Captain of Industry Read online

  “Hardly.” Jennifer’s laugh was rueful. “Models like me are a dime a dozen. There’s always someone younger and more memorable.”

  Suzanne turned to give her a long, taut look. “You are not cheap. Or forgettable.”

  Around a now enormous lump in her throat, Jennifer said, “You’d be surprised.”

  “I hope I’m never so old that I forget this.” With the lightest pressure, Suzanne ran the back of one hand over the silk covering Jennifer’s shoulder.

  She moaned, or thought she did. She wasn’t sure. That she had no bra on was abundantly obvious.

  A clatter of dishes startled them both.

  “I should go.”

  “I’ll see you home.”

  “It’s not necessary.” She rifled in her little bag as she turned blindly toward the door.

  “After your appointment, what is your day like?”

  “I’m free until two. From ten to two.” Almost at the door, she realized she was running away.

  “Then bring back my overcoat then.”

  “What coat?”

  “The one I’m going to lend you. I’ll be here.”

  The coat was a long, men’s camel-hair duster with a thick, warm lining. Suzanne helped her into it, then pulled her hair from under the collar. Jennifer felt what might have been the caress of lips at the nape of her neck before her hair settled again over it. Under the coat, parts of her flushed cold and hot all at once.

  “Thank you.”

  “This entire evening has been my pleasure.” Suzanne walked her to the elevator.

  “It didn’t turn out as I expected.”

  Jennifer ran out of air on the last word. She turned away from the elevator light, hoping the flush she could feel in her cheeks didn’t show, let alone the disappointment that Suzanne hadn’t kissed her again.

  Chapter Four

  Lean slightly right, left shoulder back, arm draped on knee, palm down, chin up. “Now you want my fingers more spread?” She treated the ridiculous photographer to a glare which he completely missed. “Is this natural enough for you?”

  “Jenny, Jenny, what are you doing?” Donald kept the camera whirring even as an assistant hurried into the frame to adjust Jennifer’s hands again. “You can’t cover the product, darling.”

  His added muttered epithet of amateurs didn’t help Jennifer’s nerves. With a sour back-of-a-taxicab voice, his whining left Jennifer feeling clammy and sticky. Most of the time everyone fell into a productive groove, but new photographers with unknown shooting protocols were always nerve-wracking.

  This morning nothing she was doing was right, according to lord-god-king-Donald. His body suit of black spandex with a lavish gold chain was so cliché that she couldn’t take him seriously. But her agent said he was the gateway for young models to hundreds of gigs for hand, body and face modeling, the easiest and most lucrative shoots. Make him happy and he’d recommend her onward to the big-ticket advertising agencies. But that wasn’t turning out to be easy at all. She wanted in the worst way to pull the not-very-virginal white kimono around her bare legs and cover up the Laverne and Shirley cleavage which always seemed to give people pause.

  Kit and Caboodle, Suzanne had called them. What on earth was a “caboodle”?

  “Those are diamonds, not snakes.” Donald’s exasperated sigh coincided with setting the camera aside. He stormed onto the dais and glared down at her.

  Seated, she had no choice but to look up. If it weren’t for her acting lessons she might not have abruptly realized that everything in the layout was designed to make her look small. He’d posed her to be collapsed on herself, hair scraped back into a braid, elbows at her side and leaning forward over her knees. It made her feel shrunken and it was hard to believe the camera wasn’t capturing that. He loomed over her, upstaging her so he could have his scripted tantrum for the amateur unchallenged.

  Surprised by the new thought, she reflected on her acting instructor’s attention to blocking and body stance—something a good actor just knows and does without a director telling them. If you have lines, take up more space and move just a little more than a no-lines extra. But don’t forget whose scene it is. When it becomes your scene, spread out even more, use wide gestures and body poses to be the center of focus.

  Right now it was Donald’s scene. Weren’t photographers supposed to be invisible—especially for print advertisement images? The shoot was for a local jeweler who wasn’t using an ad agency, giving The Donald free rein to nag and upstage both her and the product. It seemed to her that the client would be left wondering why the pretty picture of their goods didn’t quite work. Was she supposed to fear getting fired so much that she would put up with anything to please?

  Her movements slow and assured, she unkinked herself from the awkward pose and spread one arm along the back of the chaise where for the last ninety minutes she’d been admiring her beautiful diamond bracelet, the perfect wedding gift to June brides six months hence. Her distaste for the way things were going wasn’t helped by the fact that Suzanne was expecting her about now.

  “No, no, no,” Donald whined. “That won’t work.”

  Yes, yes, yes, Jennifer thought. My stage, not yours, mouthbreather. “Shouldn’t I look like I love wearing it?”

  “I’ll decide what you like.” He fussed about her hair, readjusted the kimono neckline to display a generous curve of breast, all the while leaning over and into her with the violation of private space that photographers and models took for granted. Except this felt unlike any other shoot she’d been on before.

  When she’d first come to New York she would have wondered if it was her—too inexperienced to take all the touching and physical comments impersonally. She might have thought she didn’t know how to act like a model as he fussed for long minutes with the exact placement of the kimono across her breasts. But designer clients like Lucius were asking for her by name, and she’d been on dozens of shoots in the last two months. Maybe The Donald didn’t know that.

  How much do I need this job, Jennifer wondered. The Donald’s spandex covered groin bumped her shoulder and she glanced at the assistants—both female, and both finding someplace else to look.

  He picked at her hair. “Maybe we should have you lying back on the lounge. After all, you’ll always look good on your back. As soon as you marry a rich guy you’ll be getting paid for it in diamonds. They last forever. Looks don’t.”

  It wasn’t the first time someone had told her she needed to bag a wealthy husband and stock up on gifts before her assets sagged. She hated it even more from this creep than from her family and so-called friends back home.

  He bumped her shoulder again with his crotch and smoothed the kimono over her breasts one more time. Then he began the same attention to kimono placement across her thighs, his fingers more often touching skin than fabric.

  She bit her lower lip. Was this why he only worked with “young and rising” models? Why there was no ad agency involved? The girls were old enough not to be chaperoned but too young to protest? Like she’d told Suzanne Mason last night—three months in Manhattan were like a year in the University of Life. She was older than her birth certificate said and no frightened little girl. The Queen of Prussia College for Models had included self-defense strategies, and what that class might have missed, surviving as the Hecht’s menswear pretty girl bait at the King of Prussia mall had filled in.

  The next time his crotch came close enough she met him halfway there with a shoulder check a hockey player would have envied.

  The sound of The Donald trying to breathe in was one she was going to replay in her head, it was so satisfying to hear.

  “You—you—”

  “Bitch? That’s me. Yes, I did that on purpose, just like you were fingering me all over on purpose.” She rose to her feet and stripped off the kimono in a single motion, proving she had no issue with being mostly naked on her own terms, then headed for the privacy screen where her clothes were piled. “We’re done.”<
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  She shrugged into a bra, yanked her favorite Kate Spade sweater over her head, pulled on her True Religion jeans and had her elegant but functional Ralph Lauren boots on before Donald had moved from his gasping sprawl across the chaise. One of the assistants was offering water while the other had stayed next to the camera—still whirring on auto-click—to hide a helpless smile.

  “Shame on you,” Jennifer snapped. “Letting him dickwave in girls’ faces.”

  The laughter instantly disappeared. “Easy to say from your side of the camera,” she hissed.

  “Some things aren’t worth the price of my soul.”

  “Wait until your first wrinkle.”

  She let the door slam behind her as she slid into the deep warmth of Suzanne’s overcoat. Maybe it was glee at what she’d just done, but the rest of her day was looking glorious.

  Chapter Five

  The buzz of the doorman’s intercom startled Suzanne out of sleep. She hadn’t meant to spend what was left of the night thinking about Jennifer Lamont, and her restlessness had found an outlet in cranking “Rhythm Nation” past eleven and leveling up in Tomb Raider. Her thumbs were raw and her eyeballs felt like sandpaper. Not for the first time she reminded herself that she needed to get involved in a project or she’d get lost in late night parties and endless gaming. That might have been her dream life when she was fifteen, but it wasn’t sufficiently diverting ten years later, not for more than a night.

  Jennifer the Model—now that was a diversion.

  “There’s a Miss Lamont to see you.”

  Standing in her bare feet at the intercom she still felt a flash of heat—then panic. It was after ten. If she didn’t answer, the bellman would send Jennifer away. If she answered, she had maybe thirty seconds to brush her teeth and hair and look as if she had fallen asleep before sunrise.

  She didn’t want Jennifer to be sent away. She was a walking dream, like a prom queen, the kind of girl who had never given boy or girl geeks like her a second look in high school. The glamour girls who liked to hang around her since the AOL money came in were witty and flirty, but Jennifer was in another league. Smart-assed and funny, and not afraid of pissing Suzanne off. Even though she looked like the kind of girl who usually made Suzanne feel too small or too big, inept or too smart, and never, ever cool, that wasn’t how Jennifer made her feel—at all.

  “Send her up.”

  She dashed from the intercom at the front door for the bathroom. She put way too much paste on her toothbrush and was spitting foam as she dashed for the walk-in closet for her robe to throw over her Mystery Science Theater T-shirt and plain black boxers.

  At least she had been asleep for such a short time that her hair was pretty much like it had been last night. She was still deciding if she liked the cut, slightly longer on top than the heartthrob on ER it mimicked. Annemarie, one of the Connecks employees she’d kept in touch with after the America Online buyout, had told her to see a personal stylist and so she had. Annemarie knew about that kind of thing.

  Running back to the door to answer the chime, she caught sight of her reflection in the window. Even though she sometimes still felt like the girl who had listened to Radiohead’s “Creep” a dozen times a day all through college, she no longer looked like it. Her new millions had brought the partygoers and the string of eager paramours. How could she be sure Jennifer, for all her apparent ambitions, wasn’t just like them?

  So what if she was?

  Beautiful was all Suzanne could think when she opened the heavy steel door. Beautiful. Unlike last night, her hair was pulled back into a tightly woven braid, putting all the attention on her high cheekbones. The sun pouring in seemed to put a pleased-to-see-you sparkle in the large, dark eyes and Jennifer was all the more feminine and curvaceous under Suzanne’s man-cut overcoat. All of that plus an easy smile robbed Suzanne of words.

  “I hope you haven’t been trapped inside without your coat.” Jennifer leaned against the doorjamb with her gaze taking in Suzanne’s robe. An eyebrow lifted.

  “No, I’m getting a slow start this morning is all.” She was abruptly aware of the tatty terrycloth—she’d had the robe for years and it was finally exactly the right feel. She led the way to the kitchen area. “Can I get you something to eat? If you’re eating today, that is.”

  “I ran out this morning without anything. I know that’s bad for me, and yes anything in food would be welcome. As usual, the photographer wanted to give me champagne. At eight thirty in the morning.” Jennifer’s grimace seemed extreme for just dislike of a beverage. “He was a major jerk.”

  “Did it go badly?”

  “He got inappropriate.” She slid the coat off and draped it over the back of the nearest chair. “Which I think is his usual deal. I just wasn’t going to put up with it.”

  “Good for you! Does that happen a lot?” Another glance showed a still stormy expression. “Are you okay?”

  “He got the worst of it. I just feel slimy. No doubt my agent is leaving me messages even as we speak.”

  “You don’t have a mobile phone?” She gestured Jennifer onto one of the barstools at the counter that framed one end of the kitchen area. “I’ll make some coffee.”

  “I’m kind of Amish about phones and computers.” Jennifer laughed. “Not the kind of thing I should admit to someone like you, is it?”

  “I think the word you’re looking for is Luddite.” She allowed her gaze to travel across Jennifer’s shoulders. The gray and blue striped sweater clung in all the right places and then some.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.” She dumped grounds into the fancy little brewer that had been part of the furnishings. There was a chance the results would be drinkable. The fact that it was blocks to the nearest Starbucks was considered a feature, not a bug, of the ritzy location. “Are you averse to technology?”

  “Just not exposed to it, and it’s expensive. Unlike clothes and pretty things like this purse, nobody gives you a phone or computer for knowing how to walk.” Jennifer plopped a red and black shoulder bag on the counter. It was the size of a manhole cover, or nearly, and it appeared to have very little in it. “I never had time, and I’m afraid of buying the wrong thing and regretting it, and when I first got here I was counting pennies pretty closely to make sure I could make it six months at least. Then I could lose it and—”

  “How about some expert advice?” Suddenly shy at the happy smile Jennifer gave her, she turned to the enormous refrigerator. “I think I have milk and some leftovers from last night. I sent most of it away with the caterer, but there’s lots of cheese. And these puffy things.”

  Jennifer bobbed happily on her barstool. “Let’s try the puffy things.”

  Suzanne set the plastic-wrapped tray on the counter. “See, you do eat.”

  “I eat. I work out. Personal trainer, the whole deal.”

  “Tools of your trade. I can nuke that for you,” she added as Jennifer popped one of the cold puff pastries into her mouth whole.

  “Next one. I suddenly realized I was starving. If you don’t mind, I’d like to wipe off some of this makeup and brush out my hair.”

  “This isn’t your normal morning look?” Her face looked like it had last night.

  “Heavens no. There’s two layers of foundation and way too much smoky eye for daylight. I’ll be right back.”

  Suzanne busied herself with heating up more of the pastries. Toast would be good. Her mother, who still thought Suzanne needed care packages, had sent some delicious California marmalade.

  Jennifer reappeared after a few minutes. Her face was rosier in color and she looked more like a real woman than a sculpture. She’d brushed out the braid and the indigo-highlighted black waves cascaded down her back.

  Don’t stare, geek weed. “The photographer really offered you champagne in the morning?”

  “Sick, huh? Then he started humping my shoulder—it was bizarre and rude.”

  It soun
ded to her like the guy needed to be castrated. “Good for you for walking out. Your agent won’t back you up?”

  “I doubt it. Though I just realized…” Jennifer turned to look over the park. “This will sound conceited.”

  “Go for it.” Good lord, she was beautiful. Sculpted and classic when at rest, graceful and striking in motion.

  “I think I don’t have to put up with it. Nobody should have to, but some girls would, because making a fuss will be the end of their careers. They’re not as…this.” She made a vague gesture at her body. “I don’t have to put up with that guy harassing me. He has to put up with me.”

  “So does your agent, for that matter. Who works for who? Your money, you get to say.” She knew nothing about the fashion world, but in her opinion Jennifer had a lot going for her.

  Jennifer slowly nodded. “It’s a new feeling. And all good. I think I’m going to be a success as a model. I already am in the short term. But I really want to be an actress. I’ll probably run across people I need and I won’t be able to kick them in the gut if they get handsy.”

  “Last night you said girls like you are a dime a dozen.”

  Jennifer swiveled back from the window. “That was my mother using my mouth.”

  “Your mom doesn’t want you to be a model?”

  “My mom wants me to be her booze and cigarette lackey.”

  Ouch. Not sure that was a safe topic to continue, Suzanne asked, “Did you really kick him?”

  “It wasn’t a kick, but he had trouble breathing in for a while.”

  “Nothing the jackass didn’t deserve.” She mentally draped Jennifer in the trappings of Xena, breastplate and all. Jennifer wasn’t as robust, but the look would suit her lush hair and long, lean curves. The image made the hot dish from the microwave slippery in her hands. “I’d have liked to have seen that.”

  The stormy expression from earlier was completely gone. “So my answering machine is probably filling up.”

  “Have some of these.” She set the plate down. “And we’ll go phone shopping.”