A Man of His Word Read online

  His boot hit the concrete.

  What was it with this woman? How had she managed to get under his skin like this, as irritating as a cactus-pear rash and twice as annoying?

  With a last glance up canyon, he headed back for the administration building and another bout with Westergaard’s added-mass formula for computing incompressible and compressible fluid elements. That, at least, he could comprehend.

  Happily unaware that she was the object of so much intense conjecture and irritation, Sydney loaded her crew and her equipment just as dusk dropped a veil of darkness over the canyon depths.

  She hummed contentedly for most of the circuitous drive back to town. They’d had a good day, six full hours of sunlight. Even then, they’d needed artificial lighting for the interior shots. Trailing long, snaking cables, she and Zack and Katie had positioned the lights while a stooped-over Tish clambered through low doorways to pan interiors, even climbing down into a circular stone pit that had once served as a ceremonial kiva. Henry had provided some excellent narration on the secret rites held in the pit, accessible only from a small hole in the roof. She couldn’t wait to get back to the motel to review the day’s footage and listen to the tapes.

  Her only disappointment was that the wind hadn’t cooperated. It had gusted for a half hour or so this afternoon, then died without producing the eerie wail she wanted so much to catch on tape. Oh, well, what they had so far with the emergence sequence and the rainbow and today’s shoot was good. Darn good!

  Once at the motel, Albert pleaded weariness and went back to his room. Zack and Katie disappeared in the Blazer, heading for the nearest McDonald’s, thirty-seven miles away.

  Sydney and Tish settled in to go over the day’s rushes. Changing into comfortable shorts and T-shirts, they left the door propped open to catch the night breeze and sat cross-legged on the floor of Sydney’s room. Together they ran through the day’s take, playing and replaying the tapes, recording information about the footage, making special note of those frames that caught the best contrast of light and shadow. Sydney would later transfer the information in her log onto her laptop computer. The computerized version made for easy reference when she began editing the raw material into a visual statement.

  This was one of the most critical phases of a shoot. Each night she had to step out of her role as concept designer and director and look at what she’d actually shot, as opposed to what she’d intended to shoot. The two were often quite different. If she didn’t capture the mood, the feeling she’d been seeking, she’d have to reshoot or alter her approach or perhaps rethink the statement she wanted to make.

  “There! Hold it there!” She leaned closer to the video cassette player to copy a stop number. “I want to freeze that shot of the tower and use it as backdrop when we begin the tale of the Weeping Woman.”

  “Who’s doing the narration?” Tish inquired as she jotted the stop number in her own log.

  “I’ve got an actor lined up to read the script when we get back to L.A., but…”

  “But what?”

  Sydney tapped her pencil against her knee. “But I’m trying to think of a way to talk Reece Henderson into reading the script for me. He’s got just the voice I want, all smooth rawhide and rough velvet.”

  The camera operator snorted. “If I wasn’t married to a man who never lets me forget what a good thing I’ve got, I’d surely to goodness be trying to get Reece Henderson to do more than read to me.”

  “He’s not interested in anything more.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I offered to buy him dinner,” Sydney admitted with a wry grin. “He turned me down flat.”

  “Turned you down? Uh-oh. That means he’s either A, engaged…B, married…C, gay…or D, in love with his grandmother.”

  “According to him, it’s not A or B, and from the kiss he laid on me the other night, I’m pretty sure it’s not C. I can’t speak to D, though.”

  “For the record,” the rawhide and velvet voice drawled from the door, “it’s E…none of the above.”

  Tish’s head whipped around. Sydney merely groaned and closed her eyes.

  “Tell me it’s not him,” she begged the other woman.

  “Sorry, Syd, no can do.” The camera operator’s rich contralto vibrated with laughter. “Hello, Reece. Care to come in and join the discussion?”

  “Not particularly. I just stopped by to tell your boss that you’re clear to shoot tomorrow.”

  Tish elbowed her in the ribs. “Hear that, Syd?”

  “Yes.” She unscrewed her eyes enough to shoot her friend a glare before untangling her legs to push up from the green shag carpet.

  “And to take her up on her offer,” Reece added casually. “If it still stands?”

  Sydney almost hit the shag again. Mortified by her clumsiness, she finally managed to get to her feet. The sight of Reece in the doorway, his black hair ruffled by the wind and those blue eyes glinting with amusement didn’t exactly help restore her composure.

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

  Oh, that was brilliant! Telling herself to get a grip, she plastered on a wide smile.

  “Yes, of course the offer still stands. When did you want to do it? Have dinner,” she added immediately, but not fast enough to head off Tish’s snicker.

  Those awesome shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Have you already eaten?”

  Sydney looked at him blankly. If asked, she could have recited the exact sequence of today’s shoot, tossed off the precise amount of video and sound tape recorded to date, and even estimated the cost per minute of what they’d done so far to within a few dollars. But mundane matters like food took a moment to recall.

  “No, she hasn’t,” Tish supplied, unfolding her long legs to rise gracefully to her feet. “She put me to work as soon as we got back to the motel. Now that I think about it, she skipped lunch, too.”

  “You haven’t had dinner yet, either,” Sydney pointed out to her too-helpful friend, still thrown off balance by Reece’s unexpected appearance but recovering fast. “Why don’t we all go?”

  “No, thanks. I’m not used to climbing up and down cliffs without llamas nipping at my tush to keep me moving. I’m going to take a long, slow soak, then go over a few more of these reels.”

  Scooping up three of the minicassettes, she brushed by Reece with a wave of her red-tipped fingernails.

  “Llamas?” he inquired.

  “It’s a long story.” Locking her door behind her, Sydney slipped the key into her shorts pocket. “Where would you like to dine, the Lone Eagle Café or the Gas n’ Git? Zack tells me the gas station has a tolerable selection of day-old doughnuts and hot dogs smothered in onions and Hormel chili.”

  “You choose. I’m easy.”

  Easy wasn’t the adjective Sydney would have picked to describe Reece Henderson. Hard-assed had come to mind after their curt exchange of faxes a few weeks ago. Hard-edged was how she’d thought of him after he’d rescued her from her piñon tree. And yesterday he’d gone all professorial on her when he delivered his little lecture on fulcrums and trading distance for force or whatever.

  Then there was that other aspect of his personality, the one that had prompted him to step into an awkward situation a few nights ago to spare Arlene any more embarrassment. And the curious quirk of character that had resulted in a mind-shattering kiss.

  Sydney certainly wouldn’t mind exploring that particular side of his personality just a bit more. She didn’t want to do it at the Lone Eagle Café, though, with Lula Jenkins and the rest of the café’s patrons listening to every word. Her disastrous affair with Jamie Chavez had provided the town with enough fodder for gossip to last the previous decade. She didn’t want to fuel another ten years’ worth.

  “Let’s hit the Gas n’ Git,” she suggested, as much to test Reece’s resolve as her own. “We’ll get our dinner in a bag and have a picnic. I know a great place not too far out of town to watch the stars.”

  Watching stars wa
sn’t exactly what was on Reece’s mind when he turned the Jeep off the road some miles south of town. With the scent of chili and onions teasing his nostrils, he steered the vehicle along a rutted dirt track. Low hanging pines swished their branches against the Jeep’s roof.

  He still couldn’t quite believe he’d given in to the crazy impulse to take her up on her offer of dinner. He wouldn’t have even stopped at her room on his way to the café, much less skulked outside her door like a hopeful peeping Tom, if he hadn’t heard his name mentioned.

  Hell, he wouldn’t have stopped even then if he hadn’t caught a flash of Sydney’s slim, shapely legs stretched out on the pea-green shag carpet…the same bare legs that now tantalized Reece’s senses almost as much as the onions and chili.

  He’d never considered himself a leg man. He certainly couldn’t claim to be a connoisseur like his older brother, Evan. Seeing Sydney in something other than her baggy fatigue pants gave him a new appreciation of Evan’s particular fancy, however.

  “It’s not much farther,” she said, breaking into his silent contemplation of her shapely limbs. “Less than a mile. I think.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been out here,” she murmured absently. “Ten years, at least.”

  Which begged the question, Reece thought sardonically, of who she’d watched the stars with the last time. Was she taking him to one of her old trysting places?

  The idea that Sydney had driven out to this isolated spot with Jamie Chavez and had ended up rolling around in the back seat shaved the edge right off Reece’s concentration. The left front tire dropped into a rut, jouncing him and Sydney and their dinner.

  She didn’t comment on his driving skills, or lack thereof. With one hand braced against the dash and the other wrapped around the cardboard carryout box containing their dinner, she strained forward. Anticipation shimmered through the body detailed so precisely by that thin T-shirt tucked into thigh-riding shorts.

  “Listen! There it is!” She swiveled, her face alive with eagerness in the scant moonlight filtering through the pines. “Can you hear it?”

  Straining, Reece picked up a faint roar. “If you mean the river, I can.”

  “Not the river. The waterfall.”

  As soon as the Jeep cleared the trees and rolled to a stop a prudent distance from the river’s edge, Sydney sprang out. Leaving Reece and the chili dogs behind, she scrambled up on a flat ledge. Hands shoved in the back pockets of her shorts, she drank in the vista of a tumbling, opalescent waterfall.

  The falls weren’t the most impressive Reece had ever seen. Having spent most of his adult life on the world’s riverways, he’d viewed such spectacular spills as Canada’s Churchill Falls and the spot on the border between Argentina and Brazil where the Iguacu River plunged almost three hundred feet over a two-mile-wide escarpment. This narrow fall couldn’t be more than a twenty-five or thirty-foot drop, but the utter delight on Sydney’s face told him she saw it with the eye of an artist, not a hydrologist.

  He joined her on the ledge, almost as unsettled by the way her enchantment affected him as by his irritation of a few moments ago. The thought of her driving out here with Chavez still went down hard.

  He might even have simply spent an hour downing cold chili dogs and taken her home if she hadn’t turned to him at that moment, her eyes luminous in the moonlight.

  “This was one of our special spots,” she said softly. “Mine and my father’s. Almost as special as the ruins. Since those were underwater most of the time, we’d come here when he wanted to fish or just talk.”

  “You came here with your dad?”

  She nodded. “He was the fish and game warden at the state park while I was growing up. He…”

  She swallowed, then tried a smile to hide the other emotions that flickered across her face.

  “He died a few months ago.”

  Reece knew he was in trouble then. Big trouble. He forgot his earlier suspicions. Forgot that he didn’t have time for any complications in his life now right. The urge to comfort this woman gripped him and wouldn’t let go.

  He lifted a hand to stroke her cheek. He kept the touch gentle, soft. “I’m sorry.”

  Her smile got ragged at the edges. “Me, too. He was a good man. He loved the outdoors, and respected the natural order of things. You…you would have liked him.”

  As soon as she said it, Sydney knew the reverse was true as well. Her father would have liked Reece, would have admired his chosen profession. He’d often spoken of the utility of dams, of the way they harnessed nature’s excesses so that man and river could peacefully coexist without the constant threat of floods or droughts.

  But it wasn’t the thought of her dad’s approval that turned her head and brought her lips against Reece’s palm. It was the warmth of his skin, the gentleness of his touch. That and the shivery delight that coursed through her at the contact.

  He used his thumb to tip her head back, and the look in his eyes sharpened her delight into a spear of need so strong Sydney shook with it.

  A frown feathered his brows. “Cold?”

  “No. Yes.” Another shiver rippled down her spine. “I don’t know.”

  “The chili dogs might warm you up.” His thumb traced her jawline, her lower lip. “Or I could.”

  “You choose,” she whispered, echoing his earlier words to her. “I’m easy.”

  Chapter 8

  A s soon as she heard herself, Sydney winced.

  Of all the stupid, idiotic, ill-chosen replies! She’d only been playing Reece’s words back to him, mimicking his earlier suggestion that she choose their dinner locale, but in this particular situation the attribute “easy” carried a meaning she hadn’t intended.

  It also conjured up some instant, unpleasant memories. That was only one of the labels Sebastian had hung on her the awful night he’d found her in his son’s arms. Chagrined that the memory could still sting, Sydney backpedaled, hard and fast.

  “I know you’ve been filled in on every detail of my sordid past, but I didn’t mean that as an invitation to anything more than a kiss.”

  “I didn’t take it as anything more.”

  His thumb was at it again, soothing, stroking, distracting. She saw herself reflected in his eyes before they filled with a disturbing gleam.

  “Maybe I can change your mind.”

  “You think?”

  “A guy can only try,” he murmured.

  Sydney stood unmoving under the kiss, determined not to repeat her mistake of ten years ago. She’d tumbled into love…or thought she had…with a charming rogue, and let him distract her the last time she’d tried to film the ruins. She refused to let that happen again.

  Maybe she should have thought of that before she’d invited Reece for a moonlit picnic at the falls. And maybe she’d wanted him to kiss her again, his mouth warm and hard on hers, his lips wickedly wonderful. But that insidious want did not mean she was going to fall into his bed when they returned to the motel, or invite him into hers.

  She knew she had to make that clear when he lifted his head, his eyes at once questioning and rueful at her lack of response.

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” she said quietly.

  “Okay.” His thumb made one more pass over her bottom lip before he dropped his hand. “Let’s eat.”

  Surprised at his easy capitulation, Sydney watched him make his way back to the Jeep to retrieve their dinner. She hadn’t expected him to give in that readily, and couldn’t quite suppress an irrational pique that he had.

  Telling herself to stop acting like a total jerk, she folded her legs under her Indian-style, sank down onto the rock shelf and waited for him to join her.

  Reece kept his demeanor nonchalant as he returned with the soggy brown bag. Beneath that casual expression, however, frustration ate at him like fire ants at a picnic. It had taken everything he had and then some to walk away from Sydney a few moments ago. His body still ached with wanting her.


  She didn’t want him, though. She’d made that clear enough. Obviously he’d misread her signals, inferred more from her suggestion to drive out and watch the stars than she’d intended. Even worse, he’d let himself dwell far too much on that kiss the other night. She’d been playing to an audience then, he reminded himself with a twist of his lips. They both had.

  Unfortunately, the reminder did nothing to relieve the ache in his lower body. As a result he made no objection when she swiped the last of the chili from a corner of her mouth, tossed her paper napkin and the empty beer cans into the cardboard carrier, and suggested they head back to the motel.

  The conversation on the return trip flowed a good deal less freely than it had during the drive out. Reece didn’t try to force it. Between the spicy chili and his irritatingly persistent desire for Sydney, both of which seemed to have settled like a lump in his gut, he had plenty to think about. Her annoyed exclamation when they turned into the motel parking lot gave him something altogether different to focus on.

  “For Pete’s sake!”

  Reece slanted her a quick look. “What?”

  “One of the crew must have been in my room. They left the door ajar.”

  Sure enough, a slice of light spilled from Unit Six. Frowning, Reece pulled into the empty space in front of the open door.

  “Who on your crew has a key to your room?”

  “Everyone. We use it as sort of an on-site studio. We keep the master logs and the video cassette players in there.”

  Along with a lot of other expensive equipment, Sydney thought with a slash of worry. Extra strobes. Lenses in fitted cases. Spare batteries and digital sound units. She always upped her theft insurance when she went on-site, but a possible delay in the shooting schedule due to stolen equipment bothered her more than the idea that someone might have broken into her room. She was halfway to the door when Reece caught her arm.