by Fiona Harper
‘What about location?’ she asked, hardly able to look away. It was just as well the questions she needed to ask seemed to be coming out on autopilot.
His mouth folded into a dry smile as he considered her question. ‘Not in a city,’ he said finally, his eyes fixing on a point on the far wall. ‘Somewhere different. Somewhere wild and beautiful.’
She nodded, unable to produce any other kind of answer. Yes. That suited him. Not only because of the places he liked to photograph, but because of the unexpected seriousness in his expression right now.
All day she’d believed he was a Jack the Lad sort who floated through life with only his charm and his camera to aid him on his way, but in these last few moments she’d seen a glimpse of something else. Something deeper. Something raw. And it made her ache for him in a whole new way.
Which was wrong, she reminded herself. Very wrong.
She looked away. The next question she asked wasn’t anything to do with planning a proposal; it was purely for herself, to put herself back on track.
‘And are you close to making those kind of plans? I mean…are you seeing someone?’
Of course, she already knew the answer to that question, but she needed that barrier between them now, and bringing it out into the open would make it harder to breach.
For a moment she thought he was going to say something cheeky, like he had about the proposal earlier, but then he looked her straight in the eye. ‘I don’t know and yes. In that order.’
She thought she’d feel relieved when she heard the admission out of his own lips, but all she felt was a plummeting sensation. ‘What’s she like?’ she asked, hoping a bigger dose of reality might help her get control of herself.
He hesitated for a moment, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Great, actually.’ He sighed. ‘She’s fun. I never know what to expect from her. And she’s kind, even though you wouldn’t necessarily think that of her when you first meet her. Most of all, I like her because what you see is what you get.’
Nicole nodded, trying to look as if she was just listening rather than agreeing with him. Even though she’d only met Saffron twice, her instinct told her she was all these things. She looked down at her plate. Suddenly she’d had enough of chicken.
‘And that’s important to you?’
He looked straight back at her, his usually expressive face still and unmoving. ‘Very.’
She looked away, just for a second. The feeling that he’d unwittingly hit the nail on the head returned, making her heart race. She knew the small amount of deception was required for her to do her job well, and that under normal circumstances nobody minded when the truth came out, but somehow this felt more serious, more damaging.
‘What’s her name?’ she asked, and her voice came out a little husky.
Alex shrugged. ‘I’m sure there are more interesting things to talk about than my love life. For example…’ he reached down into his camera bag and produced a second camera body and attached a lens to it ‘…that I’m going to let you take some shots after the meal.’
Nicole stared at the camera as if were about to bite her. ‘But you didn’t tell me that. I—I haven’t prepared at all!’
‘You won’t get the true feel for this job if you don’t take a few shots yourself,’ he said, leaning forward and making her look back at him. ‘And that’s what you want, isn’t it?’ She nodded, even though a voice inside her head was screaming, No!
‘But I don’t know anything about cameras like this! What if I mess up? What if I ruin the shots?’
Alex shook his head and laughed softly. ‘Then you mess up and ruin the shots.’
Nicole looked at him, aghast.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. This is my backup camera, the spare I bring with me in case my main one fails. I’ll still be doing what I do, but you can take a chance to try it for yourself. If you shoot something usable, I’ll add it to the proofs for the bride and groom, and if you don’t…Well, it doesn’t matter.’
Nicole swallowed. ‘I don’t even know how to turn it on,’ she said, looking at the scary lump of technology rather suspiciously.
Alex laughed again. ‘Lighten up, Nic! It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t even have to be good. But it’ll be real.’
Nic. No one called her Nic. She even made Mia and Peggy call her Nicole, thinking it sounded less tomboyish and more sophisticated. But when Alex said it, she kind of liked it. Nic sounded like a girl who knew how to have fun, how to roll with the punches. Nic could take this unexpected challenge and run with it.
She steered herself away from that thought and let out a shaky breath. Photographs. You’re supposed to be thinking about photographs. She did just that, pulling the words Alex had just uttered into the front of her mind.
Not perfect. Just real.
For some reason that seemed like an alien concept. Everything in her job was usually about creating perfection—just what the client wanted—and it was all about fantasy, not reality. Who wanted a ‘real’ proposal, an offhand ‘Fancy getting hitched?’ while you were eating a greasy kebab or watching EastEnders?
Alex ploughed on. ‘It’s not as terrifying as it looks, I promise,’ he told her. ‘It has plenty of automatic functions, and after a ten-minute lesson, you’ll be surprised how much you can do.’
It was only after he’d finished showing her how to work the camera and she was fiddling around with it on her own that she realised he’d done a very clever dodge about talking about his relationship, something she usually tried to get her targets to do when she did one of these reconnaissance missions.
Reconnaissance missions? She was starting to sound like Mia!
But that didn’t change the fact that Alex was being a bit slippery about Saffron. In her experience, once you got someone in love talking about their other half, the hard bit was getting them to shut up again.
She frowned as she twisted the focus ring on the camera, trying to squash down the little flame of hope that had just flickered into life. There were plenty of reasons Alex might want to keep his personal business to himself. Hadn’t Saffron said she and Alex had been keeping their relationship quiet? Maybe that was it. And he was hardly going to spill his guts to a virtual stranger.
Because that was what she was, even if she didn’t feel as if she was a stranger to him. Although being near him scrambled her head, another part of her found it easy, natural.
She looked up, raised the camera, picked a person on the other side of the room and held the button lightly so the autofocus kicked in, just the way Alex said it would. She increased the pressure of her finger on the button and the shutter clunked.
That was his gift, wasn’t it?
She checked the image on the display on the back of the camera. Dark and grainy. Underexposed, she thought Alex had called it. Not perfect at all. Not even very good.
There were probably twenty other women in this room who felt exactly the same way she did about Alex. Two meetings and people felt like they knew him. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean she was special.
And she’d heard the way he’d talked about Saffron.
Come on. Who was going to choose her over the wonderful Saffron Wolden-Barnes? It was all in her head, wasn’t it? Alex hadn’t been flirting with her. He was like this with everyone. Chummy with the lads, charming with the ladies…And if not for that kiss—oh, a million years ago—she probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. She’d have seen the situation for what it was.
She pressed the small button on the back of the camera with a trash can next to it and her grainy snap disappeared.
Crikey. Maybe Peggy was right. Maybe she did need to find herself a man. It had clearly been too long since she’d had a date if she started deluding herself about guys who were on the verge of getting married. Well, engaged, anyway.
She raised the camera again, thought about what Alex had told her and chose a subject closer to her this time. The shutter
went again. It was a reassuring, heavy sound. There was something final about it. The moment was captured and memorialised. Done. Time to move on to the next one.
And it was time for her to move on too.
She looked across at Alex, who was preparing his kit for the impending toasts and speeches.
It was time to do what she’d come here to do—use the rest of the few hours together so she could work out how to make all of Saffron’s hopes and dreams about this man come true.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The speeches started and Alex was off again. Nicole trailed in his wake, the backup camera slung round her neck, handing him lenses and memory cards, and every now and then she raised the camera and snapped at something.
She started to understand why he liked what he did. The Great Hall was beautiful. As night fell, the light from the candles in the table arrangements cast everything in a warm glow. People were relaxing, getting into the party spirit, and while the overall effect was pleasing, it was interesting to get behind the camera and pick out one image, one person or one thing, to trim and crop it with the viewfinder until you found the right shot. Then, instead of just loveliness, you got perfection. Or at least Alex probably did. Her attempts were improving, but they were definitely shaky. From the examples that he’d shown her, she was starting to see that framing things right could make them even more beautiful.
She pressed her lips together and thought for a moment. Maybe they had that in common, if nothing else. That was what she did in her job too, in a way. A proposal was always going to be special, but Hopes & Dreams provided the frame to make it truly magical.
When it came time to cut the cake, Nicole had to put away her camera, as Alex needed a succession of different lenses—a macro to get the fine details of the roses made out of royal icing that festooned each tier, a fixed-length one for the portraits, then a zoom for more candid shots.
After that, tables were cleared away, a band arrived to fill the minstrels’ gallery at the opposite end of the hall to the top table and people began to relax.
‘This is the bit I like best,’ Alex told her as he snapped away. ‘The formal shots are over and it’s all about catching those magic moments that maybe the bride and groom didn’t even see at the time, but will become part of their memories of the day. Go…’ he gestured with an arm ‘…see what you can find. And don’t worry about whether it’s the right kind of shot or what you think I’m after—just experiment. That’s where the best shots come from. There’s no list for this lot.’
Nicole put the lens bag where he indicated and picked up the spare camera. Then she set off to the other side of the hall where she might be able to work without worrying that Alex was watching her make a hash of it. If even half of what she took was in focus and not too badly underexposed she’d be pleased.
She got lost in finding angles, looking where the light was coming from, just watching people. She’d organised plenty of weddings working for Elite Gatherings, but she’d always sprinted through them, bouncing from one crisis to the next. Seeing it from a photographer’s-eye view really was a different experience. She hadn’t slowed down much, but her focus had changed. Instead of looking at lists and charts she was concentrating on the people. It made her feel warm inside in a way she couldn’t verbalise.
She took at least fifty shots. Some of them were utterly awful, but Alex had made her promise not to delete them, just in case he could do something with them. She was pleased with one or two, though. And she was pleased that for almost an hour her head had been occupied with something that wasn’t Alex. Now she’d had a bit of breathing room from him, she was starting to feel like her old self again.
It was just a silly crush. It would pass. She would make sure it did.
And, in the meantime, she’d started to think about him in a different way, mulling over who he was and what he liked. She’d started her own mental list—the one she’d come here to make. He liked beauty but not spectacle. He liked the unusual, the creative. He liked reality rather than a facsimile. He was also a high-energy sort of person, so a leisurely boat ride or an amble through a forest glade wouldn’t be right for him.
Would Saffron be prepared to hike up a mountain and propose at the top?
She pulled a face to herself. Back to the drawing board. While proposals were mostly about the person being proposed to, they also needed to fit with the way the proposer wanted to ask, and she wasn’t sure Saffron was a hiking sort of girl.
She was just putting the lens cap back on the camera when she went still. The hairs at the back of her neck had lifted gently and her skin was warm and tingly there. She turned to find Alex standing behind her.
‘Hi,’ she said, glad the low lighting was hopefully hiding the heat that was travelling round from the back of her neck to colour her cheeks.
He leaned in forward to make himself heard above the general noise of the room. The band had started playing gently up in the gallery. ‘Lynette and Charles are going to have their first dance soon. I’m going to take my normal set of shots, but it’s always harder when people are moving.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘If you could take some wider shots, so we can see the reactions of the people watching them, I might be able to use some of them. We’ll find a spot, and I’ll get the camera on the right settings, so it’ll just be a case of pointing and focusing.’
Nicole’s mouth went dry. ‘You want me to focus?’
Alex nodded. ‘I reckon you can do it by now. And if you get really stuck I’ll show you how to put the autofocus back on, but really looking at something, zooming in, twisting that lens until what you want to be sharp is sharp and what you want to be blurry is blurry…There’s nothing like it.’
They scouted the hall for a good place for her to stand, and once he’d got her all set up, the bandleader was tapping his microphone and calling for everyone’s attention. Alex gave her a reassuring smile and dashed off to the other side of the room. Many of the tables had been cleared and a dance floor laid at one end, below the gallery where the swing band was playing.
It was harder than she’d expected—keeping track of bride and groom as they did a traditional waltz. She’d been secretly hoping they were only going to shuffle from foot to foot, but obviously Charles had been practising to impress his new bride and he was eager to show off.
After the first dance, the party started in earnest. Lynette and Charles danced with their parents, each other’s parents, members of the bridal party, and their family and friends filled in around them. Alex told Nicole to keep on snapping. Although many of them wouldn’t be usable—people pulling faces while they were singing along to a song or caught in awkward shapes in the middle of a dance move—a few would grace the end pages of the album, and it only took a couple of shots in a hundred to get what they needed.
She let the strap round her neck take the weight of the camera and sighed, rubbing her eyes.
‘You look like you need a bit of a break. Maybe a little fun?’
She turned round to find the groom staring at her. ‘I won’t lie,’ she told him. ‘This is my first wedding and I’m fit to drop.’
He gave her a rueful smile. ‘Too tired to dance with me, even?’
Her eyes widened. ‘You want me to dance with you?’
He nodded over his shoulder to the dance floor. ‘My wife has snapped up your colleague. I didn’t see why he should be the only one to have a little time off.’
Nicole was pretty sure this was breaking all the rules of wedding photography. But then again, it seemed Alex didn’t mind breaking a rule or two. And she certainly didn’t need to ask his permission if he’d already taken the lead.
She looked over to where he had the bride in his arms. They were laughing and talking as he guided her round the floor to a Frank Sinatra song. Nicole unhooked the camera from round her neck and placed it on the table next to her. ‘Why not?’ she said and smiled back at Charles.
It was jus
t as well her mother had insisted she take those ballroom-dancing lessons before she’d gone to boarding school, just in case there was a formal dance and everyone else knew how to waltz and she didn’t, because Charles was certainly very keen to include every step in his repertoire. He spun her round the floor, throwing in the odd chassé and dipping her occasionally. It took all her concentration to keep up.
But even though she was dog-tired, Charles was right—it did feel good to let off a little steam, have some fun. She started to smile back at him as they danced, let the music flow around her rather than counting beats.
Unfortunately, Charles’s enthusiasm outstripped his skill, especially when it came to steering her backwards around the dance floor. They had a few near misses, but it was inevitable that they would eventually hit something. Or someone.
The breath left Nicole’s lungs as an elbow jabbed painfully into her back. Charles was most apologetic.
‘I think you’d better hand him over to me,’ his new wife said from behind them. ‘Before he does any more damage. At least I’m used to his defective steering and can take evasive action.’
Charles didn’t need another second of encouragement; he let go of Nicole and scooped his bride up in his arms and twirled away with her. That left her and Alex staring at each other in the middle of the dance floor.
‘Would be rude not to,’ he said in a low voice and held up his arms.
Nicole glanced back at the table where she’d left his camera.
‘It’ll be fine there for another couple of minutes—and that’s all we’ve got. Lynette just told me she and Charles are heading off after the next couple of songs, which means we’ll be back on duty for the bouquet toss and their departure in a car that now looks more like an oversized toilet roll than a Jaguar.’
She couldn’t really say no to that, could she? It was only a couple of minutes. Just until the current song finished, probably.