Meg Maguire – Caught on Camera (страница 2)

Ty groaned. “God, eggs.”

“Tell me about it.” She grabbed the hand he stuck out and yanked him up to sitting. “I’ve got a few of my own that’ll be going to waste in a few years, if I keep running around the globe with the likes of you.”

“So you keep telling me…but don’t pretend you don’t love this.” He wiped wet snow off the backs of his arms, zipped the camera into its sturdy bag and set it aside.

Kate sat down beside him on a log. He was right, of course. For all its ridiculous moments, she adored this job. And not just the job—but their partnership. Plus she was an unapologetic control freak and this gig allowed her to do what she did best on a grand scale, and get paid for it. At twenty-eight, thoughts of settling into a normal life could wait a few more years, or as long as the network continued to renew their contract.

Ty took her handheld camera and reviewed the footage, frowning. “Why is it you never find us wild rib-eye?”

“Why is it you never find us anything, period?” she asked, though it was a mean exaggeration. Ty more than pulled his weight, but today he was noticeably unfocused. Kate wasn’t surprised. He was running on very little food and even less sleep.

He handed the camera back and stared at her with the unearthly blue-green eyes that earned them another quarter of their ratings. “What?”

“Nothing.” His tone suggested otherwise. “Take me to your eggs.”

“Terrifying choice of words, Ty.” They stood and she tossed him the wool hat he’d been wearing in the previous scene. He tugged it on and followed her back to the tree. “Third limb.”

He squinted upward. “I see it.”

She trained the camera on Ty as he demonstrated how to loop a length of climbing rope around the trunk to make the task easier. Kate frowned at her ruined jeans and savaged thighs. In three minutes he was up and back again with the eggs in his vest pocket.

“What d’you fancy?” he asked, his perpetually mischievous eyebrow cocked at her. “Raw or boiled?”

“It’s your lunch, Ty. I’m having an energy bar.”

“What’ll look better?” he asked.

“You cooked that goose, yesterday. Better do an ‘if you can’t build a fire’ scenario.”

“You’re the boss.”

She pursed her lips, skeptical. “Care to put that in writing?”

Ty merely smirked, a dimple forming beside one corner of his mouth. Technically speaking, of course, he was the boss. It wasn’t just his name on the show, either—in addition to being the host and narrator of the wildly popular reality program, he was also its creator. He’d dreamed it up, pitched it, got himself the contract and come to the table with much of his survival experience already hard-earned from a stint in his twenties as a globe-trekking rock climber.

“How are we getting to tomorrow’s location?” Ty asked as he set up a tripod for the raw-egg-eating shot.

“Do you even look at the itineraries I write up for you?”

He angled the lens, fiddled with the settings. “Don’t need to, Katie. I’ve got you.”

“May God have mercy on the woman you trick into marrying you one day, Ty.” Not that you’re the marrying kind, she added to herself. She pulled her copy of the meticulous memorandum from the back pocket of her filthy jeans. “We’re meeting the dogsled folks tomorrow morning at five. The trip should take about three hours, then we’re doing an ice-fishing spot if the lake up there’s still frozen. Snowmobile team’s picking us up at sundown.”

“Beautiful. And after tomorrow?”

Kate smiled at the thought. “You know.”

Ty met her eyes above the camera. “Tell me anyhow, Katie. I love to hear you say it.”

“After tomorrow, we’re done for another season.”

Ty sighed, loud and dramatic. “And so our next destination will be…?”

“I don’t know about you, but mine’ll be my bed.” She could practically feel her cool sheets and soft pillows now.

“Sounds good. I’ll see you there.”

Kate waited until Ty glanced at her before she fixed him with a look she hoped conveyed her grumpy exhaustion. “While we’re on the topic, may I make a suggestion or two, for next season’s locales?”

“Mmm?”

“I’m thinking Maui. Saint John’s? Fiji? Please? This snow is killing me.”

“You’re from New England,” he said, eyes swiveling back to the camera’s screen.

“And I hated snow growing up, too. Come on, Ty…lost at sea? Even that’s got to be better than this.”

He shook his head. “No open ocean stuff.”

“Why are you so weird about—”

“I get seasick,” Ty interrupted. “Quiet on the set.”

He switched the camera on and went to work. Kate fell silent, smirking to herself. Only Dom Tyler could make swallowing the contents of raw songbird eggs erotic. Unlikely as it seemed, this shot was pure gold when it came to capturing the viewers’ attention. And with the snowy locale, this episode needed all the help it could get. Even though it was technically spring, winter still felt very much like the order of the day here in Saskatchewan. Winter meant snow and ice, gusting winds and cruel cold. And layers. Layers made the chance that the viewers would get a glimpse of Ty’s bare torso seem less likely. And that meant fewer pairs of anticipating eyes glued to the screen—the top half of Ty’s body secured them the largest chunk of their enviable viewership. They were by far the best-performing show on their nature-and travel-based network, and survival had very little to do with it.

“The viewers are going to love that,” Kate said when he finished recording.

“Our viewers are kinky, then…present company included.” He smiled at her, dismantling the tripod.

Kate bit back a smile of her own. “I’m immune to your charms, thank you very much. And if the viewers had to spend as much time with you as I do, they’d feel the same way.”

Ty faked offense, raising his eyebrows. “Now don’t tell me this isn’t what you were expecting when you moved to L.A. I mean, tell me this isn’t Hollywood glitz and glamour at its best.” He waved an arm around, indicating the dreary landscape, the minimalist campsite and the two of them. He hadn’t bathed since they’d left Los Angeles three days earlier, the antithesis of glamour. Kate wasn’t looking much better.

“I never thought being a personal assistant would be glamorous.”

“Of course not.” He grinned at her, looking skeptical. “Your coffee table’s only covered in celebrity mags because you couldn’t find any coasters, I’m sure.”

Kate pushed the slushy snow around with her foot. “Being a PA—the kind I thought I’d be,” she corrected, “is pretty slummy. I assumed I’d be fetching twelve-dollar lattes, and wiping poodle crap off somebody’s stilettos. Holding some celebutante’s hair back while she puked discreetly in the alley behind the poshest club in Hollywood. That sort of thing.”

“Very classy,” Ty said. “But I know there’s more. Don’t think I can’t see you salivating when the swag turns up.”

True. They’d been making this show for three seasons now and Ty was beginning to qualify as a bona fide TV celebrity. Kate had nearly hyperventilated the first time a designer offered Ty a suit to wear to an awards ceremony. He’d ultimately blown the event off in favor of a Lakers game and she’d grudgingly returned the goods.

“This isn’t exactly what I’d pictured…more frostbite, fewer flashbulbs. And you aren’t exactly the boss I’d pictured, either,” she admitted, squinting at him as they walked back to the fire. “I’d imagined a starlet with a dietpill habit, not some nature-boy with an adrenaline addiction. And this isn’t the skill set I thought I’d be gaining.”

Ty dragged a frame pack over and extracted a length of rope from the front pocket, tossing it to Kate. “Bowline,” he ordered in his best drill sergeant’s voice.

Kate made a perfect bowline knot in seconds flat. One of a hundred talents she’d learned from Ty and from books since landing this crazy job.

“Double figure eight.”

She tied a beauty.

“I bet Reese Witherspoon’s PA can’t do that,” Ty said smugly.

“No, and I bet she can’t treat a snakebite or diagnose dengue fever.” Kate made a loose slipknot and tossed it around his neck. “Now that I think about it, Ty, this gig’s not really teaching me any of the skills I’ll need if I’m going to run a powerful Hollywood agency someday. I thought I’d be reading Variety in first class, not manuals about ice-cave exploration in the back of a Cessna.”

He shrugged. “Funny what choices the universe makes for you.”

“Yeah. My cosmic dart didn’t land quite where I’d expected,” Kate added, referring to Ty’s new preferred method of choosing their shoot locations—tossing a dart blindly at a world map until it hit an appropriately forbidding destination. He had a penchant for leaving decisions up to chance, an aversion to caution that bordered on superstition.

He slid a long hunting knife from the sheath on his belt and slapped the handle into Kate’s palm. He pointed to a spruce tree a few yards away and stepped back.

Kate took aim and threw. The knife whipped through the air and the blade found its target, thwacking into the trunk, dead center.

Ty groaned and clapped a hand over his heart as if he were fighting an arousal-induced heart attack. “Goddamn, woman.”

Kate smiled to herself, and hoped the cold breeze would banish the prideful flush warming her cheeks.