Ali slowly lowered her digital camera to stare. “Wow,” she murmured. “You don’t even look like the same guy.”
He scowled, embarrassed that, for a split second, he’d mistaken the flash of the camera for a gunshot.
“If I didn’t know better,” she went on, “I’d never guess you were Garrett Miller, zillionaire entrepreneur.”
“Zillionaire?” Shaking his head, he turned to study himself in the full-length mirror. “You know,” he said, growing thoughtful. “This getup might be just what I need to keep from being recognized.”
“Like I said,” Ali said, with a shrug, “when in Rome…” She reached to tear the price tag off his shirt.
He yanked his arm back. “What are you doing?”
She spun him around to rip the tag off the rear pocket of the jeans. “Taking off the price tags. Don’t worry,” she assured him as she gathered from the dressing room the clothes he’d worn into the store, as well as the stack of clothing he hadn’t tried on yet, “I’ll give them to the salesclerk, along with these other clothes. That way you can wear your new duds out of the store and not have to change again.”
Ali held the camera before her face with one hand, and directed Garrett with the other. “A little to the left. A little more. Stop! Perfect.” She clicked off a half-dozen or more shots, then dropped the camera to swing from her neck. “Now let’s try a few with you standing with one boot propped on the boulder.”
He dropped his hands to his hips in frustration. “I’m not a damn model, you know.”
“No,” she said patiently. “And I’m not a chauffeur, yet I’ve been driving you around all day like I was.”
“A duty you’re being well paid for,” he reminded her.
She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, yeah. Right. Tell you what,” she said. “Pose for a few more shots, and I’ll give you a full set of prints, no charge.”
“‘A few shots’ is all I agreed to when you talked me into this nonsense more than an hour ago.”
“Can I help it if you’re such a handsome model?”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” he said dryly.
“Okay. How about this? You let me take a few more pictures, and I’ll chauffeur you around the whole month you’re in town.”
He frowned a moment, as if considering, then nodded. “All right. You’ve got yourself a deal.”
Grinning, she drew the camera before her face again. “Boot on the boulder,” she instructed. “Forearm braced on the knee. Now look off into the distance and make that face you make when you’re thinking really hard. Great!” she exclaimed, and clicked away. “Man, you should see this. The sun is setting just behind your left shoulder and creating perfect shadows on your face.
“Give me a forlorn look,” she said, continuing to click off shots. “You know. Like you’ve been running from the law for months, and you’re missing that pretty little saloon girl you met up in Dodge City.”
“A saloon girl in Dodge City?” He dropped his head back and laughed. “Damn, Ali, where do you get this stuff?”
The transformation laughter made to his face almost made her drop her camera, but she managed to hold on to it and keep clicking. “Part of the job,” she told him. “Just part of the job.”
Shaking his head, he dragged his foot from the boulder. “You should be a writer, not a photographer.” When he realized she was still taking pictures, he held up a hand to block her view. “Would you stop,” he complained. “You must’ve taken a hundred pictures or more.”
She reluctantly lowered the camera. “I’ll be lucky if a third are worth anything.”
He went stock-still. “You didn’t say anything about selling these pictures.”
“Would you lighten up?” she said, laughing. “I took the pictures for fun, not to sell. Kind of a souvenir for you of your trip to Texas.”
“Oh,” he said in relief. “Which reminds me,” he said, and plopped down on the boulder, stretched out his legs. “You were going to tell me why you’re running a bed-and-breakfast, rather than focusing on a career in photography.”
Gathering up her tote, she crossed to sit beside him. “Are you sure you want to hear this?” she asked, as she pulled her camera over her head. “It’s really boring.”
“I wouldn’t have asked, if I didn’t.”
With a shrug, she tucked the camera into her tote. “It goes back to when I dropped out of college during my junior year and moved to Austin.”
“Why did you drop out?”
“My parents come from a long line of doctors and they expected me to follow in their footsteps. Carry on the family tradition. That kind of thing.”
“And you didn’t want to?”
“Not even a little. I did try,” she said in her defense. “But I hated all the science courses I was required to take and my grades proved it. I tried to talk my parents into letting me change my major, but they wouldn’t listen. They kept saying I wasn’t applying myself. That being a doctor was an honorable occupation, a duty even. We argued about it all during Christmas break, and I finally told them that they couldn’t force me to become a doctor, that I was going to sign up for the courses I wanted to take.”
“And did you?”
She grimaced. “For all the good it did me. When they received the bill from the university for my spring tuition and saw what courses I’d signed up for, they refused to pay it. When that didn’t whip me into line, they closed the checking account they’d set up for me to pay my college expenses, which left me with no money and no way to pay for my housing, food. Nothing.”
“So how did you end up in Texas?”
“Claire Fleming. She and I met our freshman year in college and became best friends. She knew my parents had cut me off and how bummed I was. To cheer me up, she invited me to go to Austin with her to visit her grandmother. I had nothing better to do, so I tagged along.
“To make a long story a little shorter, the Vista belongs to Claire’s grandmother, Margaret Fleming. It was a wedding present from her first husband. Sadly he died after they’d been married only a few years. She remarried several years later to some oil guy and moved to Saudi Arabia, but she held on to the house. Said selling it would be like cutting out her heart.
“She came back to the States several times a year for month-long visits and always stayed at the house. As she got older, it became harder for her to travel and she wasn’t able to come as often. You can imagine what happened to the house. What the vandals didn’t destroy, varmints did. It was a mess. She’d always hoped that Claire would want the house someday, but Claire fell in love with an Aussie and was planning to move to Australia right after graduation, which she did, by the way. So the grandmother decided to make one final trip to Austin before selling the house. Claire was to meet her there
