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She stood up, slinging the obviously heavy camera bag over her shoulder. The manners drilled into him long ago prompted him to consider asking if he could carry it, but when he stacked it up against how she might react to the inference that she couldn’t do herself what she clearly usually did, he quashed it. He’d gotten off on the wrong foot with one half of this team, and he didn’t want to tick off the other half.
They stepped outside. No photos inside the house without his mother’s permission, he told her, and she was gone for the day. She gave him a look he could only describe as wondering, with a touch of wistfulness.
“What’s it like, having a big family and all living together?”
“Well, we’re not all under one roof. Keller and Sydney have their own quarters, and so does Cody—they’re just attached to the main house. Chance has his place out in the west corner of the ranch, and he and his lady, Ariel, live there. Although we see him a lot more than we used to, thanks to her.” He nodded toward the smaller of the two barns close to the house. “And I live in the loft over my studio, to keep from annoying everybody with my odd hours.”
She smiled at that, and it seemed to remind her of something. “In there,” she said, nodding back toward the house, “what were you thinking of?”
His brow furrowed. “When?”
“When she was asking about when you’d first learned you had talent. You were smiling, but all you said was you were about ten.”
He raised a brow at her. “Double-teaming with the questions?”
She looked startled. “No! I mean, I wouldn’t. Couldn’t.” Her expression changed, became worried. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean anything. Can you please not tell her I upset you?”
He frowned. Stopped walking. She stopped beside him. But not too close, a careful couple of feet away. Just how hyper-sensitive was this woman?
“First, I’m not upset, I was kidding. Second, you’re here as part of this too, so why can’t you ask a question?”
“Jillian prefers I stick to what I’m good at and leave the heavy lifting to her.”
That phrase again. Jillian had used it earlier. Inferring that the hard work was up to her. And belittling Kaitlyn’s contribution to it. Was her work really so ordinary, her photos so mundane? He’d have to do a little research on that. Or have Cody do it, in a quarter the time. But now he felt badly about having touched what was obviously a nerve with her with his joke.
“So you’re saying this is off the record?” he asked.
“Strictly a personal question, I swear.”
She still sounded anxious. He didn’t know what to do about that, so he went back to her initial question. “When I was ten, I got a little rambunctious in the house and knocked my mother’s favorite flower vase, one that had belonged to my grandmother, off the shelf and broke it. I was in so much trouble, because she’d warned me to settle down a couple of minutes before.”
“Did she…hit you?”
Startled, he drew back a little. “Of course not. But when she called Dad in to mediate, I knew how angry she was.”
She was staring at him, as if he were describing some strange foreign custom. “What happened?”
He started walking again and so did she, although she was still looking at him as if waiting breathlessly for his answer. “He told me I had to put it back together. Every shard. I’d never paid so much attention to detail before, to the shape of things, the way parts fit together. And that’s when I learned…I liked that. Figuring that out.”
“Then what?” she asked, smiling now, as if he were telling her the most interesting tale she’d ever heard.
“I started putting other things together. Seeing shapes in things, in a leaf or a branch, a stone, and putting them together.”
Her eyes widened. “The twig man! On the shelf inside.”
He stopped dead again, startled. The barely six inches tall figure was the first thing he’d ever made that looked like something. To his embarrassment his mother not only insisted on keeping it but also kept it on display. And she’d noticed the thing, among all the books and other mementos his mother kept out where she—and anyone else in the room—could see them.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “First thing I ever showed her. Later, I met Dutch Benham, a master leather craftsman. He was getting on in years, so he taught me in exchange for some chores around his place. I loved it. It felt right.”
He was, he belatedly realized, giving her a lot more than he’d given the writer. Would she keep her promise? Would it stay off the record? Not that he’d told her anything that he wanted kept secret. Except the bit about his father—he’d just as soon that didn’t hit print.Then you should have kept your mouth shut.
“That’s a wonderful story. And,” she added hastily, “I’ll never say a word. Although I think it would be a lovely thing to include.”
“That, in essence, I owe my career to my father being a hard-ass about anything that hurt my mother? And vice versa, for that matter?”
“That’s wonderful in itself,” she said softly, this time without looking at him.
Something stirred in his gut at the way she said it. Again as if it were something totally foreign to her. He started walking again, not even sure where he was heading. The big barn, maybe. He could show her Bonnie’s foal. People tended to enjoy that. And the baby horse already had his great-grandsire’s charisma.
