Page 93 of RomeAntically Challenged
Their gazes locked, and Annie’s heart fell to her stomach. She believed every word. Emmitt would go to the end of the earth for his people.
He already had.
Her pulse quickened as she wondered what it would it be like to be on the receiving end of that kind of devotion.
“Have you been googling me, Goldilocks?”
Annie had to swallow before she could speak. “I needed to know I wasn’t rooming with an ax murderer.”
Emmitt laughed and leaned back against the armrest, but his hands never slowed.
“Tell me about the photographs on the wall,” she asked. “There aren’t many, which surprised me.”
“Digital cameras have changed photography. People go on vacation and come home with three hundred pictures,” he said. “The people I’m shooting deserve more than a bunch of random clicks of the finger. For me, it’s about getting the shot.”
When she’d first moved in, she’d remarked to Gray how odd it was that there weren’t a lot of pictures on the wall. Gray had laughed and explained his friend didn’t take pictures; he took photographs.
At the time, Annie had found it incredibly obnoxious. But now, after getting to know Emmitt, she thought the statement couldn’t be more fitting.
At first glance, it would appear that Emmitt had never bothered to personalize his space by putting any of his belongings on display. There were no family pictures with Mickey Mouse, no Boy Scout camp photo of a grinning child holding a fish, not even a puff pic—like him climbing Kilimanjaro, which she knew from Gray that he had done. In the day and age of selfies, that was telling. Almost as much as the collection of photographs he had chosen.
She’d looked at them before, many times. There were nine in all, sitting in large, identical solid glass frames. Each photograph was of a different size, showing people she’d never meet from places she’d never been, and each sparking an equally powerful but wildly different emotion.
Annie wondered what emotion she’d feel tonight when she looked at her favorite one with its artist in the room. Hanging near the fireplace, it had particularly drawn Annie.
She set her laptop on the coffee table and slid her legs out of Emmitt’s embrace, then crossed the room.
The image was black and white, taken of a young girl, maybe four or five, standing barefoot in the dirt, eyes closed, face upturned as someone off camera poured a bottle of water over her head. The shutter must have snapped the moment the first few drops hit the child’s skin, because Annie could see tiny spots where the water had barely mixed with the hot dust before it slid over the girl’s face.
The photo itself would barely fill out a four-by-six frame, but the look of wonder on the girl’s face contained enough joy to erase the war-torn conditions around her. The contrast was as heartbreaking as it was breathtaking.
“That one was taken at a refugee camp right outside Afghanistan,” Emmitt said from over her shoulder, and Annie realized that while she’d been studying his photos, he’d been studying her—from kissing range. “Madeena and her mother walked barefoot, nearly sixty miles through the mountains in hopes of finding her lost brother, whom they’d been separated from months earlier.”
“Did they find him?” Annie asked past the tightness in her throat.
Emmitt’s smile was light and warm, real and so completely unexpected that she took a step back, but there really wasn’t anywhere to go, so she bumped into the wall. “Who do you think is holding the bottle?”
A pang of emotion had her clearing her throat. “How long ago was that taken?”
“Six years. She’s now a fourth grader in Germany who loves science, kittens, and Pokémon. And pink. Last year she was all about bows. This year it’s pink.”
She laughed, and the release of emotion felt good. “How do you know?”
“Every year she sends me a first-day-of-school picture to show off her new dress,” he said as if it was a normal thing to impact the life of a tiny girl on the other side of the world enough that she’d send him a photo. Every year.
“Did you buy those dresses as well?” She could tell he was shocked by her deductive reasoning, which, based on his shy smile, was spot-on.
His hands cupped her hips, and he turned her to face him completely, but he didn’t let go. “I figure a girl whose smile can light up even the darkest corners of the world deserves a pretty dress now and again.”
“But you don’t keep the school pictures framed?” She moved a little closer.
“Nah, they’re in a box in the garage,” he said, and Annie knew there was only one box in the garage. It was big, metal, and fireproof. The kind of box where people kept their most precious items. But she also guessed there was another reason he didn’t have those pictures lying about. Because then people would ask.
Emmitt didn’t send Madeena dresses because he had a hero complex or wanted to impress. He did it because he cared. So deeply he didn’t wish to share the feeling with just anyone. But he’d shared it with her.
“You’re a very complex person, Emmitt Bradley,” Annie said, placing her fingertips on his wrists, then slowly tracing his muscles all the way up his arms.
“Funny, with you I feel real,” he whispered, tugging her closer.
