Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 98226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 327(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 491(@200wpm)___ 393(@250wpm)___ 327(@300wpm)
I still had so much more left to capture.
I powered my camera on — the gently used Nikon D850 DSLR that I’d used my graduation money to buy — and smiled my first genuine smile at the sound of it coming to life. Even used, it was a massive upgrade from the old camera I’d had since my senior year of high school, the one that had somehow gotten me through undergrad. I looked through the eye of it, adjusting the focus on the lens and widening the shot. Then, I waited until the sun slipped behind a cloud, casting an almost eerie glow on the boats before I pressed my finger on the shutter trigger.
Click.
I pulled the camera away from my eye long enough to glance at the digital screen on the back, seeing what I’d just captured. Then, I held it up again, playing with the focus, waiting for the right light.
My stomach was already settling with the familiar comfort photography brought me. The way that sleek little machine felt in my hands made me feel more like myself than anything else. It was like a fifth limb, always attached to me, and without it, I’d have been handicapped. It had been like that ever since I could remember, ever since my mom handed me the little Kodak disposable camera during our family vacation to the Grand Canyon and asked me to take a picture of her, Dad, and my sister, Juniper.
From the very first time I clicked that shutter and realized I could capture a moment forever in time, I was hooked.
I frowned at the camera display after taking my next shot, turning until my back rested against the railing and sifting through the photos. Then, I lifted the camera to my eye again, searching for a new focus.
I found it more quickly than I expected.
And then I promptly lost the ability to breathe.
There was luxury all around us — riches so unfathomable to someone who grew up in a middle-class household that I didn’t even try to comprehend. But none of the expensive wood or gold-plated trims or crystal chandeliers compared to the power exuding off the man framed in my camera lens.
He was tall, and lean, and dressed like he just walked off the shoot for People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue. The charcoal gray suit he wore was fitted and tapered to perfection, his Armani dress shoes making an expensive clicking sound each time they tapped down on the teak. I could imagine the muscles lining that broad chest of his, the narrow waist, the legs that carried him effortlessly across the main deck.
The way he walked, shoulders held back and down, head high, each step calculated and sharp told me long before anything else that he was the owner of the yacht. It was in the way the crew practically bowed as he passed them, moving out of the way so as not to be seen, not to be in his way. It was in the way his lips pressed into a flat line, in the way his dark sunglasses shielded his eyes, in the way he held a briefcase with one hand as the other swung confidently at his side.
His sturdy, square jaw was dusted with a light stubble that seemed at odds with how he was dressed, but somehow worked. If anything, it only added to the power radiating off him — as if he wanted everyone to know he was rich enough to wear a tailored suit on a casual day with a five-o-clock shadow he forgot to shave.
I felt each step he took like an anvil vibration through the deck, and it seemed all the manners I’d learned in my twenty-two years had evaporated the moment he walked onto the boat, because I still stared at him through my camera lens without a care in the world if he saw me.
His dark blond hair caught a ray of sun as it slipped through the clouds above, and my finger pushed down automatically — without thought, without the good sense to pause and decide if it was a good idea or not. The clicking shutter sound of my camera sounded more like an echoing gunshot in a cave, and as soon as the picture was taken, the man’s head snapped my direction.
He stopped walking, brows furrowed above his sunglasses for a moment before they relaxed. His lips turned up, just at one side, and then he started walking again.
This time, toward me.
“Oh, God,” I murmured to myself, flushing so furiously it felt like a sunburn as I turned to face the front of the boat again. I had my camera pulled into my stomach, eyes on the screen, pretending like I was studying the shots I’d taken yesterday when Joel and I had explored La Sagrada Familia. I didn’t dare take my eyes off that screen, not when I heard those Armani shoes approach behind me, not even when the man stopped a few feet away, clearing his throat.