by Nora Roberts
“Whatever. Look, just be nonchalant. You walk around that side, I’ll walk around this side. When we have her in the middle, wham!”
Shade sent her a cautious look. “Wham?”
“Just follow my lead.” Tucking her thumbs in her back pockets, she strolled across the road, whistling.
“Bryan, you’re trying to out-think a sheep.”
She sent him a bland look over her shoulder. “Maybe between the two of us we can manage to.”
He wasn’t at all sure she was joking. His first urge was to simply get back in the van and wait until she’d finished making a fool of herself. Then again, they’d already wasted enough time. Shade circled around to the left as Bryan moved to the right. The sheep eyed them both, swiveling her head from side to side.
“Now!” Bryan shouted, and dived.
Without giving himself the chance to consider the absurdity, Shade lunged from the other side. The sheep danced delicately away. Momentum carrying them both, Shade and Bryan collided, then rolled together onto the soft shoulder of the road. Shade felt the rush of air as they slammed into each other, and the soft give of her body as they tumbled together.
With the breath knocked out of her, Bryan lay on her back, half under Shade. His body was very hard and very male. She might not have had her wind, but Bryan had her wit. She knew if they stayed like this, things were going to get complicated. Drawing in air, she stared up into his face just above her.
His look was contemplative, considering and not altogether friendly. He wouldn’t be a friendly lover, that she knew instinctively. It was in his eyes—those dark, deep-set eyes. He was definitely a man to avoid having a personal involvement with. He’d overwhelm quickly, completely, and there’d be no turning back. She had to remind herself that she preferred easy relationships, as her heart started a strong steady rhythm.
“Missed,” she managed to say, but didn’t try to move away.
“Yeah.” She had a stunning face, all sharp angles and soft skin. Shade could nearly convince himself that his interest in it was purely professional. She’d photograph wonderfully from any angle, in any light. He could make her look like a queen or a peasant, but she’d always look like a woman a man would want. The lazy sexuality he could sense in her would come across in the photograph.
Just looking at her he could plot half a dozen settings he’d like to shoot her in. And he could think of dozens of ways he’d like to make love to her. Here was first, on the cool grass along the roadside with the sun setting behind them and no sound.
She saw the decision in his eyes, saw it in time to avoid the outcome. But she didn’t. She had only to shift away, only to protest with one word or a negative movement. But she didn’t. Her mind told her to, arguing with an urge that was unarguably physical. Later, Bryan would wonder why she hadn’t listened. Now with the air growing cool and the sky darkening, she wanted the experience. She couldn’t admit that she wanted him.
When he lowered his mouth to hers, there wasn’t any of the light experimentation of the first time. Now he knew her and wanted the full impact of her passion. Their mouths met greedily, as if each one were racing the other to delirium.
Her body heated so quickly that the grass seemed to shimmer like ice beneath her. She wondered it didn’t melt. It was a jolt that left her bewildered. With a small sound in her throat, Bryan reached for more. His fingers were in her hair, tangled in the restriction of her braid as if he didn’t choose, or didn’t dare, to touch her yet. She moved under him, not in retreat but in advance. Hold me, she seemed to demand. Give me more. But he continued to make love only to her mouth. Devastatingly.
She could hear the breeze; it tickled through the grass beside her ear and taunted her. He’d give sparingly of himself. She could feel it in the tenseness of his body. He’d hold back. While his mouth stripped away her defenses one by one, he held himself apart. Frustrated, Bryan ran her hands up his back. She’d seduce.
Shade wasn’t used to the pressure to give, to the desire to. She drew from him a need for merging he’d thought he’d beaten down years before. There seemed to be no pretenses in her—her mouth was warm and eager, tasting of generosity. Her body was soft and agile, tempting. Her scent drifted around him, sexual, uncomplicated. When she said his name, there seemed to be no hidden meaning. For the first time in too long for him to remember, he wanted to give, unheedingly, boundlessly.
He held himself back. Pretenses, he knew, could be well hidden. But he was losing to her. Even though Shade was fully aware of it, he couldn’t stop it. She drew and drew from him with a simplicity that couldn’t be blocked. He might’ve sworn against it, cursed her, cursed himself, but his mind was beginning to swim. His body was throbbing.
They both felt the ground tremble, but it didn’t occur to either of them that it was anything but their own passion. They heard the noise, the rumble, growing louder and louder, and each thought it was inside his or her own head. Then the wind rocketed by them and the truck driver gave one long, rude blast of the horn. It was enough to jolt them back to sanity. Feeling real panic for the first time, Bryan scrambled to her feet.
“We’d better take care of that sheep and get going.” She swore at the breathiness of her own voice and wrapped her arms protectively around herself. There was a chill in the air, she thought desperately. That was all. “It’s nearly dark.”
Shade hadn’t realized how deep the twilight had become. He’d lost track of his surroundings—something he never allowed to happen. He’d forgotten that they were on the side of the road, rolling in the grass like a couple of brainless teenagers. He felt the lick of anger, but stemmed it. He’d nearly lost control once. He wouldn’t lose it now.
She caught the sheep on the other side of the road, where it grazed, certain that both humans had lost interest. It bleated in surprised protest as she scooped it up. Swearing under his breath, Shade stalked over and grabbed the sheep from her before Bryan could take another tumble. He dumped it unceremoniously into pasture.
“Satisfied now?” he demanded.
She could see the anger in him, no matter how tightly he reined it in. Her own bubbled. She’d had her share of frustrations as well. Her body was pulsing, her legs unsteady. Temper helped her to forget them.
“No,” she tossed back. “And neither are you. It seems to me that should prove to both of us that we’d better keep a nice, clean distance.”
He grabbed her arm as she started to swing past. “I didn’t force you into anything, Bryan.”
“Nor I you,” she reminded him. “I’m responsible for my own actions, Shade.” She glanced down at the hand that was curled around her arm. “And my own mistakes. If you like to shift blame, it’s your prerogative.”
His fingers tightened on her arm, briefly, but long enough for her eyes to widen in surprise at the strength and the depth of his anger. No, she wasn’t used to wild swings of mood in herself or causing them in others.
Slowly, and with obvious effort, Shade loosened his grip. She’d hit it right on the mark. He couldn’t argue with honesty.
“No,” he said a great deal more calmly. “I’ll take my share, Bryan. It’ll be easier on both of us if we agree to that nice, clean distance.”
She nodded, steadier. Her lips curved into a slight smile. “Okay.” Lighten up, she warned herself, for everyone’s sake. “It’d been easier from the beginning if you’d been fat and ugly.”
He’d grinned before he’d realized it. “You too.”
“Well, since I don’t suppose either of us is willing to do anything about that particular problem, we just have to work around it. Agreed?” She held out her hand.
“Agreed.”
Their hands joined. A mistake. Neither of them had recovered from the jolt to their systems. The contact, however casual, only served to accentuate it. Bryan linked her hands behind her back. Shade dipped his into his pockets.
“Well…” Bryan began, with no idea where to go.
“Let’s find a din
er before we head into camp. Tomorrow’s going to start early.”
She wrinkled her nose at that but started toward her side of the truck. “I’m starving,” she announced and pretended she was in control by propping her feet on the dash. “Think we’ll find something decent to eat soon, or should I fortify myself with a candy bar?”
“There’s a town about ten miles down this road.” Shade turned on the ignition. His hand was steady, he told himself. Or nearly. “Bound to be a restaurant of some kind. Probably serve great lamb chops.”
Bryan looked at the sheep grazing beside them, then sent Shade a narrowed-eyed glance. “That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, and it’ll keep your mind off your stomach until we eat.”
They bumped back onto the road and drove in silence. They’d made it over a hump, but each of them knew there’d be mountains yet to struggle over. Steep, rocky mountains.
Chapter 4
Bryan recorded vacationers floating like corks in the Great Salt Lake. When the shot called for it, she used a long or a wide angle lens to bring in some unusual part of the landscape. But for the most part, Bryan concentrated on the people.
In the salt flats to the west, Shade framed race car enthusiasts. He angled for the speed, the dust, the grit. More often than not, the people included in his pictures would be anonymous, blurred, shadowy. He wanted only the essence.
Trips to large cities and through tidy suburbs used up rolls of film. There were summer gardens, hot, sweaty traffic jams, young girls in thin dresses, shirtless men, and babies in strollers being pushed along sidewalks and in shopping malls.
Their route through Idaho and Utah had been winding, but steady. Neither was displeased with the pace or the subjects. For a time, after the turbulent detour on the country road in Idaho, Bryan and Shade worked side by side in relative harmony. They concentrated on their own subjects, but they did little as a team.
They’d already taken hundreds of pictures, a fraction of which would be printed and still a smaller fraction published. Once it occurred to Bryan that the pictures they’d taken far outnumbered the words they’d spoken to each other.
They drove together up to eight hours a day, stopping along the way whenever it was necessary or desirable to work. And they worked as much as they drove. Out of each twenty-four hours, they were together an average of twenty. But they grew no closer. It was something either of them might have accomplished with the ease of a friendly gesture or a few casual words. It was something both of them avoided.
Bryan learned it was possible to keep an almost obsessive emotional distance from someone while sharing a limited space. She also learned a limited space made it very difficult to ignore what Shade had once termed chemistry. To balance the two, Bryan kept her conversations light and brief and almost exclusively centered on the assignment. She asked no more questions. Shade volunteered no more information.
By the time they crossed the border into Arizona at the end of the first week, she was already finding it an uncomfortable way to work.
It was hot. The sun was merciless. The van’s air-conditioning helped, but just looking out at the endless desert and faded sage made the mouth dry. Bryan had an enormous paper cup filled with soda and ice. Shade drank bottled iced tea as he drove.
She estimated that they hadn’t exchanged a word for fifty-seven miles. Nor had they spoken much that morning when they’d set up to shoot, each in separate territory, at Glen Canyon in Utah. Bryan might be pleased with the study she’d done on the cars lined up at the park’s entrance, but she was growing weary of their unspoken agreement of segregation.
The magazine had hired them as a team, she reminded herself. Each of them would take individual pictures, naturally, but there had to be some communication if the photo essay were to have any cohesion. There had to be some blending if the final result was the success both of them wanted. Compromise, she remembered with a sigh. They’d forgotten the operative word.
Bryan thought she knew Shade well enough at this point to be certain he’d never make the first move. He was perfectly capable of driving thousands of miles around the country without saying her name more than once a day. As in, Pass the salt, Bryan.
She could be stubborn. Bryan thought about it as she brooded out the window at the wide stretches of Arizona. She could be just as aloof as he. And, she admitted with a grimace, she could bore herself to death within another twenty-four hours.
Contact, she decided. She simply couldn’t survive without some kind of contact. Even if it was with a hard-edged, casually rude cynic. Her only choice was to swallow her pride and make the first move herself. She gritted her teeth, gnawed on ice and thought about it for another ten minutes.
“Ever been to Arizona?”
Shade tossed his empty bottle into the plastic can they used for trash. “No.”
Bryan pried off one sneaker with the toe of the other. If at first you don’t succeed, she told herself. “They filmedOutcast in Sedona. Now that was a tough, thinking-man’s Western,” she mused and received no response. “I spent three days there covering the filming forCelebrity” After adjusting her sun visor, she sat back again. “I was lucky enough to miss my plane and get another day. I spent it in Oak Creek Canyon. I’ve never forgotten it—the colors, the rock formations.”
It was the longest speech she’d made in days. Shade negotiated the van around a curve and waited for the rest.
Okay, she thought, she’d get more than one word out of him if she had to use a crowbar. “A friend of mine settled there. Lee used to work forCelebrity. Now she’s a novelist with her first book due out in the fall. She married Hunter Brown last year.”
“The writer?”
Two words, she thought, smug. “Yes, have you read his stuff?”
This time Shade merely nodded and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket. Bryan began to sympathize with dentists who had to coax a patient to open wide.
“I’ve read everything he’s written, then I hate myself for letting his books give me nightmares.”
“Good horror fiction’s supposed to make you wake up at 3:00 A.M. and wonder if you’ve locked your doors.”
This time she grinned. “That sounds like something Hunter would say. You’ll like him.”
Shade merely moved his shoulders. He’d agreed to the stop in Sedona already, but he wasn’t interested in taking flattering, commercial pictures of the occult king and his family. It would, however, give Shade the break he needed. If he could dump Bryan off for a day or two with her friends, he could take the time to get his system back to normal.
He hadn’t had an easy moment since the day they’d started out of L.A. Every day that went by only tightened his nerves and played havoc with his libido. He’d tried, but it wasn’t possible to forget she was there within arm’s reach at night, separated from him only by the width of the van and the dark.
Yes, he could use a day away from her, and that natural, easy sexuality she didn’t even seem aware of.
“You haven’t seen them for a while?” he asked her.
“Not in months.” Bryan relaxed, more at ease now that they’d actually begun a two-way conversation. “Lee’s a good friend. I’ve missed her. She’ll have a baby about the same time her book comes out.”
The change in her voice had him glancing over. There was something softer about her now. Almost wistful.
“A year ago, we were both still withCelebrity, and now…” She turned to him but the shaded glasses hid her eyes. “It’s odd thinking of Lee settled down with a family. She was always more ambitious than me. It used to drive her crazy that I took everything with such a lack of intensity.”
“Do you?”
“Just about everything,” she murmured. Not you, she thought to herself. I don’t seem to be able to take you easily. “It’s simpler to relax and live,” she went on, “than to worry about how you’ll be living next month.”
“Some people have to worryif they’ll be living next month.”
“Do you think the fact they worry about it changes things?” Bryan forgot her plan to make contact, forgot the fact that she’d been groping for some sort of compromise from him. He’d seen more than she’d seen of the world, of life. She had to admit that he’d seen more than she wanted to see. But how did he feel about it?
“Being aware can change things. Looking out for yourself’s a priority some of us haven’t a choice about.”
Some of us. She noted the phrase but decided not to pounce on it. If he had scars, he was entitled to keep them covered until they’d faded a bit more.
“Everyone worries from time to time,” she decided. “I’m just not very good at it. I suppose it comes from my parents. They’re…” She trailed off and laughed. It occurred to him he hadn’t heard her laugh in days, and that he’d missed it. “I guess they’re what’s termed bohemians. We lived in this little house in Carmel that was always in varying states of disrepair. My father would get a notion to take out a wall or put in a window, then in the middle of the project, he’d get an inspiration, go back to his canvases and leave the mess where it lay.”
She settled back, no longer aware that she was doing all the talking and Shade all the listening. “My mother liked to cook. Trouble was, you’d never know what mood she’d be in. You might have grilled rattlesnake one day, cheeseburgers the next. Then when you least expected it, there’d be goose neck stew.”
“Goose neck stew?”
“I ate at the neighbors’ a lot.” The memory brought on her appetite. Taking out two candy bars, she offered one to Shade. “How about your parents?” He unwrapped the candy absently while he paced his speed to the state police car in the next lane. “They retired to Florida. My father fishes and my mother runs a craft shop. Not as colorful as yours, I’m afraid.”
“Colorful.” She thought about it and approved. “I never knew they were unusual until I’d gone away to college and realized that most kids’ parents were grown up and sensible. I guess I never realized how much I’d been influenced by them until Rob pointed out things like most people preferring to eat dinner at six rather than scrounging for popcorn or peanut butter at ten o’clock at night.”