He looked both real and terrifying.
“Wow,” she said, looking down at the view spread beneath them. “No wonder your mom was hooked on this.”
Lorenzo laughed. He raced toward the horizon, the wind tearing through Cassie’s hair. She felt exuberant and alive—yet completely safe. Lorenzo’s golden talons were locked around her waist and she knew he wouldn’t drop her.
She turned to ask him about flying, and that was when she saw the scale on his chest. It hung askew, dangling lower than the others in that row and at an odd angle. She touched it, wondering what was wrong with it, and at the merest touch, it freed itself from his hide.
It fell into her hand, glimmering like a piece of armor.
Lorenzo didn’t seem to notice, so Cassie figured this happened all the time. She put the scale in her pocket, unwilling to lose something so beautiful. She could see a bit of skin exposed where the scale had been, but maybe another would grow quickly in its place.
He dove then toward a high outcropping of rock, landing on the top with grace. He folded his wings behind himself, put Cassie down, and inclined his head to her. She thought she saw a mischievous gleam in his eyes, but then he took off again, circling her high perch.
He rocketed down toward the earth, the sun still behind him. Another shot with lots of contrast. Cassie clicked and clicked. She saw the blue shimmer of light surround him just before his feet touched the ground.
One minute he was a dragon on final approach.
The next moment, a naked man stood on the desert. He pivoted and glanced up at her, his muscles flexing. Even with his features in shadow, Cassie knew Lorenzo was grinning at her.
Then she realized why. There was no way down from this pinnacle of rock, not without a lot of gear she didn’t have.
“Hey! You can’t leave me up here!” she shouted, and he laughed.
“Got everything you need?” he asked.
“And then some. Memory card is full to the brim.” Cassie turned off the camera and tucked it into her pocket. “Are you going to make me jump?” she demanded, not believing it for a moment. It had to be two hundred feet down.
Lorenzo leapt into the air instead of replying, shimmering and shifting and soaring straight for her in his dragon form. He snatched her off the top of the rock, pivoted, and shot down to the earth again, more agile and more exciting than any theme park ride.
“A girl could get used to this,” Cassie teased when they stood beside the car again. Lorenzo flashed her a smile, then tugged on his jeans and boots, his gaze never leaving her.
She offered him the camera. “Have a look. Delete anything you don’t want to go further.”
He seemed to be startled. “You’re kidding.”
“No. We had a deal. There’s got to be six hundred shots there. Even if there are fifty you don’t like, there are a lot left.”
He smiled then, the expression dawning slowly over his face. Cassie realized that she’d never seen Lorenzo smile with real pleasure, not the way he was smiling now, as if she were the most remarkable creature on the face of the earth.
She had the evidence in her camera of how remarkable he was.
And she knew then that she could love this man, this dragon shifter, for the rest of her life, with all his complexities and enigmas. Forever wouldn’t be nearly long enough to work all of those stories free.
When he smiled at her like this, she was warmed right to her toes. She wanted to be with him for the duration. She wanted to figure out a way to be with him after his spectacle.
Because she not only could love him—she already did.
“You’re good at this,” Lorenzo said. He was flipping through the images on the camera as Cassie watched, her obvious delight with her work rising by the second. He could feel her pulse leap every time a good shot slipped into the viewfinder. The sun was warm on his back, and Cassie’s presence by his side was sweet.
Friday.
One more day.
He suddenly, irrevocably, did not want to go alone. It wasn’t just his duty to be with Cassie for the duration. He wanted to be with her forever.
“I am,” she agreed with obvious pride.
She should be proud. The shots needed no cropping or touch-ups. Virtually each one was perfectly composed, even though she’d shot on the fly. She’d done it instinctively, intuitively, because she was talented.
He couldn’t reconcile that skill—never mind her pleasure in what she’d done—with the fact that she was thinking of giving it up.
“Then why do you do this paparazzi stuff? You’re too good for it.” He watched her closely, not needing his sharp perception to notice how she flinched. She didn’t like talking about herself any more than he did, and was even more reluctant to share her secret thoughts.
“You don’t know that,” she protested, but her heart wasn’t in it.
Instead he heard longing in her words.
“It’s not what you really want to do, is it?”
Cassie exhaled and folded her arms across her chest. “Can we just talk about the shots?”
“No. Let’s talk about why you don’t believe in yourself, when you have so much innate talent. Let’s talk about why you take chances to get shots you can sell, but sell yourself short.”
“Ouch,” she said, giving him a hot look, and he feared she would shut him out completely.
But he sensed that this was important.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it,” Lorenzo said quietly. “And I understand your wish for privacy.” She looked up at him then, her eyes dark. “Think of it as fair trade.” He smiled, hoping to encourage her.
She averted her gaze, blushing a bit when she looked back at him. “I guess I do know a lot of your secrets.”
“I guess you do.”
“Okay.” Cassie leaned her hips against the car and Lorenzo did the same beside her.
She looked relaxed and happy in a way that hadn’t been the case the first time he’d seen her. Her hair was free of its ponytail, dancing around her face in a most enchanting manner, and the sunrise was reflected in her eyes. Her shirt was untucked, and he could glimpse the lace edge of her bra. Those appalling boots were dusty, but not without their merit in this particular place.
If anything, the contrast made her look more feminine.
Lorenzo could have stared at her all day, but mindful of her uncertainty, he turned to watch the sun as well. He tried to content himself with the soft press of Cassie’s arm against his and the faint scent of her skin, but failed.
He wanted more.
“Tell me,” he urged quietly, and she did.
Chapter 14
“Okay, here’s the story,” Cassie said, her tone resolved. “I was supposed to grow up to be a mom. My parents thought that’s all that women were good for. I wanted more. I was good with a camera. The short version is that we fought, I left as soon as I was legal, and I was determined to make it and prove them wrong.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Lorenzo said.
“Celebrity shots pay the best. When I started in the paparazzi business, I had a mentor. He was one of the greats, but he’d left the field to become an editor. He saw promise in me or something, and he took me under his wing, right from the beginning. He’d give me tips and it took me a while to realize that he didn’t share those tips with all the freelance photographers. It took me years to realize that he was deliberately helping me build my portfolio.”
“And what did he want in exchange?” Lorenzo could imagine what Cassie had thought he’d wanted, given her family history, and he hoped she’d been wrong.
Cassie smiled. “It’s always a negotiation, isn’t it? That’s what I thought, so I confronted him one day and asked the very same thing. He wanted to go for a drink in some quiet bar, where
no one in our business hung out.”
Lorenzo felt his eyes narrow.
“I thought I knew what he wanted then,” Cassie said. “But I was wrong.” She laughed at Lorenzo, and he knew his surprise showed. “He wanted to give me advice.”
“Really?” Lorenzo knew his skepticism showed.
“I know,” Cassie said, “but that was it. He’d been there, in Paris, the night that Princess Diana died. I didn’t know until we had that drink that it had been his last night photographing. He told me that I would have to decide which side of the line I was on, and he wanted me to remember that there are things more valuable than a photo credit. Or the check it generates. He told me that one day, I’d have to choose, and that I needed to remember that I had enough talent to do anything I wanted to do.”
“That’s it?”
She sighed and looked across the desert. He heard her breath catch. “He was dying. He knew it, but no one else did. I think originally he just thought I had talent and wanted to help me out, give me the break he hadn’t necessarily had. But in time, I think he saw some of himself in me, and he had to talk to somebody, so he talked to me. He was dead a couple of weeks later. I was in Kenya on assignment and didn’t even know for a month.”
He saw her throat work, and let her take the time she needed. No wonder she was good at being alone. She’d lost a lot of people who had been important to her.
“I miss him. I miss how blunt he was. I miss how he would always push for a bit more, even when you thought you’d given your all. I miss how he laid out truths that you never expected, or maybe didn’t even want to hear, but that later, those truths seemed so obvious that you couldn’t believe you’d overlooked them.”
“He was more than a mentor,” Lorenzo suggested quietly.
Cassie nodded. “In a way, he was the father I never had. He understood me, and he didn’t hold that against me. He didn’t try to change me to fit his own ideas of what or who I should be.” She cast him a sidelong smile, if a sad one. “And I wouldn’t be who I am without having known him.”
“And so, did that day come?”
Cassie nodded. “About a month ago, I was chasing a shot.” She named a child star who was often in the news. “She’d been out of sight for a while, which wasn’t characteristic, and the tabloids were hot for shots. Dead, alive, sick, whatever. They just wanted images. I’d met the housekeeper and she let me in, even let me park my car inside the compound.”
“Because she liked you?”
Cassie rolled her eyes. “Because I paid her. Some of these people with millions and millions of dollars are so cheap with their employees. It’s shocking. And, of course, it makes them vulnerable, because a couple hundred dollars solves nearly anything. And if you’re going to get a couple hundred thousand for the shot, that’s pocket change. Just a cost of doing business.”
Lorenzo was suddenly very glad he’d always ensured that his help were well compensated. He’d done it because it was right, not because he’d thought of the security risk of doing otherwise.
“So I was there, hiding in their back garden, when they came out of the house. The girl and her mother. And they had the family dog. The dog was clearly unwell, and not a young dog either. The girl was crying. The staff were scurrying, clearing out the limo, while the mother frantically called the vet. And I knew right then and there what was happening, that on this day, this famous child star was just a kid who was losing her pet. And that maybe it was a little bit worse for her, this day that every kid goes through sooner or later, because maybe that pet was the only friend she had.”
“And you chose,” Lorenzo suggested.
Cassie nodded. “There were paparazzi everywhere outside the gates of their home. I knew they couldn’t drive out without being photographed a thousand times. It was a moment where they needed their privacy. I revealed myself, but before I could offer them anything, the mother turned on me. Oh, she called me a lot of things—‘fucking parasite’ is one that I remember—and would have had me thrown out, but I couldn’t look past that kid’s tears.”
Cassie took a breath and swallowed. “I tipped the batteries out of my camera and threw them in the grass. I told her about the number of photographers outside; I told her that I had my Jeep and that the windows were tinted. I told her that everyone knew my car and that they’d ignore it, that she and her daughter and her dog could hide in the back and I’d take them wherever they wanted to go.”
“What happened?”
“She didn’t believe me. But the kid did, and she begged to have Patches stop hurting. So we did it.” Cassie nodded, her eyes filled with tears. “It worked like a charm. Their security guards even made a show of kicking me out, which made the other photographers laugh. I helped them into the vet’s, and then I left.” She shook her head. “Never bought new batteries for that camera. That’s when I decided I needed a vacation.”
“Maybe you need more than a vacation,” Lorenzo suggested softly. “Maybe you need to retire.”
Cassie nodded slowly. “And start all over again.”
Lorenzo watched the play of emotions on her face. This mattered a great deal to her—but he saw that she was afraid of pursuing her dream, whatever it was. “Sounds like you know what you want to do.”
Cassie sighed. “From the first moment I held a camera, I dreamed of being the next Ansel Adams. Later I thought maybe the next Edward Burtynsky. I want to photograph moments to remember. I want to take pictures that matter.”
“So?” Lorenzo prompted. “Do it.”
Cassie grimaced. “I’m not sure I have enough talent.”
“Your mentor thought you did.”
“My dad didn’t.”
“What do you think?” Lorenzo asked softly. He leaned over and tapped her heart. “What do you believe in your heart?”
She watched him for a long moment. “I’d like to think I could do it.”
Lorenzo scoffed, suspecting that would prompt a reaction from her. “But you’re afraid to take a chance on yourself? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It’s different when it matters.”
“Bullshit. It’s always mattered to you.”
She glanced up at him, surprised, but he could see conviction dawning in her eyes.
Lorenzo indicated the camera. “Do these shots count as real?”
She smiled at him, her gaze warm. “You’re about as real as it gets, Lorenzo di Fiore.”
“And you are the best photographer I’ve ever known, Cassie Redmond,” Lorenzo said. He tipped up her chin with a fingertip. “Life is about risk. Taking chances is the only way any of us know that we’re alive.”
She smiled. “I guess you live by that credo.”
He lifted a brow. “I think you do, too. Aren’t you the best at getting a shot? I think we have that in common.” He smiled. “I believe in you. And I know you’re a great photographer. You just showed me the evidence. Quit playing it safe. You owe it to the world to take a chance on yourself, Cassie.”
She stared at him, tears rising in her eyes, and then she smiled. “Thank you.”
“No. Thank you.”
There was nothing else to do then, nothing but bend down and capture her lips with his. He had no idea what the scheme was against him, much less whether he could thwart it. The Slayers weren’t in their vicinity, but Lorenzo knew that wouldn’t last. This was only a reprieve. He’d die fighting in Cassie’s defense, although he’d prefer to live with her by his side.
He just had to figure out how.
No matter how it shook out, Lorenzo wanted to taste her one last time.
Cassie felt once again that Lorenzo was reading her mind. His eyes seemed more gold in this light, but he was no less intent upon her. His gaze danced over her, as if he’d memorize her features, and she swallowed at the heat in his eyes.
She wanted him.
She didn’t care if he knew how much.
There was nothing left to say.
The sun had cleared the horizon and its light was becoming less rosy, more yellow. The desert and the rocks appeared to be glowing still, but not touched with fire. There wasn’t a sound in their vicinity except the low murmur of the wind, the shift of sand. The sky was a perfectly clear blue, a single contrail streaking high overhead.
They were alone, as alone as two people could be, and Cassie didn’t want it to be any other way.
When Lorenzo reached for her, she didn’t resist him. He speared his fingers into her hair with a proprietary ease that made her shiver and drew her closer. She was his to claim, his to take, and Cassie realized with a start that she always would be.
She would never know another man like Lorenzo.
She never wanted to.
The warmth of his hand cupped her nape as he bent and kissed her. Thoroughly.
There was something different in his kiss. It was more hungry, more demanding, less reserved.
Because this might be the last time.
Cassie was just as determined as he was to make it count. She slid her arms around his shoulders in complete abandon. She stretched to her toes and arched against him, wanting everything he could give. She wouldn’t hold back, either. They’d both have the memory of this morning.
And not one regret.
“Slow,” he murmured. “I want this time to be slow.”
“We’ve done slow before,” Cassie whispered against the heat of his skin. She spared him a glance, knowing her eyes were twinkling. “Let’s be wild.”
He smiled that slow, sensuous smile and arched one brow. “Dragon style?”
Cassie nodded. “So hot and powerful that everything is left shaking afterward.”
“Deal.” He grinned, and she knew by the light in his eyes that he’d take her dare and then some. He scanned their surroundings, then scooped her up in his arms and headed for a hollow carved out of the rock. Cassie kicked off her boots as he walked.