Free WE HAVE CONTACT (The Kurtherian Gambit Book 12) by Michael Anderle Page B

monitor.

    “When did you take that?” Cheryl Lynn asked. She and the ladies had been busy trying to keep the overwhelming female fan base out of Mark’s hair, and did not have many chances to watch the men work. If you call walking around half naked, posing for pictures with food, cats, dogs and other animals, work. Cheryl Lynn noticed one of John’s photos. “Eeww, is that a snake?”

    “Yes, oh it is just a non-poisonous one that John grabbed in the bushes,” Mark exclaimed, thinking maybe the P.R. lady thought he had placed John in danger.

    “No, not worried about it being poisonous, I just find it a little creepy. You would swear there was a touch of red in John’s eyes,” she let her voice trail off when Mark hit a button on the keyboard, and a new set of images came up on each monitor. Cheryl Lynn’s eyes flicked to Scott’s screen and specifically the lower left-hand image.

    He was handing a young boy, of four or five, over the simple rope they had used as a barricade to keep fans back from the shooting. Apparently, the little guy must have bolted, and Scott had caught him.

    Mark was going to explain this set of prints, and why he thought they might be considered when he noticed Cheryl Lynn had not heard his last couple of sentences. He tried to figure out which of the pictures had captivated her so much, and it became simple when she reached out and touched the lower left image of Scott on the monitor.

    Mark pulled his tablet up and jotted down the picture number.

    One down, eleven to go.

    “They really see them this way, don’t they?” she asked, in a whisper inside the quiet room.

    “See the guys?” Mark said. “See them as something more? Yes, I have a lot of images with the ladies in the background. Some, like say,” he pointed over to Darryl’s monitor, “the woman at the top right?” Cheryl Lynn nodded her head, “she obviously is looking for a hunk of man meat, but the one next to her? She just wants to see what a good guy is like. The second lady is going to go home satisfied that they are real, and maybe she will find her own version of Darryl. The first lady?” Mark smiled, “She’s going home frustrated.”

    “Frustrated?” Cheryl Lynn asked, turning her head, “because she can’t get Darryl’s attention?”

    Mark shrugged, “Cheryl Lynn,” he looked to her, “none of the women got the guy’s attention. At least, not in a romantic way. These guys were there, they enjoyed themselves because, why not?” He shrugged, “They were nice, they were polite, but they weren’t interested in any of the ladies who showed up.”

    Mark leaned back to the table and played with the mouse and a couple of keystrokes. The first monitor, the one with John’s pictures, went black for a second before coming up with just one image. It was John looking to his right, his chest on display but you could see he had someone in his eyes that was making the smile genuine. If that didn’t make a woman want to tack his picture up on the wall, Cheryl Lynn didn’t know what would.

    “I caught John looking over at Jean when she wasn’t paying attention,” Mark explained. “Some of the best pictures were when I was doing one of the guys, and another happened to be close, thinking I wasn’t paying attention to them at all. The image of Scott handing the child back?” Mark looked over to make sure Cheryl Lynn was listening. “That was during a session with Eric, not Scott.”

    He leaned over and started messing with the keyboard and mouse again, on Scott’s monitor one single image came up. In it, Scott was smiling, but it wasn’t like John’s, no it was a smile of longing, of something just out of his reach. His face caused her heart to ache. She wasn’t sure what or who he was looking at, but it was clear he was looking at someone.

    Cheryl Lynn vaguely noticed Mark doing something again when he spoke, “I took four pictures, one I zoomed a little further out.”

    Cheryl