Thrill Me. Сьюзен Мэллери

CHAPTER FIVE

      DEL STUDIED THE screen in front of him. “You were right,” he said flatly. “The sunrise doesn’t work at all.”

      Maya barely glanced up. “There’s too much light and it’s in the wrong place. It was impossible to make the shot and keep you in the center. So it feels off.”

      He saw she had identified the problem. While he hadn’t been able to define what was wrong, he’d sensed it. Now he was able to see how he wasn’t in the middle of the screen. Although he was supposed to be the focus, he was off to the side, with the sun making a glaring appearance.

      He waited a second, then said, “Are you going to say ‘I told you so’?”

      She continued to stare at the monitor in front of her. “You said it for me.” She finally looked at him. “It’s okay, Del. I do this for a living. The show I worked on was small enough that I had to handle more than just producing the segments. I edited, I wrote copy and sometimes I worked the camera.”

      “Meaning I should shut up and keep out of your way?”

      “No.” She gave him a faint smile. “Meaning there’s more to producing good material than simply pointing a camera and pushing a button. Look at this.”

      She typed on the keyboard and brought up more of his footage, then started it running. There wasn’t any sound, but he remembered the shot. It was taken up by the wind turbines.

      He was walking through the frame, pointing and talking. Everything was in focus, but he knew instinctively something was off.

      “It’s the eye line,” she told him, using her pen to point at the screen. “As a rule, the screen in divided into thirds, horizontally. The subject’s eye should be even with this line.” She drew an imaginary line across the screen. “You’re too low in the shot. There’s nothing in the eye line. Not you, not the wind turbines.”

      She typed again and brought up her footage of the same scene. The camera focused on him and this time his face was right where she said it should be. As he watched, the camera panned, bringing the wind turbines into view. Then the center of the blades was in the eye line.

      “Just like that,” he said and shook his head.

      “There’s some other stuff,” she told him. “You changed the camera settings at the same scene. You shot half your material in SD and half in HD. While we can bring HD down to SD, there’s no way to take it up. Because some of this material may become a TV commercial, we have to shoot in HD. It would be different if we were just going to put it on a website.”

      High definition instead of standard definition, he thought, remembering that he’d wanted to confirm the settings, but must have changed them instead.

      “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked.

      She turned to him. They were sitting close. Close enough for him to be aware of the curve of her cheek and the shape of her mouth. Dark lashes framed big, green eyes.

      Need started slowly, almost in the background. It was more of a whisper, a hint, one that grew over time. He thought about how her skin would feel against his fingers if he touched her. Of the way her lips fit against his. If he took her in his arms, would she be as he remembered, or were there changes?

      He would have thought he would be pissed at her, or disinterested. He was neither. Being around Maya was easy. She challenged him. They got along. The wanting might be a problem, but he was a big boy. He could keep himself under control.

      “You were determined,” she said, drawing him back to the conversation. “I figured it was easier to let you do what you wanted and see what happened. Maybe you were naturally gifted.”

      He laughed. “You’re saying I’m not?”

      “I’m saying what I said before. It’s harder than it looks.”

      She turned back to the screen and pulled up her footage. He watched her edit the few seconds of video. She then played as much of the clip as she had finished.

      “Nice,” he told her when it was done. “Mayor Marsha is going to be happy.”

      “I hope so.”

      He glanced at Maya. “You okay?”

      She stiffened, then relaxed. “Sure. Why?”

      “I don’t know.” Something was off. He couldn’t figure out what, though. Women were mysterious that way. “You feeling all right?”

      She smiled at him. “I’m completely fine. Now let me get back to work. Taking pictures is sometimes the easy part of the job.”

      “Pretend I’m not here,” he said, leaning back in his chair and watching her do her thing.

      She was good, he thought. Better than good.

      For a second he debated telling her about his project. The one he wanted to be his next act, only he hadn’t been able to make it work. Looking at her raw footage, he knew that he’d been the problem. Could what he had be fixed?

      He studied Maya’s profile, then looked at her rapidly manipulating the mouse. He had a feeling that if his project could be saved, she was the one to do it, then he shook his head. No, he told himself. He liked Maya. He respected her, but there was no way he was willing to trust her with something like that.

      After a couple of minutes, she glanced at him. “Are you just going to sit there, staring, watching me work?”

      “Pretty much.”

      She smiled. “I don’t think so. I mean this in the nicest possible way, but get out.”

      “Just like that?”

      “Uh-huh.”

      Del stood and stretched. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

      Something flashed in her eyes. An emotion that was gone so quickly, he wasn’t able to read it. Had she missed him? Before? When she’d ended things so abruptly? Had she regretted her decision to end their relationship?

      Not that it mattered, he told himself. The past was firmly in the past. He didn’t believe in going home, all evidence to the contrary. Because he wasn’t back for more than his father’s birthday. Over the past ten years he’d learned a lot of things. And one of the most important was that he didn’t go back. Not ever.

      * * *

      AFTER MAYA KICKED him out, Del wandered around Fool’s Gold. Somehow he found himself heading for the Mitchell Adventure Tour offices. Despite the small size of the town, he hadn’t run into Aidan since he’d been back.