Unveiling the Bridesmaid

by Jessica Gilmore

  He swivelled round to stare out of the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined one whole side of his studio. Usually looking out over Manhattan soothed him or inspired him, whatever he needed. Reminded him that he had earned this view, this space. Reminded him that he mattered. But today all it told him was that he was taking a huge gamble with his career and his reputation.

  Twenty-five minutes late. He had to keep busy, not waste another second. Turning, he assessed once again the way the summer morning light fell on the red velvet chaise longue so carefully positioned in the middle of the room, the only piece of furniture in the large studio. His bed and clothes were up on the mezzanine, the kitchen and bathroom were tucked away behind a discreet door at the end of the apartment. He liked to keep this main space clutter-free. He needed to be able to concentrate.

  Only right now there was nothing to concentrate on except the seconds ticking away.

  Gael resumed pacing. Five minutes, he would give her five more minutes and if she hadn’t arrived by then he would make sure she never worked in this city again. Hang on. Was that the buzzer? It had never been more welcome. He crossed the room swiftly. ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s a young lady to see you, sir. Name of...’

  ‘Send her up.’ At last. Gael walked back over to the windows and breathed in the view: the skyscrapers dominating the iconic skyline, the new, glittering towers shooting up around him as New York indulged in a frenzied orgy of building, the reassuring permanence of the old, traditional Upper East Side blocks maintaining their dignified stance on the other side of his tree-lined street. He shifted from foot to foot. He needed to use this restless energy while it coursed through him—not waste it in frustration.

  The creak of the elevator alerted him to his visitor’s imminent arrival. No lobby, not when you had the penthouse; the elevator opened right into the studio.

  And he did have the penthouse. Not as a gift, not as a family heirloom but because he had worked for it and bought it. Not one of his friends would ever understand the freedom that gave him.

  The doors opened with an audible swish and heels tapped tentatively onto the wooden floor. ‘Er...hello?’ English. He hadn’t expected that. Not that he cared what she sounded like; he wasn’t interested in having a conversation with her.

  ‘You’re late.’ Gael didn’t bother turning round. Usually he made time to greet the women, put them at their ease before they got started but he was too impatient for the niceties today. ‘There’s a robe on the chaise. You can change in the bathroom.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The bathroom.’ He nodded to the end of the room. ‘There’s a hanger for your clothes. Go and strip. You can keep the robe on until I’ve positioned you properly if you prefer.’ Some did, others were quite happy to wander nude from the bathroom across the floor to the chaise. He didn’t mind either way.

  ‘My clothes? You want me to take them off?’

  ‘Well, yes. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’

  He moved around to face her at the exact same moment she let out a scandalised-sounding, ‘No! Of course not. Why would you think that?’

  Who on earth was this? Dark-haired, dark-eyed, petite with a look of outraged horror. She was pretty enough, beautiful even—if you liked the ‘big dark eyes in a pale face’ look. But he was expecting an Amazonian redhead with a knowing smile and whatever and whoever this girl was she certainly wasn’t that.

  ‘Because I was expecting someone who was supposed to be doing exactly that,’ Gael said drily. ‘But you are not what I ordered. Too short for a start, although you do have an interesting mouth.’

  ‘Ordered?’ Her cheeks reddened as the outrage visibly ratcheted up several notches. ‘I’m sorry that I’m not your takeout from Call Girls Are Us but I think you should check before you start asking complete strangers to strip.’

  ‘I’m not the one who has gatecrashed their way past the doorman. Who are you? Did Sonia send you?’

  ‘Sonia? I don’t know any Sonia. There’s clearly been some kind of mix-up. You are Gael O’Connor, aren’t you?’ She sounded doubtful, taking a cautious step back as if he might pounce any second.

  He ignored her question. ‘If you don’t know Sonia then why are you here?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘My sister is getting married and...’

  ‘Great. Congratulations. Look, I don’t do weddings. I don’t care how much you offer. Now, I’m more than a little busy so if you’ll excuse me I have to make a call. I’m sure you can find your own way out. You seemed to have no trouble finding your way in.’

  The dark-haired woman stared at him, incredulity all over her face as he pulled his phone out of his pocket. Ignoring his unwanted visitor, Gael scrolled through what felt like an endless stream of emails, notifications and alerts. His mouth compressed. Nothing from the agency. With a huff of impatience he found their name and pressed call. They had better have a good explanation. The phone rang once, twice—he tapped his foot with impatient rhythm—three times before a voice sang out, ‘Unique Models, how may I help?’

  ‘Gael O’Connor here. It’s now...’ He glanced up at the digital clock on the otherwise stark grey walls. ‘It’s nine a.m. and the model I booked for eight-thirty has yet to show up.’

  ‘Gael, lovely to speak to you. I am so sorry, I meant to call you before but I literally haven’t had time. It’s been crazy, you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Sonia was booked yesterday for a huge ad campaign—only it was a last-minute replacement so she had to literally pack and fly. I saw her onto the plane myself last night. International perfume ad, what an opportunity. Especially for a model who is...’ the booker’s voice lowered conspiratorially ‘...outsize. So we are going to have to reschedule your booking I am so sorry. Or could I send someone else? We have some lovely redheads if that’s what you require or was it the curvier figure you were looking for?’

  With some difficulty Gael managed not to swear. Send someone else? An image of the missing Sonia flashed through his mind: the knowing expression in her green catlike eyes, the perfect amount of confident come-hitherness he needed for the centrepiece of his first solo exhibition. ‘No. I can’t simply replace her, nor can I rebook. I’ve put the time aside right now.’

  After all, the exhibition was in just five weeks.

  ‘Sonia will be back in just a couple of days. All I can do is apologise for the delay but...’

  It would help, he thought bitterly, if the booker sounded even remotely sorry. She would be—he would never use a Unique model again. He hung up on her bored pretence for an apology. Once Sonia was back she would be of no use to him. Unlike his photographs Gael didn’t want the subjects of his paintings to be known faces. Their anonymity was part of the point. He spent too much time documenting the bright and the beautiful. For this he wanted real and unknown.

  His hand curled into a fist as he faced the bitter facts. He still had to paint the most important piece for his very first exhibition and he had no model lined up. He mentally ran through his contacts but no one obvious came to mind. Most of the models he knew were angular, perfect for photography, utterly useless for this.

  Damn.

  ‘Mr O’Connor.’

  Palming his phone, Gael directed a frustrated glance over at his unwanted intruder. ‘I thought you’d left,’ he said curtly. She was standing stiffly by the elevator, leaning towards it as if she longed to flee—although nobody was stopping her, quite the contrary. Gael allowed his gaze to travel down her, assessing her suitability. Before he had only looked at what she lacked compared to the model he was expecting to see; she was much shorter, slight without the dramatic curves, ice to Sonia’s fire. She wore her bright clothing like a costume, her dark hair waving neatly around her shoulders like a cloak. Her eyes were huge and dark but the wariness in them seemed e
ngrained.

  She took another step back. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It is my studio...’ he drawled. That was better; indignation brought some more colour into her cheeks, red into her lips.

  ‘I am not some painting that you can just look at in that way. As if...as if...’ She faltered.

  But he knew exactly what she had been going to say and finished off her sentence. ‘As if you were naked.’

  He had lit the fuse and she didn’t disappoint; her eyes filled with fire, her cheeks now dusky pink. She would make a very different centrepiece from the one he had envisioned but he could work with those eyes, with that innocent sensuality, with the curve of her full mouth.

  He nodded at her. ‘Come over here. I want to show you something.’

  Gael didn’t wait to see if she would follow; he knew that she would. He strode to the end of the studio and turned over the four unframed canvases leaning against the brick wall. There would be twenty pictures in total. Ten had been framed and were stored at the gallery, another five were with the framers. These four, the most recent, were waiting their turn.

  He heard a sharp intake of breath from close behind him. He took a step back to stand beside her and looked at the paintings, trying to look at them with fresh eyes, to see what she saw even though he knew each and every brush stroke intimately.

  ‘Why are all the women lying in the same position?’

  Gael glanced over at the red chaise standing alone in the middle of the studio, knowing her eyes had followed his, that she too could see each of the women lying supine, their hair pulled back, clad only in jewellery, their faces challenging, confident, aware and revelling in their own sensual power.

  ‘Do you know Olympia?’

  Her forehead creased. ‘Home of the Greek gods?’

  ‘No, it’s a painting by Manet.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It was reviled at the time. The model posed naked, in the same position as each of these,’ he waved a hand at his canvases, at the acres of flesh: pink, cream, coffee, ebony. ‘What shocked nineteenth-century France wasn’t her nudity, it was her sexuality. She wasn’t some kind of goddess, she was portraying a prostitute. Nudes at that time were soft, allegorical, not real sensual beings. Olympia changed all that. I have one more painting to produce before my exhibition begins in just over a month.’ His mouth twisted at the thought. ‘But as you must have heard my model has gone AWOL and I can’t afford to lose any more time. I want you to pose for me. Will you?’

  Her eyes were huge, luminous with surprise and, he noticed uncomfortably, a lurking fear. ‘Me? You want me to pose? For you? On that couch? Without my clothes? Absolutely not!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE WANTED HER to what? Hope stepped back and then again, eyeing Gael O’Connor nervously. But he lost interest the second she uttered her emphatic refusal, turning away from her with no attempt to persuade her. Hope could see her very presence fading from his mind as he began to scroll through his phone again, muttering names speculatively as he did so.

  Maybe she should just go, try and arrange this wedding by herself. She looked around, eyes narrowing as she took on the vast if largely empty room, the huge windows, the high ceiling, the view... This much space, on the Upper East Side? Hope did some rapid calculations and came up with seven figures. At the very least. Her own studio would fit comfortably in one corner of the room and the occupant probably wouldn’t even notice she was there. Hunter had said that his stepbrother could get her into all the right places and this address, this room, Gael’s utter certainty that he commanded the world indicated that her brother-in-law-to-be hadn’t been lying.

  Hope cleared her throat but her voice still squeaked with nerves. ‘Hi, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Hope McKenzie and I’m here because your brother—stepbrother—is engaged to my sister.’

  He didn’t look up from his phone. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Which what?’

  ‘Stepbrother. I have...’ he paused, the blue eyes screwed up in thought ‘...five. Although two of those are technically half-brothers, I suppose, and too young to be engaged anyway.’

  ‘Hunter. Hunter Carlyle. He met my sister, Faith, in Prague and...’

  ‘Hunter isn’t my stepbrother. He was,’ Gael clarified. ‘But his mother divorced my father a decade ago, which makes him nothing at all to me.’

  ‘But he said...’

  ‘He would, he clings to the idea of family. He’s like his mother that way. It’s almost sweet.’

  Hope took a deep breath, feeling like Alice wrestling with Wonderland logic. ‘As I said, he’s engaged to my sister and I was wondering...’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry. I know he’s young. How old is your sister?’

  Was she ever going to say what she had come here to say? It had been a long time since she had felt so wrong-footed at every turn—although being asked to strip by a strange man at nine a.m. would wrong-foot anyone. ‘Nineteen, but...’

  He nodded. ‘Starter marriages rarely last. There will be a prenup, of course, but don’t worry, the Carlyles are very generous to their exes. Just ask my dad.’ Bitterness ran through his voice like a swirl of the darkest chocolate.

  ‘Starter marriages?’ This was getting worse. Was she going to be able to formulate a whole sentence any time soon?

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? To ask me to stop the wedding? I wouldn’t worry. Hunter’s a good kid and, like I said, the prenups are generous. Your sister will come out of this a wealthy woman.’

  Hope’s lips compressed. ‘My sister is marrying Hunter because she loves him.’ She pushed the part of her brain whispering that Faith had only known Hunter for six weeks ruthlessly aside. ‘And I am sure he loves her.’ Based on a two-minute conversation through a computer screen but she wasn’t going to give Gael O’Connor the satisfaction of seeing her voice any doubts. ‘They want to get married, here in New York, two weeks on Thursday and they asked me to organise the wedding.’

  Gael’s mouth pursed into a soundless whistle. ‘I wonder what Misty will say to that. She prides herself on her hostessing skills.’

  ‘I believe she is holding a party on Long Island shortly after. A small and intimate wedding, that’s what Faith’s asked for and that’s what I am going to give her. But it’s going to be the best small and intimate wedding any bride ever had. Hunter thought you would be able to help me but it’s very clear that you are far too busy to get involved in anything as trivial as a starter marriage. I won’t bother you any more. Good day.’

  Head up, shoulders straight and she was going to walk right out of here. So she might not have Gael O’Connor’s connections; she had a good head on her shoulders and determination. That should do it.

  ‘Hope, wait.’ There was a teasing note in his voice that sent warning shivers through her. Hope was pretty sure that whatever he wanted she wasn’t going to like it.

  ‘Pose for me and I’ll help you give your sister the perfect wedding. I can, you know,’ he added as she gaped at him. ‘My little black book...’ he held up his phone ‘...is filled with everyone and anyone you need from designers to restaurateurs. You do this and your sister will have the wedding of her dreams. And that’s a promise.’ His gaze swept over her assessingly, that same lazy exploration that made her feel stripped to the skin. She shivered, her heart thumping madly as each nerve responded to his insolence.

  Mad, bad, definitely dangerous to know. She was horribly out of her depth. ‘I...look, this isn’t something you can just throw at someone. It’s a big deal.’

  A small smile curved his mouth. It didn’t reach his eyes; she had a sense it seldom did. ‘Hope, life modelling is a perfectly respectable thing to do. Men and women of all ages and body shapes do it day in, day out.’

 
She cast a quick glance at the canvases still facing out, at the exposed flesh and the satisfied, confident gazes. ‘But these aren’t men and women of all ages and shapes,’ she pointed out. ‘They are all women and they are all beautiful, all sexy.’

  ‘That’s because of the theme of the show. If Olympia had been a middle-aged man then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’ll be quite intensive. I’ll need a week or so of your time, first a few sketches and then the actual painting. The first session is the most important—I need to know that you’re comfortable with the pose, with the jewellery you choose and its symbolism. The tricky bit is finding the right mood. The other models have spent some time thinking about their past, about their sexuality and what it means to them; the original Olympia saw sex as business and that comes across in her portrait. She is in control of her body, what it offers.’

  Which meant, she supposed, that he thought she could portray sexuality. Awareness quivered through her at the idea. Awareness of his height, of the lines of his mouth, the steeliness in his eyes. It was an attractive combination, the dark hair, such a dark chocolate it was almost black, and warm olive skin with the blue-grey eyes.

  Eyes fastened solely on her. Hope swallowed. It had been a long time since anyone had intimated that they found her sexy. Attractive, useful, nice. But not sexy. It was a seductive idea. Hope stared at the red couch and tried to imagine it: her hair piled up, pulling at the nape of her neck, the coolness of a pendant heavy on her naked breast, the way the rubbed velvet would feel against the tender skin on her thighs and buttocks, against her back.

  How it would feel to have that steely gaze directed intently on her, to have him focus on every hair, every dimple, every curve—Hope sucked in her stomach almost without realising it—every scar.

  Hope’s cheeks flamed. How could she even be having this conversation? She didn’t wear a bikini, for goodness’ sake, let alone nothing at all. If she could shower in her clothes she would. As for tapping into her sexuality...she swallowed painfully. How could you tap into something that didn’t actually exist? Even if she had the time and the inclination to lie there exposed she didn’t have the tools.