Driving Her Crazy. Amy Andrews
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On My Mind, but they both knew he’d ‘declined’ every job offered and, she’d bet her significant yearly salary, probably hadn’t taken a photo since the accident.
She narrowed her eyes at him as she tried to see behind the inscrutable expression on his angular face. ‘There are these things called planes. They’re big and metal and don’t ask me how but they fly in the air and get you to where you want to go very quickly.’
A nerve kicked into fibrillation along his jaw line and Kent clenched down hard. ‘I don’t fly,’ he pushed out through tight lips.
The words were quiet but Tabitha felt the full force of their icy blast. Cold enough to freeze vodka. She regarded him for a moment or two as her nimble brain tried to work the situation to her advantage. She drummed her beringed fingers against her desk.
An outback road trip. Local people. The solitude. The joys. The hardships. The copy laid out diary style.
And most importantly, breathtaking vistas capturing the beauty and the terror in full Technicolor shot by a world-renowned, award-winning photographer on his first job since returning from tragedy in Afghanistan.
For that reason alone the paper would sell like hot cakes.
‘Okay.’ Tabitha nodded, her mind made up. ‘Two for the price of one. Journey to the Red Centre stuff—the most spectacular photos you can take.’
‘As well as the Leonard Pinto feature?’
She nodded again. ‘Might as well get my money’s worth out of you. Lord knows when you’ll grant us some more of your time.’
Kent grunted. Tabitha Fox was probably the most business-savvy woman he’d ever met. She’d built Sunday On My Mind from a fluffy six-page pull-out supplement to a dynamic, gritty, feature-driven eighteen-page phenomenon in five years.
He lounged against the glass for a moment. ‘Tell me, I’m curious. How’d you get him? Pinto? He’s pretty reclusive.’
‘He came to me.’
Kent raised an eyebrow. ‘A man who shuns the media and lives in outer whoop-whoop came to you?’
Tabitha smiled. ‘Said he’d open up his life to us—nothing off limits.’
Kent fixed her with his best ‘and pigs might fly’ look. ‘What’s the catch?’
‘Kent, Kent, Kent,’ she tutted. ‘So cynical.’
He shrugged. After spending a decade in one war zone or other, cynical was his middle name. ‘The catch?’ he repeated.
‘Sadie Bliss.’
Kent frowned. The journo on the story with the most spectacular byline in the history of the world? ‘Sadie Bliss?’
Tabitha nodded. ‘He wanted her.’
Kent blinked. ‘And you agreed?’ The Tabitha he knew didn’t like being dictated to. She especially didn’t like relinquishing her editorial control.
She shrugged. ‘She’s young and green. But she can write. And, I—’ she smiled ‘—can edit.’
Kent rubbed a hand along his jaw. ‘Why? Does she know him?’
‘I’m not entirely sure. But he wanted her. So he got her. And so did you. She can...’ Tabitha waved her hand in the air, her bangles tinkling ‘...navigate.’
Kent narrowed his gaze. ‘Wait. You want her to travel with me?’ Three thousand kilometres with a woman he didn’t know in the confines of a car? He’d rather be garrotted with his own camera strap.
Not happening.
Tabitha nodded. ‘How else am I going to get my road trip story?’
Kent shook his head. ‘No.’
Tabitha folded her arms. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m not good company.’
Tabitha almost burst out laughing at the understatement. ‘In that case it’ll be good for you.’
‘I go solo. I’ve always gone solo.’
‘Fine,’ Tabitha sighed, inspecting her fingernails. ‘Sadie and her staff photographer can fly to Pinto and get the job done in a fraction of the time and at half the cost and you can go back to your man-cave and pretend you work for this magazine.’
Kent felt pressure at the angle of his jaw and realised he was grinding down hard. He’d already burned his bridges at a lot of places the last couple of years. He was lucky Tabitha was still taking his calls after the number of times she’d covered for him.
But days in a car with a woman whose name was Sadie Bliss? She sounded like a twenty year old cadet whose mother had named her after one too many fruity cocktails.
‘I do believe,’ Tabitha said, swinging in her chair as she prepared to play her ace, ‘you owe me a couple.’
Kent shut his eyes as Tabitha called in his debts. ‘Fine,’ he huffed as he opened them again because he wanted—needed—to do this. To get back into it again.
And he did owe her.
Tabitha grinned at him like the cat that got the cream. ‘Thank you.’
Kent grunted as he strode to her desk, barely noticing his limp, and sat down. ‘Do you like his nudes?’
Tabitha nodded. ‘I think he’s sublime. You?’
Kent shook his head. ‘They’re all too skinny. Androgynous or something.’
Tabitha rolled her eyes. ‘They’re ballet dancers.’
Leonard’s nude of Marianna Daly, Australian prima ballerina, had won international acclaim for his work and hung in the National Gallery in Canberra.
‘Well, they’re not Renaissance women, that’s for sure.’
Tabitha raised an elegantly plucked eyebrow. ‘You like Rubenesque?’
Kent grunted again. ‘I like curves.’
Tabitha smiled. Oh, goody. She picked up the phone her gaze not leaving his. ‘Is Sadie here yet?’ She nodded twice still spearing Kent with her Mona Lisa smile. ‘Can you send her in?’ she asked, replacing the receiver before the receptionist had a chance to respond.
Kent narrowed his gaze. ‘I don’t trust that smile.’
Tabitha laughed. ‘Suspicious as well as cynical.’
Kent had no intention of subjecting himself to her Cheshire grin. He rose from the chair and prowled to the window, resuming his perusal of the view as the door opened.
Sadie checked her wavy hair was still behaving itself constrained in its tight ponytail as she stepped into the plush corner office, determined not to be intimidated. So what if the legendary Tabitha Fox could make grown men weep? She’d given Sadie the job and, lowly cadet reporter or not, she knew her big break when she saw it.
Even if Leo’s agenda was questionable.
‘Ah Sadie, come in.’ Tabitha smiled. ‘I’d like you to meet someone.’ She nodded her head towards Kent. ‘This is your photographer, Kent Nelson.’
Sadie turned automatically, her gaze falling on broad shoulders before her brain registered the name. She blinked.
‘The Kent Nelson?’ she asked his back, the image that had affected her a few months ago revisiting.
Kent shut his eyes briefly. Great. A groupie. He turned as Tabitha said, ‘The one and only.’
Sadie was speechless. Multi-award-winning, world-acclaimed photojournalist Kent Nelson was coming with her to the back of beyond to take photos of a reclusive celebrity?
She almost asked him who he’d pissed off but checked her natural urge to be sarcastic.