Mal hit delete before she could talk herself out of it.
She stared at her phone, wanting someone to pull it out of her hand and throw it away, wanting to listen to this morning’s voicemail, wanting to never hear his voice again, wanting…
“Mallory, it’s five in the morning, and I miss you. I know you’ve already gone to the airport, and as much as I want to, I can’t chase you down. You don’t want that. I don’t know what happened last night or why you didn’t answer me or call me back, and honestly, I don’t care. I love you. Please call me. Bye.”
Mal deleted it again, drained and unable to cry anymore after doing so all night. She leaned her head back against the awkward airport chair and inhaled and exhaled painfully.
“Did you clean the camera that Caroline dropped off?”
“Of course I cleaned it. How much of a novice do you think I am?”
“Did you sniff it first? For that last whiff of her sultry perfume?”
Someone snorted, and then they stopped.
“How is it possible that you look worse now than you did seven minutes ago?” Dan asked as he sat down on one side of her.
“Are you freaking kidding me, Daniel? Shut up and hand me the muffin.” Taryn reached over Mal and sat down on the other side. “Mal, you turned your phone on, didn’t you?”
Mal swallowed but didn’t answer.
“Where is your phone?” Taryn asked with a sigh. “Where is… Oh, I see. Okay, Dan, you’re on phone duty. Turn it off, leave it on, play Angry Birds, I don’t care. But you monitor that thing, and Mal doesn’t get it back unless we trust the person on the other end. Got it?”
“Yep.”
They didn’t say anything for a long time, and Mal almost dozed off when she heard a phone vibrate. She jerked with a gasp and looked at Dan.
He looked at her phone, then met her eyes and pocketed it.
She groaned and shut her eyes tightly.
“He came by last night, late, after we’d all gone to bed,” Taryn murmured as she sipped her coffee. “Jerry told me about it this morning. He told him he hadn’t seen you, but Dan and I hadn’t come back to the house yet. He bought it.”
“Thanks,” Mal whispered, sniffing once.
“Wanna talk about it yet?”
“No.”
With that one word, the impossible happened. Her eyes filled with tears, and the tightness in her chest broke into a thousand pieces. Taryn put her hand over Mal’s, and Dan put his arm around her shoulder and patted softly.
And together, they waited.
ChapterSeventeen
Two weeks later.
“Taryn! Did you give Ashley the details on the Yellowstone project?”
“Yep, she knows the drill.”
Mal nodded, even though Taryn couldn’t see it from her desk in the corner. They brought Ashley in three weeks ago to be the assistant and secretary for the studio. She was a smart girl from the local community college, but she had trouble remembering specifics. She was proving to be valuable, though, and had even asked for a rundown of what sort of projects they would or would not do so she could screen calls better.
Ever since the wedding details and photos had been released, calls had been flooding in. It was getting ridiculous. Not that Mal minded being in demand, but she wasn’t about to do more celebrity stuff unless it was actually interesting to her.
She’d given Taryn and Dan more freedom and projects of their own, and they were becoming more like partners in the business than anything else. Dan leaned toward more extreme perspective shots—things that required him to skydive and rappel canyons and the like—and they were very impressive. Taryn, on the other hand, was trying her hand at fashion shots, but in unique and artistic ways. Just last week, she’d been working with preliminary pieces for Fashion Week and had done some breathtaking work with lighting and a full moon in a prairie.
Mal was proud of her assistants, although she couldn’t really call them that anymore. They had taken up a lot of the workload, once she’d decided to pursue her own projects. Yellowstone, for example, wanted her to come out in the fall to work with them, but she wanted to rework the contract details now that she had more experience in bigger playing fields.