her. “Since we’re essentially going to be living together for the next three months, you might want to get the rest of it out now.”
Though she tried to speak casually, it came out between her teeth. “The rest of what?”
“Whatever griping you have to do.”
She took a deep breath first. She hated to be angry. Invariably it exhausted her. Resigned to it, Bryan curled her hands around the top of the door and leaned toward him. “I don’t like you. I’d say it’s just that simple, but I can’t think of anyone else I don’t like.”
“No one?”
“No one.”
For some reason he believed her. He nodded, then dropped his hands over hers on top of the door. “I’d rather not be lumped in a group in any case. Why should we have to like each other?”
“It’d make the assignment easier.”
He considered this while holding her hands beneath his. The tops of hers were soft, the palms of his hard. He liked the contrast, perhaps too much. “You like things easy?”
He made it sound like an insult and she straightened. Her eyes were on a level with his mouth and she shifted slightly. “Yes. Complications are just that. They get in the way and muck things up. I’d rather shovel them aside and deal with what’s important.”
“We’ve had a major complication before we started.”
She might’ve concentrated on keeping her eyes on his, but that didn’t prevent her from feeling the light, firm pressure of his hands. It didn’t prevent her from understanding his meaning. Since it was something they’d meticulously avoided mentioning from the beginning, Bryan lunged at it, straight on.
“You’re a man and I’m a woman.”
He couldn’t help but enjoy the way she snarled it at him. “Exactly. We can say we’re both photographers and that’s a sexless term.” He gave her the barest hint of a smile. “It’s also bullshit.”
“That may be,” she said evenly. “But I intend to handle it because the assignment comes first. It helps a great deal that I don’t like you.”
“Liking doesn’t have anything to do with chemistry.”
She gave him an easy smile because her pulse was beginning to pound. “Is that a polite word for lust?”
She wasn’t one to dance around an issue once she’d opened it up. Fair enough, he decided. “Whatever you call it, it goes right back to your complication. We’d better take a good look at it, then shove it aside.”
When his fingers tightened on hers, she dropped her gaze to them. She understood his meaning, but not his reason.
“Wondering what it would be like’s going to distract both of us,” Shade continued. She looked up again, wary. He could feel her pulse throb where his fingers brushed her wrist, yet she’d made no move to pull back. If she had… There was no use speculating; it was better to move ahead. “We’ll find out. Then we’ll file it, forget it and get on with our job.”
It sounded logical. Bryan had a basic distrust of anything that sounded quite so logical. Still, he’d been right on target when he’d said that wondering would be distracting. She’d been wondering for days. His mouth seemed to be the softest thing about him, yet even that looked hard, firm and unyielding. How would it feel? How would it taste?
She let her gaze wander back to it and the lips curved. She wasn’t certain if it was amusement or sarcasm, but it made up her mind.
“All right.” How intimate could a kiss be when a car door separated them?
They leaned toward each other slowly, as if each waited for the other to draw back at the last moment. Their lips met lightly, passionlessly. It could’ve ended then with each of them shrugging the other off in disinterest.
It was the basic definition of a kiss. Two pairs of lips meeting. Nothing more.
Neither one would be able to say who changed it, whether it was calculated or accidental. They were both curious people, and curiosity might have been the factor. Or it might have been inevitable. The texture of the kiss changed so slowly that it wasn’t possible to stop it until it was too late for regrets.
Lips opened, invited, accepted. Their fingers clung. His head tilted, and hers, so that the kiss deepened. Bryan found herself pressing against the hard, unyielding door, searching for more, demanding it as her teeth nipped at his bottom lip. She’d been right. His mouth was the softest thing about him. Impossibly soft, unreasonably luxurious as it heated on hers.
She wasn’t used to wild swings of mood. She’d never experienced anything like it. It wasn’t possible to lie back and enjoy. Wasn’t that what kisses were for? Up to now she’d believed so. This one demanded all her strength, all her energy. Even as it went on, she knew when it ended she’d be drained. Wonderfully, totally drained. While she reveled in the excitement, she could anticipate the glory of the aftermath.
He should’ve known. Damn it, he should’ve known she wasn’t as easy and uncomplicated as she looked. Hadn’t he looked at her and ached? Tasting her wasn’t going to alleviate any of it, only heighten it. She could undermine his control, and control was essential to his art, his life, his sanity. He’d developed and perfected it over years of sweat, fear and expectations. Shade had learned that the same calculated control he used in the darkroom, the same careful logic he used to set a shot, could be applied to a woman successfully. Painlessly. One taste of Bryan and he realized just how tenuous control could be.
To prove to himself, perhaps to her, that he could deal with it, he allowed the kiss to deepen, grow darker, moister. Danger hovered and perhaps he courted it.
He might lose himself in the kiss, but when it was over, it would be over, and nothing would be changed.
She tasted hot, sweet, strong. She made him burn. He had to hold back or the burn would leave a scar. He had enough of them. Life wasn’t as lovely as a first kiss on a hot afternoon. He knew better than most.
Shade drew away, satisfying himself that his control was still in place. Perhaps his pulse wasn’t steady, his mind not perfectly clear, but he had control.
Bryan was reeling. If he’d asked her a question, any question, she’d have had no answer. Bracing herself against the car door, she waited for her equilibrium to return. She’d known the kiss would drain her. Even now, she could feel her energy flag.
He saw the look in her eyes, the soft look any man would have to struggle to resist. Shade turned away from it. “I’ll drop you at the studio.”
As he walked around the car to his side, Bryan dropped down on the seat. File it and forget it, she thought. Fat chance.
She tried. Bryan put so much effort into forgetting what Shade had made her feel that she worked until 3:00 A.M. By the time she’d dragged herself back to her apartment, she’d developed the film from the school and the beach, chosen the negatives she wanted to print and had perfected two of them into what she considered some of her best work.
Now she had four hours to eat, pack and sleep. After building herself an enormous sandwich, Bryan took out the one suitcase she’d been allotted for the trip and tossed in the essentials. Groggy with fatigue, she washed down bread, meat and cheese with a great gulp of milk. None of it felt too steady on her stomach, so she left her partially eaten dinner on the bedside table and went back to her packing.
She rummaged in the top of her closet for the box with the prim, man-tailored pajamas her mother had given her for Christmas. Definitely essential, she decided as she dropped them in among the disordered pile of lingerie and jeans. They were sexless, Bryan mused. She could only hope she felt sexless in them. That afternoon she’d been forcibly reminded that she was a woman, and a woman had some vulnerabilities that couldn’t always be defended.
She didn’t want to feel like a woman around Shade again. It was too perilous, and she avoided perilous situations. Since she wasn’t the type to make a point of her femininity there should be no problem.
She told herself.
Once they were started on the assignment, they’d be so wound up in it that they wouldn’t notice if the other had two heads and four thumbs.
She told herself.
What had happened that afternoon was simply one of those fleeting moments the photographer sometimes came across when the moment dictated the scene. It wouldn’t happen again because the circumstances would never be the same.
She told herself.
And then she was finished thinking of Shade Colby. It was nearly four, and the next three hours were all hers, the last she had left to herself for a long time. She’d spend them the way she liked best. Asleep. Stripping, Bryan let her clothes fall in a heap, then crawled into bed without remembering to turn off the light.
Across town, Shade lay in the dark. He hadn’t slept, although he’d been packed for hours. His bag and his equipment were neatly stacked at the door. He was organized, prepared and wide-awake.
He’d lost sleep before. The fact didn’t concern him, but the reason did. Bryan Mitchell. Though he’d managed to push her to the side, to the back, to the corner of his mind throughout the evening, he couldn’t quite get her out.
He could dissect what had happened between them that afternoon point by point, but it didn’t change one essential thing. He’d been vulnerable. Perhaps only for an instant, only a heartbeat, but he’d been vulnerable. That was something he couldn’t afford. It was something he wouldn’t allow to happen a second time.
Bryan Mitchell was one of the complications she claimed she liked to avoid. He, on the other hand, was used to them. He’d never had any problem dealing with complications. She’d be no different.
He told himself.
For the next three months they’d be deep into a project that should totally involve all their time and energy. When he worked, he was well able to channel his concentration on one point and ignore everything else. That was no problem.
He told himself.
What had happened had happened. He still believed it was best done away with before they started out—best that they did away with the speculation and the tension it could cause. They’d eliminated the tension.
He told himself.
But he couldn’t sleep. The ache in his stomach had nothing to do with the dinner that had grown cold on his plate, untouched.
He had three hours to himself, then he’d have three months of Bryan. Closing his eyes, Shade did what he was always capable of doing under stress. He willed himself to sleep.
Chapter 3
Bryan was up and dressed by seven, but she wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. She had her suitcase and tripod in one hand, with two camera bags and her purse slung crosswise over her shoulders. As Shade pulled up to the curb, she was walking down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. She believed in being prompt, but not necessarily cheerful.
She grunted to Shade; it was as close to a greeting as she could manage at that hour. In silence, she loaded her gear into his van, then kicked back in the passenger seat, stretched out her legs and closed her eyes.
Shade looked at what he could see of her face behind round amber-lensed sunglasses and under a battered straw hat. “Rough night?” he asked, but she was already asleep. Shaking his head, he released the brake and pulled out into the street. They were on their way.
Shade didn’t mind long drives. It gave him a chance to think or not think as he chose. In less than an hour, he was out of L.A. traffic and heading northeast on the interstate. He liked riding into the rising sun with a clear road ahead. Light bounced off the chrome on the van, shimmered on the hood and sliced down on the road signs.
He planned to cover five or six hundred miles that day, leading up toward Utah, unless something interesting caught his eye and they stopped for a shoot. After this first day, he saw no reason for them
to be mileage crazy. It would hamper the point of the assignment. They’d drive as they needed to, working toward and around the definite destinations they’d ultimately agreed on.
He had a route that could easily be altered, and no itinerary. Their only time frame was to be on the east coast by Labor Day. He turned the radio on low and found some gritty country music as he drove at a steady mile-eating pace. Beside him, Bryan slept.
If this was her routine, he mused, they wouldn’t have any problems. As long as she was asleep, they couldn’t grate on each other’s nerves. Or stir each other’s passion. Even now he wondered why thoughts of her had kept him restless throughout the night. What was it about her that had worried him? He didn’t know, and that was a worry in itself.
Shade liked to be able to put his finger on things and pick a problem apart until the pieces were small enough to rearrange to his preference. Even though she was quiet, almost unobtrusive at the moment, he didn’t believe he’d be able to do that with Bryan Mitchell.
After his decision to take the assignment he’d made it his business to find out more about her. Shade might guard his personal life and snarl over his privacy, but he wasn’t at a loss for contacts. He’d known of her work forCelebrity, and her more inventive and personalized work for magazines likeVanity andIn Touch. She’d developed into something of a cult artist over the years with her offbeat, often radical photographs of the famous.
What he hadn’t known was that she was the daughter of a painter and a poet, both eccentric and semi-successful residents of Carmel. She’d been married to an accountant before she’d been twenty and had divorced him three years later. She dated with an almost studied casualness, and she had vague plans about buying a beach house at Malibu. She was well liked, respected, and by all accounts, dependable. She was often slow in doing things—a combination of her need for perfection and her belief that rushing was a waste of energy.
He’d found nothing surprising in his research, nor any clue as to his attraction to her. But a photographer, a successful one, was patient. Sometimes it was necessary to come back to a subject again and again until you understood your own emotion toward it.