‘Are they... We’re not disturbing them too much, are we?’
The question was soft enough to have fooled me had I not witnessed the circus I’d convinced her to dispatch. ‘Do you care?’
Stephanie would’ve inhaled sharply at such a blunt question, then, depending on whether she was in her false role or not, would’ve delivered icy condemnation or tears on command.
Graciela met my question with another imperious lift of her brow and a steady regard when I flicked a glance her way. ‘You really don’t like me, do you?’
There was another hint of a smile in the question, a suggestion that she didn’t care either way. It should’ve confirmed every impression I’d had of her. Instead, it disconcerted me. Did my opinion of her count so very little?
‘You don’t care whether I do or not so why bother asking?’ I countered.
Her sigh was long and exaggerated, another indication that she found me...vastly amusing. That she could grind me underneath those expensive snow boots she was wearing without a second thought.
Just as Stephanie had believed she could.
Another spoilt little rich girl, this one with a few billion to play with, who believed she could buy anything and anyone in sight.
More than a little vexed that I couldn’t detach as easily as I’d hoped from the events of the past few months, I headed for the sled, pulled back the tarp and lifted out my treasured camera and slotted a fifty-millimetre lens to it to capture the close-ups I wanted to start off with. ‘You want shots for the print magazine and videos for the digital version, correct?’
‘If it’s not too much to ask, yes.’ Again she sounded amused.
And I couldn’t help it. I paused in the process of unscrewing the lens cap and looked her way to find her glasses sitting on top of her head and her stunning eyes fixed on me.
Not a single picture I’d seen of the heiress had done her justice. She had a face that just begged to be photographed. As for her body, despite being under wraps from neck to toe, I’d seen enough pictures of her in the glossy rags Steph used to devour to know just what was beneath the outfit.
Graciela was taller than average for a woman but even though she only reached my shoulder she seemed...taller.
Larger than life.
But while I wanted to believe it was mostly entitlement—because, let’s face it, that shone from her eyes and bristled from every pore—there was more. Which again made sense, since she was the very definition of a wild child and went out of her way to prove it with her various antics.
Skydiving in nothing but a string bikini over Rio.
A three-day sex party with a premier league soccer team in a hotel in Mali.
The rumours that she kept a string of lovers across the globe...
The icy wilderness landscape of Alaska was the last place I’d expected her to turn up, thinking she, like Steph, was the kind to leave all the hard work she’d later take credit for to her minions.
I finished adjusting the exposure to compensate for the darkening sky and took an initial short burst of photos of the polar bear family. Then I swapped the lens for a sixteen-millimetre, for wide-angle shots, and took another burst.
Surprisingly, she remained quiet throughout, didn’t fill the silence with mindless chatter, which I appreciated.
‘Can the cubs swim at their age?’ she asked when I lowered the camera after five minutes.
‘If they’re more than a few months old, yes, for short periods. But with more distances between icy landscapes some bears have been seen swimming with their young on their backs.’
She nodded, her gaze on the ice floe. ‘Is it dangerous for them?’ she asked.
‘Danger comes from all angles in this environment. This is a slow-moving floe and surrounded by frozen land on three sides. The mother would be on the lookout to ensure they don’t drift too far.’
‘That’s great, but it’s moving...towards us.’
I curbed a smile as I swapped cameras and grabbed a tripod to set up more stills. ‘We’ll be gone before it gets to us.’
She nodded again, but her gaze grew speculative, shifting from the bears to the other floes. They varied in size from a few metres to ones the size of football fields, all broken away from the mass that would normally have stayed solid well into the new year.
‘Can I get a short video of the floes, too?’
‘Sure.’
She didn’t interrupt or badger me with questions once I got into the flow of things. Hell, she even took herself off a short distance away, taking out her phone to take pictures of the distant Alaskan Range and the beginning of the spectacular orange on white sunsets that graced this stunning part of the world.
She returned in time to witness the bears’ floe touch another one and the mother supervising her cubs jumping from their floating platform onto a larger one.
With one last warning look over her shoulder, the mother bear escorted her cubs away towards a jagged mountain peak.
‘How long before they go into hibernation?’
‘Another two or three weeks.’
She frowned. ‘They don’t look nearly padded up enough.’
I shrugged. ‘Probably because they have to travel farther distances to feed.’
As if on cue, a loud, sharp crack sounded. Camera poised, I swung around in time to capture the towering wall of ice break away from a glacier to crash into the lake.
The sound seemed to echo for ever, bouncing off the icy landscape in perfect surround sound. Beside me, Graciela gave a soft gasp. ‘God. That’s...’
I lowered the camera and glanced at her. ‘It’s breathtaking and awe-inspiring until you remember that it shouldn’t be happening?’
Her face shuttered, her brows creasing in a frown.
I wasn’t sure whether she didn’t like that being pointed out or whether she didn’t want to admit she was affected by what was unfolding before
