“Oh, yeah,” he admitted. “In fact, he told me that if Anthony doesn’t work out I’ll find myself without a job.”
“So, he’s still serious about letting you go,” she stated. “I’ll do what I can with the pictures, and the next photo shoot should be better. But I feel like I should be doing more.”
Brody glanced at her. Her knees were pulled to her chest, her chin resting on top of them. Her olive skin had a healthy glow like she’d spent the day in the sun. Had he ever laid eyes on a more beautiful woman?
“You’ve already done a lot. In fact, just talking about it has helped.” Shit, his life had become such a mess. He’d been irresponsible and gotten his college girlfriend pregnant. Then he couldn’t hold his family together, and now the business was on a rapid slide down the tubes. His father had never said as much, but Brody had the feeling the old man placed the majority of the blame on him. And he deserved it. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost himself and other things in the process, his son being one of them. As long as he was still Tyler’s hero, nothing else mattered. Even though he felt far from anyone’s hero.
“You don’t want to talk about this, do you?” Elisa asked in a soft voice. “It’s okay if you don’t.”
How did the woman read him so well? Kelly had always complained that Brody had been a closed book and she never had any idea of what went on inside his head. The lack of communication had been the ultimate downfall of their marriage. One of the last things she’d said to him as his wife had been “If you don’t learn to open up, you’re going to end up alone.”
Elisa got him. He had no clue how, and a part of him wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. But somehow she knew, like she had some extrasensory radar.
“Are those your parents?” he asked when his attention landed on a photograph of two forty-something people.
Elisa glanced at the picture. “Yeah.”
“Do they live close by?”
Her attention shifted back to him. “They died in a plane crash.”
“I’m sorry.” Didn’t he feel like the asshole? “I know what it’s like to lose a parent. How old were you?”
Elisa sipped her wine and waited. “Eighteen,” she finally admitted.
He studied her and noted the way her eyes had clouded over. Damn, he hadn’t meant to suck the light out of them. “You were close with them, weren’t you?”
“Yeah, they were…” She nibbled her lower lip. “They were really good parents. My dad was gone a lot, but when he was home, he was very attentive.”
“What did he do that made him travel a lot?”
“He was a freelance reporter.” Elisa tucked her legs beneath her. “He used to get job offers all over the world. The traveling was his favorite part. I mean, he hated being away from his family, but at the same time he craved the adventure of going to places or situations most people didn’t want to go.”
“And your mother was a reporter also? Is that why they were both gone?”
“Sort of. She started off in a Dallas news station, basically at the bottom of the tier covering things like a high school championship football game. But over the years, she’d slowly worked her way up, and eventually she was offered an opportunity to cover riots that had broken out in Sao Paulo. That’s how she met my dad.”
“So, how did they end up back in the States?”
Elisa pulled a sip of wine. “Well, my mom loved Brazil so much that she decided to relocate there. She learned Portuguese and took a job at a local TV station. A few years later she had me and quit her job, but with Dad traveling all time, my mother got lonely. She had no family around and not many friends. So, my dad agreed to move my mom back to Dallas. Since he was freelance, the move was easy for him.
“Anyway, Mom still liked to travel so she would sometimes go with my dad when he’d go on an assignment.”
“And that’s why they were on an airplane,” he guessed.
Elisa nodded and stared down into her wineglass. “Yeah. They were on a twin-engine commuter plane in Panama.”
Brody tried to imagine losing both parents so suddenly and in such a tragic way. To have them there one day and gone the next. Not having a chance to say good-bye or prepare for their passing. “That must have been hard” was all he could think to say.
Her lashes lowered and she gazed into her wine before responding. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever been through.”
He tilted his head and looked at her for a moment. The death of her parents had scarred her. That much was painfully obvious just by the tone of her voice and the look in her eyes when she glanced at their picture. They’d been close, and she’d just been a kid when they’d been taken from her. This was another layer of Senorita Cardoso being peeled back for him to examine.
“How did you manage on your own after they died?”
She lifted her eyes to his and ran her tongue over her bottom lip. “It wasn’t easy. My parents didn’t leave us with much. But I was lucky enough to land a modeling contract that paid for the rest of my college tuition.”
Modeling? He knew it. She was tall enough, beautiful and ethereal enough to be good at it. “That’s what Tyler meant about the pictures,” he said more to himself than her.
“Pictures?” she asked.
He stretched his arm along the back of the couch and his fingers came within millimeters of touching her hair. “He said one day that you had pictures of yourself around your house. I wasn’t sure what he meant.”
A slow, sweet smile broke across her face. “Oh, my covers.” Her cheeks turned a beautiful shade of pink. “I can’t believe he mentioned that.”
If it was possible, she was even more gorgeous when she blushed. The color in her cheeks made him want to trail the tip of his index finger across her face. Would she allow him to touch her again? Would she blush even more?
“Being on the cover of a magazine is quite an accomplishment. You shouldn’t be embarrassed about that.”
Her teeth stabbed into her lower lip. “It’s not that I’m embarrassed. It’s just… I was never totally comfortable with the attention I got as a model. I was good at it, but I didn’t love it. That’s why I quit and turned to photography. I’d much rather be behind the camera than in front of it.”
Most women would have walked around with their nose in the air and a you-can’t-touch-me attitude. He’d been around a few women like that in his life. Their attitude alone made him turn the other direction. Elisa’s humility was an endearing trait. She’d lost her parents at a young age but she’d made the best of her situation by taking care of herself. Brody wished he had half her courage.
He lost his will and trailed his finger over a chunk of her hair. It really was as soft as it looked. Touching the weightless strands had more of an effect on him than when he’d touched other women in his life. Something about this one had him tied up in knots. She had a strange magnetic pull over him he was powerless to resist.
He set his wineglass, then hers on the table so there were no hindrances between them.
“Brody,” she said on a half sigh, half moan when his hand went farther into her hair.
“What is it about you that makes me feel this way?” he murmured.
“Like what?”
He trailed his finger down the column of her neck. “Not like myself. Like I’m having an out-of-body experience.”
Her lips quirked. “I’m not sure if I should feel flattered or insulted.”
“Trust me, there’s no insult in that. I’m just not sure how to handle what I’m feeling.”