Spring Collection

SPRING COLLECTION

JUSTINE LORING—
This brilliant businesswoman doesn’t need a man in her life. But suddenly there are two men vying for her attention … one, none other than her long-lost father.

FRANKIE SEVERINO—
Since her divorce, the feisty Brooklyn beauty is off men, all men … until she starts working with the object of her devastating high school fantasy, only to find him arrogant and difficult.

APRIL NYQUIST—
She has the timeless purity of her Scandinavian ancestors. But behind her exquisite, ice-princess facade lurks a far more erotic style—and her first romance will be a real shocker.

JORDAN DANCER—
A colonel’s daughter with vast potential, she’s successfully navigating the roadblock to a black model’s career, but not the treacherous territory of the heart.… Is her rise to fame about to be derailed by an impossible love?

TINKER OSBORN—
Once the star of the children’s beauty pageant circuit, this exquisite, emotionally fragile young woman will do anything to be on top again … even if it means risking her health, her happiness, and her life.

JACQUES NECKER—
Masterful and charming, rich but lonely, the Swiss billionaire wants one thing only—a place in his daughter’s life. But that is something even his money can’t buy.…

MARCO LOMBARDI—
Darkly gorgeous and as hugely unprincipled as he is talented, he is used to getting exactly what—and whom—he wants. Now, his spring show will make or break this young designer … and the model who has become his muse.

MAUDE CALLENDER—
A talented writer for
Zing
magazine, she’s as fascinating—and gloriously unique—as any of her subjects. But is she too sophisticated to fall in love?

MIKE AARON—
Tall and diabolically handsome, this top fashion photographer is paid to appreciate beautiful women. But suddenly there’s only one woman in the world for him.

Scruples
Princess Daisy
Mistral’s Daughter
I’ll Take Manhattan
Till We Meet Again
Dazzle
Scruples Two
Lovers
Spring Collection
The Jewels of Tessa Kent

O
ptimistic idiot that I am, I sprinted from the subway to the office at a ridiculously early hour in the morning. Believe me, nobody can move faster than I can on the streets of New York. Call me snake-hips Frankie Severino but I’ve never needed to push or shove in an unladylike way. During my many years of taking the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan I’ve patented a way to twist, sidestep and slither through any crowd. If I’d been a man I’d have made a hell of a linebacker. Riding up in the elevator to Loring Model Management where I work, I
knew
that today was the day. Last night I’d had a dream about getting the long-awaited fax from Necker in Paris that had been so incredibly real—not dream-real but
real
real—that I woke up this morning with my heart beating like crazy. I was filled with wild anticipation, every competitive instinct I have was up and screaming, all that fight-or-flight stuff made me leap out of bed, get dressed in ten minutes and race to the subway without as much as a bagel inside my stomach.

The fax wasn’t there. The little incoming tray was bare, the smug metal fax machine sat primly on its table, too high to allow me even the satisfaction of kicking it the way you do an empty vending machine. Short of taking an ax to the thing there was nothing I could do except stomp away in disgust. At least I had my cowboy boots on so the sound effects weren’t wasted.

After I’d coaxed a cup of coffee from our fancy, temperamental coffeemaker, I took it into the main room of Loring Model Management where, in an hour, seven bookers would be sitting at their phones around the circular desk. There our models’ schedules hang on a rotating file. All day long the bookers, each responsible for ten to fifteen girls, would be talking into their headsets, twirling the file and consulting their computers. An unglamorous setting, I thought, yet on any given day a memorable page in the history of glamour could so easily result from one of the calls our bookers field so adroitly. When I’d been a booker, right after I started work here, every phone call had been a thrill to me. Now, at twenty-seven, I’m second-in-command of the business and a damn sight less easily thrilled.

It was freezing in the booking room and I still hadn’t taken off the old duffle coat and two extra sweaters I’d piled over my usual uniform of tights, a leotard, leg warmers and a cardigan knotted at my waist. I decided that the warmest place in the agency on this icy morning in January of 1994 would have to be the enormous, enveloping leather chair behind my boss’s desk. Justine had definitely built herself a great little fortress, I realized as I cuddled way down into her amazingly comfy chair and sipped coffee, well within earshot of the phone ring that announces a fax. Justine Loring, my peerless leader, is just thirty-four, a former model who’d intelligently abandoned her career about five minutes after it reached its peak to become an independent agency owner. She’d hired me seven years ago. The timing was perfect for me because a bad fall—where else but in the subway?—had recently brought my dancing career to an end. I’d been a serious modern dance student at Juilliard but the injuries to both my kneecaps meant that disco was the only dancing I’d do in the future.

Sitting in Justine’s chair, I thought that, although no one outside of the business realizes it, it’s essential for the head of any successful model agency to have a strong personal style. Every successful agency in town is defined by
a single personality, ranging from preacher to pimp. Justine’s style? Good question. In many ways she qualified as the ideal Girl Scout Troop Leader with all the virtues that implies, radiating strength and trustworthiness; straightforward, infinitely capable and, above all, reassuringly calm. She’s the person anyone, even I, would agree to follow up a slippery mountain trail or cling to in an avalanche, certain of being rescued.

On the other hand, Justine’s probably too gorgeous to be a convincing Scout. If thirty-four is mature, which I deeply tend to doubt, maturity has made her far more seriously alluring than when she was modeling, blandly ravishing, throughout her late teens into her mid-twenties, a full-fledged member of the prom-queen-all-American league. You know that look: all-but-impossibly blue eyes, features too ideal to describe, a quick, indiscriminately adorable smile, infuriatingly good teeth and the faint beginnings of deliciously squinchy laugh lines.

Now Justine’s grown so interesting to watch that you wouldn’t think she’d once been only conventionally stunning. Her eyes, still the very hue of victory, are thoughtful and often pensive. Her smile is meaningful and selective, a smile that has forgotten how to turn on automatically for a camera. There’s a fascinatingly slow play of changing expressions on Justine’s lovely face that shows a mind always at work. She’s my idea of a woman who has just barely entered into the beginning of the best part of her life and eligible men, heaven knows, agree with me. But she turns them down, one after another. Sometimes I find myself in a lather of outrage listening to her explain, with that maddening, reasonable calm, just what is wrong about each one.

It must be some inherited Anglo-Saxon character trait that allows Justine to shrug off any problem she can’t do anything about and simply let it go. My preferred mode, when faced by a defect—in a man or in a situation—is to attack, charge and make it right!
Fix it!
But then my ancestors on both sides came from the south of Italy.

The difference in our ways of approaching life was probably why the two of us made such a good team, I thought, not for the first time, probably the reason why I’d advanced so rapidly from the ranks of bookers to become Justine’s right hand as well as her closest friend. I’m explosive enough to allow Justine to remain her glowing blond self at all times. I’m the one who understands exactly when and how to pull a major-league freak-out, who remembers to carry necessary grudges, who won’t settle for the difference between the possible and the impossible, who doesn’t believe in any sensible Twelve Step maxim about having the wisdom to accept things you can’t change. Accept, my ass! Not when you’re from Brooklyn!

“Have you been here all night?” Justine’s voice asked, interrupting my reverie.