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With a shake of his head, Laredo signaled his ignorance. “That’s something you’ll have to ask Trey.”
Common sense overruled her maternal curiosity, and she said, “If it’s serious, I’ll find out soon enough. And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter who she is.”
Laredo couldn’t argue with that logic. And since Jessy hadn’t asked his opinion, he kept it to himself.
Chapter Five
The breeze channeled itself through the alleyway behind the chutes, kicking up little eddies of dust and swirling them along it. Trey took little notice of that as he dawdled at the entrance, one shoulder propped negligently against a post. The whole of his attention was focused on Sloan, some twenty feet away.
Again she was wearing that bulky vest, its many pockets bulging with assorted rolls of film, a light meter, and camera attachments. To anyone passing by, it appeared that she was chatting with one of the save men, still in his clown makeup, and every now and then idly snapping a picture of him.
But Trey had been watching her all afternoon, long enough to realize there was nothing idle or casual about anything she did. Even now, while she was engaging in idle chitchat to keep her subject relaxed, she kept constant track of the sun’s angle and adjusted her position to compensate for any change in it.
She was all business, to the exclusion of everything else, including Trey. And it had been that way ever since he’d arrived at the rodeo grounds. After scouring the arena fence and chutes, he had finally located her in the rear area, busy taking pictures of a pen of bucking horses.
His greeting had barely gained him a glance before she was once again studying the scene through the camera’s viewfinder. “Sorry. This light isn’t going to last,” she had told him in a distracted murmur.
Personally, Trey hadn’t seen anything particularly unusual about the light or the pen of horses, but he had waited until she finished. Yet, almost the moment she moved away from the pen, her eyes had begun a search for her next subject. They had quickly fastened on an injured cowboy being helped to the first-aid station. She had immediately set off in the same direction, talking and smiling at Trey, yet he had sensed that her mind was elsewhere.
After the injured cowboy, she had focused on another cowboy, this one making a careful inspection of his saddle cinch. Then she had gravitated to the action in the arena.
And Trey had followed—until he started feeling like a damned puppy dog, panting at her heels, waiting for her to remember he was there. Pride wouldn’t let him dog her any more, but he continued to keep her within sight.
Logic told him that Sloan was here to do a job. Yet he found her single-minded devotion to it frustrating and irksome. There was little solace in remembering that Sloan had told him that photography was her passion. At the time Trey hadn’t thought she meant it literally. Now he was beginning to wonder.
Watching her, his anger and impatience growing by the minute, Trey struggled to accept the notion that he was jealous of a camera. Yet it was true. The time she spent with it, the care she took of it, and the undivided energy she gave to it—he wanted all that for himself. It shook him how much he wanted it.
“Hey, Trey!” A bright, happy voice called to him, female in pitch. It pulled him out of the swirl of blac
k thoughts and dragged his gaze in its directions as Kelly Ramsey approached him, all smiles. “Hi. How’s it going?”
The impulse was there to brush aside this unwanted intrusion, but out of the corner of his eye, Trey had seen Sloan throw a glance in his direction.
Instead of cutting Kelly short, he smiled. “Hi, Kelly. What are you doing behind the chutes?”
She tucked her fingers in the hip pockets of her jeans, an action that thrust her young breasts forward to enhance the rounded shape they made beneath her T-shirt. She tipped her head at a flirtatious angle.
“Looking for Johnny,” she said. “I wanted to wish him luck in the race. And you, too, of course,” she added, having planned that to sound like an afterthought, before darting a look around and asking, “You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find Johnny, would you?”
“Not really, but he’s around here somewhere.” Trey used the excuse of locating Johnny to let his gaze return to Sloan. His mouth tightened slightly when he saw her shake hands with the rodeo clown and drift off in another direction.
Kelly had noticed her as well. “Isn’t that the girl you were with last night?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
Undeterred by his single-word response, Kelly observed, “She’s pretty. With a tan like that, though, she can’t be from around here. Where’s she from? Do you know?”
“Hawaii.”
“Really?” Kelly stared at him with a surprise she didn’t have to feign. She was secretly pleased by the news. “Hawaii is a heck of a long way from here.”
Trey didn’t bother to comment on that. Instead he turned. “Let’s go find Johnny. He’s usually somewhere behind the chutes.”
He escorted Kelly into the alleyway, convinced that Sloan was too wrapped up in her work to remember he even existed. That knowledge didn’t set well, not when he couldn’t get her out of his mind.
The cheers of the crowd, the announcer’s voice over the loudspeakers, the pounding of hooves, and the assorted snorts and whinnies were background noises that Sloan had long ago tuned out. With one knee on the ground and the other serving as support for her elbow, she steadied the camera and examined the framed shot in the viewfinder, then adjusted the focus on the sea of equine legs and shaggy fetlocks. Satisfied, she snapped the picture.
Instantly the camera whirred, signaling the end of the roll. Out of habit Sloan pulled a new roll out of her vest pocket and stood up, ready to make the switch once the rewinding process was complete.
