At Your Most Beautiful by Harper Bliss (best free ereader .TXT) 📗

“Which I’m not.” Maya had an inkling of what Angus was about to say and she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want someone saying the words out loud. She herself had already said too much in this conversation.

“I’ll say it anyway,” Angus continued, as expected.

“Of course you will.”

“Maybe instead of going on a date with Beverly, you should ask Quinn out.” Angus stated it so matter-of-factly, it almost sounded plausible. Almost.

“I’m not going on a date with someone twenty years younger than me.” Maya could sound very resolute as well—decades of teaching had made it easy.

“Why not?” Angus waggled his eyebrows.

“I didn’t tell you about Quinn because I want to go out with her, Angus. I only wanted to share this with someone who wouldn’t judge me.”

“I’m not judging, darling. Nu-uh.”

“I know you’re not, but you are insinuating something.”

“I just call it as I see it. Maybe that’s why you chose to tell little old me.”

Maya couldn’t think of anyone else she might have told. She might let Tommy know that Quinn was the photographer for the Acton shoot, but that would be the full extent of the information she would share with her son.

But Angus had been right about one thing. Ten years was a very long time to hold on to all the guilt being with Quinn had instigated within her. Maybe, at the very least, it was time to let go of that. From the way Quinn had behaved the other day, Maya could only conclude that it hadn’t affected her life in an obvious negative way. On the contrary, because Quinn had been the first one to refer to their long-ago night together.

“I’m going on a date with Beverly and that’s that,” Maya said.

“Do you have a picture of Quinn?” Angus fixed his eyes on her.

“Why would I have her picture?”

Angus shrugged. “What’s her last name? I’ll Google her.”

“Hathaway,” Maya said on a sigh, because even though she had lightened her emotional burden by sharing her secret with Angus, she knew it would be a very long time before she heard the last of this from him. It was the price she had to pay for telling him.

“Let’s have a look.” Angus picked up his phone and typed in Quinn’s name—an action Maya had stopped herself from doing a few times over the years. It didn’t take long before Angus showed her his screen. “Is this her?” In the picture he’d found, Quinn’s blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her blue eyes seemed to glitter with some secret delight. All of Quinn seemed to be utterly elated about something, judging from the sparkling smile on her full lips.

Maya nodded.

“In that case, Beverly’s got her work cut out for her,” Angus said drily.

Chapter 16

Retouching the image of a person was always an intimate act, but working on Maya Mercer’s picture was a never-ending flashback.

It wasn’t that Quinn hadn’t thought about Maya over the years. Of course she had. Quinn had reminisced about their night together often, but while doing so, she had only relied on memories. If she wanted to, she could make Maya look exactly like the memory she had of how she was ten years ago, but Quinn didn’t want to do that at all. She found herself staring into Maya’s dark-brown eyes for long stretches of time, not getting any work done—mesmerized by how she looked now.

The concept for the final image she wanted to create had come to her much quicker than usual. Maybe because where any other subject was concerned, Quinn had to do some hard graft to make them part of a magical looking scene while with Maya, there was something naturally spellbinding about her. In the elongation of her arm and the curve of her fingers. In the stretch of her neck and the flow of her hair. The red dress she wore in the picture lent her the aura of a proper movie star from a long-gone era.

Fucking hell, Quinn thought, as the cursor moved over Maya’s face without altering anything about it once again. Maybe Griff had a point. Maybe Maya was the key to unlock Quinn’s romantic future. Not in the sense that she and Maya would fall in love and live happily ever after—nothing as ludicrous as that—but in the sense that Maya turning up in Quinn’s life like that, now of all times, was a golden opportunity to get double closure—for two defining experiences in her life. To look Maya in the eye again and simply have a conversation about the night they’d shared would already be a win. While doing so, Quinn could remove herself—her heart and her soul—from Morgan a few inches farther. From previous bouts of heartbreak, although none as gut-wrenching as this one, she knew all too well that getting over someone was a slow process. To get over someone like Morgan, someone she had foolishly staked her future on and had given so much of herself to, would take a very long time. Unless Quinn could find a way to speed things up. A blast from the past might be just what she needed. Something so powerful it couldn’t help but snap her out of her post-Morgan funk. Because that night with Maya had been quite something.

Quinn still had no idea how she had managed to keep it a secret from every single person she knew. She hadn’t even told Morgan, with whom she’d shared so much. She had told absolutely no one, simply because Maya had asked her not to. There wasn’t anything else she could ever do for Maya, except keep their secret. So she’d done just that. Until she’d told Griff last night. After seeing Maya again, it was no longer an option to keep it to herself. That’s what being in the same room with Maya had done to her.

Granted, over time it had become much easier to keep the secret. If she had