Nicole blew out a shaky breath. That wouldn’t be a good idea. As gorgeous as he was, he wasn’t her type, and he probably had ‘drifter’ stamped all the way through him like Brighton rock. Still, she wasn’t rude enough to completely snub him. Her parents had brought her up better than that.
‘Nicole,’ she said, gently easing her wrist from his grasp and circling it with her own fingers. ‘Nicole Harrison.’
He nodded. ‘And what do you do, Nicole Harrison, when you’re not driving men crazy by disappearing into the night air never to be found again?’
Her stomach bottomed out. For the last ten minutes she’d completely forgotten why she was here. She’d forgotten all about Saffron and her fiancé-to-be. She’d forgotten all about Hopes & Dreams and why this job was so darn important. She needed to stop chit-chatting and find Alex Black. The easiest way was to stop sparring with this man and just roll over and answer his questions.
‘I’m a journalist,’ she said quickly, then frowned at herself. She didn’t know why she’d said that. It would have been okay to tell him the truth. But maybe, because she’d been all prepped to come out with a cover story this evening, that was what had left her mouth first.
‘And what are you working on now? Not covering the show, are you?’
She shook her head. ‘No, this is just for fun…’
Torture, more like.
‘Actually, I’m doing a piece on…a piece on…’
He raised his eyebrows again. And the smile was back. The one where she thought he might be laughing at her.
‘On weddings,’ she blurted out. It was all she’d been able to think of. ‘For Beautiful Weddings magazine.’
‘Really?’ he said and waited, clearly expecting her to elaborate.
Nicole’s brain flew in three directions at once, and none of them useful. See? This was why she didn’t like veering from her careful plans. Everything turned out messy and unpredictable.
She had to say something. Something that was easy to understand and wouldn’t require further interrogation. Something to do with weddings. Something that would work for a magazine feature.
She thought of all the weddings she’d planned when she’d worked at Elite Gatherings, when she’d been part of an army of worker bees who’d found the day anything but ethereal and magical.
She refocused on him. ‘I’m going to do a piece on the unsung heroes of the wedding industry, you know…all the people who work in the background to make the magic happen.’ She shot him a smile. Her brain was whirring now and she went with it. ‘Rather than just chatting to people on the phone and doing the superficial stuff, I want to follow each professional round for a couple of weeks, do different kinds of weddings, make it really in-depth. Then I can do an interest piece, but also with some really good tips about getting the most out of that professional when someone plans their own big day.’
He nodded. ‘So who would you follow round?’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know. People like caterers and waitresses, florists or bakers.’
The grin was back. ‘People like photographers?’
She could have sworn her insides turned to chocolate. Melting chocolate.
‘People like photographers,’ she echoed, a slight dryness in her voice.
‘Then you’ve come to the right guy,’ he said then waved an arm to encompass the photos on the walls. ‘This is what I really love to do, why I pick up my camera on a daily basis, but I earn my bread and butter doing weddings. At least for now.’
‘Oh,’ she said, forgetting to keep calm and collected, letting her eyes widen. She hadn’t expected him to say that. There was nothing about this guy that made her think of weddings and rings and happy-ever-afters.
‘So why don’t you follow me around for a couple of weeks?’ he asked, his dimple putting in another appearance. Nicole couldn’t quite tear her eyes from it.
He lowered his voice. ‘I could give you the low-down on slaves and f-stops?’
F-stops? She knew it was probably a technical term, but in that voice and with that smile it sounded kind of naughty.
‘So…are you interested?’ he said, leaning in close enough for her to get a whiff of his aftershave.
She swallowed again. The tiniest glimmer of interest in his eyes suggested he was asking about more than a professional opportunity. He didn’t want to just score a point; he wanted total defeat. Revenge for skipping out on him all those months ago.
So she would say no. To the offer to shadow him—because that wasn’t her real job anyway, and it would be a total waste of time—and to the offer to spend more time with him, because…because…
Although he’d moved back, she could still smell his scent, and it prompted one of those New Year flashbacks, a particularly potent one of his lips on the soft skin of her neck, his hands round her waist. Suddenly she was very tempted to say yes. To everything.
She knew she should walk away a second time, but something was sticking her feet to the floor like Velcro. Something was telling her to go with that wild feeling his photographs had stirred inside her, to tell the voice of caution inside her head to go to hell.
He was watching her, taking in the emotions, the thoughts, flitting across her features. The knowing expression told her he knew exactly what she was thinking, knew exactly what decision she was teetering on the edge of.
Nicole was about to open her mouth, suggest they go for a coffee after the exhibition to discuss his offer, when her phone buzzed in her pocket again.
It brought her back to reality with a bump.
Oh, heck. Saffron.
She glanced up at him as she pulled her phone out of her coat pocket. ‘I’m sorry…I really need to check this.’
He shrugged one shoulder carelessly as she swiped her phone screen to pull up the message.
‘Maybe we can discuss this shadowing thing after—’
The rest of the sentence never left her mouth. Because the message was indeed from Saffron. An hour later than they’d planned, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the picture message that accompanied the text.
She was staring down at a photo of a windswept photographer with a bewitching little dimple.
She seemed to have frozen looking at her phone. She was clutching it so hard her finger joints were going white. Alex coughed softly. ‘Nicole?’ Still she stared at the screen, not moving, not speaking. He started to regret teasing her quite so hard. What if it was horrific news, if someone had died or her house had burnt down? ‘Are you okay?’
She snapped upright then, shoving her phone back in her pocket, and bestowed a bright smile on him. ‘Fine.’ She blinked. ‘Absolutely fine. Nothing wrong at all.’
Okay, then…
He frowned a little. In his experience women often said ‘fine’ when they meant ‘my life is going down the toilet’. He had a feeling this might be one of those times, but he really didn’t know her well enough to push. He also didn’t know her well enough to read her correctly. She could be as fine as that fluorescent smile said she was.
Or she could be faking it just as hard as he was.
As much as he liked to think he’d been in control of the conversation up until now. He’d been doing what he always liked to do in a hairy situation—winging it and