She cleared her throat and called Dan over. He jogged to her, surprisingly all business for his usual backward hat and black V-neck. She handed him her camera and bag and told him to take over. He did so immediately, then she walked in the opposite direction.
“Where are you going?” Hunter asked, surprised.
“I’ve got to find a ladder,” she said simply.
“What for?”
She picked at a leaf on her striped Gap T-shirt and sniffed. “I seem to have gotten myself into a majorly deep hole, and I’d like to get out of it now.”
Hunter laughed once and grabbed her arm. “Hey, hey, come on, I’m sorry.”
Mal turned to him, floored by his apology. “You’re sorry? I called you a liar and held a grudge that you had more money than an entire country, and you’re apologizing? Stop digging me a deeper hole. I’m the idiot here, not you.”
He smiled, his teeth not quite touching and his eyes crinkling at the edges. “I never said I was an idiot, but thanks.”
Mal folded her arms and sighed. “Look, why don’t you just go back to the party guests, and I’ll be the family photographer, and we can pretend this never happened?”
“What if I’m glad it happened?” he suddenly said, his smile fading, but his eyes still warm.
Mal stopped in the motion of scratching her ear. “Excuse me?”
If possible, his eyes turned bluer and warmer. “What if I enjoyed it?” he said in a low voice. “What if I’ve already started planning tomorrow’s sunrise shoot, and I would rather listen to you ramble nonsense for hours than spend a minute listening to one of the hens try for legitimate conversation? I like you, Mallory. And I won’t apologize for that, either.”
Mal counted four heartbeats before her lungs decided to work. “Freaking A, you’re intense,” she eventually managed. “Give a girl a few seconds to breathe here.”
One side of his mouth quirked back into a smile. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi…”
“Shut up.”
He all-out grinned, which was quite a sight to behold. “So, where to?”
Mal shook her head. “No clue. I just gave away my camera, and knowing Dan, it’ll be hours before he’ll give it up.”
“Back to the Hen House?” he suggested with a quirk of his brows.
She snorted and shook her head. “Please. I thought I was going to die today.”
He hissed with a wince. “That bad?”
Mal gave him a look. “Have you ever had to endure designer clothing with socialite snobs?”
He laughed, but his wince remained. “That sounds terrible.”
“It’s worse than you think,” she assured him. “And there is nothing to eat. I had to have a salad for lunch—without toppings and without dressing. It was like eating leaves straight from the tree.”
He took her arm again and steered her toward the lodge. “I can fix that.”
“It’s like three o’clock!” she protested, going along with it anyway. “Dinner is in a few hours.”
He hummed an amused sound. “I think you’ll be hungry by then.”
“Come on, Hunter, it’s not that bad, I was kidding.” She laughed. “I was in a food coma so bad after last night that I could barely eat anything for breakfast. I felt like a whale.”
He stopped and gave her a blatant and very thorough look over, his lips in a tight line. “Nope, can’t see anything whale-like. Stop arguing. Let’s go.”
She grinned, wanting to burst out laughing. “That was the most perfect excuse to check me out I have ever seen. Bravo.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t need an excuse, but why waste a perfectly good opportunity? Okay, tell me: what food is in that house? We stocked it before everyone came based on requests, but if you’re starving away, I can put in an order.”