Off Kilter. Donna Kauffman
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feigned. “No thanks. I’ll wait until Tessa’s taken her leave.”
“Aha! So you admit it then. Well, that’s a start.” She patted him on the arm. “But I know you, you’ll only find some other excuse entirely. You don’t strike me as a chicken, Roan, so seriously, man up.”
“I’m no’ a chicken, as you put it. And my manhood isn’t in question.” He waggled his brows. “You’ve seen my sword?” He lifted it, then stowed it in the back of the lorry when she merely shook her head and gave him a sad, pitying look.
“Don’t think you’re going to charm me into forgetting this conversation,” she warned, unwittingly echoing the same dire warning as issued by her fiancé earlier. “I’m on to you, Roan McAuley. You run around this island, being roguishly adorable and making everyone else feel good about themselves. It’s about time you got some of that love back.”
He shot her an affronted look. “I’ll have you know I’m beloved by all here. Treated like a veritable prince. What more could a man ask than the admiration and love of his people?”
“A warm bed and an open heart,” she said, quite a bit more sincerely than he’d have anticipated. “One that’s accepting of yours.”
He didn’t have a quick rejoinder for that.
“You have so much to give the right person,” she went on as they trundled toward town. “And she’s right here, all but on your doorstep. What is it that’s holding you back?”
His smile faded a bit. “It’s a complex tale, Katie.”
“It couldn’t be. You’re a man. And therefore too one dimensional for complexity.”
He barked a laugh, though a quick glance at her proved that while she was willing to keep things light, she was far from letting it go.
“Speaking of our one-dimensional capacity,” he said, changing the subject back to work, “what integrity-challenging marketing campaign has that wickedly brilliant brain of yours devised? Despite what you think, we men like to think we’re more than just the sum of our manly parts. We’re sensitive blokes, you know, with fragile egos. We need them stroked.” He glanced at her and grinned. “And stroked often.”
“Oh, brother.”
“Roguishly adorable, I believe you said.”
“And already regretting it.”
They laughed together as he drove the rest of the way into town, but his thoughts remained partly on his conflicted feelings for Kira … and far more annoying, his apparent inability to stop thinking about her temperamental houseguest.
“Well, doesn’t that just bite.” With a disgusted snort, Tessa clipped up the final series of shots on the cotton cord she’d strung inside Kira’s narrow pantry, which temporarily doubled as her dark room. It was cramped and the juryrigged lighting sucked, but she’d operated in far, far worse conditions. “Figures.”
She wasn’t surprised. Not really. She’d known exactly what she was getting when she’d started running the shutter. She’d just hoped that maybe, for the first time, her illustrious eye for things might have failed her.
So much for that.
With the last of the film processed, she needed to clean up so Kira could have her pantry back before breakfast. But she couldn’t seem to stop staring at the last half dozen shots she’d taken.
She could tell herself she was interested in the integrity of the shot, the point of view she’d chosen, and how the angle allowed the sun to perfectly filter the light across the tops of the mountains and spill down over the fortress tucked between the peaks. She had an affinity for capturing the natural beauty of any landscape in her scope of vision, and had done it for so long it was second nature to her.
Of course, what had always drawn her was the juxtaposition of the staggering splendor of nature’s bounty … contrary to the horrifying atrocities committed by man.
She closed her eyes briefly against any threat of invading visuals, then opened them once more to look at the subject of the photos in front of her. There was nothing remotely horrifying or atrocious about their human subject. In fact, she could argue that his natural beauty almost eclipsed that of the stunning backdrop.
He wasn’t ruggedly hewn like their island leader, Graham, whom she thought of as Paul Bunyan in plaid. Roan was tall, as well, but where Graham was linebacker big with a square jaw, Roan was rangy and lean, broad of shoulder, lean of hip, his muscles perfectly and tightly defined, and his skin surprisingly golden, which only leant a gleaming, gladiator feel to the whole image. Unruly, sun-bleached brown hair shagged around his head in wayward curls, looking as if he did nothing more than rake a hand through it now and again. There was a shadow of stubble on his cheek, but she sensed it was more a result of the afternoon hour than through any deliberate design. In fact, she doubted he gave his appearance much thought. Mostly because he didn’t have to.
He was roguish and charming, with a devilish glint of mischief in his green eyes and a deeply grooved dimple that winked often given his penchant for grinning. She was quite certain he was well used to incorporating all of that to further his own agenda whenever it suited him. Probably because it had netted him an alarmingly high, ego-inflating ratio of success.
She had no patience with people like that.
She knew her own unusual looks and her taller-than-average height set her apart from the crowd, but she’d spent a lifetime playing them down to get what she wanted, and where she wanted to go. She took a lot of pride in the fact that her work spoke for her. And only her work. No one could argue that she’d earned her way to her current pinnacle of success by employing any asset other than her pure, unmitigated talent behind a camera.
And yet … she looked at all that rugged, charming beauty, and it tugged at something inside her. Something intensely … female. She responded to it, to him, almost viscerally, and no amount of intellectual arguing with herself could divert her from that singular truth.
She closed her eyes with the sole intent of ridding herself once and for all of his unwanted hold on her attention, but all that did was drive her thoughts in steamier, more primal directions. She thought about how he’d smiled and dangled that kilt. How he held that sword. His palms were wide, even the muscles in his forearms were rigidly defined, as he’d gripped the hilt. Her lips parted as she imagined him letting go of that tartan, and striding to her, planting that sword deep in the earth, then taking her by the arms and yanking her up against him, plunging his tongue into her mouth and making her—
A tap on the door jerked her from her reverie.
“How goes it in there?”
“Almost done,” she choked out, cheeks flaming as she realized how almost “done” she’d actually been.
“Can I see?” Kira asked through the closed door.
“Not yet with these,” she said, rallying herself back to the moment at hand. And away from where she’d like to have another pair of hands at the moment. “But I have a ton of digital stuff to sort through, so you can give me your expert advice about them.”
There was a snort. “I have an eye for weaving patterns, but you don’t want me tellin’ ye anything about photography.”
“They’re pictures of half-naked men.” Tessa opened the door a bare crack and slipped through, shutting it quickly behind her. “The appeal is universal, requiring only gut instinct.”
“So shallow,” Kira said, then smiled. “I like it.”
“Then you are officially my assistant.”
Kira’s smile broadened, and the light it brought to her eyes made Tessa feel slightly less than the schmuck of