“You mean delete them?” she asked, obviously confused by his word usage.
“Yeah. If that’d be what makes you happy.”
She lowered her arms and walked over to the sink, picking up a rag. “It would have made me happy to have my privacy respected in the first place,” she said, starting to clean the counters briskly. “But since I wasn’t granted that the other day, your offer will have to suffice. How do I know I can trust you not to have made a dozen copies of those photos?”
“I’m a professional photographer. I’d never release any photos including a person without their signed permission. If I ever did, said person would have the right to take me to court,” he said, taking a bite of corn bread and butter that melted in his mouth. “Blimey, this is bloody good.”
She rinsed off the rag and folded it neatly. “All right. I spoke to Katie Pierce about you yesterday, and she seems to find you fairly trustworthy. I guess I’ll just have to take her word for it.”
“Fairly trustworthy?” Chance frowned, pausing in the ravishment of his meal. He hadn’t tasted food this good in a long time. Sherona’s slow smile nearly made him forget his flash of disappointment at being judged only fairly trustworthy by Rill’s wife, Katie. He’d been trying to make a good impression on his hostess in Vulture’s Canyon.
“As trustworthy as a man with unlimited wealth, talent and cockiness can be,” she said.
“Katie said that?” he asked incredulously.
“No. I listened to her describe you in much rosier terms and came to that conclusion on my own,” Sherona said bluntly. She walked toward the swinging door behind the counter. “I have to unload some boxes in the storage room. Just yell when you finish eating and get your computer.”
“You mean you are going to delete all the photos yourself?”
“You better believe I am,” she told him with a cool sideways glance before she pushed through the swinging door.
Chance grinned and took another voracious bite of meatloaf. In the privacy of Rill and Katie’s guesthouse he’d examined those photos more times than he’d ever admit to. He knew firsthand they packed a gargantuan punch. Sherona was going to have to look at each photograph before she deleted it, and he was going to be right there next to her while it happened.
He was looking forward to this.
Chapter Two
Sherona started when she heard Chance call her name and nearly dropped the can of tomatoes she was placing on the pantry shelf. Her nerves had been jumping ever since she’d glanced across the counter and seen him sitting in that booth, all long, lean, careless male virility. A man like Chance Hathoway didn’t come through a town like Vulture’s Canyon save once in a lifetime, and he was bound to cause havoc in at least one female heart during that ephemeral visit.
For some reason, fate had seen fit to make her heart the one at risk, Sherona thought wryly as she nervously smoothed her skirt and rushed into her office, glancing at herself in the cracked mirror on her office wall. Or maybe not her heart, but certainly her body. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d experienced her femininity and sexuality as acutely as she had the other day on the edge of that lake with Chance’s camera trained directly on her. Knowing that he’d witnessed the sudden, sharp awareness of herself as a beautiful, desirable woman made her vulnerable to him.
Or maybe what made her vulnerable was that his observance of her was what had caused her potent arousal.
She knew who he was, of course. She hadn’t out there at Orchard Lake, but she’d recognized his name when Katie mentioned their houseguest yesterday while she’d been visiting the diner, and Sherona had put two and two together. Her brother, Derek, had bought Sherona one of Chance Hathoway’s books last Christmas when she’d taken up landscape photography as a hobby. Hathoway was one of the best-known nature photographers in the world. His photos had appeared in museums, art galleries, magazines, books and newspapers across the globe. He’d won multiple prizes for his work—actually, a surprising number for a man so young. The fact that he was also the heir to the Hathowa
y retail fortune and a gorgeous Aussie with a bad-boy, adventure-here-I-come smile only added to his mystique.
This was the man with whom Sherona Legion—diner owner, cook, waitress and lifetime resident of the skeleton of a forgotten town, Vulture’s Canyon—was about to go and view naked photos with.
Nude photos of herself.
As she walked out of her office, her gaze flickered across the U.S. lotto jackpot ticket she’d bought the other day. She’d tacked it up on the bulletin board, along with the ten other ones she’d wasted her money on over the past decade. Stupid ritual, she knew, but it hadn’t stopped her from buying one chance a year for the past ten years at an escape from Vulture’s Canyon; one wispy, ephemeral shot at finally springing her life out of permanent stall-mode.
Sometimes you had to take a chance if you ever wanted to truly live.
She applied the no-nonsense, unflappable expression she’d acquired after years of being a cook and waitress in a quirky community of artists and nonconformists and pushed through the swinging doors.
He sat on his stool, his glass of ice water, his laptop and an opened package of mints sitting before him on the counter. She noticed his dinner plate was missing. Her gaze flicked to the sink, and she saw that he’d rinsed it off.
“Make yourself at home,” she said with amused sarcasm.
“I was just trying to clean up after myself,” he said, attempting an innocent look and completely failing. It was a little hard for a rugged, six-foot-and-so-many-inches, shaggy-haired, whiskered male who had seen it all in every location across the globe to come off as angelic. Her wry glance told him so.
“Don’t open those photos out here!” she said, suddenly realizing that his fingers were tapping across the keyboard and his monitor faced the entrance to the diner. Just what she needed, for her customers to see her stark naked. Anger flickered through her once again at his infringement on her privacy.
“Come on,” she said, waving for him to follow. She didn’t look around until she’d reached her tiny, cramped office in the back room and sat at her desk.
“Shouldn’t we lock up out front?” Chance asked as he maneuvered into the only other chair in the office. His knees pressed against the wood panel on the front of her desk when he sat. This room was much too small for him.