by Nora Roberts
* * *
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 complete
ly 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 conversa
tion.
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.”
