CHAPTER THREE
Bryan was up and dressed by seven, but she wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. She had her suitcase and tripod in one hand, with two camera bags and her purse slung crosswise over her shoulders. As Shade pulled up to the curb, she was walking down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. She believed in being prompt, but not necessarily cheerful.
She grunted to Shade; it was as close to a greeting as she could manage at that hour. In silence, she loaded her gear into his van, then kicked back in the passenger seat, stretched out her legs and closed her eyes.
Shade looked at what he could see of her face behind round, amber-lensed sunglasses and under a battered straw hat. “Rough night?” he asked, but she was already asleep. Shaking his head, he released the brake and pulled out into the street. They were on their way.
Shade didn’t mind long drives. They gave him a chance to think or not think, as he chose. In less than an hour, he was out of L.A. traffic and heading northeast on the interstate. He liked riding into the rising sun with a clear road ahead. Light bounced off the chrome on the van, shimmered on the hood and sliced down on the road signs.
He planned to cover five or six hundred miles that day, leading up toward Utah, unless something interesting caught his eye and they stopped for a shoot. After this first day, he saw no reason for them to be mileage-crazy. It would hamper the point of the assignment. They’d drive as they needed to, working toward and around the definite destinations they’d ultimately agreed on.
He had a route that could easily be altered, and no itinerary. Their only time frame was to be on the East Coast by Labor Day. He turned the radio on low and found some gritty country music as he drove at a steady, mile-eating pace. Beside him, Bryan slept.
If this was her routine, he mused, they wouldn’t have any problems. As long as she was asleep, they couldn’t grate on each other’s nerves. Or stir each other’s passion. Even now he wondered why thoughts of her had kept him restless throughout the night. What was it about her that had worried him? He didn’t know, and that was a worry in itself.
Shade liked to be able to put his finger on things and pick a problem apart until the pieces were small enough to rearrange to his preference. Even though she was quiet, almost unobtrusive, at the moment, he didn’t believe he’d be able to do that with Bryan Mitchell.
After his decision to take the assignment, he’d made it his business to find out more about her. Shade might guard his personal life and snarl over his privacy, but he wasn’t at a loss for contacts. He’d known of her work for Celebrity, and her more inventive and personalized work for magazines like Vanity and In Touch. She’d developed into something of a cult artist over the years with her offbeat, often radical photographs of the famous.
What he hadn’t known was that she was the daughter of a painter and a poet, both eccentric and semisuccessful residents of Carmel. She’d been married to an accountant before she was twenty, and divorced him three years later. She dated with an almost studied casualness, and she had vague plans about buying a beach house at Malibu. She was well liked, respected and, by all accounts, dependable. She was often slow in doing things—a combination of her need for perfection and her belief that rushing was a waste of energy.
He’d found nothing surprising in his research, and no clue as to his attraction to her. But a photographer, a successful one, was patient. Sometimes it was necessary to come back to a subject again and again until you understood your own emotion toward it.
As they crossed the border into Nevada, Shade lit a cigarette and rolled down his window. Bryan stirred, grumbled, then groped for her bag.
“Morning.” Shade sent her a brief, sidelong look.
“Mmm-hmm.” Bryan rooted through the bag, then gripped the chocolate bar in relief. With two quick rips, she unwrapped it and tossed the trash in her purse. She usually cleaned it out before it overflowed.
“You always eat candy for breakfast?”
“Caffeine.” She took a huge bite and sighed. “I prefer mine this way.” Slowly, she stretched, torso, shoulders, arms, in one long, sinuous move that was completely unplanned. It was, Shade thought ironically, one definitive clue as to the attraction. “So where are we?”
“Nevada.” He blew out a stream of smoke that whipped out the open window. “Just.”
Bryan folded her legs under her as she nibbled on the candy bar. “It must be about my shift.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Okay.” She was content to ride as long as he was content to drive. She did, however, give a meaningful glance at the radio. Country music wasn’t her style. “Driver picks the tunes.”
He shrugged his acceptance. “If you want to wash that candy down with something, there’s some juice in a jug in the back.”
“Yeah?” Always interested in putting something into her stomach, Bryan unfolded herself and worked her way into the back of the van.
She hadn’t paid any attention to the van that morning, except for a bleary scan that told her it was black and well cared-for. There were padded benches along each side that could, if you weren’t too choosy, be suitable for beds. Bryan thought the pewter carpet might be the better choice.
Shade’s equipment was neatly secured, and hers was loaded haphazardly into a corner. Above, glossy ebony cabinets held some essentials. Coffee, a hot plate, a small teakettle. They’d come in handy, she thought, if they stopped in any campgrounds with electric hookups. In the meantime, she settled for the insulated jug of juice.
“Want some?”
He glanced in the rearview mirror to see her standing, legs spread for balance, one hand resting on the cabinet. “Yeah.”
Bryan took two jumbo plastic cups and the jug back to her seat. “All the comforts of home,” she commented with a jerk of her head toward the back. “Do you travel in this much?”
“When it’s necessary.” He heard the ice thump against the cup and held out his hand. “I don’t like to fly. You lose any chance you’d have at getting a shot at something on the way.” After flipping his cigarette out the window, he drank his juice. “If it’s an assignment within five hundred miles or so, I drive.”
“I hate to fly.” Bryan propped herself in the V between the seat and the door. “It seems I’m forever having to fly to New York to photograph someone who can’t or won’t come to me. I take a bottle of Dramamine, a supply of chocolate bars, a rabbit’s foot and a socially significant, educational book. It covers all the bases.”
“The Dramamine and the rabbit’s foot, maybe.”
“The chocolate’s for my nerves. I like to eat when I’m tense. The book’s a bargaining point.” She shook her cup so the ice clinked. “I feel like I’m saying—see, I’m doing something worthwhile here. Let’s not mess it up by crashing the plane. Then, too, the book usually puts me to sleep within twenty minutes.”
The corner of Shade’s mouth lifted, something Bryan took as a hopeful sign for the several thousand miles they had to go. “That explains it.”
“I have a phobia about flying at thirty thousand feet in a heavy tube of metal with two hundred strangers, many of whom like to tell the intimate details of their lives to the person next to them.” Propping her feet on the dash, she grinned. “I’d rather drive across country with one cranky photographer who makes it a point to tell me as little as possible.”
Shade sent her a sidelong look and decided there was no harm in playing the game as long as they both knew the rules. “You haven’t asked me anything.”
“Okay, we’ll start with something basic. Where’d Shade come from? The name, I mean.”
He slowed down, veering off toward a rest stop. “Shadrach.”
Her eyes widened in appreciation. “As in Meshach and Abednego in the Book of Daniel?”
“That’s right. My mother decided to give each of her offspring a name that would roll around a bit. I’ve a sister named Cassiopeia. Why Bryan?”
“My parents wanted to show they weren’t sexist.”
The minute the van stopped in a parking space, Bryan hopped out, bent from the waist and touched her palms to the asphalt—much to the interest of the man climbing into the Pontiac next to her. With the view fuddling his concentration, it took him a full thirty seconds to fit his key in the ignition.
“God, I get so stiff!” She stretched up, standing on her toes, then dropped down again. “Look, there’s a snack bar over there. I’m going to get some fries. Want some?”
“It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“Almost ten-thirty,” she corrected. “Besides, people eat hash browns for breakfast. What’s the difference?”
He was certain there was one, but didn’t feel like a debate. “You go ahead. I want to buy a paper.”
“Fine.” As an afterthought, Bryan climbed back inside and grabbed her camera. “I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.”
Her intentions were good, but she took nearly twenty. Even as she approached the snack bar, the formation of the line of people waiting for fast food caught her imagination. There were perhaps ten people wound out like a snake in front of a sign that read Eat Qwik.
They were dressed in baggy Bermudas, wrinkled sundresses and cotton pants. A curvy teenager had on a pair of leather shorts that looked as though they’d been painted on. A woman six back from the stand fanned herself with a wide-brimmed hat banded with a floaty ribbon.
They were all going somewhere, all waiting to get there, and none of them paid any attention to anyone else. Bryan couldn’t resist. She walked up the line one way, down it another, until she found her angle.
She shot them from the back so that the line seemed elongated and disjointed and the sign loomed promisingly. The man behind the counter serving food was nothing more than a vague shadow that might or might not have been there. She’d taken more than her allotted ten minutes before she joined the line herself.
Shade was leaning against the van reading the paper when she returned. He’d already taken three calculated shots of the parking lot, focusing on a line of cars with license plates from five different states. When he glanced up, Bryan had her camera slung over her shoulder, a giant chocolate shake in one hand and a jumbo order of fries smothered in ketchup in the other.
“Sorry.” She dipped into the box of fries as she walked. “I got a couple of good shots of the line at the snack bar. Half of summer’s hurry up and wait, isn’t it?”
“Can you drive with all that?”
“Sure.” She swung into the driver’s side. “I’m used to it.” She balanced the shake between her thighs, settled the fries just ahead of it and reached out a hand for the keys.
Shade glanced down at the breakfast snuggled between very smooth, very brown legs. “Still willing to share?”
Bryan turned her head to check the rearview as she backed out. “Nope.” She gave the wheel a quick turn and headed toward the exit. “You had your chance.” With one competent hand steering, she dug into the fries again.
“You eat like that, you should have acne down to your navel.”
“Myths,” she announced, and zoomed past a slower-moving sedan. With a few quick adjustments, she had an old Simon and Garfunkel tune pouring out of the radio. “That’s music,” she told him. “I like songs that give me a visual. Country music’s usually about hurting and cheating and drinking.”
“And life.”
Bryan picked up her shake and drew on the straw. “Maybe. I guess I get tired of too much reality. Your work depends on it.”
“And yours often skirts around it.”
Her brows knit, then she deliberately relaxed. In his way, he was right. “Mine gives options. Why’d you take this assignment, Shade?” she asked suddenly. “Summer in America exemplifies fun. That’s not your style.”
“It also equals sweat, crops dying from too much sun and frazzled nerves.” He lit another cigarette. “More my style?”
“You said it, I didn’t.” She swirled the chocolate in her mouth. “You smoke like that, you’re going to die.”
“Sooner or later.” Shade opened the paper again and ended the conversation.
Who the hell was he? Bryan asked herself as she leveled the speed at sixty. What factors in his life had brought out the cynicism as well as the genius? There was humor in him—she’d seen it once or twice. But he seemed to allow himself only a certain degree and no more.
Passion? She could attest firsthand that there was a powder keg inside him. What might set it off? If she was certain of one thing about Shade Colby, it was that he held himself in rigid control. The passion, the power, the fury—whatever label you gave it—escaped into his work, but not, she was certain, into his personal life. Not often, in any case.
She knew she should be careful and distant; it would be the smartest way to come out of this long-term assignment without scars. Yet she wanted to dig into his character, and she knew she’d have to give in to the temptation. She’d have to press the buttons and watch the results, probably because she didn’t like him and was attracted to him at the same time.
She’d told him the truth when she’d said that she couldn’t think of anyone else she didn’t like. It went hand in hand with her approach to her art—she looked into a person and found qualities, not all of them admirable, not all of them likable, but something, always something, that she could understand. She needed to do that with Shade, for herself. And because, though she’d bide her time telling him, she wanted very badly to photograph him.
“Shade, I want to ask you something else.”
He didn’t glance up from the paper. “Hmm?”
“What’s your favorite movie?”
Half annoyed at the interruption, half puzzled at the question, he looked up and found himself wondering yet again what her hair would look like out of that thick, untidy braid. “What?”
“Your favorite movie,” she repeated. “I need a clue, a starting point.”
“For what?”
“To find out why I find you interesting, attractive and unlikable.”
“You’re an odd woman, Bryan.”
“No, not really, though I have every right to be.” She stopped speaking a moment as she switched lanes. “Come on, Shade, it’s going to be a long trip. Let’s humor each other on the small points. Give me a movie.”
“To Have and Have Not.”
“Bogart and Bacall’s first together.” It made her smile at him in the way he’d already decided was dangerous. “Good. If you’d named some obscure French film, I’d have had to find something else. Why that one?”
He set the paper aside. So she wanted to play games. It was harmless, he decided. And they still had a long day ahead of them. “On-screen chemistry, tight plotting and camera work that made Bogart look like the consummate hero and Bacall the only woman who could stand up to him.”
She nodded, pleased. He wasn’t above enjoying heroes, fantasies and bubbling relationships. It might’ve been a small point, but she could like him for it. “Movies fascinate me, and the people who make them. I suppose that was one of the reasons I jumped at the chance to work for Celebrity. I’ve lost count of the number of actors I’ve shot, but when I see them up on the screen, I’m still fascinated.”
He knew it was dangerous to ask questions, not because of the answers, but because of the questions you’d be asked in return. Still, he wanted to know. “Is that why you photograph the beautiful people? Because you want to get close to the glamour?”
Because she considered it a fair question, Bryan decided not to be annoyed. Besides, it made her think about something that had simply seemed to evolve, almost unplanned. “I might’ve started out with something like that in mind. Before long, you come to see them as ordinary people with extraordinary jobs. I like finding that spark that’s made them the chosen few.”
“Yet for the next three months you’re going to be photographing the everyday. Why?”
“Because there’s a spark in all of us. I’d like to find it in a farmer in Iowa, too.”
So he had his answer. “You’re an idealist, Bryan.”
“Yes.” She gave him a frankly interested look. “Should I be ashamed of it?”
He didn’t like the way the calm, reasonable question affected him. He’d had ideals of his own once, and he knew how much it hurt to have them rudely taken away. “Not ashamed,” he said after a moment. “Careful.”
They drove for hours. In midafternoon, they switched positions and Bryan skimmed through Shade’s discarded paper. By mutual consent, they left the free way and began to travel over back roads. The pattern became sporadic conversations and long silences. It was early evening when they crossed the border into Idaho.
“Skiing and potatoes,” Bryan commented. “That’s all I can think of when I think of Idaho.” With a shiver, she rolled up her window. Summer came slower in the north, especially when the sun was low. She gazed out the glass at the deepening twilight.
Sheep, hundreds of them, in what seemed like miles of gray or white bundles, were grazing lazily on the tough grass that bordered the road. She was a woman of the city, of freeways and office buildings. It might’ve surprised Shade to know she’d never been this far north, nor this far east except by plane.
The acres of placid sheep fascinated her. She was reaching for her camera when Shade swore and hit the brakes. Bryan landed on the floor with a plop.
“What was that for?”
He saw at a glance that she wasn’t hurt, not even annoyed, but simply curious. He didn’t bother to apologize. “Damn sheep in the road.”
Bryan hauled herself up and looked out the windshield. There were three of them lined unconcernedly across the road, nearly head to tail. One of them turned its head and glanced up at the van, then looked away again.
“They look like they’re waiting for a bus,” she decided, then grabbed Shade’s wrist before he could lean on the horn. “No, wait a minute. I’ve never touched one.”
Before Shade could comment, she was out of the van and walking toward them. One of them shied a few inches away as she approached, but for the most part, the sheep couldn’t have cared less. Shade’s annoyance began to fade as she leaned over and touched one. He thought another woman might look the same as she stroked a sable at a furrier. Pleased, tentative and oddly sexual. And the light was good. Taking his camera, he selected a filter.
“How do they feel?”
“Soft—not as soft as I’d thought. Alive. Nothing like a lamb’swool coat.” Still bent over, one hand on the sheep, Bryan looked up. It surprised her to be facing a camera. “What’s that for?”
“Discovery.” He’d already taken two shots, but he wanted more. “Discovery has a lot to do with summer. How do they smell?”
Intrigued, Bryan leaned closer to the sheep. He framed her when her face was all but buried in the wool. “Like sheep,” she said with a laugh, and straightened. “Want to play with the sheep and I’ll take your picture?”
“Maybe next time.”
She looked as if she belonged there, on the long deserted road surrounded by stretches of empty land, and it puzzled him. He’d thought she set well in L.A., in the center of the glitz and illusions.
“Something wrong?” She knew he was thinking of her, only of her, when he looked at her like that. She wished she could’ve taken it a step further, yet was oddly relieved that she couldn’t.
“You acclimate well.”
Her smile was hesitant. “It’s simpler that way. I told you I don’t like complications.”
He turned back to the truck, deciding he was thinking about her too much. “Let’s see if we can get these sheep to move.”
“But, Shade, you can’t just leave them on the side of the road.” She jogged back to the van. “They’ll wander right back out. They might get run over.”
He gave her a look that said he clearly wasn’t interested. “What do you expect me to do? Round ’em up?”
“The least we can do is get them back over the fence.” As if he’d agreed wholeheartedly, Bryan turned around and started back to the sheep. As he watched, she reached down, hauled one up and nearly toppled over. The other two bleated and scattered.
“Heavier than they look,” she managed, and began to stagger toward the fence strung along the shoulder of the road while the sheep she carried bleated, kicked and struggled. It wasn’t easy, but after a test of wills and brute strength, she dropped the sheep over the fence. With one hand, she swiped at the sweat on her forehead as she turned to scowl at Shade. “Well, are you going to help or not?”
He’d enjoyed the show, but he didn’t smile as he leaned against the van. “They’ll probably find the hole in the fence again and be back on the road in ten minutes.”
“Maybe they will,” Bryan said between her teeth as she headed for the second sheep. “But I’ll have done what should be done.”
“Idealist,” he said again.
With her hands on her hips, she whirled around. “Cynic.”
“As long as we understand each other.” Shade straightened. “I’ll give you a hand.”
The others weren’t as easily duped as the first. It took Shade several exhausting minutes to catch number two, with Bryan running herd. Twice he lost his concentration and his quarry because her sudden husky laughter distracted him.
“Two down and one to go,” he announced as he set the sheep free in pasture.
“But this one looks stubborn.” From opposite sides of the road, the rescuers and the rescuee studied each other. “Shifty eyes,” Bryan murmured. “I think he’s the leader.”
“She.”
“Whatever. Look, just be nonchalant. You walk around that side, I’ll walk around this side. When we have her in the middle, wham!”
Shade sent her a cautious look. “Wham?”
“Just follow my lead.” Tucking her thumbs in her back pockets, she strolled across the road, whistling.
“Bryan, you’re trying to outthink a sheep.”
She sent him a bland look over her shoulder. “Maybe between the two of us we can manage to.”
He wasn’t at all sure she was joking. His first urge was to simply get back in the van and wait until she’d finished making a fool of herself. Then again, they’d already wasted enough time. Shade circled around to the left as Bryan moved to the right. The sheep eyed them both, swiveling her head from side to side.
“Now!” Bryan shouted, and dived.
Without giving himself the chance to consider the absurdity, Shade lunged from the other side. The sheep danced delicately away. Momentum carrying them both, Shade and Bryan collided, then rolled together onto the soft shoulder of the road. Shade felt the rush of air as they slammed into each other, and the soft give of her body as they tumbled together.
With the breath knocked out of her, Bryan lay on her back, half under Shade. His body was very hard and very male. She might not have had her wind, but Bryan had her wit. She knew if they stayed like this, things were going to get complicated. Drawing in air, she stared up into his face just above her.
His look was contemplative, considering and not altogether friendly. He wouldn’t be a friendly lover, that she knew instinctively. It was in his eyes—those dark, deepset eyes. He was definitely a man to avoid having a personal involvement with. He’d overwhelm quickly, completely, and there’d be no turning back. She had to remind herself that she preferred easy relationships, as her heart started a strong, steady rhythm.
“Missed,” she managed to say, but didn’t try to move away.
“Yeah.” She had a stunning face, all sharp angles and soft skin. Shade could nearly convince himself that his interest in it was purely professional. She’d photograph wonderfully from any angle, in any light. He could make her look like a queen or a peasant, but she’d always look like a woman a man would want. The lazy sexuality he could sense in her would come across in the photograph.
Just looking at her, he could plot half a dozen settings he’d like to shoot her in. And he could think of dozens of ways he’d like to make love to her. Here was first, on the cool grass along the roadside with the sun setting behind them and no sound.
She saw the decision in his eyes, saw it in time to avoid the outcome. But she didn’t. She had only to shift away, only to protest with one word or a negative movement. But she didn’t. Her mind told her to, arguing with an urge that was unarguably physical. Later, Bryan would wonder why she hadn’t listened. Now, with the air growing cool and the sky darkening, she wanted the experience. She couldn’t admit that she wanted him.
When he lowered his mouth to hers, there wasn’t any of the light experimentation of the first time. Now he knew her and wanted the full impact of her passion. Their mouths met greedily, as if each one were racing the other to delirium.
Her body heated so quickly that the grass seemed to shimmer like ice beneath her. She wondered it didn’t melt. It was a jolt that left her bewildered. With a small sound in her throat, Bryan reached for more. His fingers were in her hair, tangled in the restriction of her braid as if he didn’t choose, or didn’t dare, to touch her yet. She moved under him, not in retreat but in advance. Hold me, she seemed to demand. Give me more. But he continued to make love only to her mouth. Devastatingly.
She could hear the breeze; it tickled through the grass beside her ear and taunted her. He’d give sparingly of himself. She could feel it in the tenseness of his body. He’d hold back. While his mouth stripped away her defenses, one by one, he held himself apart. Frustrated, Bryan ran her hands up his back. She’d seduce.
Shade wasn’t used to the pressure to give, to the desire to. She drew from him a need for merging he’d thought he’d beaten down years before. There seemed to be no pretenses in her—her mouth was warm and eager, tasting of generosity. Her body was soft and agile, tempting. Her scent drifted around him, sexual, uncomplicated. When she said his name, there seemed to be no hidden meaning. For the first time in too long for him to remember, he wanted to give, unheedingly, boundlessly.
He held himself back. Pretenses, he knew, could be well hidden. But he was losing to her. Even though Shade was fully aware of it, he couldn’t stop it. She drew and drew from him, with a simplicity that couldn’t be blocked. He might’ve sworn against it, cursed her, cursed himself, but his mind was beginning to swim. His body was throbbing.
They both felt the ground tremble, but it didn’t occur to either of them that it was anything but their own passion. They heard the noise, the rumble, growing louder and louder, and each thought it was inside his or her own head. Then the wind rocketed by them and the truck driver gave one long, rude blast of the horn. It was enough to jolt them back to sanity. Feeling real panic for the first time, Bryan scrambled to her feet.
“We’d better take care of that sheep and get going.” She swore at the breathiness of her own voice and wrapped her arms protectively around herself. There was a chill in the air, she thought desperately. That was all. “It’s nearly dark.”
Shade hadn’t realized how deep the twilight had become. He’d lost track of his surroundings—something he never allowed to happen. He’d forgotten that they were on the side of the road, rolling in the grass like a couple of brainless teenagers. He felt the lick of anger, but stemmed it. He’d nearly lost control once. He wouldn’t lose it now.
She caught the sheep on the other side of the road, where it grazed, certain that both humans had lost interest. It bleated in surprised protest as she scooped it up. Swearing under his breath, Shade stalked over and grabbed the sheep from her before Bryan could take another tumble. He dumped it unceremoniously in the pasture.
“Satisfied now?” he demanded.
She could see the anger in him, no matter how tightly he reined it in. Her own bubbled. She’d had her share of frustrations as well. Her body was pulsing, her legs were unsteady. Temper helped her to forget them.
“No,” she tossed back. “And neither are you. It seems to me that should prove to both of us that we’d better keep a nice, clean distance.”
He grabbed her arm as she started to swing past. “I didn’t force you into anything, Bryan.”
“Nor I you,” she reminded him. “I’m responsible for my own actions, Shade.” She glanced down at the hand that was curled around her arm. “And my own mistakes. If you like to shift blame, it’s your prerogative.”
His fingers tightened on her arm, briefly, but long enough for her eyes to widen in surprise at the strength and the depth of his anger. No, she wasn’t used to wild swings of mood in herself or to causing them in others.
Slowly, and with obvious effort, Shade loosened his grip. She’d hit it right on the mark. He couldn’t argue with honesty.
“No,” he said a great deal more calmly. “I’ll take my share, Bryan. It’ll be easier on both of us if we agree to that nice, clean distance.”
She nodded, steadier. Her lips curved into a slight smile. “Okay.” Lighten up, she warned herself, for everyone’s sake. “It’d have been easier from the beginning if you’d been fat and ugly.”
He’d grinned before he’d realized it. “You too.”
“Well, since I don’t suppose either of us is willing to do anything about that particular problem, we just have to work around it. Agreed?” She held out her hand.
“Agreed.”
Their hands joined. A mistake. Neither of them had recovered from the jolt to their systems. The contact, however casual, only served to accentuate it. Bryan linked her hands behind her back. Shade dipped his into his pockets.
“Well…” Bryan began, with no idea where to go.
“Let’s find a diner before we head into camp. Tomorrow’s going to start early.”
She wrinkled her nose at that but started toward her side of the truck. “I’m starving,” she announced, and pretended she was in control by propping her feet on the dash. “Think we’ll find something decent to eat soon, or should I fortify myself with a candy bar?”
“There’s a town about ten miles down this road.” Shade turned on the ignition. His hand was steady, he told himself. Or nearly. “Bound to be a restaurant of some kind. Probably serve great lamb chops.”
Bryan looked at the sheep grazing beside them, then sent Shade a narrowed-eyed glance. “That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, and it’ll keep your mind off your stomach until we eat.”
They bumped back onto the road and drove in silence. They’d made it over a hump, but each of them knew there’d be mountains yet to struggle over. Steep, rocky mountains.