Gibson's Girl. Anne McAllister
Читать онлайн книгу.
she, Gib thought.
“She won’t be able to cope with this,” he told Gina bluntly. “She’s too naive. Too innocent.”
“Well, she’ll have you and—”
“She damned well won’t have me! I’m not Mary Poppins, you know!”
“Of course not,” Gina said quickly. “I don’t expect that. Not...really. I was just hoping you’d be sort of...aware of her.”
Oh, he was that.
“She’s very eager to learn whatever you can teach her—”
Oh, cripes, don’t say that!
“—and you always seem to need a new assistant...”
Had she been talking to Edith?
“She’s exactly the sort of girl I wish you’d—” Abruptly, Gina stopped.
There was a long silence. A pregnant silence. A silence Gib was determined not to fill. One which he hoped Gina wouldn’t fill, either. He knew what she’d say if she did.
The girl I wish you’d marry.
It was no secret that Gina wanted him to get married and come back to Iowa. That was what she’d always hoped for, ever since he’d taken a summer internship with noted celebrity photographer Camilo Volante a dozen years ago.
At the time Gina had wondered why he would do something like that. “Celebrity doesn’t interest you,” she’d said.
And Gib had replied, “But people do.” It was people he wanted to photograph. Working for Camilo Volante had seemed like a terrific opportunity to learn from one of the world’s foremost photographers of famous people. Then he could take it from there, using what he’d learned, photographing whoever he wanted.
That had been the plan, at least.
He’d expected then that he would go back to Iowa.
But life had a way of changing those plans. And the summer job had turned into an autumn one. And after that, well, things had changed. Irrevocably.
And Gib had never come back.
Now Gina appreciated that he was a success as a fast-lane, high-style photographer of beautiful women. But she still never hesitated to ask what had happened to his dream of shooting photos of people from all walks of life. And she also never hesitated to say how much nicer she thought it would be if he would find a lovely young woman, marry her, come back to Iowa and take photos of farmers—and Pork Queens.
Or maybe, just this once, she did hesitate.
“I’m not interested,” Gib said firmly, in case she thought she had subliminally made her point.
“Interested? Oh, you mean... in Chloe?” Gina laughed lightly. “Of course not. And Chloe’s not interested in you, either. She’s only there for a break, Gib. Anyway she’s engaged. She’s getting married in September.”
Married? Chloe?
Gib felt oddly breathless, as if someone had punched him. It was the most unexpected feeling he’d ever had. It puzzled him. Why should he care?
He didn’t care.
It was just that all of a sudden his mind offered him a reprise of a very naked, very rosy, very jiggly Chloe Madsen—and she didn’t look like anyone’s fiancée!
“Who’s the idiot letting her run around loose?” he demanded.
“If you’re asking who she’s engaged to, it’s Dave Shelton. He’s a very nice young man. You remember Ernie and Lavonne Shelton? They farm north of town. Dave is their son.”
Gib vaguely remembered the name. “There was a Kathy Shelton,” he said, “in my class.”
“Dave’s older sister. She got married and moved to Dubuque. Then about three years ago, she divorced and came home with her kids. Until a couple of months ago, she was living in a mobile home on the farm where Dave and Chloe had been going to live. She’s the reason they didn’t get married three years ago.”
“They’ve been engaged for three years?”
“Not three,” Gina said. “Eight, I think.”
“Eight!”
“I’m talking out of turn,” Gina said quickly. “I don’t know all the particulars, so I shouldn’t be gossiping.”
Gib was willing to bet Gina knew almost every particular. In a town the size of Collierville, everyone knew everyone else’s particulars.
But Gina just said, “I’ll let you go now, darling. Just keep me posted. And if you want to know more about Chloe and Dave, I’m sure Chloe will be happy to tell you. Just ask her.”
The hell he would.
Chloe supposed she ought to be feeling guilty.
She knew Gibson Walker did not want her working for him. If he could have turned her out onto the street and slammed the door on her back, she thought he would have.
Sensing how he felt, she knew she ought to say, Fine, I’ll leave.
But she didn’t.
She’d made such a deal out of leaving home—of needing this two months away, just to say she’d been out in the big wide world once—that she couldn’t just give up and go back home and tell Dave she’d changed her mind.
He would want to know why.
And Chloe, being Chloe and incapable of dissembling, would have had to tell him-about the mix-up, about the naked photo shoot, about what a fool she’d made of herself.
And there was no way she was going to do that.
So she was staying. And she only felt the tiniest bit guilty. There was no room for guilt in a soul so full of embarrassment.
Now, hours later, high up in the hotel room where Gibson had unceremoniously stashed her, she pressed her face to the glass and saw, not the Empire State Building out her window, but her own silly self prancing around in the buff—and she still wanted to die.
But not yet, she admitted.
First she wanted her two months in New York.
The phone rang.
She picked it up. “Hi,” she said, knowing it had to be Dave. She’d called him as soon as she’d come upstairs, forgetting the time difference and that he would be out doing the milking for at least another hour. She’d left him a message with a number to call her back.
“Hi yourself. Are you fulfilled yet?”
She almost smiled. “Not quite yet. How are you?”
He was fine. Of course he would be. She’d only seen him sixteen hours ago. But he told her anyway. He told her about his day, about the weather, about the cows, about the meal he’d just had with his parents at their house.
“Mom invited me for supper. I think they wanted to see if I’d show up alone, if you were really gone,” he told her. “They can’t believe you’re really doing this.”
Most people couldn’t.
The twelve hundred and forty-two people who called Collierville, Iowa home were not given to eagerness when it came to spending a summer in New York City. Everyone she’d told thought she was out of her mind.
Chloe had given up trying to explain—except to Dave.
She needed Dave to understand. She’d thought he would. She and Dave had grown up together. They’d played as children. They’d gone steady in high school. They were serious about each other when everyone else was still playing the field.
Chloe had always assumed she and Dave were destined for each other.