Gibson's Girl Read online

  “I won’t be responsible for you!”

  About the Author

  Books by Anne McAllister

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  Copyright

  “I won’t be responsible for you!”

  Chloe looked at him, startled. “Of course not!”

  “I won’t fight your battles for you or protect your innocence or mollycoddle you in any way!”

  “I never asked—”

  Gib’s finger stabbed the air, making his point. “I just want it clear. If you stay, you’re on your own!”

  Chloe stood her ground. She even looked mutinous. He thought she might bite his finger.

  “Yes, certainly!” she agreed. As he turned away, she asked almost belligerently, “Is there anything else?”

  He whirled back. “Yes! You’ll damned well keep your clothes on!”

  ANNE McALLISTER was born in California. She spent long lazy summers daydreaming on local beaches and studying surfers, swimmers and volleyball players in an effort to find the perfect hero. She finally did—not on the beach, but in a university library where she was working. She, her husband and their four children have since moved to the Midwest. She taught, copyedited, capped deodorant bottles and ghostwrote sermons before turning to her first love, writing romance fiction.

  RITA award-winning author Anne McAllister

  writes fast, funny and emotional romances.

  You’ll be hooked till the very last page!

  Books by Anne McAllister

  HARLEQUIN PRESENTS

  1620—CALL UP THE WIND

  1680—CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

  1769—THE ALEXAKIS BRIDE

  1854—A BABY FOR CHRISTMAS

  1890—FINN’S TWINS!

  1832—FLETCHER’S BABYI

  2005—THE PLAYBOY AND THE NANNY

  Don’t miss any of our special offers. Write to us at the following address for information on our newest releases

  Harlequin Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269 Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  ANNE McALLISTER

  Gibson’s Girl

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  For Samantha Bell and Tessa Shapcott

  —wise and supportive editors both—

  Gib and Chloe (and I) thank you

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE were six naked women in Gibson Walker’s line of sight. They were slender, lissome women with long legs, smooth thighs, and pert breasts.

  And all he could think was, Why in hell weren’t there seven?

  He glanced at his watch, tapped his foot, ground his teeth.

  “Where is she?” he muttered for the fiftieth time in the past half hour.

  How was he supposed to shoot the photos for the brand-new fragrance Seven! if he only had six naked women?

  “Can’t we start?” one of the naked women whined.

  “I’m cold,” bleated another, hugging herself.

  “I’m hot!” purred a third, batting her lashes at Gibson in an all too obvious attempt to make him hot, too.

  But any temperature elevation in his body, Gibson knew, would have more to do with the heat of his growing irritability than with any woman’s seductive wiggle. To make that fact clear he glared at her. She immediately edged behind a light reflector to avoid his gaze.

  “Gibson, my nose is shiny,” one of them complained now, studying herself in the mirror, tipping her head this way and that and making rabbit faces.

  They won’t be looking at your nose, sweetheart, Gibson wanted to tell her. But he knew better. This was Art—in the eyes of marketing, at least. So all he did was say to the makeup girl, “Judi, powder her nose.”

  Judi powdered the girl’s nose. She powdered someone else’s cheeks. Sierra, the hair stylist, fiddled for the thousandth time with everybody’s hair.

  Gibson tapped his toes, drummed his fingers, yelled at Edith, the studio manager, to find out who the hell she was, this missing female.

  Whose fault she was, he meant.

  Given a choice Gib always picked his own models—ones he knew, ones he trusted to be reliable, professional, on time.

  But he hadn’t picked any of these. The client had.

  “We want a little of everything,” the ad rep had told him on the phone. “All beautiful, of course,” he’d added hastily, “but not all...you know, standard brand.”

  Gibson had snorted at the time, but he knew what the rep meant.

  Seven!, according to the ad-babble he’d been given, was supposed to appeal to Every-woman. Therefore Every-woman—albeit beautiful—was supposed to be in the ad. In other words, not cookie-cutter dark-haired, expressionless models with chiseled cheekbones and pouty lips.

  “We’ll look through the head sheets and pick them,” the rep had promised. “Some tall, some short. Curly hair. Straight. A variety of ethnic types.” Like it was somehow bold and daring. “And we’ll send them over.”

  Fine with him. Gibson didn’t care who was sent—as long as they could tell the time.

  One of them obviously couldn’t.

  He drummed his fingers on the desktop. He paced. He fumed. The girls fumed, too. They fluttered. The fluttering grew. Agitation was next. Then, who knew?

  Gibson, who counted on setting a mood for a shoot, could feel the mood of this one turning grim.

  And then, all of a sudden, he heard Edith say, “Yes, yes. He’s waiting for you. Go on right through. Go in.”

  The door opened. Slowly. Warily.

  As 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.

  Gibson lowered the camera. He blinked. He shifted position, disbelieving, wanting to see her more clearly. He’d never seen a full body blush. He was amazed. Intrigued. Enchanted.

  Well, no. Not enchanted. That was stretching things too far.

  Gibson Walker was not enchanted by women. He hadn’t been enchanted by any woman since...

  He squelched that thought.

  “Stop shaking,” he commanded her. “Or I’ll have six lovely ladies and a blur.”

  “S-sorry.” But she still shook. She didn’t stop.

  Gib shook his head, then picked up the camera again. He shot. He moved. He directed.

  “Swim,” he told them. “Languid, easy movements overhead. Like you’re going through water.”

  They swam. Easy overhand strokes. They went up on tiptoe. They floated.

  Chloe jiggled.

  Gib ground his teeth.

  He looked away, focused on another of the women. They moved and Chloe hove into view once more. He cleared his throat and tried to find a rhythm. “Let’s see those lips. Purse those lips. Kisses. I want kisses.”

  And damned if Chloe didn’t look straight at him, face aflame, body blushing, lips pursed!

  Gib blew out a harsh exclamation of air. “Not me, sweetheart!” he said in a slightly strangled tone. “I want profiles. Kiss your lover. You do have a lover, don’t you?”

  Whoa. The flush was back—with a vengeance. Too bad the ad wasn’t going to be in color. That was some rosy glow.

  Gib let out a pent-up breath. He wiped suddenly damp palms on the sides of his jeans, then ran his tongue over his lips. Focus, damn it, he told himself.

  He was focusing. That was the problem.

  Don’t focus on her!

  He tried not to. He moved, he crouched. He willed himself to ignore the growing insistence in his body. He pointed the camera at all seven women. Unerringly it found Chloe.

  He tried to remember all the ways he wanted them to move. His mind was a blank. Well, no, not really a blank. There were very definite curves on his mind. A very definite body.

  A very sexy body.

  A real body. Unlike the other six, Chloe seemed to respond to his direction with more than her muscles. She was unguarded, open. He said, “Lover,” and she blushed. He said, “Kiss,” and he saw longing on her face.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s it. Like that. More. Give me more, sweetheart.”

  They all looked at him.

  “Er, sweethearts,” he correc
ted. He smiled at them all. He looked at Chloe.

  She trembled. She blushed. Her breasts jiggled.

  Then he heard a commotion in the outer office. A “You can’t go in there!” followed by “Of course I can. I’m late!”

  And the door burst open and Tasha, a top flight model he’d worked with lots of times, burst into the room.

  “Ah, Gibson, I am zo zorry! Zee taxi! Zhe break down! Zee driver! He say I can’t leave without pay! I say, No pay! You don’t go where I mus’ go! No pay! Then he grab me! An’ I scream! I say, he kidnapping me! He say, I cheating him! Oh!” She shook a yard of flaming red hair. “Zhose police! Zhey never listen! You zhink zhey would listen to be-you-tif-ful girl, yes? No! Zhey listen to dumbest taxi driver!”

  And while she delivered this entire monologue, Tasha was busily flinging off her clothes. First the skimpy halter top, then the minuscule bra. One foot came up and a sandal slipped off. The other followed. She unzipped her mini-skirt and wiggled it past mini-hips over mini-thighs down ski slope legs.

  “I tell you, zhese police, zhey know from nozhing!” To punctuate her declaration, she peeled off her underpants and flung them in the air. Then she lifted her arms and beamed at Gibson.

  “We begin now, yes? I am ready!”

  In the silence that followed, Gibson was conscious of shutting his mouth.

  He was conscious of looking from Tasha, standing bare and beautiful in the middle of the room, full-frontal fantastic and not jiggling at all, to the rest of the naked women who surrounded her.

  His gaze moved slowly. From body to body to body. From face to face to face. They looked at him, then at each other. Their eyes seemed to be doing the same thing his were.

  Counting.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.

  His eyes went to Chloe. Trembling. Jiggling. Blushing. Seven.

  And Tasha made...

  Eight.

  Eight?

  “Wait a minute,” Gibson said. “There’s something wrong here. If Tasha’s supposed to be here—”