well it might, Gibson thought.
“About time,” he barked at the young woman who appeared in the doorway. “You were supposed to be here at one.”
She blinked round eyes so deep and dark a blue they were almost violet. Gib shook his head. The idiots in marketing strike again. They knew he was shooting in black-and-white. The eyes were wasted.
“M-my plane was late.”
“Plane?” They’d flown her in? Was she some hotshot West Coast model he’d never seen before? The latest L.A. superstar?
Gib’s brows drew down, and he studied her more closely, trying to see whatever it was they’d seen in her. He was the one, after all, who was supposed to be a connoisseur of women.
It was what he did—photograph women. Beautiful women. It was what he was famous for—the photographs—and the ability to recognize beauty and capture it so others could see it, too.
He looked closely now.
Miss Blue-Violet looked like a caricature of the 1950s version of “the all-American girl.” She was in her mid-twenties age-wise, he’d guess. Older than the average “flavor of the month” they usually came up with. She wasn’t especially tall, either. Average, he’d have said. Not average when it came to curves, though. He’d seen roads through Nebraska with more curves than the typical model. This one looked more like a real woman than that from what he guessed was camouflaged under her shirtwaist dress.
Who the hell wore a shirtwaist dress on a job like this? Who the hell wore a shirtwaist dress in New York City in this day and age? With her wavy blonde hair and full lips, she looked, for all the world, like a sort of discreet, demure, buttoned-down Marilyn Monroe.
And there was a contradiction in terms for you, he thought wryly.
Maybe that was what they saw in her—the potential to burst out, to become something more. Sprinkle on a little Seven! and a woman could turn from the seven virtues to the seven sins.
Not a bad idea. A speculative smile touched Gibson’s mouth. He could work with that.
“What’s your name?” he asked her.
“Chloe,” she said with a flutter of lashes designed to indicate bafflement, as if she thought he should have known.
Gibson’s brows lifted. Was she going to be one of those arrogant ones, then? One of those models who’d done two or three jobs, maybe got a cover somewhere, and expected that she was now a household word? Gib had no use for prima donnas, even if their planes were late.
“Well, Chloe,” he drawled, “you’re here now, so take off your clothes and let’s get this show on the road.”
The blue-violet eyes seemed almost to bug out of her head. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. She only gaped at him. Her cheeks actually seemed to be turning red.
“What’s the matter?” Gibson said, entirely unsympathetic. “Didn’t the nice people tell you what you’d have to do if you came here today?”
“They didn’t say...they didn’t say...that” Chloe gulped. She looked around wildly, blinking as her gaze went from one naked woman to the next.
Generally models who’d been around a while were entirely unselfconscious, wandering around without a stitch on. Every one had seen so many naked people that they were too blasé to care. But now, under Chloe’s stricken gaze, Gib could feel their self-consciousness rising. Next thing you knew they’d be grabbing for their robes.
Gib ground his teeth. Then he pasted a smile on his face. “Well, I guess you can leave,” he said in saccharine tones. He leveled a challenging gaze at her. “I guess you can just get back on that plane and fly home again.” He paused a beat. “Or you can do what you were hired for.”
Dead silence. She seemed almost to stop breathing. Then she made a quick gasp. Her tongue touched her upper lip. Gib could read indecision on her face. He almost thought he could read fleeting panic there, too.
Hell’s bells, what had possessed them to hire this one?
And then, with one last desperate gulp, she nodded. “Wh-where do I...ch-change?”
“I’ll show you.” Sierra, the purple-haired stylist, smiled encouragingly at her and beckoned to her with long, be-ringed fingers. “This way.”
With one last gulp and a sidelong glance in his direction, Chloe skittered after Sierra toward the row of changing rooms on the other side of the studio.
Gib could have sworn he heard her teeth chattering as she passed.
In the last twelve years, Gibson had photographed a lot of women.
His camera liked them. It traced their lines, their curves, their pouts, their smiles. It turned them into art. It made Gibson one of the most sought-after photographers in the business. From a professional standpoint he was pleased.
Personally he couldn’t have cared less.
He didn’t care about the women either. Gibson didn’t get involved with the women he photographed.
He’d been there, done that. And he’d learned his lesson.
As far as he was concerned, they were nothing more than light and shadow, curve and angle, rise and fall.
It was the geometry of the lens and the body he concentrated on. Nothing personal. They might as well have been old tires or autumn leaves, these naked women. They were objects. They were interchangeable, all of them. Had been for years.
Until Chloe came out of the dressing room that afternoon.
Chloe wasn’t just a curve or an angle, a light or a shadow. She was a person. Live. Breathing.
Trembling.
It drove him nuts.
“Okay. Let’s go,” he said, barely sparing her a glance, when she finally crept out of the changing room and slipped in behind the other models. “In a circle now. I need silhouettes. Arms over your heads. Reaching...that’s right... reaching.”
And seven women’s arms went over their heads. Seven women reached, stretched.
Six moved smoothly, their gestures flowing, their bodies curving.
The seventh trembled.
Gib lowered the camera. “Chloe,” he said. “Straighten up.”
She gave him a quick desperate glance. She nodded. She ran her tongue over her lips. She straightened up.
“Reach,” he commanded.
Chloe reached. Her hair bounced.
Her breasts did, too.
And Gib’s mouth went dry. His palms went damp. His body got hard. Like he was some damn teenager, for heaven’s sake!
He’d seen breasts before. Hundreds. Thousands. He’d probably seen more women’s breasts in the last twelve years than most men did in a lifetime.
But most of the breasts he’d seen didn’t—he ran his tongue over his lips—well, they didn’t...bounce.
The other thousands of breasts Gib had seen had been firm, perky, plastic almost. And there had never been very much of them. Not even a handful.
Chloe was rather more... voluptuous.
The shirtwaist gone, she was Marilyn unbound.
Gib shut his eyes and shoved the thought away. But the moment he opened them, his gaze, and the thought, immediately snapped back right to her.
“Reach,” he barked at her. And when she reached—and jiggled—he bit out, “I didn’t say lunge, sweetheart! I said, reach. Like you’re reaching for your lover.”
Her whole body blushed.