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her stomach told her it wouldn’t be that easy. The guilt, the sense of wrongness wouldn’t go away that easily. Yes, Sean had been eager that she get on with her life if something happened to him. But she doubted he meant with his own brother. If she believed in the afterlife, his ghost would come back and haunt them both, torment them until they went insane.
    She sighed. Torturing herself with such thoughts wouldn’t help. She could ignore the situation and hope it would go away, concluding she’d experienced a weird reaction to seeing Sean’s brother again. Or she would have to tell him what was going on in her head, her heart, and deal with what came next—whether he felt the same or not.
    She thought he did feel the same—or at the very least, he liked her, and not in a platonic way. Which didn’t necessarily mean that he was falling for her. Fuck, she didn’t know whether she wanted him to be or not.
    Standing, she willed the thoughts to go away. If she carried on much longer, it would give her the headache she’d faked.
    Walking to the kitchen, she poured a bowl of cereal, grabbed a spoon, and ate it, standing at the counter. Cereal counted as a major comfort food— and healthier than chocolate .
    Later, she distracting herself with several rounds of computer puzzle games then took a shower, hoping she might get some sleep.

 
     
     
Chapter Seven
     
     
    Melodie dragged herself out of bed and headed into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Miraculously, she’d slept well, and, even better, she hadn’t dreamed. Or, perhaps more realistically, she couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed about.
    After grabbing breakfast, she washed up and got dressed, dragging her hair up into a high ponytail. Carrying her computer bag over to her desk, she switched on the computer. While it booted up, she settled in front of the screen with a cup of tea and prepared to upload the images from the previous day’s shoot.
    By the time she’d viewed the last image, Melodie’s jaw almost hit the floor. Despite Patrick’s obvious discomfort, even the early photos in his shoot were good. His great bone structure, shock of black hair, gorgeous eyes and kissable lips combined to make a startling bunch of photos. When the shirtless ones appeared, however, things got even more interesting.
    Closing the slideshow, she created a reject folder. The way to select the image she wanted to use would be to slowly eliminate them until she ended up with the best one. Or the best few, anyway. She and Patrick had already decided to make the final decision together.
    Dragging all of the fully-clothed photos into the folder, she delighted at how many she’d reduced the total by. She paused, went in search of her cell phone, then tapped out a text.
    Looking at photos now. Going to narrow to a few as discussed. Are you free after work to finalize? No worries if not, can do it another time. We still have a month or so until entries close. XX
    M
    Continuing to work through the images, she discounted several more and dragged them into the reject folder, aiming to get the final count to around ten to choose from. Many were easy to eliminate for technical reasons—poor angle, too much light, too little light, problems that couldn’t be fixed using image-editing
    God, there are an awful lot of photos here . No wonder the poor guy had been so relieved to finish the shoot. He’d stood around for ages while she’d whizzed about like a demented bee. At least it hadn’t been for nothing, though. There were still plenty of images left to choose from and one would definitely be right for the calendar. Hopefully the charity would see it that way, too.
    Melodie didn’t want to get too attached to the idea of one of her photos ending up in a charity calendar, but it had become very important to her in a very short space of time. Especially considering she’d gone from not having a model and giving up on the idea, to having an extremely