Page 21 of Gabriel's Angel

He caught something in her voice, something that made him tense. “What sort of problems?”

“They don’t matter.” She shook her head and started to rise, but Gabe put his hand firmly on hers.

“You started this, Laura, now finish it.”

“He drank,” she said quickly. “When he drank he got mean.”

“Mean? Do you mean violent?”

“Yes. When he was sober, he was discontented and critical. Drunk, he was—could be—vicious.” She rubbed a hand over her shoulder, as if she were soothing an old wound. “My aunt was his usual target, but he often went after the children.”

“Did he hit you?”

“Unless I was quick enough to get out of his way.” She managed a ghost of a smile. “And I learned to be quick. It sounds worse than it was.”

He doubted it. “Go on.”

“The social services took me away again and placed me in another home. It was like being put on hold. I remember when I was sixteen, counting the days until I’d be of age and able to at least fend for myself. Make... I don’t know, make some of my own decisions. Then I was. I moved to Pennsylvania and got a job. I was working as a clerk in a department store in Philadelphia. I had a customer, a woman, who used to come in regularly. We got friendly, and one day she came in with a man. He was short and balding—looked like a bulldog. He nodded to the woman and told her she’d been absolutely right. Then he handed me a business card and told me to come to his studio the next day. Of course, I had no intention of going. I thought... That is, I’d gotten used to men...”

“I imagine you did,” Gabe said dryly.

It still embarrassed her, but since he seemed to take it in stride she didn’t dwell on it. “In any case, I set the card aside and would have forgotten about it, but one of the girls who worked with me picked it up later and went wild. She told me who he was. You might know the name. Geoffrey Wright.”

Gabe lifted a brow. Wright was one of the most respected fashion photographers in the business—no,themost. Gabe might not know much about the fashion business, but a name like Geoffrey Wright’s crossed boundaries. “It rings a bell.”

“When I found out he was a professional, a well-known photographer, I decided to take a chance and go to see him. Everything happened at once. He was very gruff and had me in makeup and under the lights before I could babble an excuse. I was terribly embarrassed, but he didn’t seem to notice. He barked out orders, telling me to stand, sit, lean, turn. He had a fur in his vault—a full-length sable. He took it out and tossed it around my shoulders. I thought I was dreaming. I must have said so aloud, because while he was shooting he laughed and told me that in a year I could wear sable to breakfast.”

Saying nothing, Gabe settled back. With his eyes narrowed, he could see her, enveloped in furs. There was a twist in his stomach as he thought about her becoming one of Wright’s young and casually disposable mistresses.

“Within a month I had done a layout forModemagazine. Then I did another forHer, and one forCharm.It was incredible. One day I was selling linens and the next I was having dinner with designers.”

“And Wright?”

“No one in my life had ever been as good to me as Geoffrey. Oh, I knew he saw me as a commodity half the time, but he set himself up as, I don’t know, a watchdog. He had plans, he’d tell me. Not too much exposure too quickly. Then, in another two years, there wouldn’t be a person in the Western world who wouldn’t recognize my face. It sounded exciting. Most of my life I’d been essentially anonymous. He liked that, the fact that I’d come from nothing, from nowhere. I know some of his other models saw him as cold. He often was. But he was the closest thing I’d ever had to a father.”

“Is that how you saw him?”

“I suppose. And then, after all he’d done for me, after all the time he’d invested, I let him down.” She started to rise again, and again Gabe stopped her.

“Where are you going?”

“I need some water.”

“Sit. I’ll get it.”

She used the time to compose herself. Her story was only half done, and the worst part, the most painful part, was yet to come. He brought her a clear glass with ice swimming in it. Laura took two long sips, then continued.

“We went to Paris. It was like being Cinderella and being told midnight never had to come. We were scheduled to be there for a month, and because Geoffrey wanted a very French flavor to the pictures we went all over Paris for the shoot. We went to a party one night. It was one of those gorgeous spring nights when all the women are beautiful and the men handsome. And I met Tony.”

He caught the slight break in her voice, the shadow of pain in her eyes, and knew without being told that she was speaking now of her baby’s father.

“He was so gallant, so charming. The prince to my Cinderella. For the next two weeks, whenever I wasn’t working, I was with Tony. We went dancing, we ate in little cafés and walked in the parks. He was everything I’d thought I’d wanted and knew I could never have. He treated me as though I were something rare and valuable, like a diamond necklace. There was a time when I thought that was love.”

She fell silent for a moment, brooding. That had been her mistake, her sin, her vanity. Even now, a year later, it cut at her.

“Geoffrey grumbled and talked about rich young pups sowing wild oats, but I wouldn’t listen. I wanted to be loved, I wanted so terribly for someone to care, to want me. When Tony asked me to marry him, I didn’t think twice.”

“You married him?”

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