Unveiling the Bridesmaid Read online

  ‘Gold accessories?’

  Hope felt a little as if she were taking a test. ‘Soft gold, not metallic. Because of the thread in the lace.’

  ‘So Hunter and I will need ties in that colour. His dad too probably.’

  Hope stared at him, horrified. Suits? She hadn’t even thought about suits. Dear God, she wasn’t expected to sort the rings out as well, was she?

  To her relief Gael carried on. ‘My tailor has already started on the suits for the party. A light grey with white linen shirts. You can work with that? We’ll order the ties once you have chosen the bridesmaids’ dresses. I think we’ll want a darker, almost charcoal suit for the wedding, to go with the soft gold accents in the cream of the dress. And a lightweight fabric.’ He pulled his phone out and started tapping. How could it be that simple?

  Easy, she reminded herself, he had connections. Besides, dress number one had been pretty easy for her thanks to the limitless budget. She’d met up with a personal shopper and this dress was the second she’d seen. She’d fallen for it instantly—more importantly she knew Faith would love it.

  Gael looked up from his phone. ‘What about you? Have you sorted a dress out yet?’

  ‘No, not yet but I still have a few days. Besides, I don’t have a limitless budget so an hour with a personal shopper isn’t going to cut it for me. I thought I’d head downtown tomorrow and see what I can find in a soft gold. It’s Faith’s day anyway so as long as I complement her in the photos it’s all good.’

  ‘Hope, just use Hunter’s card. He’ll be expecting you to use it.’ He threw her a shrewd glance. ‘But sure, hide away in the background as usual.’

  ‘I’m not! It’s her wedding. Some sister I would be if I tried to overshadow her.’ Besides, that huge canvas right there? She was in the foreground there. Enough in the foreground to last her a lifetime. ‘I’ll find something, I promise. Besides, Hunter wants me to put the bridesmaids’ dresses for the party on the limitless card so this afternoon I’ll spend big. You won’t recognise me, my dress will be so attention seeking.’

  ‘I’d know you anywhere,’ he said softly and her heart trembled. No, she scolded herself. No reading meanings into words. No thinking this is more than it is. You escaped awkward if sweet fumblings with Tom Featherstone for toe-curling, out-of-body-type sex. How many people go straight to advanced levels, huh? It’s just your emotions are still stuck on beginner level. Give them a chance to catch up.

  Besides. She wasn’t that stupid. She trusted Gael with her body but there was no way she would trust him with her heart. She was pretty sure he couldn’t handle his own, let alone somebody else’s. No, she would enjoy this for what it was and when it was over take the confidence and belief she was gaining day by day and go out and make herself a happy life. One day she might even feel that she deserved to.

  ‘We’re due at the shop in four hours. Do you need me to pose?’ Airily said but each time she still needed to take a deep breath before she let the robe slip. Habits of a lifetime were hard to escape and after years of keeping in the background being under such intense scrutiny was hard. More than hard.

  ‘No, there’s not really enough time. I’m doing some work on the background so I don’t need you. Why don’t you get on with the archive?’

  And there she was. Relegated from lover to muse to wedding planner to assistant in four easy steps. Know your place, she told herself sternly as Gael snagged the brown bag to take out his coffee—black, two shots—and bagel—pumpkin seed with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Both a stern contrast to her own more adventurous orders but she was a tourist, it was her duty to experiment. She grabbed her own food and headed off into the kitchen where her workstation was set up. She enjoyed the work but this time away from the office was making her face some uncomfortable truths. She’d hoped this job swap, working with Brenda, would give her the time she needed to work on her career—but instead it was becoming increasingly clear that although she was good at office work and ran events smoothly and meticulously she was bored. In fact she had been bored for a long time if she was honest with herself—something was missing and she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what that was.

  Hope had fallen into a rhythm over the last week. Gael kept good records and she was beginning to recognise many of the faces so she barely had to put any aside for future clarification. She had already worked her way through his junior year at school and made a good start on senior. The photos were all taken anonymously up to this point but there was a step change the second he was outed: less candid, more posed, less scandalous.

  And more of Gael himself. Set-up group shots, time delays. He didn’t look at ease, didn’t pose, a faraway look on his face as if he was dreaming of being safely back behind the camera.

  It wasn’t just Gael who made more of an appearance. Time after time the camera lingered lovingly on a willowy blonde girl. She had possibly the most photogenic face Hope had ever seen, the sharp angles and exaggerated features made for the lens. It wasn’t just the camera who loved her, judging by the close-ups. The photographer had too.

  Hope checked the face against the records she was building up. The girl had been in the junior year pictures as well, only in the background, watching the main players as yearningly as the camera. At some point, like Gael, she had come out of the shadows to shine on centre stage. Tamara Larson.

  With half an eye on Gael through the open door, Hope brought up her internet browser and typed in the name. In less than a second it presented her with thousands of possibilities. She pressed randomly on one link. She almost knew what she’d see before the picture loaded: Gael looking down at Tamara, almost unrecognisable. It wasn’t just that he was more than a decade younger, slim to the point of skinny, still wearing the gangliness of a very young man. It was the softness in his face, the light in his eyes, the warmth in his smile that made him so alien. Hope had never seen him look that way, not even in their most intimate, unguarded moments.

  ‘I believe in love,’ he had said. The proof was right here. He had loved. Adored.

  Hope’s breath caught in her throat and her fingers curled into fists. It wasn’t that she was jealous—well, she conceded, maybe just a teensy weensy bit in a totally irrational way but no, in the main it wasn’t jealousy consuming her, it was curiosity. Something had happened to wipe that softness out so complexly replacing it with cynicism. What was it?

  She clicked back and scrolled onwards until a headline caught her eye. ‘Expose photographer and muse to wed’ it screamed in bold type over a picture of a beaming Tamara Larson showing a gigantic—and tacky, Hope sniffed—ring, Gael standing proudly behind her, his hands possessively on her shoulders.

  Engaged! He must have still been a baby, younger even than Hunter.

  What had happened? There was definitely no socialite living here in the loft. Of course Gael had no obligation to tell her if he was divorced, none at all.

  Hurt flickered inside her. Small but scalding. He knew everything about her from the scars on her thighs to the scars on her heart and yet he had shared nothing that wasn’t already public knowledge. No, this definitely wasn’t anything like a relationship. For him she was a convenience; a convenient model, a convenient assistant, a convenient lover.

  Which was absolutely no problem. She just needed to remember, remember exactly what this was—and exactly what it wasn’t.

  ‘Researching?’ How had she not heard him come into the kitchen? Hope jumped guiltily. ‘How very keen.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were engaged.’ There was no point in prevaricating; she’d been caught red-handed.

  His mouth twisted. ‘Briefly. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘What happened?’ She saw the shutters come down and pressed on. ‘You’re going to have to tell me at some point. She’s going to feature heavily in the retrospective; half your pictures from that time are o
f her.’

  ‘Tale as old as time: boy meets girl, girl sees opportunity, boy falls for girl, it ends tragically. The end.’ The mocking tone was back but this time it was entirely self-directed. That was worse in some ways than when he employed it against her.

  She tried for a smile, wanting to lighten the suddenly sombre mood. ‘Fairy tales have darkened since my day.’

  ‘Oh, this is no fairy tale. It’s an old-fashioned morality tale of lust, hubris and greed.’ He hooked a stool out and sat down opposite her, leaning on the steel countertop, eyes burning with sardonic amusement. ‘They rarely have a happy ending.’

  Hope was right. He couldn’t have a retrospective and not include his own secrets and shame. What would be the point in that? Besides, Tamara was no secret. Their relationship was well documented as the long list of web links on the laptop attested.

  Gael spun the laptop round and stared at the photo. All he felt, all he wanted to feel was pity for the poor fool. Standing there looking as if he had won life’s lottery, as if the right honeyed words from the right girl were all he needed to count in this world. ‘It’s really no big deal. It wouldn’t be worth a footnote in the retrospective if I hadn’t been stupid enough to think I was old enough to get married.’

  ‘But you did get engaged?’

  ‘Does it count as an engagement if the blushing bride-to-be had no intention of going through with the wedding?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘It’s not that exciting, Hope. No big romance. Tamara was in the year behind me at school. She was...’ he paused, searching for the right word ‘...she was ambitious. She felt that she belonged at the very top of the social strata; she was beautiful, smart, athletic, rich—but our school was full of beautiful and smart rich girls and somehow she couldn’t even get into the inner circle, let alone rule it. She was left out on the fringes.’

  ‘Like you.’

  Like him but so much more ambitious. ‘Like me. But I knew my place and had no desire to move upwards. I think she knew who I was before I was outed. Sometimes I think she was the one who outed me, because a couple of months before it happened, a few months into my senior year, she started to make a very subtle and clever play for me. Of course I, sap that I was, had no idea. I thought it was the other way round and couldn’t believe that this gorgeous girl would ever consider a commoner like me. But the more I noticed her—and she made sure I did—the more I photographed her, the more she made it into Expose and the more she featured on the blog the higher her status grew.’

  ‘She might not have planned it. You make her sound like Machiavelli.’

  Proof Hope didn’t belong on the Upper East Side; the boys and girls he’d gone to school with had studied Machiavelli at preschool. ‘Oh, she planned it. She played me like a pro—like father, like son. Suckers for a poor little rich girl every time. No one can make you feel as special as a society goddess, like Aphrodite seducing a mere mortal. We started dating spring break that year and right through my first year at college. I asked her to marry me when she graduated from high school. Can you even imagine?’ He couldn’t. He couldn’t begin to imagine that kind of wild-eyed optimism any more. You’d think his own parents would have taught him just how foolish marrying the first person you fell for was. Turned out it was a lesson he needed to learn for himself.

  ‘She said yes?’

  He nodded. ‘Oh, she wasn’t finished with me yet, and such a youthful engagement ensured she was in the headlines, just where she wanted to be. She dropped out of college to play at being a fashion intern, did some modelling and dumped me for the heir to a hotel empire. I don’t think she has any regrets. Her penthouse apartment, properties in Aspen, Bermuda, Paris and the Hamptons more than make up for any lingering feelings she may have had.’ He ran into Tamara every now and then. She usually tried to give him some kind of limpid look, an attempt at a connection. He always ignored her.

  ‘You were much better off finding out what she was like before you got married.’

  ‘That’s what Misty said. She sent me to Paris for my sophomore year as a consolation prize and that’s when I really fell in love.’

  ‘With Olympia?’

  He smiled then. ‘Olympia and all her sisters.’

  ‘You’re lucky.’

  ‘Lucky? Interesting interpretation of the word. Foolish, I would have said.’

  ‘Not for Tamara, for Misty. To have someone who cares. Okay, you lost out a little in the parent lottery. They were too young, too self-absorbed to know how to raise you.’

  ‘Were?’ Neither of them had ever grown up, at least where he was concerned.

  ‘But it sounds to me like Misty has always been there for you. Not everyone has that.’

  Interesting interpretation. But there was a kernel of truth there that niggled at him uncomfortably. He’d never asked why Misty had kept him after she divorced his father; he’d been more focussed on the fact both biological parents had walked away rather than appreciating the non-biological one who’d stayed. But she had kept him. Supported him, still expected him to come and stay every Christmas, Thanksgiving, every summer. She’d have bought him the studio, made him an allowance if he weren’t so damned independent. Her words.

  He’d always thought that somehow he was fundamentally flawed, unlovable; that was why his parents didn’t stay, why Tamara could discard him without a qualm. That was why he only dated women with short-term agendas that matched his, never allowed himself to open up. But maybe he wasn’t the one who was flawed after all.

  Because it wasn’t just Misty who believed in him. He might have bribed Hope into posing, manipulated her into helping him, but she’d responded with an openness that floored him. The painting was almost taking on a life of its own, rawer and more honest than he had thought possible. And then there was the sex...

  He’d be lying if he said that was unexpected. There had been a spark between them from the first moment and although he’d been reluctant to take her virginity in the end he’d been powerless when confronted by the desire in her eyes. She was a grown woman and she had made it clear she knew exactly what she was doing.

  What was unexpected was how calmly she accepted the situation. No expectations for anything beyond his limited offer. He should be relieved. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he wasn’t. He was very sure that he didn’t want to know.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LUCKY. SEVERAL HOURS later Hope’s words were still reverberating around Gael’s head. He’d been called lucky before—when his father married Misty and he stopped being one of ‘us’, a local, and became one of ‘them’, the privileged summer visitors. Lucky when he started seeing Tamara, lucky as his career progressed. It had been said with envy, with laughter, with amusement but never before with that heart-deep wistfulness.

  He’d never been able to think about that time with anything but regret and humiliation. Tamara’s manipulation had been the final confirmation of everything he had suspected since the day his mother had walked out, her next lover already lined up. His subsequent relationships hadn’t done much to change his mind, a series of models, socialites and actresses whose beautiful eyes were all solely focussed on what he, his camera and his influence could do for them. The only thing in their favour was that they knew the score, were only interested in the superficial and the temporary and made no demands on his heart or future.

  Of course he had never dated outside that narrow world. Never searched for or wanted anything more meaningful. Why would he when so many easy opportunities presented themselves with such monotonous regularity?

  Until Hope. She broke the mould, that was for sure. The first woman he had met who seemed to want nothing for herself—he didn’t know whether he admired her or wanted to shake her and shout at her to be more selfish, dammit. To live. It would be so easy to take advantage of her, to hurt her. Every day he told himself that they shoul
d end their affair. And yet here they still were.

  Maybe he wasn’t the one with the power here after all; in his own way he was as bad as she was, living safely, ensuring his emotions were never stirred, that he remained safe.

  Gael scowled, pushing the unwanted thought out of his mind. He was challenging himself, opening himself up to potential ridicule with his change of direction. In a few weeks his paintings would be exhibited at one of the most influential galleries in town, exposing his heart and soul in a way that his photos never had. Besides, look at him now. Wedding planning, ordering suits, playing happy families so that his pain of a little brother could have the perfect wedding.

  Little brother? He was usually so quick to disassociate himself from any close relationship with Hunter by a judicious ‘ex’ and ‘step’. Just as he always added the ‘half’ qualifier onto his mother’s two children.

  Gael shifted, uncomfortable on the overstuffed velvet seat. A few phone calls had led Hope and he here to the exclusive bridal salon popularised on the TV show Upper East Side Bride. Women from all over the States—and further afield—travelled here, prepared to pay exorbitant prices for their one-of-a-kind designs, hoping for a sprinkle of rarefied fairy dust to cast a sparkle over their big day.

  ‘I have your sister’s measurements and her choices from our available stock,’ the terrifyingly elegant saleswoman had said, eyeing Hope as if she were a prize heifer. ‘You’re a couple of inches too short and a little larger around the bust but I think it’s best if you try on the dresses I have selected. That way you’ll know how they feel, how your sister will feel when she puts it on.’

  Hope had gaped at her, looking even more terrified than when Gael had first asked her to model. ‘Me?’ she had spluttered but had been whisked away before she could formulate a complete sentence. That had been half an hour ago and Gael had been left in splendid isolation with nothing to occupy him except several copies of Bridal World and a glass of sparkling water.