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“When did you take it?”
“About eleven months ago.”
“Morning of March 6th?”
Her gaze shot to his face then. “Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I knew it,” he said, and proceeded to tell her everything he’d thought about that image when he’d found it. Her eyes widened as he spoke, and he knew he’d struck gold with her, that he’d been right about what she’d tried to accomplish that day at this place that was sacred to so many Texans.
“How did you even find it?” she finally asked.
He shrugged. “Cody told me you had pictures up at the site. Once I got there, finding them was easy. Your work stands out, Kaitlyn. The thought behind them, the care, the attention to detail, the framing, all of it makes them distinctive.”
He didn’t think he imagined that she was standing straighter now, and she suddenly seemed more steady. Solid. As if in this she had no doubts. This, at least, she was certain of. “Thank you,” she said, and her voice echoed that certainty. “For understanding all that. And appreciating it.”
He smiled at the change in her. And suddenly it felt right, her being here, in the place only family had been grudgingly allowed until now.
“Come on in,” he said, meaning it this time.
She slid the backpack off her shoulder, then looked back at him. “Leave it, or bring it?”
She said it as if she understood completely what this place meant to him, how private it was. At the same time, he knew the magazine would expect photos of the place where it happened. And he realized he’d already decided. Because he trusted that, if she gave her word, this woman would keep it.
“Will you agree to not take anything of work in progress?”
He liked that she didn’t immediately say yes, the answer that would get her what she wanted. Instead she looked thoughtful, as if she were thinking about—and more importantly understanding—why this was what he asked of her.
Then, slowly, she nodded. “I get that. And there’s enough of your existing work out there to take photos of. But…they’ll want some of you working. The process.”
He grimaced, but then, so she wouldn’t think it was her, said with a roll of his eyes, “Genius burns, my mother says.”
She smiled, that genuine, killer smile. “Exactly that. Would that be acceptable, if I make sure the actual work itself isn’t clear?”
And again he was certain she would keep her word. Which was strange in itself—he didn’t usually trust someone this quickly. Especially when it came to protecting this, the inner sanctum as Cody called it. To which he usually responded with a joke about Cody’s lair in turn. Crazy how she always got him thinking about the workings of his family. Maybe because she’d never had anything like it herself. He hadn’t asked, but he was fairly certain her mother had always been dysfunctional, maybe even always an alcoholic. And maybe that got him thinking about how lucky he was, even with losing Dad so young. He’d had a safety net, Mom and Keller had seen to that. Kaitlyn had had only herself, after her mother’s addiction had destroyed her father.
He had to snap himself back to the present, with an inward shake. How did she do that, get him rambling in his head all the time? “All right,” he said.
“Then we’re agreed,” she said, with another of those smiles.
And he had the oddest feeling that, with this simple act, letting her into his sanctuary, his entire life had shifted.
Chapter Eighteen
She had enough.
Kaitlyn told herself that repeatedly, and yet she kept framing and angling and hitting the shutter. Because once she started taking actual shots of Ry himself, she couldn’t seem to stop.
Not that she hadn’t taken a raft of the studio itself, because she had. It fascinated her, and that always sent her trigger finger on a rampage. She’d begun with the workbench, focusing on the tools themselves, and then the tool case he told her was a present from his mother, bought from The World in a Gift long before Sydney had come into their lives. She’d even taken shots of the debris scattered to one side, the remnants of his last project. She thought of the famous sculptor who said he simply cut away everything that wasn’t his subject, and figured this must be about the same.
Then she’d shifted to the easel that sat to one side, then hesitated. It held a large pad of paper, and the top page held a pencil sketch, a familiar icon against an unexpected backdrop. The Liberty Bell, complete with crack, amid a bed of roses.
She’d lowered her camera. She should have known a man who could produce what he did in carved leather had to be able to draw as well, but somehow this had startled her. She looked over to see him watching her. “Looks like work in progress to me,” she said.
He’d smiled then, and she knew she’d done the right thing. “It is. What do you think it means?”
Looking back at the image, she studied it a moment before asking, “That depends. What color are the roses?”
To her shock, he’d given her the most amazing smile she’d ever seen, and he’d sounded almost triumphant when he’d said, “I should have known you’d get it.”
