Oh. My. God.
She swallowed a fizzy brew of disbelief and panic and primitive female response. “Excuse me.”
He stepped back and shoved his hands into his pockets, and then whistled some tuneless nonsense as he strolled down the breezeway. He paused in the wide doorway, turned and flashed her one of his dazzling smiles. “Elephants over the Alps, Ellie. Elephants over the Alps.”
THREE DAYS LATER, Fitz launched himself from a rickety set chair to stretch his legs. It wasn’t the acting that wore him down and got him in trouble. It was the waiting around, the inactivity that made his legs twitch and his hands itch and his mind the devil’s playground.
Surely it was the stop-and-go boredom that kept these vaguely impure thoughts about their no-nonsense saddle boss oozing and bubbling in the sewer of his subconscious. It couldn’t be her stop-right-there scowl. Or those slitty-eyed glances she shot him every so often.
He thought he’d had her pegged—the uptight widow saving herself and the family spread for the guy with the whitest ten-gallon hat in the local cattlemen’s association. But then he’d caught her crooning a silly lyric to that big red horse of hers, and watched her eyes drift soft and dreamy over some ancient, ill-fated hero.
Something had been tugging at him since that night, something other than an urge to tease her cross-eyed and wipe the smug off her face, or loosen up her thick reddish braid and stick his tongue down her throat. Whatever it was, she’d sure thrown him off balance.
“Fitz.” Burke stepped into his path. “Nora’s looking a little pale.”
Fitz turned to see Marlene clucking at Nora and dabbing a foundation sponge along her forehead. The endless delays, combined with the day’s heat, were beginning to take their toll.
“Think I might be a bit temperamental about my lunch hour today,” he said. “You get her out of the sun and off her feet while I clear things with Van Gelder.”
A few minutes later he found his leading lady collapsed in a chair beneath a van awning. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thanks. Burke went for some water.” Nora sighed and let her head fall back against the chair. “I saw you pulling strings for me just now. Thanks.”
He swung another set chair around and lifted her feet onto it. Where was Anna, her assistant? “How are you doing? Any morning sickness?”
“Not yet.” She smiled and smoothed her hands over her stomach. “Just more tired than usual. This break will help.”
He ran a finger along the back of her hand. “You let me know whenever you need to take another one. I can come up with enough excuses for both of us.”
“Thanks, hon.” She sighed and settled more comfortably in the chair and closed her eyes. “You’re a real gentleman.”
“Yeah, that’s me all right.” Knowing Burke would be back soon to play mother hen, he dropped a kiss on the top of her head and strolled off in the direction of the catering truck.
Across the open area behind the set, he spied a battered wooden lawn chair tilted at a crazy angle, one of its wide legs bumped up against the roots of an oak tree umbrella. The scene had a kind of Norman-Rockwell-does-Montana rustic appeal. He made a mental note to stake out some territory in the dappled shade for a post-lunch nap.
There were two chairs, he discovered as he drew closer, and the second was occupied by a scrawny kid with Ellie’s fly-speck freckles and sorrel-red hair. The moment she spied him headed her way, her nose dive-bombed into the fat book spread across her lap.
“Hi,” he said as he stretched out on the long grass near her feet. He looped one arm beneath his head and set his hat on his chest. “Are you Ellie Harrison’s kid?”
“Yes, sir.” She flashed a shy smile in his direction, and then stood and gathered a camera and a pile of library books into a tidy stack before starting off toward the ranch house.
“Hey, don’t let me run you off,” he said.
She hesitated, glanced at the big white house perched above the creek and bit her lip.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jody Harrison.”
“Come on, Jody Harrison.” He sat up and waved her back to her chair. “Keep me company. That is, if you don’t have anything better to do.”
Still worrying her lower lip, she accepted his invitation. “You’re Mr. Kelleran, aren’t you?”
“Yep. But I like it better when people call me Fitz.” He raised his knees and rested his elbows across them. “Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Fitz,” he said with a grin.
“Fitz,” she said, and smiled back.
So far, the kid was a whole lot easier to get along with than her mother.
He snapped off a piece of long grass and stuck it in one corner of his mouth. “What are you doing out here, Jody Harrison? Besides enjoying this fine day.”
“Watching. Reading.”
“Hm.” Fitz held out his hand. “Let’s see.”
She passed him a book from the top of the pile. An Introduction to Photography. Pretty boring stuff—technical terms, black line drawings, shaded shot angles. “You like photography?”
“I don’t know yet.” She frowned at the camera in her lap. “I’m just learning.”
“Don’t you think you’d learn better by taking some pictures, trying stuff out? See what works, instead of just reading about it?”
“I guess.” She glanced at him from under her lashes. “Do you like photography?”
Press flashes blinding, Steadicams angling in close, tabloid zooms clicking like scuttling cockroaches. “I’m not sure.”
He spit out the grass and returned the book. “Let me see your camera.”
She handed him a cheap model. He lifted it to his face and snapped a shot of a startled young girl in a lemon-yellow tank top, rumpled denim shorts and dusty athletic shoes. “Okay,” he said, handing it back. “Your turn.”
“What?”
“To take my picture.”
“Can I?”
“Sure.” He stood and squinted up through the tree branches. “But I don’t know if this is the best kind of light for a picture.” He looked down at her. “What do you think?”
She hitched up both shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Guess we’re not going to learn much about photography by talking to each other.” He swept his hat off the grass and settled it back on his head. “We could talk to Krystof.”
“Krystof?”
“Krystof Laszlofi. He’s a kind of photographer—a cinematographer. Come on,” he said, plucking the books off her toothpick legs. “Let’s go.”
He headed back to the set, pretending he didn’t notice her attempts to stare without actually staring. Pretty polite, for a kid. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been called Mr. Kelleran by someone who didn’t have an angle.
“So, Jody Harrison,” he asked, “have you been studying photography a while?”
“No. I just got interested from, you know, watching some filming last week. And Jason—he’s a Steadicam guy—he told me some stuff and let me look through the lens.”