Razed (Barnes Brothers #2)(72)

He’d have to paint it. Maybe in a few years, put a different ceiling in altogether.

“I wonder if you could put a picture up there.”

He slid Keelie a look. She still had those shadows in her eyes, but there was a hard glint, almost like she had made up her mind to lock herself away from whatever had crawled out to haunt her. Biting back a sigh, he resigned himself to yet more . . . waiting.

She wasn’t ready for anything more.

Wasn’t really a surprise. A few dates. Phone calls off and on while he was in Albuquerque. A couple of nights that made him sweat even thinking about it.

But that didn’t make for a relationship, not in her eyes.

She’d probably take off running if he told her he loved her. Needed her. Dreamed about her. Needed to take away some of the misery of whatever hung around her like an ugly, painful cloak.

He said nothing.

Folding his arms over his chest, he studied the ceiling.

“A picture.”

From the corner of her eye, he saw her shrug. “I don’t mean like a framed print or anything. That space is huge—it’s the first thing you see when you walk in. All that white is kinda distracting.”

“No. I get it.” He rolled that idea over in his head and looked around, spying his laptop bag where he’d dumped it near the front door. Grabbing his computer, he settled his back against the long wall that split the front from the back and powered up. Keelie sat down just as the desktop came up.

“That owl,” she murmured.

He glanced at her.

She reached out, stopping just before her fingers touched the screen. Then she angled her gaze up at him. “That’s one of yours.”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Took it back when I was a kid. My grandpa was big into birding and nature. He used to take us camping before he died. The others loved the fishing, making s’mores. I loved hearing him talk about everything else. Mom gave me his camera when he died. Man. I loved that camera. It was a Leoto. They don’t make them anymore. I carried it almost everywhere with me up until I went to college.” He touched his finger to the screen, remembering how his grandfather had taught him how to use the camera, how to grab something more than a few blurry shots of his brothers. “The owl was one of the first good shots I got.”

“How old were you? Do you remember?”

To the day, he thought, his mind flashing back to it. Then he shrugged. “When I was twelve.”

Sixth grade. Riding his bike home with Shannon Macy. His first big crush.

Sixth grade . . . when he learned one of the most crucial lessons in life.

Running away never solved anything.

“I guess I see why you had the owl put on you,” Keelie murmured, resting her head on his shoulder. “Is that when you really got into photography?”

Zane stared at the image.

Let it go. Let it go . . .

“It was before then actually.” He flipped open one file, studied a couple of the mountain images, one from Mount McKinley up in Alaska—the snow-covered peak spiking out of the ground to stand guard over a pristine lake, so still you could see the mountain, the sky, the green of the trees reflected in it. “Something like that. You can get murals made from images—they need to be high resolution. This might do it.”

He studied the space overhead once more.

It might not be a bad idea.

“So how did you get into this? I can’t believe you took a picture that good when you were a kid.”

“Yeah.” He let his fingers hover over the mouse pad on his laptop and then, before he let himself think about it too long, he went to one file. He kept it on hand for when kids showed an interest in photography. It held his oldest shots, starting from the shaky pictures he took of his brothers, a few of Abby and Zach, then to when he moved to subjects other than people. He scrolled them slowly, letting Keelie see the way he’d caught the childhood of his brothers on film. The pictures had started when he was eight and went from the unfocused pieces to the ones that had helped him land a scholarship.

“Wow,” Keelie murmured. “Show me more.”

He shifted to another folder, still from his teens, but these weren’t ones he showed others. Not ever. He rarely even looked at them himself. Slowly, he felt the tension creep back into the quiet woman leaning against him. Her hand lay on his thigh. He wondered if she realized she’d started to squeeze.





Chapter Fourteen




The pictures were . . . brutal.

Keelie couldn’t think of any other way to describe them.

The fact that the subjects were kids made it that much harder and her nerves were already raw. One of them showed a guy—looked like a jock, right down to the letter jacket—leaning into a girl who probably didn’t weigh half what the guy did.

That fear . . .

The sight of it drove a spike into Keelie’s heart and she fisted her hand tight as she stared at the image.

Around the guy stood a group of boys and their faces were locked forever in masks of laughter.

He’d caught that image of a bunch of guys terrifying a girl, trapped against her locker.

The next image had a girl sitting at a table. She was by herself, lost in a book. A pair of glasses slid down her nose but she didn’t seem to notice.

The image after it was the same girl, looking up, startled.