One Summer
Nora Roberts
RIVALS Bryan Mitchell and Shade Wilder. She was America's greatest celebrity photographer. He was one of the world's most respected photojournalists.COMPANIONS They were working together, traveling across the country, recording two views of one American summer. They we complete opposites. And yet they each felt a passion that was destined to draw them together.LOVERS It took the eye of the camera to show them how close they could become. And it took their mounting desire to lower their defenses and allow them to revel in the fulfillment of love…Nora Roberts is a publishing phenomenon; this New York Times bestselling author of over 200 novels has more than 450 million of her books in print worldwide.Praise for Nora Roberts'The most successful novelist on Planet Earth' - Washington Post‘A storyteller of immeasurable diversity and talent’ - Publisher’s Weekly
One Summer
Nora Roberts
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
RIVALS
Bryan Mitchell and Shade Wilder. She was America's greatest celebrity photographer. He was one of the world’s most respected photojournalists.
COMPANIONS
They were working together, traveling across the country, recording two views of one American summer. They we complete opposites. And yet they each felt a passion that was destined to draw them together.
LOVERS
It took the eye of the camera to show them how close they could become. And it took their mounting desire to lower their defenses and allow them to revel in the fulfillment of love….
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
Chapter One
The room was dark. Pitch-dark. But the man named Shade was used to the dark. Sometimes he preferred it. It wasn’t always necessary to see with your eyes. His fingers were both clever and competent, his inner eye as keen as a knife blade.
There were times, even when he wasn’t working, when he’d sit in a dark room and simply let images form in his mind. Shapes, textures, colors. Sometimes they came clearer when you shut your eyes and just let your thoughts flow. He courted darkness, shadows, just as relentlessly as he courted the light. It was all part of life, and life—its images—was his profession.
He didn’t always see life as others did. At times it was harsher, colder, than the naked eye could see—or wanted to. Other times it was softer, more lovely, than the busy world imagined. Shade observed it, grouped the elements, manipulated time and shape, then recorded it his way. Always his way.
Now, with the room dark and the sound of recorded jazz coming quiet and disembodied from the corner, he worked with his hands and his mind. Care and timing. He used them both in every aspect of his work. Slowly, smoothly, he opened the capsule and transferred the undeveloped film onto the reel. When the light-tight lid was on the developing tank, he set the timer with his free hand, then pulled the chain that added the amber light to the room.
Shade enjoyed developing the negative and making the print as much as, sometimes more than, he enjoyed taking the photograph. Darkroom work required precision and accuracy. He needed both in his life. Making the print allowed for creativity and experimentation. He needed those as well. What he saw, what he felt about what he saw, could be translated exactly or left as an enigma. Above all, he needed the satisfaction of creating something himself, alone. He always worked alone.
Now, as he went through each precise step of developing—temperature, chemicals, agitation, timing—the amber light cast his face into shadows. If Shade had been looking to create the image of photographer at work, he’d never have found a clearer statement than himself.
His eyes were dark, intense now as he added the stop bath to the tank. His hair was dark as well, too long for the convention he cared nothing about. It brushed over his ears, the back of his T-shirt, and fell over his forehead nearly to his eyebrows. He never gave much thought to style. His was cool, almost cold, and rough around the edges.
His face was deeply tanned, lean and hard, with strong bones dominating. His mouth was taut as he concentrated. There were lines spreading out finely from his eyes, etched there by what he’d seen and what he’d felt about it. Some would say there’d already been too much of both.
The nose was out of alignment, a result of a professional hazard. Not everyone liked to have his picture taken. The Cambodian soldier had broken Shade’s nose, but Shade had gotten a telling picture of the city’s devastation, of the waste. He still considered it an even exchange.
In the amber light, his movements were brisk. He had a rangy, athletic body, the result of years in the field—often a foreign, unfriendly field—miles of legwork and missed meals.
Even now, years after his last staff assignment for International View, Shade remained lean and agile. His work wasn’t as grueling as it had been in his early years in Lebanon, Laos, Central America, but his pattern hadn’t changed. He worked long hours, sometimes waiting endlessly for just the right shot, sometimes using a roll of film within minutes. If his style and manner were aggressive, it could be said that they’d kept him alive and whole during the wars he’d recorded.
The awards he’d won, the fee he now commanded, remained secondary to the picture. If no one had paid him or recognized his work, Shade would still have been in the darkroom, developing his film. He was respected, successful and rich. Yet he had no assistant and continued to work out of the same darkroom he’d set up ten years before.
When Shade hung his negatives up to dry, he already had an idea which ones he’d print. Still, he barely glanced at them, leaving them hanging as he unlocked the darkroom door and stepped out. Tomorrow his outlook would be fresher. Waiting was an advantage he hadn’t always had. Right now he wanted a beer. He had some thinking to do.
He headed straight for the kitchen and grabbed a cold bottle. Popping off the lid, he tossed it into the can his once-a-week housekeeper lined with plastic. The room was clean, not particularly cheerful with the hard whites and blacks, but then it wasn’t dull.
After he tilted the bottle back, he chugged the beer down, draining half. He lit a cigarette, then took the beer to the kitchen table where he leaned back in a chair and propped his feet on the scrubbed wood surface.
The view out the kitchen window was of a not-so-glamorous L.A. It was a little seamy, rough, sturdy and tough. The early-evening light couldn’t make it pretty. He could’ve moved to a glossier part of town, or out to the hills, where the lights of the city at night looked like a fairy tale. Shade preferred the small apartment that looked out over the unpampered streets of a city known for glitz. He didn’t have much patience with glitz.
Bryan Mitchell. She specialized in it.
He couldn’t deny that her portraits of the rich, famous and beautiful were well done—even excellent ones of their kind. There was compassion in her photographs, humor and a smooth sensuality. He wouldn’t even deny that there was a place for her kind of work in the field. It just wasn’t his angle. She reflected culture, he went straight for life.
Her work for Celebrity magazine had been professional, slick and often searing in its way. The larger-than-life people she’d photographed had often been cut down to size in a way that made them human and approachable. Since she’d decided to freelance, the stars, near-stars and starmakers she’d photographed for the glossy came to her. Over the years, she’d developed a reputation and style that had made her one of them, part of the inner, select circle.
It could happen to a photographer, he knew. They could come to resemble their own themes, their own studies. Sometimes what they tried to project became a part of them. Too much a part. No, he didn’t begrudge Bryan Mitchell her state of the art. Shade simply had doubts about working with her.
He didn’t care for partnerships.
Yet those were the terms. When he’d been approached by Life-style to do a pictorial study of America, he’d been intrigued. Photo essays could make a strong, lasting statement that could rock and jar or soothe and amuse. As a photographer, he had sought to do that. Life-style wanted him, wanted the strong, sometimes concise, sometimes ambiguous emotions his pictures could portray. But they also wanted a counterbalance. A woman’s view.
He wasn’t so stubborn that he didn’t see the point and the possibilities. Yet it irked him to think that the assignment hinged on his willingness to share the summer, his van and the credit with a celebrity photographer. And with a woman at that. Three months on the road with a female who spent her time perfecting snapshots of rock stars and personalities. For a man who’d cut his professional teeth in war-torn Lebanon, it didn’t sound like a picnic.
But he wanted to do it. He wanted the chance to capture an American summer from L.A. to New York, showing the joy, the pathos, the sweat, the cheers and disappointments. He wanted to show the heart, even while he stripped it to the bone.
All he had to do was say yes, and share the summer with Bryan Mitchell.
“Don’t think about the camera, Maria. Dance.” Bryan lined up the forty-year-old ballet superstar in her viewfinder. She liked what she saw. Age? Touches of it, but years meant nothing. Grit, style, elegance. Endurance—most of all, endurance. Bryan knew how to catch them all and meld them.
Maria Natravidova had been photographed countless times over her phenomenal twenty-five-year career. But never with sweat running down her arms and dampening her leotard. Never with the strain showing. Bryan wasn’t looking for the illusions dancers live with, but the exhaustion, the aches that were the price of triumph.
She caught Maria in a leap, legs stretched parallel to the floor, arms flung wide in perfect alignment. Drops of moisture danced from her face and shoulders; muscles bunched and held. Bryan pressed the shutter, then moved the camera slightly to blur the motion.
That would be the one. She knew it even as she finished off the roll of film.
“You make me work,” the dancer complained as she slid into a chair, blotting her streaming face with a towel.
Bryan took two more shots, then lowered her camera. “I could’ve dressed you in costume, backlit you and had you hold an arabesque. That would show that you’re beautiful, graceful. Instead I’m going to show that you’re a strong woman.”
“And you’re a clever one.” Maria sighed as she let the towel drop. “Why else do I come to you for the pictures for my book?”
“Because I’m the best.” Bryan crossed the studio and disappeared into a back room. Maria systematically worked a cramp out of her calf. “Because I understand you, admire you. And—” she brought out a tray, two glasses and a pitcher clinking with ice “—because I squeeze oranges for you.”
“Darling.” With a laugh, Maria reached for the first glass. For a moment, she held it to her high forehead, then drank deeply. Her dark hair was pulled back severely in a style only good bones and flawless skin could tolerate. Stretching out her long, thin body in the chair, she studied Bryan over the rim of her glass.
Maria had known Bryan for seven years, since the photographer had started at Celebrity with the assignment to take pictures of the dancer backstage. The dancer had been a star, but Bryan hadn’t shown awe. Maria could still remember the young woman with the thick honey-colored braid and bib overalls. The elegant prima ballerina had found herself confronted with candid eyes the color of pewter, an elegant face with slanting cheekbones and a full mouth. The tall, athletic body had nearly been lost inside the baggy clothes. She’d worn ragged sneakers and long, dangling earrings.
Maria glanced down at the dingy Nikes Bryan wore. Some things didn’t change. At first glance, you’d categorize the tall, tanned blonde in sneakers and shorts as typically California. Looks could be deceiving. There was nothing typical about Bryan Mitchell.
Bryan accepted the stare as she drank. “What do you see, Maria?” It interested her to know. Conceptions and preconceptions were part of her trade.
“A strong, smart woman with talent and ambition.” Maria smiled as she leaned back in the chair. “Myself, nearly.”
Bryan smiled. “A tremendous compliment.”
Maria acknowledged this with a sweeping gesture. “There aren’t many women I like. Myself I like, and so, you. I hear rumors, my love, about you and that pretty young actor.”
“Matt Perkins.” Bryan didn’t believe in evading or pretending. She lived, by choice, in a town fueled by rumors, fed by gossip. “I took his picture, had a few dinners.”
“Nothing serious?”
“As you said, he’s pretty.” Bryan smiled and chewed on a piece of ice. “But there’s barely room enough for his ego and mine in his Mercedes.”
“Men.” Maria leaned forward to pour herself a second glass.
“Now you’re going to be profound.”
“Who better?” Maria countered. “Men.” She said the word again, savoring it. “I find them tedious, childish, foolish and indispensable. Being loved…sexually, you understand?”
Bryan managed to keep her lips from curving. “I understand.”
“Being loved is exhilarating, exhausting. Like Christmas. Sometimes I feel like the child who doesn’t understand why Christmas ends. But it does. And you wait for the next time.”
It always fascinated Bryan how people felt about love, how they dealt with it, groped for it and avoided it. “Is that why you never married, Maria? You’re waiting for the next time?”
“I married dance. To marry a man, I would have to divorce dance. There’s no room for two for a woman like me. And you?”
Bryan stared into her drink, no longer amused. She understood the words too well. “No room for two,” she murmured. “But I don’t wait for the next time.”
“You’re young. If you could have Christmas every day, would you turn away from it?”
Bryan moved her shoulders. “I’m too lazy for Christmas every day.”
“Still, it’s a pretty fantasy.” Maria rose and stretched. “You’ve made me work long enough. I have to shower and change. Dinner with my choreographer.”
Alone, Bryan absently ran a finger over the back of her camera. She didn’t often think about love and marriage. She’d been there already. Once a fantasy was exposed to reality, it faded, like a photo improperly fixed. Permanent relationships rarely worked, and still more rarely worked well.
She thought of Lee Radcliffe, married to Hunter Brown for nearly a year, helping to raise his daughter and pregnant with her first child. Lee was happy, but then she’d found an extraordinary man, one who wanted her to be what she was, even encouraged her to explore herself. Bryan’s own experience had taught her that what’s said and what’s felt can be two opposing things.
Your career’s as important to me as it is to you. How many times had Rob said that before they’d been married? Get your degree. Go for it.
So they’d gotten married, young, eager, idealistic. Within six months he’d been unhappy with the time she’d put into her classes and her job at a local studio. He’d wanted his dinner hot and his socks washed. Not so much to ask, Bryan mused. To be fair, she had to say that Rob had asked for little of her. Just too much at the time.
They’d cared for each other, and both had tried to make adjustments. Both had discovered they’d wanted different things for themselves—different things from each other, things neither could be, neither could give.
It would’ve been called an amicable divorce—no fury, no bitterness. No passion. A signature on a legal document, and the dream had been over. It had hurt more than anything Bryan had ever known. The taint of failure had stayed with her a long, long time.
She knew Rob had remarried. He was living in the suburbs with his wife and their two children. He’d gotten what he’d wanted.
And so, Bryan told herself as she looked around her studio, had she. She didn’t just want to be a photographer. She was a photographer. The hours she spent in the field, in her studio, in the darkroom, were as essential to her as sleep. And what she’d done in the six years since the end of her marriage, she’d done on her own. She didn’t have to share it. She didn’t have to share her time. Perhaps she was a great deal like Maria. She was a woman who ran her own life, made her own decisions, personally and professionally. Some people weren’t made for partnerships.
Shade Colby. Bryan propped her feet on Maria’s chair. She might just have to make a concession there. She admired his work. So much so, in fact, that she’d plunked down a heady amount for his print of an L.A. street scene at a time when money had been a large concern. She’d studied it, trying to analyze and guess at the techniques he’d used for setting the shot and making the print. It was a moody piece, so much gray, so little light. And yet, Bryan had sensed a certain grit in it, not hopelessness, but ruthlessness. Still, admiring his work and working with him were two different things.
They were based in the same town, but they moved in different circles. For the most part, Shade Colby didn’t move in any circles. He kept to himself. She’d seen him at a handful of photography functions, but they’d never met.
He’d be an interesting subject, she reflected. Given enough time, she could capture that air of aloofness and earthiness on film. Perhaps if they agreed to take the assignment she’d have the chance.
Three months of travel. There was so much of the country she hadn’t seen, so many pictures she hadn’t taken. Thoughtfully, she pulled a candy bar out of her back pocket and unwrapped it. She liked the idea of taking a slice of America, a season, and pulling the images together. So much could be said.
Bryan enjoyed doing her portraits. Taking a face, a personality, especially a well-known one, and finding out what lay behind it was fascinating. Some might find it limited, but she found it endlessly varied. She could take the tough female rock star and show her vulnerabilities, or pull the humor from the cool, regal megastar. Capturing the unexpected, the fresh—that was the purpose of photography to her.
Now she was being offered the opportunity to do the same thing with a country. The people, she thought. So many people.
She wanted to do it. If it meant sharing the work, the discoveries, the fun, with Shade Colby, she still wanted to do it. She bit into the chocolate. So what if he had a reputation for being cranky and remote? She could get along with anyone for three months.
“Chocolate makes you fat and ugly.”
Bryan glanced up as Maria swirled back into the room. The sweat was gone. She looked now as people expected a prima ballerina to look. Draped in silk, studded with diamonds. Cool, composed, beautiful.
“It makes me happy,” Bryan countered. “You look fantastic, Maria.”
“Yes.” Maria brushed a hand down the draping silk at her hip. “But then it’s my job to do so. Will you work late?”
“I want to develop the film. I’ll send you some test proofs tomorrow.”
“And that’s your dinner?”
“Just a start.” Bryan took a huge bite of chocolate. “I’m sending out for pizza.”
“With pepperoni?”
Bryan grinned. “With everything.”
Maria pressed a hand to her stomach. “And I eat with my choreographer, the tyrant, which means I eat next to nothing.”
“And I’ll have a soda instead of a glass of Taittinger. We all have our price to pay.”
“If I like your proofs, I’ll send you a case.”
“Of Taittinger?”
“Of soda.” With a laugh, Maria swept out.
An hour later, Bryan hung her negatives up to dry. She’d need to make the proofs to be certain, but out of more than forty shots, she’d probably print no more than five.
When her stomach rumbled, she checked her watch. She’d ordered the pizza for seven-thirty. Well timed, she decided as she left the darkroom. She’d eat and go over the prints of Matt she’d shot for a layout in a glossy. Then she could work on the one she chose until the negatives of Maria were dry. She began rummaging through the two dozen folders on her desk—her personal method of filing—when someone knocked at the studio door.
“Pizza,” she breathed, greedy. “Come on in. I’m starving.” Plopping her enormous canvas bag on the desk, Bryan began to hunt for her wallet. “This is great timing. Another five minutes and I might’ve just faded away. Shouldn’t miss lunch.” She dropped a fat, ragged notebook, a clear plastic bag filled with cosmetics, a key ring and five candy bars on the desk. “Just set it down anywhere, I’ll find the money in a minute.” She dug deeper into the bag. “How much do you need?”
“As much as I can get.”
“Don’t we all.” Bryan pulled out a worn man’s billfold. “And I’m desperate enough to clean out the safe for you, but…” She trailed off as she looked up and saw Shade Colby.
He gave her face a quick glance, then concentrated on her eyes. “What would you like to pay me for?”
“Pizza.” Bryan dropped the wallet onto the desk with half the contents of her purse. “A case of starvation and mistaken identity. Shade Colby.” She held out her hand, curious and, to her surprise, nervous. He looked more formidable when he wasn’t in a crowd. “I recognize you,” she continued, “but I don’t think we’ve met.”
“No, we haven’t.” He took her hand and held it while he studied her face a second time. Stronger than he’d expected. He always looked for the strength first, then the weaknesses. And younger. Though he knew she was only twenty-eight, Shade had expected her to look harder, more aggressive, glossier. Instead, she looked like someone who’d just come in from the beach.
Her T-shirt was snug, but she was slim enough to warrant it. The braid came nearly to her waist and made him speculate on how her hair would look loose and free. Her eyes interested him—gray edging toward silver, and almond-shaped. They were eyes he’d like to photograph with the rest of her face in shadow. She might carry a bag of cosmetics, but it didn’t look as if she used any of them.
Not vain about her appearance, he decided. That would make things simpler if he decided to work with her. He didn’t have the patience to wait while a woman painted and groomed and fussed. This one wouldn’t. And she was assessing him even as he assessed her. Shade accepted that. A photographer, like any artist, looked for angles.
“Am I interrupting your work?”
“No, I was just taking a break. Sit down.”
They were both cautious. He’d come on impulse. She wasn’t certain how to handle him. Each decided to bide their time before they went beyond the polite, impersonal stage. Bryan remained behind her desk. Her turf, his move, she decided.
Shade didn’t sit immediately. Instead, he tucked his hands in his pockets and looked around her studio. It was wide, well lit from the ribbon of windows. There were baby spots and a blue backdrop still set up from an earlier session in one section. Reflectors and umbrellas stood in another, with a camera still on a tripod. He didn’t have to look closely to see that the equipment was first-class. But then, first-class equipment didn’t make a first-class photographer.
She liked the way he stood, not quite at ease, but ready, remote. If she had to choose now, she’d have photographed him in shadows, alone. But Bryan insisted on knowing the person before she made a portrait.
How old was he? she wondered. Thirty-three, thirty-five. He’d already been nominated for a Pulitzer when she’d still been in college. It didn’t occur to her to be intimidated.
“Nice place,” he commented before he dropped into the chair opposite the desk.
“Thanks.” She tilted her chair so that she could study him from another angle. “You don’t use a studio of your own, do you?”
“I work in the field.” He drew out a cigarette. “On the rare occasion I need a studio, I can borrow or rent one easily enough.”
Automatically she hunted for an ashtray under the chaos on her desk. “You make all your own prints?”
“That’s right.”
Bryan nodded. On the few occasions at Celebrity when she’d been forced to entrust her film to someone else, she hadn’t been satisfied. That had been one of the major reasons she’d decided to open her own business. “I love darkroom work.”
She smiled for the first time, causing him to narrow his eyes and focus on her face. What kind of power was that? he wondered. A curving of lips, easy and relaxed. It packed one hell of a punch.
Bryan sprang up at the knock on the door. “At last.”
Shade watched her cross the room. He hadn’t known she was so tall. Five-ten, he estimated, and most of it leg. Long, slender, bronzed leg. It wasn’t easy to ignore the smile, but it was next to impossible to ignore those legs.
Nor had he noticed her scent until she moved by him. Lazy sex. He couldn’t think of another way to describe it. It wasn’t floral, it wasn’t sophisticated. It was basic. Shade drew on his cigarette and watched her laugh with the delivery boy.
Photographers were known for their preconceptions; it was part of the trade. He’d expected her to be sleek and cool. That was what he’d nearly resigned himself to working with. Now it was a matter of rearranging his thinking. Did he want to work with a woman who smelled like twilight and looked like a beach bunny?
Turning away from her, Shade opened a folder at random. He recognized the subject—a box-office queen with two Oscars and three husbands under her belt. Bryan had dressed her in glitters and sparkles. Royal trappings for royalty. But she hadn’t shot the traditional picture.
The actress was sitting at a table jumbled with pots and tubes of lotions and creams, looking at her own reflection in a mirror and laughing. Not the poised, careful smile that didn’t make wrinkles, but a full, robust laugh that could nearly be heard. It was up to the viewer to speculate whether she laughed at her reflection or an image she’d created over the years.
“Like it?” Carrying the cardboard box, Bryan stopped beside him.
“Yeah. Did she?”
Too hungry for formalities, Bryan opened the lid and dug out the first piece. “She ordered a sixteen-by-twenty-four for her fiancé. Want a piece?”
Shade looked inside the box. “They miss putting anything on here?”
“Nope.” Bryan searched in a drawer of her desk for napkins and came up with a box of tissues. “I’m a firm believer in over-indulgence. So…” With the box opened on the desk between them, Bryan leaned back in her chair and propped up her feet. It was time, she decided, to get beyond the fencing stage. “You want to talk about the assignment?”
Shade took a piece of pizza and a handful of tissues. “Got a beer?”
“Soda—diet or regular.” Bryan took a huge, satisfying bite. “I don’t keep liquor in the studio. You end up having buzzed clients.”
“We’ll skip it for now.” They ate in silence a moment, still weighing each other. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to doing this photo essay.”
“It’d be a change for you.” When he only lifted a brow, Bryan wadded a tissue and tossed it into the trash can. “Your stuff overseas—it hit hard. There was sensitivity and compassion, but for the most part, it was grim.”
“It was a grim time. Everything I shoot doesn’t have to be pretty.”
This time she lifted a brow. Obviously he didn’t think much of the path she’d taken in her career. “Everything I shoot doesn’t have to be raw. There’s room for fun in art.”
He acknowledged this with a shrug. “We’d see different things if we looked through the same lens.”
“That’s what makes each picture unique.” Bryan leaned forward and took another piece.
“I like working alone.”
She ate thoughtfully. If he was trying to annoy her, he was right on target. If it was just an overflow of his personality, it still wouldn’t make things any easier. Either way, she wanted the assignment, and he was part of it. “I prefer it that way myself,” she said slowly. “Sometimes there has to be compromise. You’ve heard of compromise, Shade. You give, I give. We meet somewhere close to the middle.”
She wasn’t as laid-back as she looked. Good. The last thing he needed was to go on the road with someone so mellow she threatened to mold. Three months, he thought again. Maybe. Once the ground rules were set. “I map out the route,” he began briskly. “We start here in L.A. in two weeks. Each of us is responsible for their own equipment. Once we’re on the road, each of us goes our own way. You shoot your pictures, I shoot mine. No questions.”
Bryan licked sauce from her finger. “Anyone ever question you, Colby?”
“It’s more to the point whether I answer.” It was said simply, as it was meant. “The publisher wants both views, so he’ll have them. We’ll be stopping off and on to rent a darkroom. I’ll look over your negatives.”
Bryan wadded more tissue. “No, you won’t.” Lazily, she crossed one ankle over the other. Her eyes had gone to slate, the only outward show of a steadily growing anger.
“I’m not interested in having my name attached to a series of pop-culture shots.”
To keep herself in control, Bryan continued to eat. There were things, so many clear, concise things, she’d like to say to him. Temper took a great deal of energy, she reminded herself. It usually accomplished nothing. “The first thing I’ll want written into the contract is that each of our pictures carries our own bylines. That way neither of us will be embarrassed by the other’s work. I’m not interested in having the public think I have no sense of humor. Want another piece?”
“No.” She wasn’t soft. The skin on the inside of her elbow might look soft as butter, but the lady wasn’t. It might annoy him to be so casually insulted, but he preferred it to spineless agreement. “We’ll be gone from June fifteenth until after Labor Day.” He watched her scoop up a third piece of pizza. “Since I’ve seen you eat, we’ll each keep track of our own expenses.”
“Fine. Now, in case you have any odd ideas, I don’t cook and I won’t pick up after you. I’ll drive my share, but I won’t drive with you if you’ve been drinking. When we rent a darkroom, we trade off as to who uses it first. From June fifteenth to after Labor Day, we’re partners. Fifty-fifty. If you have any problems with that, we’ll hash it out now, before we sign on the dotted line.”
He thought about it. She had a good voice, smooth, quiet, nearly soothing. They might handle the close quarters well enough—as long as she didn’t smile at him too often and he kept his mind off her legs. At the moment, he considered that the least of his problems. The assignment came first, and what he wanted for it, and from it.
“Do you have a lover?”
Bryan managed not to choke on her pizza. “If that’s an offer,” she began smoothly, “I’ll have to decline. Rude, brooding men just aren’t my type.”
Inwardly he acknowledged another hit; outwardly his face remained expressionless. “We’re going to be living in each other’s pockets for three months.” She’d challenged him, whether she realized it or not. Whether he realized it or not, Shade had accepted. He leaned closer. “I don’t want to hassle with a jealous lover chasing along after us or constantly calling while I’m trying to work.”
Just who did he think she was? Some bimbo who couldn’t handle her personal life? She made herself pause a moment. Perhaps he’d had some uncomfortable experiences in his relationships. His problem, Bryan decided.
“I’ll worry about my lovers, Shade.” Bryan bit into her crust with a vengeance. “You worry about yours.” She wiped her fingers on the last of the tissue and smiled. “Sorry to break up the party, but I’ve got to get back to work.”
He rose, letting his gaze skim up her legs before he met her eyes. He was going to take the assignment. And he’d have three months to figure out just how he felt about Bryan Mitchell. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Do that.”
Bryan waited until he’d crossed the room and shut the studio door behind him. With uncommon energy, and a speed she usually reserved for work, she jumped up and tossed the empty cardboard box at the door.
It promised to be a long three months.
Chapter Two
She knew exactly what she wanted. Bryan might’ve been a bit ahead of the scheduled starting date for the American Summer project for Life-style, but she enjoyed the idea of being a step ahead of Shade Colby. Petty, perhaps, but she did enjoy it.
In any case, she doubted a man like him would appreciate the timeless joy of the last day of school. When else did summer really start, but with that one wild burst of freedom?
She chose an elementary school because she wanted innocence. She chose an inner-city school because she wanted realism. Children who would step out the door and into a limo weren’t the image she wanted to project. This school could’ve been in any city across the country. The kids who’d bolt out the door would be all kids. People who looked at the photograph, no matter what their age, would see something of themselves.
Bryan gave herself plenty of time to set up, choosing and rejecting half a dozen vantage points before she settled on one. It wasn’t possible or even advisable to stage the shoot. Only random shots would give her what she wanted—the spontaneity and the rush.
When the bell rang and the doors burst open, she got exactly that. It was well worth nearly being trampled under flying sneakers. With shouts and yells and whistles, kids poured out into the sunshine.
Stampede. That was the thought that went through her mind. Crouching quickly, Bryan shot up, catching the first rush of children at an angle that would convey speed, mass and total confusion.
Let’s go, let’s go! It’s summer and every day’s Saturday. September was years away. She could read it on the face of every child.
Turning, she shot the next group of children head-on. In the finished spot, they’d appear to be charging right out of the page of the magazine. On impulse, she shifted her camera for a vertical shot. And she got it. A boy of eight or nine leaped down the flight of steps, hands flung high, a grin splitting his face. Bryan shot him in midair while he hung head and shoulders above the scattering children. She’d captured the boy filled with the triumph of that magic, golden road of freedom spreading out in all directions.
Though she was dead sure which shot she’d print for the assignment, Bryan continued to work. Within ten minutes, it was over.
Satisfied, she changed lenses and angles. The school was empty now, and she wanted to record it that way. She didn’t want the feel of bright sunlight here, she decided as she added a low-contrast filter. When she developed the print, Bryan would “dodge” the light in the sky by holding something over that section of the paper to keep it from being overexposed. She wanted the sense of emptiness, of waiting, as a contrast to the life and energy that had just poured out of the building. She’d exhausted a roll of film before she straightened and let the camera hang by its strap.
School’s out, she thought with a grin. She felt that charismatic pull of freedom herself. Summer was just beginning.
Since resigning from the staff of Celebrity, Bryan had found her work load hadn’t eased. If anything, she’d found herself to be a tougher employer than the magazine. She loved her work and was likely to give it all of her day and most of her evenings. Her ex-husband had once accused her of being obsessed not with her camera, but by it. It was something she’d neither been able to deny nor defend. After two days of working with Shade, Bryan had discovered she wasn’t alone.
She’d always considered herself a meticulous craftsman. Compared to Shade, she was lackadaisical. He had a patience in his work that she admired even as it set her teeth on edge. They worked from entirely different perspectives. Bryan shot a scene and conveyed her personal viewpoint—her emotions, her feelings about the image. Shade deliberately courted ambiguity. While his photographs might spark off a dozen varied reactions, his personal view almost always remained his secret. Just as everything about him remained half shadowed.
He didn’t chat, but Bryan didn’t mind working in silence. It was nearly like working alone. His long, quiet looks could be unnerving, however. She didn’t care to be dissected as though she were in a viewfinder.
They’d met twice since their first encounter in her studio, both times to argue out their basic route and the themes for the assignment. She hadn’t found him any easier, but she had found him sharp. The project meant enough to both of them to make it possible for them to do as she’d suggested—meet somewhere in the middle.
After her initial annoyance with him had worn off, Bryan had decided they could become friends over the next months—professional friends, in any case. Then, after two days of working with him, she’d known it would never happen. Shade didn’t induce simple emotions like friendship. He’d either dazzle or infuriate. She didn’t choose to be dazzled.
Bryan had researched him thoroughly, telling herself her reason was routine. You didn’t go on the road with a man you knew virtually nothing about. Yet the more she’d found out—rather, the more she hadn’t found out—the deeper her curiosity had become.
He’d been married and divorced in his early twenties. That was it—no anecdotes, no gossip, no right and wrong. He covered his tracks well. As a photographer for International View, Shade had spent a total of five years overseas. Not in pretty Paris, London and Madrid, but in Laos, Lebanon, Cambodia. His work there had earned him a Pulitzer nomination and the Overseas Press Club Award.
His photographs were available for study and dissection, but his personal life remained obscure. He socialized rarely. What friends he had were unswervingly loyal and frustratingly closed-mouthed. If she wanted to learn more about him, Bryan would have to do it on the job.
Bryan considered the fact that they’d agreed to spend their last day in L.A. working at the beach a good sign. They’d decided on the location without any argument. Beach scenes would be an ongoing theme throughout the essay—California to Cape Cod.
At first they walked along the sand together, like friends or lovers, not touching but in step with each other. They didn’t talk, but Bryan had already learned that Shade didn’t make idle conversation unless he was in the mood.
It was barely ten, but the sun was bright and hot. Because it was a weekday morning, most of the sun-and water-seekers were the young or the old. When Bryan stopped, Shade kept walking without either of them saying a word.
It was the contrast that had caught her eye. The old woman was bundled in a wide, floppy sun hat, a long beach dress and a crocheted shawl. She sat under an umbrella and watched her granddaughter—dressed only in frilly pink panties—dig a hole in the sand beside her. Sun poured over the little girl. Shadow blanketed the old woman.
She’d need the woman to sign a release form. Invariably, asking someone if you could take her picture stiffened her up, and Bryan avoided it whenever it was possible. In this case it wasn’t, so she was patient enough to chat and wait until the woman had relaxed again.
Her name was Sadie, and so was her granddaughter’s. Before she’d clicked the shutter the first time, Bryan knew she’d title the print Two Sadies. All she had to do was get that dreamy, faraway look back in the woman’s eyes.
It took twenty minutes. Bryan forgot she was uncomfortably warm as she listened, thought and reasoned out the angles. She knew what she wanted. The old woman’s careful self-preservation, the little girl’s total lack of it, and the bond between them that came with blood and time.
Lost in reminiscence, Sadie forgot about the camera, not noticing when Bryan began to release the shutter. She wanted the poignancy—that’s what she’d seen. When she printed it, Bryan would be merciless with the lines and creases in the grandmother’s face, just as she’d highlight the flawlessness of the toddler’s skin.
Grateful, Bryan chatted a few more minutes, then noted the woman’s address with the promise of a print. She walked on, waiting for the next scene to unfold.
Shade had his first subject as well, but he didn’t chat. The man lay facedown on a faded beach towel. He was red, flabby and anonymous. A businessman taking the morning off, a salesman from Iowa—it didn’t matter. Unlike Bryan, he wasn’t looking for personality, but for the sameness of those who grilled their bodies under the sun. There was a plastic bottle of tanning lotion stuck in the sand beside him and a pair of rubber beach thongs.
Shade chose two angles and shot six times without exchanging a word with the snoring sunbather. Satisfied, he scanned the beach. Three yards away, Bryan was casually stripping out of her shorts and shirt. The sleek red maillot rose tantalizing high at the thighs. Her profile was to him as she stepped out of her shorts. It was sharp, well defined, like something sculpted with a meticulous hand.
Shade didn’t hesitate. He focused her in his viewfinder, set the aperture, adjusted the angle no more than a fraction and waited. At the moment when she reached down for the hem of her T-shirt, he began to shoot.
She was so easy, so unaffected. He’d forgotten anyone could be so totally unselfconscious in a world where self-absorption had become a religion. Her body was one long lean line, with more and more exposed as she drew the shirt over her head. For a moment, she tilted her face up to the sun, inviting the heat. Something crawled into his stomach and began to twist, slowly.
Desire. He recognized it. He didn’t care for it.
It was, he could tell himself, what was known in the trade as a decisive moment. The photographer thinks, then shoots, while watching the unfolding scene. When the visual and the emotional elements come together—as they had in this case, with a punch—there was success. There were no replays here, no reshooting. Decisive moment meant exactly that, all or nothing. If he’d been shaken for a instant, it only proved he’d been successful in capturing that easy, lazy sexuality.
Years before, he’d trained himself not to become overly emotional about his subjects. They could eat you alive. Bryan Mitchell might not look as though she’d take a bite out of a man, but Shade didn’t take chances. He turned away from her and forgot her. Almost.
It was more than four hours later before their paths crossed again. Bryan sat in the sun near a concession stand, eating a hot dog buried under mounds of mustard and relish. On one side of her she’d set her camera bag, on the other a can of soda. Her narrow red sunglasses shot his reflection back at him.
“How’d it go?” she asked with her mouth full.
“All right. Is there a hot dog under that?”
“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 that 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 up 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 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 on 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 Three
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. They 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 for Celebrity, and her more inventive and personalized work for magazines like Vanity and In 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 semisuccessful residents of Carmel. She’d been married to an accountant before she was twenty, and 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, and no 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.
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 plastic 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 cup 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 cup 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 into 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 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 firsthand 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.”
“To Have 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 for Celebrity. 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 because of 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 it in 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 free way 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’swool 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 he 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.”
“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 outthink 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.
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