Only one thing? Quite a lot had been bothering her about it. Her reaction to his closeness not the least.
“What were you doing out on that ledge?” he continued.
“Not jumping.”
“So I gathered.”
She stared at him and then crossed to the large photo album on the coffee table. She spun it in his direction and flipped it open. “These are Wilma and Fred.”
He leaned down to look at the range of photographs artfully displayed on the page. “Hawks?”
“Peregrine falcons. They live wild in this area.”
Deep blue eyes lifted to hers. “And … ?”
“And I was installing a nest box for them.”
He blinked at her. “Out on the ledge?”
She clenched her teeth to avoid rolling her eyes. “I tried it in here, but it just didn’t do as well.” Idiot.
Archer grunted and Tori’s arms stole round her midsection while he flicked through the various images in her album.
“These are good,” he finally said. “Who took them?”
“I did.”
His head came up. “Where from?”
She pulled back the breezy curtain from her living-room window to reveal spotless glass. “There’s another window in the bedroom. Sometimes I use the roof. Mostly the ledge.”
“So that wasn’t your first dangerous foray out there?”
“It’s not dangerous. I’m tethered at all times.”
He lifted aristocratic eyebrows. “To a century-old building?”
A century-old building that’s crumbling around you. He might as well have said it. It was perfectly evident to anyone who cared to look. The neglect wouldn’t fly in Morningside proper, but being right on the border of West Harlem, he was getting away with it. Of course he was. Money talked around here.
“I pick the strongest point I can to fix to,” she said.
He looked at the pictures again. “You must have some great equipment.”
She shrugged. Let him believe that it was the camera that took the photo, not the person behind it. “I’ve always enjoyed wildlife photography.” More than just enjoyed. She’d been on track to make a career out of it back when she’d graduated.
He reached the back pages of the album. “These ones weren’t taken out your window.” He flipped it her way and her heart gave a little lurch. An aerie with a stunning mountain vista stretching out in all directions behind it. An eagle in flight, its full wings spread three meters wide. Both taken from high points.
Really, really high points.
“I took those in the Appalachians and Cascades,” she said, tightly, but then she forced the topic back to her city peregrines before he could ask any more questions. As far as she knew, this court order didn’t come with the requirement for full disclosure about her past.
“Fred and Wilma turned up in our skies about three months ago, and then about four weeks ago they started visiting this building more and more. I made them a nest box for the coming breeding season so they don’t have to perch precariously on a transformer or bridge or something.”
So she could have a little bit of her old life here in her new one.
“Hawks …” He closed the album carefully and placed it gently back on the coffee table. Then he stood there not saying a word. Just thinking.
“So.” She cleared her throat. “Should we talk about how this is going to work? What you can do here for one hundred hours?”
His eyes bored into her and triggered a temperature spike. “I sense you’ve been giving it some thought?”
She crossed to the kitchen and took up the sheet of notepaper she’d prepared. “I made a list.”
His lips twisted. “Really—of what?”
“Of all the things wrong with the building. Things that you can fix in one hundred hours.”
The laundry. The elevator. The floors. The buzzer …
His eyebrows rose as he read down the page. “Long list.”
“It’s a bad building.”
His long lashes practically obscured his eyes, they narrowed so far. “So why do you live here?”
Her stomach shriveled into a prune under his scrutiny. “Because I can afford it. Because it’s close to the parks.” Not that she’d visited those in a long time. But it was why she’d chosen this building originally.
He continued reading the list. “Just one problem.”
“Why did I know there’d be a ‘just’?”
He ignored her. “The judge’s decree is firm on me not outsourcing any of this service. It has to be by my own hand. Most of this list calls for tradesmen.”
She stared at him. “It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d actually follow the order. You struck me as a corner-cutter.”
“Not at all.”
She matched his glare. “The front-door buzzer’s still faulty.”
“That’s not about cutting corners—or costs,” he said just as she was about to accuse him of precisely that.
“What is it, then?”
He folded his arms across his chest, highlighting its vast breadth. “It’s asset strategy.”
Her snort was unladylike in the extreme. “Is your strategy to let the building and everyone in it crumble to dust? If so, then you’re right on target.”
Was that the tiniest hint of color at his collar? He laid the list down on the table. “I’ve accepted the terms of the order. I’ll see it through. My way.”
“So what can you do? What do you do?”
His grunt was immediate. “I do a lot of paperwork. I sign things. Spend money.”
“Just not here.”
He ignored that. “I’m in the information industry.”
Tori threw her hands up. “Well, what’s that going to be useful for?”
It took the flare of his pupils to remind her how offensive he might find that. And then she wondered why she cared all about offending him. “I mean, here … in my apartment.”
“Actually, I have an idea. It relates to your birds.”
“The falcons?”
“Urban raptors are a big deal on Manhattan. There are a number of webcams set up across the city, beaming out live images to the rest of the world. Kind of a virtual ecotourism. For those who are interested.”
The way he said it made it perfectly clear of how little interest they were to him.
“I guess. I was just doing it for me.” And in some ways she’d enjoyed keeping the peregrine falcon pair a special thing. A private thing. Which was probably selfish. The whole world should be able to see the beauty of nature. Wasn’t that what her photography was all about? “A webcam, you think?”
“And a website. One’s pointless without the other.”
Flutters fizzed up inside her like champagne and the strangeness of it only made her realize how long it had been since something had really excited her. A website full of her images, full