Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4)(19)

After several minutes she stopped shooting, and the bearded guy in the odd pants clapped and told the models to take a short break. “Get a bottle of water. Have a salad. Be back in twenty minutes. You were all amazing. Perfect. Brilliant. Gorgeous,” he said, then blew kisses to the bikini-clad women who scattered from their posts. The man draped an arm around Annalise, and she nodded several times as he talked quietly to her.

The man then joined the models, who were flanked by attendants, while Annalise scanned the pool area. Soon, her eyes landed on Michael and lit up, beaming at him. His heart slammed against his chest at her reaction. She weaved through lounge chairs, around the edge of the pool, and soon stood face-to-face with him, then lips-to-cheek. She whispered, “You’re here.”

She sounded amazed that he’d made it.

“Did you think I wouldn’t show?” he asked, regarding her curiously.

She shrugged as a small smile of admission crept across her lips. “Maybe.”

“Hey,” he said softly. “Why would you think I wouldn’t show?”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s just…” Her voice trailed off as she raised her chin, meeting his eyes. Her gaze went soft, almost vulnerable. “It’s just that…you never know.”

He nodded his understanding. Yeah, he got that. You never knew if someone would show or if something would derail them, or if a fate would change in the blink of an eye.

She grabbed her camera bag from a nearby table under a big yellow umbrella. He followed her. “Thanks for inviting me,” he said, looking at her over the tops of his shades. “Was it a good shoot?”

She raised her face, and little wispy tendrils of red waves moved with her. “It was. These women are terrific. They love the camera and the camera loves them. It makes my job easy, having such talent to work with.”

He smiled at her comment. It would be simple for her to say something catty, to toss a quippy one-liner about a too-skinny model. Instead, she’d done the opposite—praised them, not for their beauty, but for their ability.

“I doubt your job is easy,” he said. “You’ve always been good at what you do. Yours is a natural talent as well. You have an eye.”

“All I do is point, shoot, click,” she said with a wink, then lifted her camera and snapped a candid of him without even looking in the lens.

“Hey now,” he teased, covering his face with crossed arms, pretending he was a star avoiding the shutter.

“Too late. I’ve got you here. For all posterity,” she said, tapping the camera. Her gaze drifted to the back of the Nikon. “You look good.”

He rolled his eyes.

“I mean it. Come see,” she said, gesturing for him to come closer.

He waved her off. “I don’t need to see myself.”

“Oh, stop being so modest. You are beautiful, Michael Sloan. You were always one of my favorite subjects,” she said in her straightforward way, so open and direct. His heart pounded faster, his skin heating up from her compliments. It grew tougher to keep her in a neat, organized corner when she said things like that.

“Thank you,” he said softly, as he moved in near to her, his arm bumping her shoulder. A slight hitch of breath escaped her lips as they looked at the image. He resisted touching her, even though all his instincts told him to. Instead, he studied himself on the screen of the camera, and he looked like the guy he’d always been. And yet, as he saw himself through her eyes, through her lens, he seemed…happier.

Maybe he looked more complete because he’d been caught staring at her.

“See,” she said, nudging him with her elbow. “Your eyes are so expressive. Your cheekbones are perfection. And your lips are…”

He picked up where she’d stopped. “My lips are what?”

She met his eyes. “Red,” she whispered, saying it in the same tone he’d uttered the word last night. Her cheeks flushed pink.

Ah, hell. He was going to have the hardest time not losing himself in her. She was going to have to stop this right now. It was past time for him to put an end to all these sweet nothings, or he’d be utterly ruined. But no f*cking way could he tell her to stop. He liked her compliments too much.

“By the way, I liked watching you work,” he said, sidestepping to a safer topic.

“You did?” she asked as she returned to her camera bag and zipped up a compartment.

“You sort of radiate energy, but it’s focused. It’s almost like an athletic event when you take pictures.”

Her lips curved up. “Sometimes it feels that way.”

“You perform like that. Top of your game. You with your camera, seeing the world in ways other people don’t.”

She stilled her movements and cocked her head, looking curious. “Is that how it seems?”

“Yeah. It does. Both watching you work and seeing what you saw. I always got a kick out of looking at your photos. Like when you took pictures at the Pearl Jam concert we went to. Eddie Vedder didn’t look the same way to my eye as he did to yours. Seeing the pictures afterward was like opening a whole new view of something I’d already experienced,” he said, taking off his shades and tucking them on the neck of his shirt. “What’s your favorite thing to photograph?”

“Surprises,” she answered quickly, as she zipped another compartment.