Maximum Exposure

by Alison Kent

  And really, it was cute, his discomfort, as if she’d caught him doing something he knew better than to do.

  Heat rose unexpectedly, and she did what she could to deflect it before he looked at her too closely and figured it out. “Honestly, I don’t care if you have or not, but I’d like to see them.”

  “Uh, I haven’t, no, but I can boot up the laptop, sure.” He waited, as if what he wanted was for her to tell him not to bother.

  Instead, what she said was, “I can wait till your finished eating.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. Then he set his plate on top of hers, cleaned his hands, and hopped up. His camera bag was on the desk. He unzipped it and dug inside for the memory card, then grabbed his wheeled computer case and came back.

  It didn’t take him but five minutes to plug in and boot up, launch his software program, and slide the card into the reader slot. The photo browser pulled up thumbnails of over two hundred shots. That couldn’t be right, could it?

  “I had no idea. How long did I dance?” He’d given her directions several times, moving her here and there as he circled her, climbing up a ladder or lying on the floor to capture her at different angles. But she couldn’t believe she’d danced long enough for this.

  “I wasn’t watching the clock. The CD had a dozen tracks on it, and it played almost all the way through.”

  “That was forty-five minutes at least. It didn’t seem like ten!”

  “Which proves you do just fine keeping in shape without the boring routine of the gym.”

  She gave him a distracted laugh, too focused on the photos, the black background, the single spotlight. Her arms overhead. Her head back. Her back arched.

  She was only looking at tiny squares; she couldn’t see any details, but to see herself repeated over and over was just plain unsettling. And memories of what had gone on after Finn laid down his camera returned.

  “How do I look at them individually? And make them larger?” she asked, admitting to herself that this probably hadn’t been the best of ideas.

  She should’ve had him burn the collection to a DVD so she could browse through at home, lingering over the photos and studying them, looking for what Dustin had hoped Finn would capture. Looking for what Finn had seen.

  Looking, too, for anything of herself that would help her understand the things she was feeling for Finn.

  He had set his laptop on the flat surface of the futon, and he adjusted the program’s settings, showing her how to zoom in and out with the touch pad, to pan from top to bottom, side to side. She saw how he would be able to crop the photos for closeups or leave them full size, printing her out from head to toe.

  For the first time since Dustin had concocted this scheme, she found herself doubting his instincts, found herself, too, doubting that pizza and beer had been a good idea. Her stomach clenched and burned, and if she could’ve gracefully changed her mind, she’d have done so in a snap.

  Instead, she convinced herself this picnic was a business dinner, her viewing Finn’s photographs an unscheduled meeting to check on the project’s progress. After all, she was his client, and he a professional she’d contracted for a job.

  While he sat back to finish off the pizza, she started with the first of the photographs. There was a hesitation in her eyes, which she remembered feeling, not knowing when she’d agreed to dance if she could make Finn’s idea work.

  Her hair was still artfully arranged in a loose twist; her makeup was still flawless. She cringed when she recalled the disaster she’d been at the end of the shoot.

  She’d spent ten minutes with her engine idling, working at tangles and smears before driving home. She’d been that crazy messed up.

  But when she’d first started, she’d looked good. She’d also looked stilted, her movements less fluid than in later shots, though it hadn’t taken long to relax.

  She remembered that, too, how the music had taken over, how she’d loved the way her muscles had felt, flexing, stretching, working harder than they had in a while. God, she’d been way too lazy lately.

  Following Finn’s instructions had been intuitive; she’d never been quite sure if she was hearing them over the music or imagining them, because the moves came so naturally.

  There, her face bathed in light, her neck long and arched, her gaze cut sharply toward the sound of his voice as she searched him out. It was the sort of look she could see Dustin wanting, with the whites of her eyes so bright.

  “These aren’t too bad,” she heard herself saying, because the only sounds in the room were of her breathing and the pizza sliding from the box to Finn’s plate.

  It was strange to look at herself without him saying a word, especially because of what had followed the dance, and how they’d yet to talk about making love.

  “Scroll down a few to where you hit your stride.”

  “My stride?”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled as he chewed. “You got into it. You relaxed. Those should be the best.”

  She did as he’d instructed, mousing down the first column of thumbnails and choosing one to view full size. Her hair had started to tumble, loose locks curling, strands sticking to her damp neck. Her body had a sheen of perspiration here, which had been absent before, but it was her expression that was most changed.

  She didn’t remember what she’d been thinking, or exactly what Finn had been telling her to do. But she did remember looking back at him over her shoulder—or at least glancing in the direction of his camera’s last flash, never being quite sure where he was—and thinking of what it had felt like to strip for him in front of her office window.

  She’d poured that rush of sensation into her dance, running her hands down her sides, casting him a sultry glance, performing for him like she’d never performed for anyone else. Her eyelids were lowered; her lips parted. If she’d been facing him, he would have seen her nipples in full pout, peaking from beneath her top’s fringe.

  Her stomach quivering, she zoomed out on that one as far as she could, then clicked on another farther down the queue to bring it into the screen. Big mistake. Her mascara was smeared—so much for being waterproof—and her lips were swollen, as if she’d been thoroughly kissed.

  This was what she looked like when she was fourteen and the police came to the house. She had run to the bathroom, had stared at her reflection, searching for something to explain how things had gone so wrong. She’d had to be coaxed out to talk by the female officer who, with her partner, had answered the call.

  “We can’t use these. Maybe a couple of the first ones, but not these.” She didn’t want anyone seeing her like this. Not even Dustin. Certainly not Finn—a ridiculous thought when he’d been there all along.

  Finn moved closer, his shoulder bumping hers, settling against hers. “I don’t understand. These are amazing.”

  She looked for the differences between these photos and what she remembered seeing in the mirror. Her cheeks weren’t rubbed raw by beard stubble, for one thing. Her bare shoulders weren’t covered in bruises from fingers digging into her skin. Her eyes weren’t red from crying, but from the sting of sweat and her damn cheap mascara instead. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. These wouldn’t do.

  She closed the laptop before Finn could object, hiding the secrets from her past. And then she got to her feet; straightened her dress where it had hiked up her thighs; smoothed her vest where it covered her breasts, belly, and hips; slipped her feet into her shoes.

  “I need to get home—”

  From where he was sitting, Finn reached for her hand. “Olivia, what’s going on?”

  It would take eons to tell him, and she didn’t want to think about that night ever again. But his hold was kind, not demanding, and so she gave him a minute before she pulled away. “Tomorrow’s my only day off, and I’ve still got a few things to wrap up tonight so I can enjoy it.”

  “It’s getting dark,” he finally said in response. “I’m going to walk you to your car.”

 
“You don’t have to. I do this every night.”

  “When I’m not here, yeah. But I am, so I’m walking you out.”

  She couldn’t argue with chivalry, and she didn’t want to argue with Finn. The fight she was going to have with herself over continuing this project was going to be draining enough.

  Now that her history had entered the picture, she wasn’t sure she had the energy to see it through to the end.

  Twenty-six

  Jodi reached into the tub and turned the faucets, adjusting the temperature before climbing in, pulling the curtain behind her, and sending the water spraying down from the showerhead and onto the top of hers.

  Her knees stung when hit by the secondhand splatter, but only for a second, the pain fading to the ache that she’d learned to live with over the last ten days. The ache was the only one still nagging at her since Roman had returned Friday night.

  Her fear for her life had not been erased, though it had been eased. Today would be the test of how completely—whether she felt better only when he was around, or if his assurance that he’d keep her safe left her able to walk out of her own front door.

  Jodi Fontaine. Afraid to face the world alone. If someone had told her that day was coming, she would have taken the bet in a heartbeat and never in a million years would have expected to lose a dime.

  It had been late on Friday when she’d heard the knock on the door. She’d been asleep on the couch, huddled beneath the quilt she’d brought with her from Atlanta, one of the only things she’d kept when she’d cut the ties with her old life and left it behind.

  The quilt had belonged to her grandmother Netta, and it had been Gramma who’d reminded her at every visit that it didn’t matter if she followed her head or her heart as long as she didn’t give a fig about anyone else’s. Gramma wouldn’t have been much for Jodi giving in to her fears, but she definitely would’ve liked Roman.

  She and Gramma had seen eye to eye on most things. And it surprised her at times how much she did like him, and the ways she liked him. Her liking him had gone way beyond wanting to get him into bed. Even last week, when she’d been hating his guts, she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  And hating him was exactly what she’d spent most of last week doing. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t called her back when she’d told him it was urgent. Yes, she’d agreed to his terms that night in her office, promising to keep their contact to what happened there and then, but he’d broken that when he’d come to her at the pool!

  She couldn’t believe he’d hold her to a higher standard or let himself off the hook so easily because he wanted to get in her pants! That wasn’t the reason he’d given her for his visit, of course. And she’d been the one to fondle his goods first. She still didn’t like the way that exchange of power had gone down.

  Him, however, she liked. She liked the way he hadn’t been scared of being met at her door by a gun. She liked the way he’d known immediately, intuitively, that something was wrong. She even liked the way he’d pressed for the truth, that he hadn’t settled for the bits and pieces she’d doled out, but had demanded the whole.

  She’d liked him as Roland Green, but as Roman Greyle he was…something. Amazing. Unbelievable. Hard and determined and disciplined. Powerful. Provocative. Potent. Oh, so potent. Insistent. Intense. He oozed all the things she loved about men. And that was before she even got to the sex and his skills as a lover.

  When he’d come back to her on Friday night, he’d scooped up her and her quilt from the couch and carried her to bed. They hadn’t made love. Neither one of them had undressed. He’d told her to go to sleep and assured her that he’d taken care of the threat, that he wasn’t going to let harm come to her when he’d only just found her. He wasn’t going to let her go.

  She’d believed him. Just like that. She’d been wounded, exhausted, beyond beat. All she’d wanted was sleep, and with him there, with only his word to go on that he was a federal agent, she had gotten it.

  He’d been there with coffee and a monstrous blueberry muffin the next morning. Wrapped in her quilt, she’d leaned into the pillows he’d stacked against the headboard and devoured her breakfast as if she hadn’t eaten in days, while he’d sprawled across the foot of the bed, with her newspaper and a large cup of his own.

  When she’d finished, he’d finished, folding the paper before gathering her up in his arms and carrying her to the tub. He’d sat her on the edge and gently bathed her knees, and he’d done it all without saying a word. She’d remained hushed, too, finding in the silence a place of calm she wasn’t willing to disturb.

  Once he’d dried her legs and applied ointment to the healing scrapes on her knees, he’d returned to her room, where he’d undressed her and, never taking his eyes off her, he’d stripped out of his own clothes and laid them both down, so gently, so carefully.

  After that, well, she wasn’t sure she’d ever been made love to so thoroughly. He’d spent hours with her, fucking, coming, recharging, doing it all again. Thinking of it now, her hands slick with soap and her eyes closed, she cupped her breasts with one arm, teasing her nipples, found and flicked at her clit with the fingers of her other hand.

  And then she heard the slide of the shower-curtain rings on the rod and Roman asking, “You need help with that?”

  She opened her eyes, met his wildly charged gaze. “That’s up to you. You can watch, or you can participate, whichever one’s your pleasure.”

  “How ’bout I come closer first? Not sure I can make up my mind from all the way out here.”

  “You can come as close as you’d like,” she told him, smiling as she widened her stance and slipped both of her hands down to her sex, slipped a finger deep.

  He stepped inside, pulling the curtain closed. The space she’d always thought too roomy for one was a perfect fit for two. They could share the water without touching, and if they wanted to touch, there would be no banging into the soap trays or knocking into the water controls or tripping on the shower-curtain hem.

  And if they wanted to touch…What was she thinking? Of course, they wanted to touch. They were here because they wanted to touch. As much bliss as she could give herself, even having him watching heightened the thrill.

  But he didn’t just watch. He leaned forward, bracing his hands on the snowy white tiled wall on either side of her head, bringing his mouth to the sensitive skin where her shoulder met her neck. “You sure you really feel up to going in to work?”

  She’d been off a week. She needed the money. And his assurance that he’d taken care of the threat meant she wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder all day. Or at least she’d be less afraid when she did. “I have to. And I’ll be fine. I might be walking a little bit slower than usual, but it’s all part of the cover story, right? You know all about cover stories.”

  “I know you’re a hell of a better actor than I am,” he said, nuzzling across her collarbone, down her arm, to the crease of her pit, where he sucked on the tender skin there, leaving a bruise.

  “You’ve just been at it too long. You’re tired.” She clenched her hands at her sides, desperate to reach for his cock where he nudged it against her hip, even more desperate to wait. “You’ll be able to be yourself again soon.”

  His mouth was against her left breast when she felt him shake his head. “If not Roland Green, I’ll be someone else. It’s what I do. Being someone else is who I am.”

  She closed her eyes, fighting frustration, fighting anger. She’d just found him, and when he turned into someone else, she’d lose him just as quickly. “What kind of life is that for anyone? What about friends, and a home?”

  “I have friends,” he said, rolling her nipple with his tongue. “I work with most of them, but that means they understand when a break in a case means bailing on a fishing trip last minute.”

  “But why does it have to be you? Why do you have to give up so much? Why do you have to be the one putting your life on the line?” She was well aware how selfish she sou
nded, how selfish she was being, giving voice to her inner six-year-old. But, goddammit, she wanted things to go her way. Why was that too much to ask?

  He lifted his head, looked down at her, his expression frighteningly severe, censuring, taut, and unforgiving. “Do you want me to make love to you? Or do you want to hear the story of my life?”

  “Can’t I have both?” she asked, still six, still selfish. She added a pout.

  He shook his head. And then he laughed. “Give me your hand.”

  She did, and he wrapped it around his cock, which continued to soften, even when she squeezed. “Did I do that? Asking all those questions about why?”

  “Thinking about you? I get hard. But you start me thinking about seeing my brother murdered? This is what you get.”

  His brother? Murdered? “What are you talking about?”

  “Just what I said. I saw my brother murdered,” he said, his eyes dark, his expression agonized before he shut down and left her with nothing.

  She didn’t want him to shut down. She wanted to know. “When? Where?” And she asked the obvious. “Why? What happened?”

  “Later,” he said, shaking his head and reaching for the soap. “We’ve both got to get to work, and this is no way to start the day.”

  They could have been making love. They could have started the day sated and gloriously sore. But she’d had to whine like a petulant child who wanted her way. And now she had nothing to show for it, and he was in pain.

  Right then, she hated her guts more than she’d ever hated his. She took the soap from his hand, rubbed it in circles over his back, filling her hands with rich suds scented with sandalwood and sage.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, washing his shoulders, his arms, his pits, his ribs, pressing her body against his back and wrapping him up to scrub his belly and chest. “For pressing you, for arguing with you. I’m sorry for what happened to you, for your brother.”

  “It was a long time ago,” he told her, his hands braced on the wall, the water beating down on his neck as he hung his head.