Nora Roberts - One Summer

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.