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The woman’s smile was blinding. But Ry only caught a glimpse of it because a tiny sound, somewhere between a gasp and a groan, had drawn his attention back to the woman from the strip mall. The woman whose voice and smile he’d take over the flashy blonde’s polished one any day.
But an instant after he’d shifted his gaze her expression cleared, before he could even put a description to it.
“Well,” she said, her tone now impossibly dry, “that makes my job easy.”
“Your job?” he asked.
“Oh, don’t mind her,” the blonde said breezily. “She’s just the photographer. I’m the one who will make readers all over want to dump piles of money on you for your creations.”
He barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes.Hyperbole much?
The reporter reminded him of someone else besides Chelsea, but he couldn’t quite place who it was. Somebody he’d seen on television somewhere. Maybe giving a speech. Or maybe it was the emptiness behind the eyes that made him think that.
Or the dismissive tone in her voice when she’d said, “She’s just the photographer.”
This, he thought as he gestured them through the gate, closed it, then remounted Flyer, was going to be even worse than he’d feared.
*
Kaitlyn had meantwhat she’d said. Rylan Rafferty was going to make her job very, very easy. Almost too easy. She supposed he could be that rare person who looked magnetic as hell in person, but it was lost in the transition to still images, but she highly doubted it.
She tried to imagine a shot she could take where he wouldn’t look good, where he wouldn’t exude that wild charisma. She couldn’t.
But she could certainly imagine all sorts of shots she’d love to take. Him on that horse. Maybe grooming that horse. Or petting it. She was sure he did, from the way he’d patted the horse’s neck as he’d dismounted.
Then a close-up with the emphasis on those stormy-gray eyes, that black hair falling over his forehead, and those thick, long eyelashes none of the tools in Jillian’s bag could give her.
And him with the cowboy hat. Without the hat. Without the shirt—
She cut her own thoughts off sharply. That was a path she did not want to go down.
Still, she was glad she had the gravel road to use as an excuse to drive slowly enough to keep pace with the gleaming ebony horse’s easy canter. And not knowing exactly where they were going as an excuse to keep watching the pair just slightly ahead of them. Black hat over black hair on a black horse against a sunny Texas sky. It was enough to warm this January day to summer.
The way they both moved had her wondering if perhaps on their website the magazine might go for some video, simply a clip of him riding, with the ease of someone who’d grown up doing it. Showing another side of the artist, a side that brought home that he was indeed a Texan. Her fingers fairly itched to have her camera in hand, filming this run across the land that was his family’s. Already she could sense this was an elemental part of this man.
“Oh, I’m going to enjoy this,” Jillian said, and Kaitlyn realized she was watching them too. Some primitive, stupid part of her yelped silently,I saw him first!She quashed it fiercely; that way lay pain.
She had no business even thinking about a man in that way, because her life wasn’t her own, and wouldn’t be again for a long while yet.
Besides, if Jillian had marked Rylan Rafferty as hers, that was it. She’d pursue him as relentlessly as she did her questioning, and that rarely ended in anything less than success. And heaven help the man if he fell for her and wanted more than just a fling.
She couldn’t picture this man falling so easily, but she’d been wrong before. So very, very wrong.
Be nice to him, honey. We need this to go well.The words echoed in her head. Followed by Jillian’s cogent assessment.He likes the needy ones.
The needy ones.
And no matter how much Kaitlyn told herself Jillian meant anyone not lucky enough to be her, she couldn’t deny the truth at the core of the observation. Professor Louis Bates, subject of a profile Jillian was doing for a national publication, indeed liked the needy ones, for his own twisted reasons. And that’s all Kaitlyn had ever been to him.
Her mind veered off the painful memory with the ease of long practice.
“Need another notch on the ol’ bedpost?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out. She never did that, said what she was thinking, not with this woman. She waited for the inevitable slap-down.
“That,” Jillian said, in the vocal equivalent of a leer as she watched Rylan Rafferty, “could take the entire bedpost down.” Then she looked at Kaitlyn. “And I’m sure he’d never go for the needy type.”
And there it was. She’d been put back in her place and now they could go on.
Kaitlyn drove, not sure which she hated more, this woman or the fact that she was in a position where she was forced to deal with her.
