n’t slept . . . but he could go without sleep for days, and I’d probably never know. He hid things that well. But with Keegan’s odd question about Coen sleeping, and then the first night Coen had spent the night and had seemed to be in awe over the fact that he’d slept . . . I wouldn’t put it past Coen to be telling me the truth.
Deciding not to breach that subject right now, I looked at his laptop and my eyes widened. “Oh my God. Coen, is this one of your shoots?”
“Uh, yeah . . . I guess we haven’t really talked about this yet.”
I shot him a confused look before stepping closer to the laptop. “Can I look through them?”
His dark eyes widened and he shrugged before reaching for a coffee cup. “If you want. I just finished editing those before you got here.”
Sitting down at the desk, I clicked through a shoot of a tattooed girl on a couch in nothing but a lacy pair of underwear. Her arms had been perfectly positioned to cover her bare breasts in the different positions. It was beautiful and seductive, and I’d frowned by the time I got to the last one.
“Are there more shoots?”
Coen was staring at me like he was waiting for something.
“Do you not want me to look at these?”
He kept looking at me before flashing his eyes at the screen. “I’m waiting for you to get mad.”
“Why would I get mad?”
Nodding in the direction of the laptop, he kept his eyes pinned on mine. “She was topless. She only had underwear on. This was a week and a half ago. I’m just waiting for you to react like a normal girlfriend.”
My lips twitched. “And how would a normal girlfriend react?”
He put the hand holding the coffee cup out in front of him and raised his shoulders up. “I don’t know. Yell. Say you don’t want me doing those kinds of shoots. Be jealous, I don’t know.”
I widened my eyes and acted like I was really considering doing just that. “Well, we both know how much I love to argue with you. But that”—I gestured toward the screen—“is amazing. Besides, Keegan already told me you did those kinds of photos sometimes. It’s not like it was a secret.”
“Of course it wasn’t a secret, Reagan. But it’s one thing to know about it, its another to see it.”
I smiled softly at him. “Does it bother me? I would be lying if I said it didn’t. Do I think what you did with that shoot was beautiful? Absolutely. Do I wish I had her body? Hell yes.” Coen made a face, but I kept going. “Would I ever ask you to stop doing those shoots? No.”
“Where did you come from?” he muttered.
“The way I see it, you were doing these long before we started seeing each other. So I know that if there was something to be worried about with these shoots, then it would have been going on even back then, and we would have never started dating.”
Coen stared at me in awe for a few seconds without saying anything. Just before I asked if he was okay, he asked, “Can I pull a Parker?”
“A Parker?”
“You, Duchess, are the coolest.”
I laughed loudly before turning back around in the chair to face the laptop. “Can I see more?”
He stepped up behind me and kissed the top of my head as he clicked through his files to where all his shoots were. “Knock yourself out. If you don’t want to stay through the whole shoot, I’ll call you when I’m done, all right?”
I nodded and tilted my head to the side when he brushed his lips against my neck, and shamelessly watched as he set up his studio. But by the time his client got there, I’d barely spared the guy a glance before getting caught up in the thousands upon thousands of pictures on Coen’s laptop.
There were some more like the first one I’d looked through. Some couple shots and weddings. The ones of the guy when I’d first come to the studio, and a lot of this guy I was having trouble figuring out if he was a firefighter, model, or fitness athlete. Then there were the more artistic ones, where every new set had me leaning closer to the laptop, and falling more in love with Coen’s style.
Clicking on the last file, labeled “bullshit,” my eyebrows rose and eyes darted to Coen before quickly going back to the screen. My mouth slowly fell open as I clicked through picture after picture of Coen. It was at probably the twelfth photo that my eyebrows dropped and pinched together, before I rapidly clicked back to the beginning and started over again, this time going through faster.
Sitting back in the chair, I folded my arms over my chest and angled my head to the side as I stared at the picture of him filling the screen. I don’t know how many pictures I’d finally gone through of him before stopping. Close to one hundred? Every one of them had been amazing, or funny, or artsy, or just sexy as sin. But that’s not why I couldn’t go through any more. I couldn’t go through any more because in every single picture, Coen’s face was somehow covered. Either by a shadow, glasses, mask, hat, cameras, paint . . . something. There wasn’t one that was just him.
“I didn’t think you’d sta—find the lame folder.”
Looking up at him, I pointed to the screen. “Do you have an issue with your face?”