had once been a thriving steel mill was now a crumbling warehouse with broken windows, the concrete beneath their feet reduced to a siltlike dust. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t crazy about being barefoot. There was no way in hell he would lie down on the floor and breathe that rubble in.
“I thought they made steel here before it closed. How dangerous could that be?”
Kyle pointed to the sign hanging at an awkward angle. “That dangerous.”
It said Days Without An Accident: 3.
“Oh. Well, all the machinery is gone. And they said the shoot wouldn’t run that long.”
Great. Now she was reassuring him. He was supposed to be the man here, easing her nervousness about her nudity. Instead she was snaking her hand over and slipping it into his and squeezing. Wait. Nothing wrong with that.
Kyle squeezed back.
“I’m sure your virility is intact,” she told him.
There was no doubt about that. Kyle let his thigh brush hers, and their shoulders bumped. He glanced over at her. “Promise?”
She gave a short laugh before snapping her lips shut. “Yes.”
“You didn’t even look.” He was playing in dangerous territory here, but he was a gambling man. He would bet she wasn’t going to slap him in the middle of the photo shoot.
Emma turned to him, her tongue moistening her lips nervously. “Kyle...what are you doing?”
“Flirting with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re attractive. Which I’ve always known, but today has given me a whole new appreciation for that fact.”
“You are not attracted to me.”
“Um, my Jolly Green Giant says otherwise.” He didn’t mean to brag, but anyone looking below his waist would see his erection. There was no disguising it, boxer briefs or not.
“Your...” Her eyes dropped. And widened. “Oh. Oh.”
He wasn’t sure he’d ever heard Emma speechless before. It was satisfying, to say the least.
She was still staring at his jock.
All the attention had it jumping a little. Which made her jerk away like she’d been stung by a bee.
Kyle smiled. He loved his job.
3
EMMA KNEW SHE was staring at the tent Kyle’s penis was making. Jolly Green Giant, indeed.
She was holding his hand. And she had the overwhelming urge to tangle her body up with his on a big bed. Neither of those things made sense.
She also knew she was naked except for a tiny pair of underwear, so she couldn’t explain her odd reaction to him other than the obvious—she was trained to equate nudity with sexy times. That was the only explanation for why her nipples were suddenly as hard as the steel that had once been shipped in and out of this warehouse. Why her insides were molten and her fingers itched to reach out and give his erection a hard squeeze to see his reaction.
It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Kyle himself.
Which she knew was a total lie. She’d been attracted to him since the day she’d met him two years ago, when he had been led around the office by Claire and introduced to the drooling staff. Even the men liked him—they saw Kyle as a man’s man, a golf buddy.
But none of them were standing here covered in body paint, bare leg squashed against his, staring at his erection.
“Emma.” His voice was tight, pained.
She dragged her eyes off his briefs and forced them upward. “Yes?” she asked breathlessly.
“Do you think—”
But whatever he’d been about to say was drowned out by the sound of the man with the megaphone, yelling for their attention.
“Okay, I need everyone to stand still in the positions you’ve been given. Ladies along the back wall, I need your arms up to form the letter “I” in front of your chest, got it?”
“That’s you,” Kyle murmured.
Emma moved her arms automatically, feeling a little stunned. Why did she have the feeling that Kyle had been about to ask her out? Why would he do that? He wouldn’t. He wasn’t attracted to her. Or at least that’s what she had always thought until today. But he clearly was attracted to her, as was evidenced by what she had seen hiding beneath the green.
That didn’t mean, however, that he would ask her out, so why had she jumped to that conclusion?
Because she wanted that conclusion.
Ugh.
It was a relief to cover her green breasts. Not that anyone would have been able to see much of anything, given that she was one of two hundred people and she was slathered in paint, but it still made her feel better. She would no longer be on display for Kyle or for future internet trawlers.
“Mr. Bainbridge wants to thank all of you for participating. He’ll only need to shoot for a few minutes, and when you all see the results, I think you’ll be pleased to see how he has captured the sense of people being reduced to the walls of a crumbling manufacturing economy.”
The words jolted her out of her musings about Kyle and back to the real business at hand. Was that an official statement? Emma repeated the words back in her head, wondering if she could quote that in her article. But unless this guy was the photographer’s spokesman, she had to tread lightly.
“There’s the man of the hour,” Kyle muttered. “It’s about freaking time. My paint is starting to crust and flake.”
“Where?” But the words were barely out of her mouth when she finally saw the photographer, Ian Bainbridge, as he climbed onto a platform set up on the other side of the warehouse. His camera and equipment were already there, ready to use immediately. Emma had of course researched the artist. She knew he was originally from New Zealand, and that he looked like a former soccer player who had gotten in touch with his emotions. He wore a lot of black rocker T-shirts with blazers and tweed bowler hats. He also had funky black glasses that appeared in some photos of him and not in others. Today no glasses and no blazer adorned him, but a hat jauntily perched on his head as he made adjustments to his camera.
There was also very clearly a bodyguard behind him, which was no surprise given that the attention of his stalker had escalated in recent months, as reported by the Pittsburgh paper where Ian had shot the month before. Emma wondered what sort of desperation drove someone to follow another human being around and pretend you were in an actual relationship with him. Fantasizing about Justin Timberlake at age twelve was normal, but creating chaos at his concert was not. And this had the makings of a celebrity-crush stalking.
The shoot itself lasted all of ten minutes, if even. It seemed like Ian pushed a few buttons,
