Nora Roberts - One Summer

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.

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.