Gibson's Girl

“You’re happy?” he asked her now.

“So far,” she said. There was room for a tiny bit of happiness along with the embarrassment. So it wasn’t a lie.

“Is it all you were expecting?”

“More, actually.” And wasn’t that the truth!

Fortunately he didn’t ask what she meant. “So where are you staying? What’s it like?”

She told him about the hotel. It was a no-frills place. “Respectable,” Gib had told her. “Safe.” She remembered a muscle in his jaw ticking as he’d steered her in. “Wish they had locks on the outside of the doors, too,” he’d muttered.

She wasn’t sure what he meant by that She hadn’t asked.

Dave was surprised. “I thought you were going to rent somebody’s apartment.”

“This is just temporary. He hasn’t found a place yet.” She didn’t tell Dave he’d been hoping against hope that she wasn’t coming.

“You’re not staying with him!”

“Of course not!”

Gibson Walker didn’t want her at his apartment any more than Dave wanted her there. There had never been any question. When he’d realized he was stuck with her, he’d taken her to this hotel.

“I can’t afford a hotel,” she’d protested.

“I can,” he’d said in a voice that brooked no argument. He’d marched her up to the desk and paid for one night’s lodging.

She’d dug into her purse for her credit card. “I can manage one night!”

But he hadn’t paid any attention. He’d checked her in, handed her bags to the bellboy, tipped him, told her he hoped she came to her senses by tomorrow and went home. And then he’d turned on his heel and started toward the door.

“Wait!” Chloe had called, and he’d stopped, then turned. “What time do we start in the morning?”

For a long moment he’d just looked at her. Then a corner of his mouth had twisted and he’d replied. “First shoot’s at nine.” Then he’d turned again and strode out the door.

“I’ll find a place tomorrow,” she told Dave now. “After work.”

“A safe place,” Dave instructed her.

“A safe place,” Chloe agreed.

“I miss you.”

“I miss you, too. But I’ll be home before you know it.”

“I’ll know it,” Dave said gruffly. “It’s sixty-one more days.”

He’d counted, Chloe realized guiltily. Well, so had she, but with anticipation, not annoyance.

“Compared to forever, sixty-one days isn’t so long,” she said gently. “And once I get home, we’ll have forever.”

And that was the truth. She had had Dave in her life for so long she couldn’t imagine him not being there. Sometimes she wondered if she existed without him. Maybe that was what she was trying to find out.

“Sister Carmela has a lot to answer for,” he grumbled.

“It wasn’t just Sister Carmela.”

But Dave wasn’t convinced.

And he was right that it had been Sister Carmela, the new abbess at the monastery just outside Collierville, who had put the idea into Chloe’s head.

She’d interviewed Sister last month for the newspaper. They’d hit it off at once, going on to talk much longer than the actual interview required. And in the course of their conversation, Sister Carmela had told Chloe not just about her new position as abbess, but the spiritual journey that had brought her there.

She had, she’d told Chloe, come to the abbey just after college, fresh with the enthusiasm and idealism of youth.

“I loved it,” she’d said, her brown eyes sparkling. “I felt at home at once. More alive. Centered. As if this was where I’d always been meant to be. And everything went smoothly until right before I was to make my final profession. And then I began to get worried. What if I was wrong? What if I was foreclosing on my options too soon? What if I was doing this just because it seemed easy for me? Maybe too easy? I got restless, fidgety, unsettled.”

Chloe, who had been feeling some of those very same feelings for the past few months, leaned forward earnestly and held her pencil, poised to note the reply. “How did you overcome it?”

“I didn’t,” the abbess told her with a smile. “I left.”

“Left?” Chloe dropped the pencil. Scrabbling to pick it up, she’d looked up at the nun again to see if she was joking.

But though there was a smile on Sister Carmela’s face, she was apparently quite serious. “I couldn’t stay. Not until I was sure. So I decided to test my vocation, to go out, live in the ‘real world’ for a while and see if that was where I belonged. So I did.”

Chloe smiled. “And that’s when you realized...you didn’t like it?”

Sister Carmela shook her head. “I did like it. A lot. It was wonderful, and by the ‘real world’s’ standards, I was a success. But in the end, I knew it wasn’t right for me. I saw that, no matter how ‘successful’ I was out there, I belonged here. And so I came back.”

It made sense. It made an incredible amount of sense. While Sister Carmela had been talking about her monastic life, she might as well have been talking about Chloe’s.

She’d been feeling every bit as unsure, every bit as restless as the date she and Dave had finally set for their wedding approached. Granted it had been, at that time, still four months off. But some nights Chloe couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about the rest of her life...and wondering if it was going to be any different than what she’d already had.

It wasn’t that she was dissatisfied really. It was just that she didn’t know!

She and Dave had been together so long, they seemed so perfect for each other—like Sister Carmela and the monastery—that it made her nervous.

“You’re asking for trouble,” Dave said.

But Chloe knew that wasn’t true. She was asking for a test. She needed to see what was beyond the rolling hills and river bluffs of the northeastern Iowa town where she’d grown up. Collierville was wonderful. Dave was wonderful. She loved them both. But maybe, like Sister Carmela, she was taking the easy way out.

Maybe she should leave, too.

“Not for fifteen years!” Dave had said when she told him how long Sister Carmela had stayed away.

“Of course not! A couple of months. That’s all. What do you think?”

“I think it’s nuts,” Dave had said with his customary bluntness. “What’s out there that isn’t here? Besides crime, poverty, dirt and air pollution, that is.”

Dave knew they had all that, to some degree, in Iowa. He was just trotting out the time-honored arguments that all self-satisfied midwesterners indulged in when they felt morally superior to big city folks.

But in the end, he’d supported her. He’d told his parents that if Chloe felt she had to do it, then she had to do it. He’d told her parents that he didn’t mind waiting to get married. They’d waited often enough.

“I’ll be back in August,” Chloe had reminded them all.

“Leaving me to do all the work,” her mother had said darkly.

But in fact, Chloe thought her mother was secretly pleased. She had far more interest in making it a wedding to remember than Chloe did.

“I’ll take the phone book with me. I’ll contact the florist, the caterer,” Chloe promised. “I’ll send out the wedding invitations from there.”

She’d brought the phone book. But she wasn’t working on lists of florists and caterers tonight. Tonight she was staring out at the New York skyline, periodically pinching herself, hardly able still to believe she was here.

It was going to be wonderful. The experience. The job. She would do a good job—she was determined about that. Despite her disastrous, humiliating beginning, she would salvage her job. And she would go home at peace, having seen the bright lights and big city; she would be ready to settle down with Dave.

Like Sister Carmela, she would get her taste of the big broad world, and then she would go home.

“The grass isn’t greener on this side of the fence,” she said aloud now. Then she giggled. From where she stood and looked out the window, there wasn’t any grass to be seen at all.

She closed her eyes and thought about Iowa. She thought about how green the grass was now, how blue the sky. She thought about Dave. Strong. Steady. Dependable. Dave.

He was all she’d ever wanted in a man.

But just before she went to sleep she found herself hoping that, when she came to him naked on their wedding night, he would look at her with the same intensity that Gibson Walker had.

You’d think Gina had an in with the Almighty!

Well, Gib admitted, maybe she did. She was always doing good deeds and helping other people. Maybe that was why everything she wanted for Chloe seemed to be falling into place.

He’d just been standing there by Edith’s desk, telling her that if she wanted to keep Chloe she’d have to find her a place to stay, when the door opened and Sierra, the hair stylist, came in.

“She’s staying?” Sierra sounded delighted. “Your sister’s friend? You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was,” Gib grumbled. “She won’t leave.”

Sierra’s eyes got big. “Took one look at you, did she? Decided she can’t live without you?” Sierra came in to do hair frequently on Gib’s shoots. She knew how many women flung themselves at his feet. She also knew it irritated the hell out of him.

“She’s engaged,” Gib said dampeningly.

Sierra blinked in surprise. Then she shrugged. “You could cut him out.”

“I’m not interested!”

The force of his voice had Sierra stepping backwards. She lifted her shoulders again. “You never are, are you?” It was common knowledge that for all that women threw themselves at Gib, he never chased them. He dated, but never seriously.

“No,” he said firmly now. “I’m not.”

“So,” Sierra changed the subject, “when’s she coming in?”

Gib shrugged. “I told her we started at nine. So we’ll see if she actually shows up. Maybe by today she’s come to her senses. Maybe,” he said hopefully, “she got to thinking about it and went home this morning.”

The door opened. “Who? Me?” Chloe said.

Gib groaned. Partly because she was still there—and partly because she looked every bit as sweet and innocent and delectable as she had the day before. He’d told himself he was imagining it.

He hadn’t been.

She also looked fresh and bright and well-rested—a whole lot better rested than he was. And though her cheeks were rosy, if it was from mortification over yesterday’s disaster, she didn’t look nearly as mortified as he might have hoped.

Actually the blush on her cheeks looked more like brimming good health than lingering embarrassment. She looked like she could hardly wait to get to work.

“I haven’t found you a place to stay,” he told her flatly.

“My sister needs a house sitter,” Sierra said.

Both Gib and Chloe jerked around to stare at her.

Sierra shrugged. “If you need a place to stay,” she said to Chloe, “you can probably stay at my sister’s. She’s having her apartment redecorated this summer. They’re doing a lot of work on it and she’s going out to the Hamptons while they’re working, but she was saying just the other day that she’d like someone to keep an eye on things, be there when the plasterers showed up, that sort of thing.”

Chloe’s eyes lit up. “Fantastic.”

“Hang on a minute,” Gib objected.

They all looked at him. He opened his mouth again, then closed it. What was he going to say? That he didn’t think that the apartment of the sister of a purple-haired stylist was appropriate lodging for a former Iowa kindergarten teacher no more worldly than her students?

“She doesn’t look like me,” Sierra said with a grin, as if she could read his mind. “Mariah is...normal.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Gib began, then stopped. What did he care? As he’d been at pains to point out to both Gina and Chloe, he wasn’t going to be anyone’s keeper. He shrugged irritably. “Fine. Ask your sister.” He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, then turned away. “Save me the trouble. I’ve got work to do,” he said and stalked off toward the studio.

Footsteps hurried after him. “Wait for me,” Chloe said a little breathlessly.

But Gib didn’t want Chloe underfoot right now. He was entirely too aware of her at the moment. “Go help Edith,” he said. “When Misty gets here she can help me.”

He glanced long enough to see a flicker of disappointment on her face. His jaw tightened. He steeled himself against it. Telling her to help Edith was not the same as kicking a puppy, damn it.

The door to the outer office opened again, and the first models came in chattering. “Hi, Gib!”

“Hi. handsome!”

Gib flashed them standard smiles, then turned a scowl on Chloe again. “Go,” he said. “Didn’t you agree to do whatever I asked you to do?” he reminded her silkily.

She colored slightly. She sighed. She went.

Gib turned back to load film in the camera. Sierra started to work on the blonde model’s hair. Beyond the door he could hear Edith telling Chloe about how she arranged the scheduling.

“Let me make some notes,” Chloe said.

Gib nodded, satisfied. If she had to be here, helping Edith was the best place for her. She could have her time in the city, and she wouldn’t be underfoot.

Now, if Misty would just show up.

He needed her to set up the lights and the reflectors so they could get started as soon as Sierra finished with the models’ hair. He would need her to move things later, changing the lighting while he shot.

He read over the notes the agency had sent. He made some of his own. He started setting things up himself, annoyed.

Edith stuck her head in. “Misty called. She can’t come in today. Something about her planets not being properly aligned.”

Gib stared.

Edith shrugged, a small smile playing around the corner of her mouth. “Apparently she’s sensitive to that sort of thing.”

Gib gave her a steely-eyed glare.

“Shame about that,” Edith said, still smiling. “You could probably use some help.”

Gib could see Chloe sitting at Edith’s desk, talking on the phone to someone, taking notes studiously, her lower lip caught between her teeth. Gib looked at her, then at Edith.

Edith looked at Gib, then at Chloe, then back at Gib.

Damn it, was she going to make him beg?

“I could send Chloe in to help when she’s finished on the phone,” Edith ventured after a moment.

“Do that,” Gib growled.

Chloe came in five minutes later. “What can I do?” she said eagerly.

“Set these up.” Gib pointed to the reflectors. He indicated where. Chloe went to work.

Gib was used to Misty and her predecessors—girls who needed to be directed and prodded every step of the way. Chloe didn’t. Once he told her what to do, she did it. And the next time he needed it done, she did it without his having to say a word. She seemed almost to anticipate his directions. And she didn’t say a word, either. Just worked.

He was amazed.

Chloe took it all in her stride.

And when they’d finished and the models had left, only then did she look at him and beam. “That was fun!”

Misty had never called it fun.

“Yeah,” Gib said gruffly. “Here.” He thrust the camera at her. “Can you load this?”

Solemnly, almost reverentially in fact, Chloe took it from him. While he watched, she loaded film into the camera. “That’s another of your jobs,” he told her.

Just as she was handing it back, Sierra came in. “I called my sister. She’d like Chloe to come over this evening at seven.”

“We’ll be there,” Gib said.

Both Chloe and Sierra looked at him, then blinked.

He scowled. “Gina would want me to make sure it’s the right place for her,” he said. “Don’t stare at me like that. She’s my sister. She doesn’t ask for much!”

“Right.” Sierra nodded wisely.

Chloe gave him a bright, entirely unnecessary smile. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Gib said. “Let’s get to work.”

Naturally Chloe thought Mariah’s apartment was wonderful.

A day in Chloe’s company had shown Gibson the truth of everything he’d feared: she thought the city was wonderful. Period.

“It’s just so...so...alive,” she’d said on the way uptown in the taxi. “Look!” She’d pointed at a man in top hat and tails, playing a grand piano on a street corner. “Wherever you look, you never know what you’ll find!”

“That’s not necessarily good,” Gib had said gruffly.

But Chloe hadn’t stopped enthusing. She enthused about the neighborhood in which Mariah lived. It was on the Upper West Side, not too many blocks above and just a little west of Gib’s own apartment on Central Park West. Not a bad neighborhood at all, he conceded. But not exactly Iowa.

Still, he reserved judgement, going only so far as to say, “I’m the one who’s deciding if it’s all right or not If it’s not, you’re not staying,” just as they were alighting from the taxi.

“What?” Chloe looked astonished.

He took her suitcases and pointed her toward the brownstone whose address Sierra had given them. “You heard me.”

Sierra’s sister, Mariah, was normal. Attractive even, in a slender, long-haired, model-like way. Her hair was brown hair, not purple. Her fingernails were red, not black. And other than tiny studs in her ears, she had no visible body piercings.

Not that Sierra had any, either. But Gib suspected she had leanings in that direction.

Mariah ushered them in and up the stairs. “I’m on the second floor. A floor-through. Everything has been pretty much gutted since I bought it this spring. The building was a wreck when I bought my place. Plaster crumbling. Wallpaper peeling. Ceilings sagging. But it’s down to the bare bones now, and the plasterers are supposed to be starting later this week.”

The apartment faced south. It was, as Mariah claimed, almost cavern-like. She had no furniture in the living room besides a television and VCR and a futon with a brightly colored Indian coverlet and lots of pillows. The kitchen was equally spartan. Appliances, a bar stool and a butcher block stacked with a small assortment of pots and pans and dishes.

“The stove is gas,” Mariah said. “It works. The water runs. Hot and cold. The refrigerator is hooked up. There’s a light overhead.” She gestured at the shop light hanging from the ceiling fixture. “Once they’ve plastered in here, the cabinet maker will begin working. Then they’re going to bring in the counter tops. They might have to shut things off briefly, but for the most part, you shouldn’t have any problems.”

Chloe took it all in wordlessly. Gib had a hundred questions.

Were these workers licensed? Bonded? Responsible? Did they have criminal records?

“Next thing you’ll be wanting to see their high school transcripts,” Chloe said irritably.

“You can’t be too careful,” Gib told her.

“I’m sure they’re very reliable,” Mariah said. She led the way into the bedroom at the back of the apartment. It needed plastering, too. But there was a queen-size bed and another pile of colorful pillows in the center of the room. It looked too big for one person, Gib thought nervously. Would some man talk her into bringing him home to share it? Would her farmer fiancé fly out for weekend trysts?

What difference did it make?

“The plasterers and cabinet maker all worked on the apartment downstairs,” Mariah went on. “It was finished this spring and it’s wonderful. I’ll ask Rhys to show you,” she said to Chloe.

“Rhys? Who’s that?” Gib wanted to know.

“My neighbor,” Mariah said. She pointed downstairs.

“We bought into the building at the same time. He’s done a great job with his place. He has the bottom two floors. Seems a waste when he’s single and hardly home enough to enjoy it.” She shook her head. “He’s a fireman. Goes all over the world putting out blazes. Oil wells, natural disasters, things like that.”

Gib watched Chloe’s eyes get bigger and bigger. He wished Mariah would confine herself to the relevant details.

“What days do they pick up trash?” he asked. “What about recyclables? Is someone checking that all this plastering gets done? Chloe won’t be responsible for it.”

“I’ve made a list.” Manah gestured toward some papers on the butcher block. “I’ve got it all written down, when everything is supposed to happen. It’s not a big deal.”

Gib snorted. Easy for her to say. She was going to be in the Hamptons. It would be Chloe who would be here. What if they were all axe murderers and rapists?

Well, he could hardly ask that. Not in so many words.

Chloe apparently had none of the same qualms. She picked up the list and smiled beatifically at Mariah. “No problem. Sounds like fun. And—” she looked at Gib, eyes shining “—I’ll get to have a real New York experience.”

Mariah chuckled. “That’s for sure.”

“She has a job,” Gib reminded them. “She can’t be here all the time.”

“Oh, she won’t have to be. Rhys can let them in.”

“I thought he was all over the world. Never home long enough to enjoy it, didn’t you say?” And now he was going to let people into the apartment. He had a key?

Mariah waved her hands. “Oh, you know how it is. When he’s gone, he’s anywhere. When he’s home, he’s downstairs. He’ll be home for the next six weeks. I’m sure you’ll meet him in the next few days,” she said to Chloe, and confided, “He’s a hunk.”

Gib’s teeth came together. “She’s engaged,” he said through them.

Mariah’s eager smile faded for a moment, then brightened again. “Well,” she said cheerfully to Chloe, “no harm in looking, is there?”

They shared a conspiratorial giggle. Gib drummed his fingers on the butcher block. When Chloe looked his way, he gave her a black scowl. She frowned right back at him.

What was that for? he wondered. He was only protecting the rights of her fiancé.

“I’m not sure he should have a key,” Gib began.

But Chloe cut in. “I think this is very nice of you,” she said to Mariah, just as if he weren’t there at all. “And I’ll be happy to let plasterers in or cabinet makers or whoever. I’m sure I’ll be very happy here.”

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