Nora Roberts - One Summer

“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.