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