He perched on the edge of the bed, his back to her. He didn’t want to look at those goddamn things or watch her expression dissolve when he told her. “My first camera. A used Nikon. When you loaded the film, it got caught on this little dent in the winding mechanism and the edge peeked into every photo. That’s the black triangle you see in the upper right.” Pinching the bridge of his nose, he pushed back his body’s cry for nicotine. Scotch.Something. “I fiddled with that camera all the time, trying to fix it. Marked every photo I took until I got the Leica.”
“And these?” It was a whisper, as if her words were made of glass. Or he was.
He hummed an answer, realized it was his biggest tell, and shook it off. He glanced over his shoulder—because he couldn’t not—and found her head bowed, her gaze searching the pictures of his mother as if a key to a treasure chest were locked inside them. “What do you think?”
He watched her throat catch, her eyes darting to his before flittingaway.
“Don’t hold back,” he said. “You wanted to know.”Damn her.
“She looks haunted. Despondent. Lost.”
Propping his elbows on his knees, he dropped his head to his hands. “Bingo.”
“You couldn’t have known, couldn’t have seen.” Her hand skimmed his back, thumb tracing each tense knot in his spine. “You were a boy, a kid.”
“Fon, I saw everything through that viewfinder.”
“But—”
“Two weeks.”
She crawled across the bed, wedging herself next to him. When she took his hand, he let her. When she tilted his head so they could look each other in the eye, he let her do that, too.
The formidable urge to allow everything inside him to spill out consumed him, a waterfall of repressed emotion crashing over him in a bed still tangled from their lovemaking. “She died two weeks later. And I wasn’t surprised.”
He swallowed hard, lowering his gaze to their linked hands, finding solace in the mystery of her. “They said it was an accident, but I’ve always wondered.”
Silence fell around them. He loved that she didn’t rush in, didn’t try to solve what couldn’t be solved.
In the distance, a blue jay called, a sharp reminder of how little time they had left before he had to get breakfast going for Kit and John Nelson. Everything settled over him like a blanket, the scent of her, ofthem.
Her essence tangled in his sheets, draped across his skin. Enveloping. Devouring.
“So, no more photos of people,” she whispered.
Campbell squeezed her fingers. “No more photos of people.”
Tilting his chin, she leaned in, pressing her lips to his. Her tongue lingered at the edge of his mouth, drawing him intoher orbit. When she eased him back onto the bed with a whispered,You're not alone,he let her take him—mind, body, soul.
chapter
nineteen
Under the Bridge –Red Hot Chili Peppers
FONTANA
The woman was smoky cool,if Fontana had to describe her.
Standing in the Rise’s drive, watching the stunning couple on the veranda talk, sifting through a tangle of emotions for the one that would get her through this, she supposed she did.
‘Nothing Special’ had arrived—and she was so Campbell’s type.
Leggy blonde, artifice aplenty. The convertible Mustang parked out front had to be hers.
The smile she gave Campbell—tipped at one corner, like the past held so many delicacies she wasn’t sure which one to select—tumbled through Fontana like a pebble down a barren well. Almost as tall as he was, her delicately rounded chin hit him right at Adam’s apple level. A sensitive area Fontana had kissed, bitten, and sucked as he’d thrust inside her last night beneath a sky bleeding stars, his moan vibrating through her lips and down herthroat.
She had little rationale for the possessive greed churning through her.
