by Nora Roberts
As they crossed the border into Nevada, Shade lit a cigarette and rolled down his window. Bryan stirred, grumbled, then groped for her bag.
“Morning.” Shade sent her a brief, sidelong look. “Mmm-hmm.” Bryan rooted through the bag, then gripped the chocolate bar in relief. With two quick rips she unwrapped it and tossed the trash in her purse. She usually cleaned it out before it overflowed. “You always eat candy for breakfast?”
“Caffeine.” She took a huge bite and sighed. “I prefer mine this way.” Slowly, she stretched, torso, shoulders, arms, in one long, sinuous move that was completely unplanned. It was, Shade thought ironically, one definitive clue as to the attraction. “So where are we?”
“Nevada.” He blew out a stream of smoke that whipped out the open window. “Just.”
Bryan folded her legs under her as she nibbled on the candy bar. “It must be about my shift.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Okay.” She was content to ride as long as he was content to drive. She did, however, give a meaningful glance at the radio. Country music wasn’t her style. “Driver picks the tunes.”
He shrugged his acceptance. “If you want to wash that candy down with something, there’s some juice in a jug in the back.”
“Yeah?” Always interested in putting something into her stomach, Bryan unfolded herself and worked her way into the back of the van.
She hadn’t paid any attention to the van that morning, except for a bleary scan that told her it was black and well cared for. There were padded benches along each side that could, if you weren’t too choosy, be suitable for beds. Bryan thought the pewter carpet might be the better choice.
Shade’s equipment was neatly secured, and hers was loaded haphazardly into a corner. Above, glossy ebony cabinets held some essentials. Coffee, a hot plate, a small teakettle. They’d come in handy, she thought, if they stopped in any campgrounds with electric hookups. In the meantime, she settled for the insulated jug of juice.
“Want some?”
He glanced in the rearview mirror to see her standing, legs spread for balance, one hand resting on the cabinet. “Yeah.”
Bryan took two jumbo Styrofoam cups and the jug back to her seat. “All the comforts of home,” she commented with a jerk of her head toward the back. “Do you travel in this much?”
“When it’s necessary.” He heard the ice thump against the Styrofoam and held out his hand. “I don’t like to fly. You lose any chance you’d have at getting a shot at something on the way.” After flipping his cigarette out the window, he drank his juice. “If it’s an assignment within five hundred miles or so, I drive.”
“I hate to fly.” Bryan propped herself in the V between the seat and the door. “It seems I’m forever having to fly to New York to photograph someone who can’t or won’t come to me. I take a bottle of Dramamine, a supply of chocolate bars, a rabbit’s foot and a socially significant, educational book. It covers all the bases.”
“The Dramamine and the rabbit’s foot maybe.”
“The chocolate’s for my nerves. I like to eat when I’m tense. The book’s a bargaining point.” She shook her glass so the ice clinked. “I feel like I’m saying—see, I’m doing something worthwhile here. Let’s not mess it up by crashing the plane. Then too, the book usually puts me to sleep within twenty minutes.”
The corner of Shade’s mouth lifted, something Bryan took as a hopeful sign for the several thousand miles they had to go. “That explains it.”
“I have a phobia about flying at thirty thousand feet in a heavy tube of metal with two hundred strangers, many of whom like to tell the intimate details of their lives to the person next to them.” Propping her feet on the dash, she grinned. “I’d rather drive across country with one cranky photographer who makes it a point to tell me as little as possible.”
Shade sent her a sidelong look and decided there was no harm in playing the game as long as they both knew the rules. “You haven’t asked me anything.”
“Okay, we’ll start with something basic. Where’d Shade come from? The name, I mean.”
He slowed down, veering off toward a rest stop. “Shadrach.”
Her eyes widened in appreciation. “As in Meshach and Abednego in the Book of Daniel?”
“That’s right. My mother decided to give each of her offspring a name that would roll around a bit. I’ve a sister named Cassiopeia. Why Bryan?”
“My parents wanted to show they weren’t sexist.”
The minute the van stopped in a parking space, Bryan hopped out, bent from the waist and touched her palms to the asphalt—much to the interest of the man climbing in the Pontiac next to her. With the view fuddling his concentration, it took him a full thirty seconds to fit his key in the ignition.
“God, I get so stiff!” She stretched up, standing on her toes, then dropped down again. “Look, there’s a snack bar over there. I’m going to get some fries. Want some?”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“Almost ten-thirty,” she corrected. “Besides, people eat hash browns for breakfast. What’s the difference?”
He was certain there was one, but didn’t feel like a debate. “You go ahead. I want to buy a paper.”
“Fine.” As an afterthought, Bryan climbed back inside and grabbed her camera. “I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.”
Her intentions were good, but she took nearly twenty. Even as she’d approached the snack bar, the formation of the line of people waiting for fast food caught her imagination. There were perhaps ten people wound out like a snake in front of a sign that read Eat Qwik.
They were dressed in baggy bermudas, wrinkled sundresses and cotton pants. A curvy teenager had on a pair of leather shorts that looked as though they’d been painted on. A woman six back from the stand fanned herself with a wide-brimmed hat banded with a floaty ribbon.
They were all going somewhere, all waiting to get there, and none of them paid any attention to anyone else. Bryan couldn’t resist. She walked up the line one way, down it another until she found her angle.
She shot them from the back so that the line seemed elongated and disjointed and the sign loomed promisingly. The man behind the counter serving food was nothing more than a vague shadow that might or might not have been there. She’d taken more than her allotted ten minutes before she joined the line herself.
Shade was leaning against the van reading the paper when she returned. He’d already taken three calculated shots of the parking lot, focusing on a line of cars with license plates from five different states. When he glanced up, Bryan had her camera slung over her shoulder, a giant chocolate shake in one hand and a jumbo order of fries smothered in ketchup in the other.
“Sorry.” She dipped into the box of fries as she walked. “I got a couple of good shots of the line at the snack bar. Half of summer’s hurry up and wait, isn’t it?”
“Can you drive with all that?”
“Sure.” She swung into the driver’s side. “I’m used to it.” She balanced the shake between her thighs, settled the fries just ahead of it and reached out a hand for the keys.
Shade glanced down at the breakfast snuggled between very smooth, very brown legs. “Still willing to share?”
Bryan turned her head to check the rearview as she backed out. “Nope.” She gave the wheel a quick turn and headed toward the exit. “You had your chance.” With one competent hand steering, she dug into the fries again.
“You eat like that, you should have acne down to your navel.”
“Myths,” she announced and zoomed past a slower-moving sedan. With a few quick adjustments she had an old Simon and Garfunkel tune pouring out of the radio. “That’s music,” she told him. “I like songs that give me a visual. Country music’s usually about hurting and cheating and drinking.”
“And life.”
Bryan picked up her shake and drew on the straw. “Maybe. I guess I get tired of too much reality. Your work depends on it.”
>
“And yours often skirts around it.”
Her brows knit, then she deliberately relaxed. In his way, he was right. “Mine gives options. Why’d you take this assignment, Shade?” she asked suddenly. “Summer in America exemplifies fun. That’s not your style.”
“It also equals sweat, crops dying from too much sun and frazzled nerves.” He lit another cigarette. “More my style?”
“You said it, I didn’t.” She swirled the chocolate in her mouth. “You smoke like that, you’re going to die.”
“Sooner or later.” Shade opened the paper again and ended the conversation.
Who the hell was he? Bryan asked herself as she leveled the speed at sixty. What factors in his life had brought out the cynicism as well as the genius? There was humor in him—she’d seen it once or twice. But he seemed to allow himself only a certain degree and no more.
Passion? She could attest first-hand that there was a powder keg inside him. What might set it off? If she was certain of one thing about Shade Colby it was that he held himself in rigid control. The passion, the power, the fury—whatever label you gave it—escaped into his work, but not, she was certain, into his personal life. Not often, in any case.
She knew she should be careful and distant; it would be the smartest way to come out of this long-term assignment without scars. Yet she wanted to dig into his character, and she knew she’d have to give in to the temptation. She’d have to press the buttons and watch the results, probably because she didn’t like him and was attracted to him at the same time.
She’d told him the truth when she’d said that she couldn’t think of anyone else she didn’t like. It went hand in hand with her approach to her art—she looked into a person and found qualities, not all of them admirable, not all of them likable, but something, always something that she could understand. She needed to do that with Shade, for herself. And because, though she’d bide her time telling him, she wanted very badly to photograph him.
“Shade, I want to ask you something else.”
He didn’t glance up from the paper. “Hmm?”
“What’s your favorite movie?”
Half annoyed at the interruption, half puzzled at the question, he looked up and found himself wondering yet again what her hair would look like out of that thick, untidy braid. “What?”
“Your favorite movie,” she repeated. “I need a clue, a starting point.”
“For what?”
“To find out why I find you interesting, attractive and unlikable.”
“You’re an odd woman, Bryan.”
“No, not really, though I have every right to be.” She stopped speaking a moment as she switched lanes. “Come on, Shade, it’s going to be a long trip. Let’s humor each other on the small points. Give me a movie.”
“ToHave and Have Not .”
“Bogart and Bacall’s first together.” It made her smile at him in the way he’d already decided was dangerous. “Good. If you’d named some obscure French film, I’d have had to find something else. Why that one?”
He set the paper aside. So she wanted to play games. It was harmless, he decided. And they still had a long day ahead of them. “On-screen chemistry, tight plotting and camera work that made Bogart look like the consummate hero and Bacall the only woman who could stand up to him.”
She nodded, pleased. He wasn’t above enjoying heroes, fantasies and bubbling relationships. It might’ve been a small point, but she could like him for it. “Movies fascinate me, and the people who make them. I suppose that was one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to work forCelebrity. I’ve lost count of the number of actors I’ve shot, but when I see them up on the screen, I’m still fascinated.”
He knew it was dangerous to ask questions, not because of the answers, but the questions you’d be asked in return. Still, he wanted to know. “Is that why you photograph the beautiful people? Because you want to get close to the glamour?”
Because she considered it a fair question, Bryan decided not to be annoyed. Besides, it made her think about something that had simply seemed to evolve almost unplanned. “I might’ve started out with something like that in mind. Before long, you come to see them as ordinary people with extraordinary jobs. I like finding that spark that’s made them the chosen few.”
“Yet for the next three months you’re going to be photographing the everyday. Why?”
“Because there’s a spark in all of us. I’d like to find itin a farmer in Iowa, too.”
So he had his answer. “You’re an idealist, Bryan.”
“Yes.” She gave him a frankly interested look. “Should I be ashamed of it?”
He didn’t like the way the calm, reasonable question affected him. He’d had ideals of his own once, and he knew how much it hurt to have them rudely taken away. “Not ashamed,” he said after a moment. “Careful.”
They drove for hours. In midafternoon, they switched positions and Bryan skimmed through Shade’s discarded paper. By mutual consent they left the freeway and began to travel over back roads. The pattern became sporadic conversations and long silences. It was early evening when they crossed the border into Idaho.
“skiing and potatoes,” Bryan commented. “That’s all I can think of when I think of Idaho.” With a shiver, she rolled up her window. Summer came slower in the north, especially when the sun was low. She gazed out the glass at the deepening twilight.
Sheep, hundreds of them, in what seemed like miles of gray or white bundles were grazing lazily on the tough grass that bordered the road. She was a woman of the city, of freeways and office buildings. It might’ve surprised Shade to know she’d never been this far north, nor this far east except by plane.
The acres of placid sheep fascinated her. She was reaching for her camera when Shade swore and hit the brakes. Bryan landed on the floor with a plop.
“What was that for?”
He saw at a glance that she wasn’t hurt, not even annoyed, but simply curious. He didn’t bother to apologize. “Damn sheep in the road.”
Bryan hauled herself up and looked out the windshield. There were three of them lined unconcernedly across the road, nearly head to tail. One of them turned its head and glanced up at the van, then looked away again.
“They look like they’re waiting for a bus,” she decided, then grabbed Shade’s wrist before he could lean on the horn. “No, wait a minute. I’ve never touched one.”
Before Shade could comment, she was out of the van and walking toward them. One of them shied a few inches away as she approached, but for the most part, the sheep couldn’t have cared less. Shade’s annoyance began to fade as she leaned over and touched one. He thought another woman might look the same as she stroked a sable at a furrier. Pleased, tentative and oddly sexual. And the light was good. Taking his camera, he selected a filter.
“How do they feel?”
“Soft—not as soft as I’d thought. Alive. Nothing like a lamb’s-wool coat.” Still bent over, one hand on the sheep, Bryan looked up. It surprised her to be facing a camera. “What’s that for?”
“Discovery.” He’d already taken two shots but wanted more. “Discovery has a lot to do with summer. How do they smell?”
Intrigued, Bryan leaned closer to the sheep. He framed her when her face was all but buried in the wool. “Like sheep,” she said with a laugh and straightened. “Want to play with the sheep and I’ll take your picture?”
“Maybe next time.”
She looked as if she belonged there, on the long deserted road surrounded by stretches of empty land, and it puzzled him. He’d thought she set well in L.A., in the center of the glitz and illusions.
“Something wrong?” She knew he was thinking of her, only of her, when he looked at her like that. She wished she could’ve taken it a step further, yet was oddly relieved that she couldn’t.
“You acclimate well.”
Her smile was hesitant. “It’s simpler that way. I told you I don’t like complications.”
He turned back to the truck, deciding he was thinking about her too much. “Let’s see if we can get these sheep to move.”
“But Shade, you can’t just leave them on the side of the road.” She jogged back to the van. “They’ll wander right back out. They might get run over.”
He gave her a look that said he clearly wasn’t interested. “What do you expect me to do? Round ‘em up?”
“The least we can do is get them back over the fence.” As if he’d agreed wholeheartedly, Bryan turned around and started back to the sheep. As he watched, she reached down, hauled one up and nearly toppled over. The other two bleated and scattered.
“Heavier than they look,” she managed and began to stagger toward the fence strung along the shoulder of the road while the sheep she carried bleated, kicked and struggled. It wasn’t easy, but after a test of wills and brute strength, she dropped the sheep over the fence. With one hand she swiped at the sweat on her forehead as she turned to scowl at Shade. “Well, are you going to help or not?”
He’d enjoyed the show, but he didn’t smile as he leaned against the van. “They’ll probably find the hole in the fence again and be back on the road in ten minutes.”
“Maybe they will,” Bryan said between her teeth as she headed for the second sheep. “But I’ll have done what should be done.”
“Idealist,” he said again.
With her hands on her hips, she whirled around. “Cynic.”
“As long as we understand each other.” Shade straightened. “I’ll give you a hand.”
The others weren’t as easily duped as the first. It took Shade several exhausting minutes to catch number two with Bryan running herd. Twice he lost his concentration and his quarry because her sudden husky laughter distracted him.
“Two down and one to go,” he announced as he set the sheep free in pasture.
“But this one looks stubborn.” From opposite sides of the road, the rescuers and the rescuee studied each other. “Shifty eyes,” Bryan murmured. “I think he’s the leader.”
“She.”