“Thank you for lunch, by the way,” she said as she slid in beside him, and five minutes later they were back at her office building, and she turned to smile at him again before she got out. “This was fun. Thanks, John. I feel like a human being again, going back to work. My staff will thank you for it. Most of the time I skip lunch.”
“We'll have to do something about that, it's not healthy. But I do the same thing,” he confessed with a grin. “I enjoyed it too. Let's do it again soon,” he said as she got out and smiled at him. And then she hurried into the building as he drove off, thinking about her. Fiona Monaghan was a remarkable woman, beautiful, intelligent, exciting, elegant, and in her own inimitable way, scary as hell. But as he thought about her as he went back to his office, he wasn't scared. John Anderson was seriously intrigued. She was the first woman he'd met in two years who seemed worth more than a second glance. And that she was.
Chapter 2
The week after she met John Anderson, Fiona spent two days at an important shoot. Six of the world's most important supermodels were in it, four major designers were represented, and the photographs were shot by Henryk Zeff. He flew in from London for the shoot, with four assistants, his nineteen-year-old wife, and their six-month-old twins. The shoot was fabulous, and Fiona was sure the photographs would be extraordinary, and inevitably the entire week turned into a zoo. The models were difficult and demanding, one of them used cocaine for most of the shoot, two of them were lovers and had a humongous fight on the set, and the most famous and essential of them was so anorexic, she fainted after eating literally nothing for the first three days they worked. She said she was “fasting,” and the paramedics who came to revive her suspected that she was suffering from mono too. They shot some of the photographs on the beach, wearing fur coats, and the blazing sun and relentless heat were nearly enough to kill them all. Fiona stood watching them up to her hips in the water, it was the only relief, as she fanned herself with a huge straw hat. Her cell phone rang late that afternoon, for the ninety-second time. Every other time it had been her office with some new crisis. They were deep into the September issue by then. The shoot they were doing was for October, but this was the only time Zeff had been able to give them, he was solidly booked for the rest of the summer. And this time when the phone rang, it wasn't Fiona's office. It was John Anderson.
“Hi, how are you?” He sounded relaxed and cheerful, despite a long, aggravating day at his end. But he wasn't one to complain, particularly not to someone he didn't know well. He had been fighting all afternoon to keep a major account, which was threatening to walk. He had saved it finally, but felt as though he had spent the entire day giving blood. “Is this a bad time?” Fiona chuckled at the question.
One of the models had just passed out from the heat, and another one had just thrown a bottle of Evian at Henryk Zeff for taking her out of a shot. “No, not at all. Perfect time,” Fiona said, laughing. If she'd had a gun, she would have shot them all. “My models are dropping like flies and having tantrums, one of them just threw something at the photographer, we're all about to keel over from sunstroke and heat prostration, and the photographer's twelve-year-old wife is nursing twins, both of whom have heat rash and haven't stopped crying all week. Just another ordinary day at Chic.” He laughed at her description, but to Fiona, it was all too real, even if hard for him to imagine. She was used to this. It was daily fare for her. “How was your day?”
“It's sounding a lot better now that I've heard yours. I've been running the Paris peace talks here since seven A.M. But I think we won. I just had a crazy idea and thought I'd give you a call. I was wondering if you wanted to have a hamburger with me on your way home.” This time she guffawed.
“I'd love to, except that I'm standing here up to my ass in the Atlantic in two-hundred-degree heat, somewhere on a beach on Long Island, in some godforsaken town with nothing but a bowling alley and a diner, and at this rate, we'll be here till tomorrow morning. Otherwise I'd have loved it. Thanks for asking.”
“We'll do it some other time. What time are you planning to wrap up?”
“After sunset, whenever that is. I think this is supposed to be the longest day of the year. I knew that by about noon, after two of the models slapped each other, and one of them threw up from the heat.”
“I'm glad I don't have your job. Is it always like that?”
“No. Usually, it's worse. Zeff runs a pretty tight ship. He doesn't put up with a lot. He keeps threatening to walk out and expects me to make everyone behave. Good luck on that.”
“Do you always go to the shoots?” He understood little about her job, and had somehow assumed that she sat at a desk, writing about clothes. It was considerably more complicated than that, although she did a lot of writing too, and checking over everyone else's work, for content and style. Fiona ran Chic with an iron hand. She worried about the budget and was the most fiscally responsible editor-in-chief they'd ever had. In spite of their vast expenses, the magazine had been in the black for years and turned a handsome profit, in great part thanks to her, and the quality of her product.
“I only go to shoots when I have to. Most of the time, the younger editors take care of that. But if it's dicey enough, or liable to be, I go. This one is. And Zeff is a major star, so are the girls here.”
“Are they modeling bikinis?” he asked innocently, and she laughed even harder.
“No. Fur.”
“Oh, shit.” He couldn't even imagine it in this heat.
“Precisely. We keep having to ice the girls down after they take them off. So far no one has died of the heat, so I guess we're still ahead.”
“I hope you're not wearing fur too,” he teased.
“Nope. I'm standing here in the water, in a bikini. And the photographer's wife has been walking around naked all day, holding her babies.”
“It all sounds very exotic.” Beautiful women wandering around naked or wearing fur on a beach. It was an interesting vision, as he imagined Fiona standing in the ocean in a bikini talking to him on her cell phone. “Not exactly like my workday. But I guess it sounds like fun too.”
“Sometimes it is,” she conceded as Henryk Zeff started waving his arms at her in a panic. He wanted to move for their last shot, and all but one of the girls objected, and pleaded exhaustion from the heat. He wanted Fiona to negotiate it for him, which of course she would. “Looks like I've got to go, the Indians are about to kill the chief. I'm not sure who I feel sorrier for, him or them or me. I'll call you back,” she said, sounding distracted. “Probably tomorrow.” It was already seven-fifteen, she realized, as she glanced at her watch, and she was surprised he was still in the office.
“I'll call you,” he said calmly, but she was already gone, as he sat pensively at his desk. Her life seemed light-years from his, although the art department in the agency was certainly not unfamiliar with a life like hers. But John rarely dealt with them and never went on shoots. He was far too busy soliciting new accounts, and keeping the existing ones happy, and overseeing vast amounts of money being spent on ad campaigns. The details of how those campaigns were put together were someone else's problem and not his. But he was undeniably intrigued by Fiona's world. It sounded fascinating and exotic to him, although Fiona would have disagreed with him, as she helped the assistants pack Henryk's equipment, while his wife had a tantrum, and he argued with her, and both babies cried. The models were languishing under umbrellas, drinking warm lemonade from a huge container, and threatening to quit, trying to negotiate hardship pay, and calling their agencies on their cell phones. They said no one had told them how long the shoot would be, or that it would involve fur. One of the models had already threatened to walk out on principle, and said she was going to report them to PETA, who would surely demonstrate in front of the magazine, as they had before, if they featured fur too prominently.