Page 75 of The Best Shot

I shifted left. His eyes stayed on mine in the reflection, and I took another, catching the slope of his shoulders and the lean muscle of his back.

“What are you doing?” His voice was low, and there was a new edge under it.

I smiled. “Don’t move.”

“Yasmine Valentine.”

“Don’t move,” I repeated, softer.

Click.

“Thought you only pointed that thing at mountains and dangerous animals,” he said.

“I can dabble.”

He shook his head, but he didn’t stop me.

I didn’t follow him exactly, but I found him wherever he settled—at the window with the dark woods behind him, back at the dresser, balanced on the arm of the chair to reach the ends of a loc near his neck.

He was simply being, doing something he’d probably done hundreds of times with no one watching.

I kept watching.

The bashfulness came on gradually. A shift in his shoulders. The way his movements got a little less fluid, like he’d suddenly remembered he had limbs.

He ran a hand over the back of his neck and looked everywhere except the lens. “I’m getting ready for bed, darlin’. This can’t be worth your film.”

“You’re fascinating.”

If he were a lighter-skinned man, I swear those cheeks would’ve been red.

“Are you shy, Hale?”

“No.” He turned to face me fully, eyebrow arched, chin lifted, defiant about it now, like I’d thrown down a gauntlet and he intended to pick it up.

I raised the phone and shot another.

He immediately looked away and rubbed the back of his neck again. Adorable.

I lowered the phone and looked at him for real this time. Unframed. Not composed.

Just him standing in the middle of his bedroom, dark skin gleaming, caught somewhere between amused and self-conscious.

“You have a beautiful body, Hale.”

He tilted his head. “Isn’t that my line?”

“Says who?”

He didn’t answer.

“I mean it.” I lowered the phone the rest of the way. “Will you let me shoot you? Properly.”

His eyes flicked to the camera bag near the chair, then back to me, then to the phone in my hand like it had become a third presence in the room.

“I’m not a model,” he said carefully. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I do.”