Lee wanted to be able to shrug and say she didn’t have time to talk. She was under a deadline, after all. The article was under a deadline. But then, so was her life. Drawing a breath, she turned in her chair. She didn’t want to see the neat, clever little words she’d typed. Not now.

“Bryan, if you’d taken a picture, one that required a great deal of your time and all of your skill to set up, then once you’d developed it, it had come out in a completely different way than you’d planned, what would you do?”

“I’d take a good hard look at the way it had come out,” she said immediately. “There’d be a good possibility I should’ve planned it that way in the first place.”

“But wouldn’t you be tempted to go back to your original plans? After all, you’d worked very, very hard to set it up in a certain way, wanting certain specific results.”

“Maybe, maybe not. It’d depend on just what I’d seen when I looked at the picture.” Bryan sat back, crossing long, jeans-clad legs. “What’s in your picture, Lee?”

“Hunter.” Her troubled gaze shifted, and locked on Bryan’s. “You know me.”

“As well as you let anyone know you.”

With a short laugh, Lee began to push at a paper clip on her desk. “Am I as difficult as all that?”

“Yeah.” Bryan smiled a bit to soften the quick answer. “And, I’ve always thought, as interesting. Apparently, Hunter Brown thinks the same thing.”

“He asked me to marry him.” The words came out in a jolt that left both women staring.

“Marry?” Bryan leaned forward. “As in ‘till death do us part’?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” The word came out like a breath of air as Bryan leaned back again. “Fast work.” Then she saw Lee’s unhappy expression. Just because Bryan didn’t smell orange blossoms when the word marriage came up was no reason to be flippant. “Well, how do you feel? About Hunter, I mean.”

The paper clip twisted in Lee’s fingers. “I’m in love with him.”

“Really?” Then she smiled, because it sounded nice when said so simply. “Did all this happen in the canyon?”

“Yes.” Lee’s fingers moved restlessly. “Maybe it started to happen before, when we were in Flagstaff. I don’t know anymore.”

“Why aren’t you happy?” Bryan narrowed her eyes as she did when checking the light and angle. “When the man you love, really love, wants to build a life with you, you should be ecstatic.”