Tempting Taylor. Joan Elizabeth Lloyd
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she smiled and thought of the twenty-five hundred dollars the afternoon had added to her bank account. And she was sure Logan would be back. She laughed out loud. The Madam of Maple Court had done it again.
Chapter
1
“He’s going to take me. I’m really going along. It’sgoing to be so great. My first real field trip.”
Melissa Bonner’s squealing voice was so loud that Taylor Barwick had to hold her cell phone inches from her ear. “Slow down, Lissa, and tell me how you finally got him to agree,” she said, her voice pitched to its usually low, husky timbre.
“This trip’s a six-month photo shoot in China somewhere. He’s doing a spread for National Geographic and he’s going to take me along. He’s really going to take me.” Tay knew all about the trip since Lissa had been talking about it for a month. However, she let her best friend prattle on. “We leave somewhere during the first week of April. I’m going. Come what may, I’m going.”
“Okay, I get it. You’re going. He’s going to take you along.” Her slight sarcasm was lost on her friend. Tay had known for several weeks that Dave Bonner, a world-renowned photojournalist and animal-rights activist, was going to spend from six months to a year in God-Knows-Where, China, photographing some endangered species or other. With a deep desire to follow in her famous father’s footsteps, and a talented photographer in her own right, Lissa had been telling Tay how she’d been deviling her dad to let her accompany him. Tay had seen a lot of her friend’s work and she had to admit that Lissa knew how to tell an entire story with one photo or brief video clip. Her father had won numerous awards and his guidance would be of great help to his daughter.
Lissa had explained the art behind great photography several times. “Anyone who’s ever written a short story thinks he or she is a great author and the only thing keeping them off the best-seller list is the time to actually sit down and write the great American novel. We all know that’s not true at all.
“Well, it’s the same with photography. Anyone with a digital camera thinks that taking really great pictures is just a matter of point-and-shoot. Dad learned, and has taught me, that great pictures take time, effort and patience.”
The voice in Tay’s cell phone continued. “Begging, whining and wheedling seems to finally have worked. I’m so excited.” Her voice hadn’t dropped from its original squeal and Tay flipped her cell phone to speaker and held it at arm’s length.
“I’m delighted for you,” she said, trying to sound overjoyed. She’d miss Lissa, the rock that had held her together since Steve’s defection three months before.
Tay and Lissa had met in their freshman year at the Manhattan Art and Technology Institute. Over the seventy-five years since its founding as the Manhattan Art Institute it had added various aspects of computer graphics to its program so that, ten years before, the word Technology had been added to its original name. Lissa majored in photography, both still and movies, studying everything from composition and dark-room work to software and digital editing. Tay had gotten a small scholarship to study Web-page design and programming and from her first class had found that she loved the challenge of combining the artistic and practical.
The girls had met at freshman orientation and had almost immediately become friends. Tay commuted from her family’s home in New Jersey and Lissa took the train each day from Westchester County. Eventually, by taking on various part-time jobs, they’d been able to afford to move into a small loft in SoHo together, which they filled with furniture that they referred to as either Modern Salvation Army or Contemporary Castoff.
In her senior year Tay took advantage of a work-study program to intern with a small graphic-design firm that hired her immediately upon graduation. Tay had worked for them for a few years, then had been wooed away by the large multinational firm she still worked for.
After trying unsuccessfully to get freelance work, Lissa had taken a job with a small magazine, specializing in fabulous photographs of wildlife around the world. Although Lissa knew she had talent, she had confided to Tay that her father’s name had opened doors for her. She’d always wondered whether her talent would have been enough on its own.
Once they were both working, they were delighted that they could finally afford to join the local health club and began to indulge one of their mutual interests, swimming. For years, since her dad had moved to their current house, Lissa had been able to swim several times a week in the Bonner pool. Tay had been on the swim team in high school and lamented that she was going to get flabby if she didn’t get regular exercise.
They swam laps several times a week, keeping their bodies trim, enjoying the rhythmic strokes and racing toward the end to see who could complete fifty laps fastest. Then they’d lounge in the sauna while they unwound and shared the events of their respective days. The talk was usually about the guys they dated and their sex lives. Both women were open about their love of good, hot, steamy sex. It was gradually becoming awkward to combine a good love life with sharing an apartment, but they put up with it, inventing a series of signals to alert each other to the need for the other to “get a cup of coffee” at the local Starbucks.
The two women managed to continue to room together until a year after graduation, when they both were making enough so that Lissa could afford to move into her own place and Tay could pay the rent herself and keep the loft. Tay had continued to live there until she’d moved to Brooklyn Heights with Steve seven months before.
“So begging finally payed off,” she said now into the phone’s speaker.
Tay could hear Lissa’s chuckle. “Yeah, that and persistence, moaning and the occasional tear. I pulled out all the stops. Oh, Tay, I wore him down and he’s really agreed.”
Tay huffed out a breath, genuinely delighted for her friend. “Lissa, I’m thrilled for you. I know you’ve wanted this for a long time.”
She stopped pacing, dropped onto the bed and put her feet up. Now that Lissa had calmed a bit and her voice had gone back to its normal level, Tay flipped the speaker on the phone off and propped the instrument back against her ear. She looked around the small rented apartment, three months later still scattered with bits of her now-ex-boyfriend’s stuff, detritus from their suddenly aborted love affair.
Love affair? Not! Certainly not on his part. It had taken longer than it should have for her to realize that she’d been a meal ticket, a sex partner and little else. Steve had been a taker and she, to her eternal shame, had done the giving until she began to wise up. That had been after a dinner just before Christmas, when they’d been living together for almost four months. They were sitting at the little kitchen table sipping glasses of Burgundy. As she thought back she remembered that as a special treat for him she’d bought a new, more expensive vintage.
“I’m sorry, Steve, but a two-thousand-dollar sound board is out of the question,” she said after he explained the intricacies and importance of a new piece of sound electronics.
“Listen, baby, you can afford it. I really need it and it could be my Christmas present. Without really top-of-the-line equipment the band’s music sounds awful. Think of it as an investment in our future.”
“How is my buying you a new sound board an investment in our future?”
“The band is a business. The new stuff that I’m writing is going to take Steak and Potatoes to the top of the charts. We might even let you do a vocal or two.” Let her?
Dumb name, Steak and Potatoes. She’d been singing along with the band from time to time and had gotten a pretty good reception wherever they’d performed. Steve never said what kind of reaction they’d gotten without her. “You’ve posted a music video on YouTube and very few people have watched it,” Tay said. “You thought that would be your big chance, but it hasn’t turned out as well as you’d thought. Why don’t we just wait until you’ve had a little more success?”
His face darkened. “No one’s interested in it because I don’t have the electronics to make it really great. I need a sound board