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He laughed, harsh and bitter. ‘Are we really going to do it like this?’
‘Do it like what, Mr Scott?’
Without answering me, he rose, strolled down the length of the conference room to the door and
turned the key in the lock.
A million butterflies fluttered in my belly. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
He ambled back to me, looking sleek and delicious in his suit. ‘I thought giving you a week to think things through would work,’ he repeated.
I deliberately raised an eyebrow, despite my heart leaping at that fixated look in his eyes. ‘Then
you obviously don’t know me well.’
He stopped a few feet away, his gaze not leaving my face. ‘And whose fault is that? One of us ran
away the moment things got a little too personal, and that person wasn’t me.’
Shame engulfed me but years of staring opponents down weren’t easy to dismiss. ‘Is that why
you’ve locked the door? To physically restrain me?’
Distaste washed over his face. ‘That’s so we’re not disturbed, not so you can’t leave whenever you
want to. I’ll never keep you prisoner, Graciela. Not unless you specifically ordered me to.’
A fever started in my belly, heating me up from within. I fought to deny it. ‘Not going to happen.’
Briefly, his nostrils flared, his expression dimming before he turned to the table. He shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over a chair before curtly nudging his head at the tray. ‘Fine. Looks like you want to keep hiding from reality, so let’s get on with this, shall we?’
He started the projector. I grabbed the remote and dimmed the lights and took a seat, forcing myself not to glance his way. Not to breathe him in.
He negated all of that by dragging his chair closer, until he was a tempting arm’s length away. For the next long while hundreds of pictures scrolled across the screen, each one stunning enough to make paring it down to the essential twenty-five I needed for the magazine near impossible.
When we reached the images he’d taken on the night of the borealis, fine tremors shook through me,
memory attempting to shake free everything I needed to hold inside. Every frame he’d captured was
overwhelmingly breathtaking, unique enough to draw a gasp.
I felt him lean in close but couldn’t move away. Didn’t want to.
‘I’ll never be able to experience another borealis without thinking of you,’ he breathed in my ear.
‘You know that, don’t you?’
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. A lump had lodged in my throat; with selfish pleasure I took from his
words. Yes, I didn’t want him thinking of anyone else but me.
Abruptly, he moved away, hit the button again, and we scrolled through the last of the images.
When Jensen activated the lights, I blinked, still awestruck by the power and beauty of the pictures.
‘How the hell am I going to choose?’ I blurted.
His smile was stiff and cold. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’