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“Sure, sounds good. I’ll just watch this time.” Theresa repeated back his instructions to keep up appearances while she began to run through scenarios.
He probably didn’t know how to get her closer to him without it looking odd to everyone else. If he just pulled her right onto his team, issues of seniority would arise. They needed to be more subtle than that.
She’d take care of it for him, though. She’d come up with some way to get herself in that meeting, to get them working more closely together.
“Great. I’m meeting Chad for lunch. Katelyn, do you have everything you need for the conference call with Parker Industries?” Andrew asked as he stepped toward the door.
When Katelyn nodded, he gave a final wave and left the office.
Theresa watched him go. Things would move more quickly now that she had the chance to push them together through work.
She was done waiting for him to make the first move. Modern women were supposed to take charge, weren’t they?
Chapter Fourteen
Andrew parked in front of Jill’s house and rang the bell. He’d thought about cancelling a million times that day, but he hadn’t been strong enough to do what would have been best for both of them.
He opened the door and walked in when she called out to come in.
Jill stood in the living room off the front hallway, bent over a tripod and camera that was aimed at the fireplace. The room was lit with several large, professional photography lights complemented by large white umbrella-like things that seemed to angle the light toward the fireplace. Andrew supposed he should have been looking at the photograph over the fireplace but all he could do was focus on Jill.
She was immersed in her work focused only on the camera and whatever magic she saw through the lens. The lights in the room were soft and they bounced off her blond hair and framed her face in a soft glow.
The outline of her slender arms and the breasts he wanted to feast on was clear through the sheer fabric of her shirt. The image sent a blow right to Andrew’s gut. It was like he was a teenager again. There wasn’t any way to tear his eyes from Jill.
He watched as she made several adjustments to the settings on her camera and then snapped the shutter a half dozen times before looking up at him with a smile.
“Sorry, I’m just trying to get these shots done so I don’t have to try to set the lights again tomorrow. When the sunlight comes through the windows in the morning, it will change the way these lights hit the wall and I’ll have to start all over again,” she explained, gesturing to the wall above the fireplace.
He finally tore his eyes from the woman in front of him and looked at the wall. Above the fireplace hung a gorgeous picture of a dense forest in the fall. The leaves on the trees were an incredible arrangement of golden yellows, burnt oranges, and fiery reds that cast a warm feeling over Andrew as he looked at it.
The glow of the sun shone through the leaves of the trees, creating an effect against the leaves that took the picture from one that merely captured nature to one that was pure art.
“Another one from your fall collection?” he asked, gesturing to the print. The appreciation was clear in his voice.
“Mmm hmm,” she said as she flipped through the pictures saved on the disk in the camera to be sure she had the shot she needed.
“It’s amazing. All of your work I’ve seen is so much more artistic than I thought it would be. I thought it would just be pictures of nature, but it’s not. You’ve turned nature into art.”
She laughed. “Thanks.”
Then he processed what she was doing, taking a picture of one of her pictures. “Uh, why are you taking pictures of your pictures?”
“Remember I said I was starting a website for my work? We’re choosing a handful of my pictures to sell as prints and reproductions and this is one of them. I thought I was finished with my side of the website but the site designer decided he wants pictures of the prints as they’ll look hanging in someone’s home. We could photoshop them into a preexisting photo but this is better. It lets me get the lighting right for each of the images we want to highlight.”
She started clearing away the equipment, apparently satisfied with the shots she’d gotten. “We’ll also sell things like thank you cards and notepads with the images on them so those all have to be photographed as well. This is the boring commercial side to what I do. Someday, maybe I’ll make enough off my pictures to turn this side of things over to an assistant so I can get back to just taking the pictures that I love,” she said with a wry smile.
Andrew held up a DVD. “The latestBournemovie. Seen it yet?”
“Nope. Taking a chance I’d like action, huh? What makes you think I didn’t want a romantic comedy?” She teased as she started shutting off the bright lights. She seemed to be trying to busy herself with her work and Andrew wondered if she was nervous.
He returned her laugh. “I was hoping it would be okay but I have a sappy romance in the car if we need it, just in case.”
“Nice.” she smiled and waved him into the kitchen.
Jill pulled out the leftovers from the previous night and began zapping containers in the microwave. They opened the containers and piled plates high – with him taking about three times as much food as she did – before going back to the couch to eat in front of the fireplace.
Jill hit a switch that turned on the gas flames and then curled her feet under her on the couch.
