guess what your fee is and send you a check?” Because he would.
“I won’t cash it.”
“Then tell me a number.”
“Fine. Two hundred dollars.”
He started to write down the amount and paused. “That isn’t possible.”
“That’s my number, take it or leave it.”
“Why are you being difficult about this?”
“Because I don’t want your money,” she told him.
He dropped his pen. “That might be the first time I’ve ever heard that.”
She laughed. “That’s too bad.”
“You’re refreshing,” he told her.
“I have no business being anything to you for at least another seventy-five days.”
The fact she had the days down like a calendar made him grin as if he were a kid skipping school on a sunny day. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Goodbye, Victor.”
“Goodbye.”
He stared at his phone for five minutes and replayed their conversation in his head. Then he opened his calendar, counted seventy-five days ahead, and started a countdown clock. He titled it: Major Life Event.
Shannon hung up the phone as she sat surrounded by the portfolios she’d done when she was in college.
Victor calling didn’t surprise her, but his reason did.
There was no way she was taking any of his money. Not after she’d kissed the man. Not with a pending romantic date in seventy-five days. On some level, she knew her job as his photographer and going on a date were entirely different things, but it didn’t stop her from cutting him off.
Shannon Wentworth was finished taking money from men.
Especially men she kissed.
“Miss Annoyed,” she said to herself.
Shaking her head, she ducked back into the project in front of her. Each collection of photographs had a different purpose for the class she’d taken. In the beginning, she took her professor’s direction literally. When he assigned an urban setting, she went out and photographed all the angles and textures of Los Angeles. She remembered vividly the moment she saw her grade as a D. The doubt she’d harbored inside her heart about picking the class as her minor soared. Her second assignment had been “Through the eyes of a child.” The grade went to a C minus. Again, she pulled her hair out. The images she’d captured were exactly what the professor asked for. When she turned in her third assignment, her professor called her into his office.
He told her that if she was going to continue delivering photographs that anyone with a cell phone could take, that she should drop his class right then and there.
She was so upset to see her dream explode before she could even exercise it.
As she was leaving his office, tears down her face, he stopped her.
“How do you feel?” he asked. “One word. Tell me how you feel in one word.”
She had turned around, looked him in the eye. “Despair.”
“Good. Now go out there, capture despair . . . in the city, and the eyes of a child . . . anything. Prove to me you should be in my class.”
And she did.
Shannon picked up the portfolio of those pictures she’d taken all those years ago and flipped through them. With one word, one emotion, she found exactly what her instructor wanted. Her first stop was an animal shelter, where she found the solemn face of an emotionally wounded mixed breed dog. It took everything not to spring the animal and take it home. Then she took the same emotional wound on the face of a child sleeping in a makeshift tent with her parents under one of the many overpasses of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. That was when Shannon found her voice behind the camera.
She’d proved she belonged in the class and went on to capture the attention of the head of the photojournalism department. Some of her work ended up in the school newspaper.
When her professor encouraged her to reach out to the more mainstream media, Shannon retreated back into her shell. The turmoil of her sister’s independence had started to shake their parents’ patience and made life for Shannon more difficult. They expected her to fall in line even faster since her sister couldn’t find the damn thing. By the time Shannon was graduating college, Angie had long since dropped out.
Shannon sold out to the commercial end of photography. Because she came from an affluent family, she managed to book the occasional wedding. But her meals came from the stream of kids wanting their starts in Hollywood who were in need of reasonably priced headshots.
Somewhere in all of that she’d met Sam and was told about Alliance. She met with