She didn’t like his words, didn’t like his bitterness, didn’t like that he was correct. Since she was a kid she’d wanted to be a reporter, but she wasn’t blind to the narrow line that a journalist had to walk. Integrity versus news.
Instinctively she changed the subject to something safer. Like sex. “Is this your idea of seduction? It’s not working,” she muttered, relieved when the tight smile appeared again.
“No. It’s my idea of trying to get you off this rock.”
He looked strangely content for a man who was disturbed, but she understood. He provoked her, but she could feel the answering thrum in her blood, the tightening of her skin, the brooding pulse between her thighs.
Frowning, she crossed her legs and his eyes followed the movement with a knowing awareness that didn’t help the situation. “That didn’t work with the pilgrims at Plymouth. It’s not going to work with me. I have an assignment. I’m going to do my assignment, and I’m sorry if my presence disturbs your man-in-the-bubble existence. Actually, no, I’m not sorry. It’s a lot of fun to irritate you.”
He looked at her, his eyes a little too stunned. “Do you clip the wings off butterflies, as well?”
It was fascinating the way he drifted into insults so easily, using them like a shield, parrying anything that cut too close. “A butterfly, are we?” she said, raising a faux superior brow.
“I like to think in objectifying metaphors, dehumanizing as much as possible. It makes dealing with people much easier. Generally I like to avoid most people.”
Not quite sure how to answer that one, not quite sure why he seemed content to sit with her on the rock, Jenn elected to remain silent, her legs firmly locked.
It was a beautiful night not to be thinking about sex. The sounds of nature weren’t quite so forbidding when he was beside her. Somewhere an owl was hooting, and she realized she’d never heard the hoot of an owl. Crickets played and the stars shimmered in a velvet sky. When he didn’t think she was looking, he would glance at the display on her phone, matching the constellation to the one’s overhead. But she was always secretly looking, always watching him.
She liked him, she admitted. He was the best sort of man. Brutally honest and unafraid to speak his mind, dark and twisted such as it was. But it was that honesty that was refreshing.
He leaned back on the uneven surface of the stone, his chest rising steadily, his face turned up to the sky. He had a nice chest. He chose to hide it, much like he seemed to hide everything, a complete opposite of most of the other men she met who wanted to drone on about every aspect of their existence as if she couldn’t wait to hang on each and every second of their day. Frankly a little mystery could be very sexy.
Maybe she should do this. Maybe she should have an affair. Maybe she should lean over four inches and kiss him. Feel that sharp mouth on hers. Slide her hands under the buttons of his shirt, and see if his heart would beat faster. At the moment, so deep into her own dreams, she thought that it would.
“What’s your assignment?” he asked, which was the very worst question to ask while she was contemplating seduction.
Turning back to the matters at hand, which weren’t nearly as exciting as her current thoughts, she wiped sweaty palms on her jeans. “Harmony Springs. The Summer Nights Festival. The city-goers’ annual mecca to a quiet upstate community that offers very little in comparison to the myriad wonders of the five boroughs, so why the heck do all these people come here?”
Perhaps he noted the snark in her voice. “Which do you work for? Fear-mongering scandal-chaser with a penchant for yellow journalism or overpriced glossies perpetuating an idea of beauty or wealth that no ordinary person could achieve? “
She looked at him sharply, surprised by the anger. These days people were cynical about government, business and international diplomacy. But the media had been defanged long ago.
“I work for a newspaper. Large. Manhattan-based. Many Pulitzers among the staff. You probably haven’t heard of it.”
Beneath the sarcasm, she still felt the thrill, the fierce pride in her job, which warred with her marginalized female propensity to remain humble. Usually the pride won out.
His mouth curved, and not in a happy way. “They give the Pulitzer to every journalistic rabble-rouser who spent their college years watching All the President’s Men.”
After all her bragging—completely deserved in her eyes—the man didn’t look nearly as impressed as she’d hoped. Secretly she wanted to make that disdainful gaze flash with admiration and respect. Some of it was her own defensiveness, her own not quite deserved pride in her career. And some of it was because he belonged to the world of the intelligentsia and the literati. It was a nut she wanted to crack, a place she wanted to belong. At the paper, the halls were filled with people who dropped rhetorical devices at the drop of a hat. Instinctively she knew he lived in that high-brow existence, as well. His careful assessment of his surroundings, his use of language, his absolute moral certainty. So, who was he?
“I’m assuming you’re not a reporter. What is your job?”
He waited a long time before replying. But eventually he met her eyes casually. Too casually. “Writer.”
“Journalist?” she asked, not because she believed he was, but merely to see him dump all over the profession again. There was much to be gleaned from a person’s prejudices.
“Fiction. Not so different.”
A writer? Sure, there was something bohemian about him, but he seemed a little more intense than the unambitious dreamers who sat alone in their cave, waiting for the muse to come down and strike them with brilliance. No, this man would beat his muse senseless before he depended on someone else for his words.
He belonged somewhere else. Like Brooklyn, for instance.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Why aren’t you out among the teeming masses, mingling with the great unwashed dregs of humanity, obsessed with the eight million stories in the naked city?”
“Do you have to keep bringing up naked?”
He looked so upset at the idea of weakness, so worried that he was actually afflicted with something as common as lust, that Jenn wanted to shout childishly, “Naked, naked, naked,” or perhaps, less childishly, to rip off her T-shirt and see what he’d do. Prudently she abstained from both and changed the subject.
“You’re here to write? No, strike that. I still don’t get you. How you can stay here without going bonkers? Don’t you want to know what’s happening in the world?”
“Are people still getting robbed, are hurricanes still blowing, is the country still poised on the edge of ruin?”
Okay, he had a point, but it amazed her that anyone could stay so unplugged from the events of the world, the personalities, the happenings that affected them all. He didn’t seem as though he’d be disinterested in the world. Maybe he didn’t want to think that way, but she’d seen him watching her phone, she watched him at the inn earlier.
“But it’s news,” she protested, speaking out in defense of the American media institution. How could anyone ignore … everything?
“It’s
