intimidated him, whereas Emma wanted to crawl into a hole and bury herself under heavy fleece blankets at the thought of taking off her clothes in front of other people.
This was career dedication. But as she stood in the parking lot of an abandoned warehouse with two hundred other people prepared to strip down to their underwear, she wasn’t sure securing an interview with the famed photographer Ian Bainbridge was worth this level of discomfort.
“If you do it too soon, the organizers will kick you out, so keep your pants on, please.” Emma sidled a look at Kyle’s jeans, as if she could tell anything other than that he was muscular. She already knew that. She’d noticed it every single day since he’d joined the newspaper staff twenty-three months and one week ago, three months and fifteen days after she had been hired. Not that she was counting. “Are you wearing boxers? You’re supposed to wear underwear. If you’re not, they’ll kick you out.” Aware of how nervous and frantic she sounded, she clapped her mouth shut.
“You’re very concerned with me getting tossed out.” He adjusted the baseball cap on his head. “I appreciate how badly you want me to stick around.”
Emma rolled her eyes. The truth was she’d rather be sharing this story with a rabid dog than with Kyle. Though she wasn’t convinced there was much difference between the two. Kyle just smiled more than a disease-ridden mutt. But “dog” definitely described him.
As if to prove her point, he smirked at her and pulled the waistband of his jeans down, revealing taut abdominal muscles and the elastic of his tight black briefs. “But yes, I’m wearing underwear, which I don’t mind getting ruined with body paint, per the instructions. I can follow rules.”
Somehow Emma doubted that. She had worked with Kyle at the newspaper since that fateful day her boss had hired him, and Kyle seemed to think that charm usurped rules on a regular basis. If he just smiled, it didn’t matter if he turned his piece in three hours late. What burned her butt was that it seemed to work for him. She would have been fired five times over if she pulled the stunts he did.
Then again, she wasn’t a hot guy who had all the women in the office drooling over him. Their editor was a divorced woman, and Kyle was single and always up for a good time. There was no getting around it, as much as Emma would like to pretend otherwise. Her own personal reaction to him was frustrating in the extreme. She liked to pride herself on her self-control and focus. She was a career woman, driven and sensible. Yet she was like any other female when Kyle walked into the room—weak in the knees and warm between the thighs. It was infuriating. She sympathized with every teenage boy who was at the mercy of his hormones because her reaction to Kyle was just ridiculous.
Now she was going to be mostly nude in a group photo shoot with him. Fabulous.
“I don’t care if you stay or not,” she told him, “but Claire won’t be thrilled if you get tossed out on your ass.” His very fine ass, which Emma was afraid she wouldn’t be able to resist staring at once he removed his jeans. “I’d rather the focus of this story be my stellar reporting, not your antics.”
She might be only a features writer for the Life & Style section of the Daily Journal, but she took it seriously. Working on a Sunday like this was a matter of course for her, though usually it wasn’t under quite these unusual circumstances. But the only reason she was even joining the actual shoot was because otherwise reporters were restricted solely to the parking lot. Nor was anyone allowed access to the photographer, Ian Bainbridge, and Emma was determined to get at least a word or two with him.
Heralded as the next big thing in group nude photography, Ian was traveling from city to city shooting mass groups of volunteers who he arranged artistically to blend in to whatever environment he had chosen, in order to make a statement. For this particular shoot, he had landed in northeast Ohio and had chosen the crumbling warehouse. It figured. He couldn’t choose somewhere attractive, like the lakeshore or the botanical gardens. But Emma reasoned that those places didn’t resonate with angsty photographers quite the same way.
So far there hadn’t been any sight of Ian, just a slew of security guards patrolling the perimeter and preventing outsiders from snapping pictures with their cell phones. A tent had been set up as a further barrier, and inside participants were being sprayed with body paint and then funneled directly into the dilapidated warehouse. It was actually well-organized and efficient, which meant that any minute now Emma would in fact be forced to take off her jeans and T-shirt, which made her palms sweat. Naked alone, in the shower, was fine. Naked with a man was, well, necessary for the positive outcome that resulted from it. Naked with two hundred strangers? Not okay.
It wasn’t that she was a prude. She was just modest. There was nothing wrong with that and Kyle wasn’t going to make her feel bad about it.
“My antics? Gee, Mom, I’ll be good, I promise. We’ll have a swell time.” He gave her a broad cheesy smile and swung his arms back and forth.
His sarcasm was not appreciated. Okay, so maybe she was a teeny bit prudish. Or maybe it was just irritating that Kyle hit on every woman between the ages of twenty-four and fifty in the office yet had never once flirted with her. Wasn’t she flirtworthy? Not that she would ever consider dating him, not in a million, trillion years, but it would be nice if he tried.
Though why she was thinking about any of that was a mystery to her. She needed to focus on finding Ian. Not on Kyle.
“Besides, Claire won’t care. She didn’t want two of us on this story, anyway.”
That was news to her. “Then why are you here?”
Kyle touched her elbow and directed her into the line outside the tent, where everyone was queuing to be processed. “I think we’re supposed to be here. I’ve seen Ian Bainbridge’s work before. I thought it would be cool to be a part of it. I like that he makes a bold statement.” Kyle winked at her. “Besides, it’s a chance to get naked in public and not get arrested. How often does an opportunity like that come up?”
Emma tossed her blond hair over her shoulder. It was too long and she needed a trim, but she had kept it out of a ponytail this morning because she had thought it would make her feel less naked having hair around her shoulders. The logic seemed flawed in retrospect since her breasts would be totally bare, but she was desperate, quaking in her ballet flats from fear. She wasn’t sure what exactly she was afraid of, but she had been less uncomfortable getting a root canal. Maybe she needed anesthetic for this, too. Emma sighed.
“You’re a freak,” she told him. “People are not supposed to roll around naked together.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Really? That’s news to everyone I know who’s having sex.”
Okay, so that wasn’t exactly what she had meant. Emma flushed, aware that the line they stood in was gradually moving closer and closer to the entrance of the tent. Where she would have to remove her clothes. Otherwise known as the Panic Room. There were only about eight people in front of her now. “You know what I meant! It’s not normal to put two hundred naked people together in a warehouse.”
“This isn’t a mass orgy. It’s art. Which is precisely why Bainbridge does it—Americans are both fascinated and made squeamish by nudity. That’s the angle I’m taking on my piece. Claire said I could write a column about the oversexualization of commercial products like movies and advertising, in contrast to the moral restrictions on art that still exist.”
Wonderful.
Somehow, Kyle had managed to find an angle that was more in-depth than what Emma was planning while making her sound like a total wet
