Mandy Makes Her Mark (6 page)

“Nope.” Sylvie sounded smug. “It's real. I told her you'd be mad.”

“I'm sorry, Mandy,” Jayde said. “But I had to do it.”

“You—you can't—” Mandy sputtered.

“I
told
her it was the end of her career,” Sylvie said, in a long-suffering voice.

“I don't want to model anymore, anyway.” Jayde said. “You were right, Mandy.”

“
I
was right?” Shock was quickly turning to panic. In half an hour, Mandy was going to have to explain to Lark why he was one model short for his shoot, because there was no way they could photograph the revealing gowns on a model whose fresh ink showed from every angle. “Please explain to me exactly how I was right?”

“When you said Jonas wasn't good enough for me. When you said I should stand up for myself.”

“But what exactly does that—that
thing
have to do with it?” Mandy couldn't bear to even look at the ruinous tattoo, even if it was rather beautiful and appeared to be expertly done.

“Well, it's my spirit flower. The magnolia stands for purity and healing. I need to get Jonas out of my system, and reclaim my truth.”

“The tattoo girl explained it,” Sylvie chimed in. “She was real nice. She had this mobile tattoo cart—”

“But your career is
over
! You can't model anymore!” Mandy shrieked. Had everyone besides her gone crazy?

“Oh, I know,” Jayde said calmly. “I need to focus on
me
now, and I can't do that while I'm working, so I'm going to take some time off. But don't worry. Sylvie figured out what to do. You can do the shoot in my place.”

“
What
?” Mandy sank onto a wicker divan upholstered in bright pink cotton. Her head was beginning to throb, and all the pleasant sensations from the evening before were lost to a burgeoning sense of nausea.

“Well, you're a size twelve, right? All the sample plus-sized gowns are twelves. You've been over the mood boards. And all the layouts will feature me, anyway.” Sylvie shrugged matter-of-factly. “I'm the focus. You'll just be window dressing, like Tad.”

Mandy sputtered in disbelief. Her plus-size model had just thrown away a perfectly good career, and now that Luna was gone, Sylvie was her top earner, and was evidently planning to single-handedly bring down the agency. “I can't just sub in a different model, even if we
had
one,” she said. “I promised Lark that everything would go exactly according to plan.”

“Man plans…” Jayde said, in that same spooky calm voice. “…God laughs.”

“She's gotten all new-agey,” Sylvie confided, sotto voce. “I think it's the breakup.”

“I can't believe you let her do that to herself!”

“Stop yelling at me, Mandy. I could have just left her last night when she was drunk. I made sure she got back here, didn't I? I got her put to bed. And at least I talked her out of getting a jaguar on her neck.”

“Jaguar's my spirit animal,” Jayde said, slipping out of bed and padding into the bathroom. They heard the sound of the shower being turned on.

Mandy moaned and covered her face with her hands. Some sort of crazy island mania seemed to have come over her employees since they arrived. Tad and Jayde had lost their minds, and Sylvie had somehow morphed into a responsible human being.

“So, look,” Sylvie said, folding the blanket and draping it over the couch. “You can keep yelling at me or we can get over there and try to get through this damn shoot. Your call. But you did promise Lark we'd be clean so I'm going back to my bungalow for a shower. See you on the beach.”

Mandy watched her go, speechless, before catching a look at herself in the decorative mirror hung over the fireplace. Her hair was a disaster, her top was on inside out, but she did have a certain…glow about her this morning. She had no idea if she could pull off Sylvie's harebrained plan. But for the sake of the agency, she had no choice but to try.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“She did
what
?” Lark was speaking in a deadly calm voice, but his face had gone beet red above his stiff starched linen shirt. Next to him, Deirdre King, the photographer, shot nervous glances from him to Mandy to Sylvie to Tad. Deirdre's two assistants, a terribly thin man and woman dressed in black from head to toe, busied themselves with the light screens and props in the spot they had chosen on the beach, under the shade of a clump of palm trees. The wardrobe assistant sorted through a portable canvas wardrobe and the makeup artist was arranging her supplies in the cabana that had been set up with chairs and mirrors and lights.

Everything was ready for the shoot. Now all that remained to be seen was whether Lark would allow it to proceed with Mandy standing in for Jayde.

“She
did
have a recent breakup,” Mandy said lamely. “Her, um, mental health is in jeopardy.”

“I don't care about her breakup. Don't you have contract clauses for this sort of thing?”

Deirdre leaned close and murmured something to Lark. Mandy caught Tad's eye, mostly by accident. She was determined to do her best to say as little as possible to him today. But he didn't look the least bit chagrined. He'd been the last to appear, ambling down the beach at a minute before seven, his hair still wet from the shower. And now, in addition to looking well rested, he looked…amused. Happier, at any rate, than he'd looked in months.

Lark's scowl deepened. “Deirdre thinks you'll do,” he muttered.

“Actually, what I said was that you have lovely presence,” Deirdre said brightly. She was famously kind, a favorite among the models, and Mandy was grateful even if she was lying. “And I'm sure the gowns will work just fine.”

One of the assistants made a derisive snort, then tried to cover it up with a coughing fit. Mandy didn't blame them; they were the ones who'd be taking up hems and clothes-pinning garments, to give the impression that the gowns fit perfectly. Only in this crazy world would Mandy, who was the same size as the average American woman, be considered “plus” sized.

After another few moments of glowering, Lark crumpled the coffee cup he was holding and threw it on the sand. “Fine. Every minute we stand here is wasting time. Let's get started. And do not mess this up for me, Ms. Leif.”

He stomped off toward the manor, leaving the rest of them staring at each other.

“Well,” Deirdre said, clapping her hands together and forcing a smile. “Shall we begin?”

#

By the third change of clothes, Mandy had ceased feeling self-conscious. She knew modeling was challenging and exhausting; she'd been on dozens of shoots and watched her sister and the other models at work. But as she peeled off a fuchsia two-piece gown with a peplum and a deep slit in the skirt, she ruefully acknowledged that she'd never truly understood the strain of working the dozens of poses and putting her face through the many expressions until she found the one that Deirdre was looking for.

A pin had stabbed her in the waist as she pirouetted. Sylvie had stepped on her instep, leaving a gash with her pointed stiletto. And every time Tad offered her his arm, she experienced a head rush that had as much to do with the fact that she didn't dare eat anything, as it did with the effort it took not to think about what they had been doing together mere hours before.

The whole exercise seemed to amuse him. Mandy had peeked in the cabana that had been designated his changing room. Because he'd change only once or twice over the course of the day, he was mostly just lounging in a canvas chair, reading a paperback novel and drinking one Dr. Pepper after another.

By contrast, the cabana that Mandy shared with Sylvie was jammed with dresses and shoes and accessories. During each change, all four of them—Mandy and Sylvie and both assistants—jammed into the small space. Irons, steamers, and sewing machines were plugged in and ready to go, and Mandy quickly learned to keep her mouth shut and her limbs loose, ready to be stuffed or sewn or slid into each change of clothing. Sylvie gave her more than one “I told you so” look, but had the grace not to say anything out loud.

In the makeup tent, Mandy learned how much the girls went through for the sake of beauty. The false eyelashes made her eyes feel heavy. The tweezing of a few spare eyebrow hairs hurt badly enough to make her squeak. Her hair was yanked and blown out and curled and straightened and twisted and pinned, until her scalp felt like little more than a pincushion. Throughout, Sylvie sat with her eyes closed and a Zen-like expression on her face, humming tunelessly.

If Mandy survived this day, she would have some apologizing to do.

“So,” Sylvie said, as the assistants zipped them into emerald-green gowns with plunging wrap bodices. What seemed like an entire roll of tape had been used to strategically arrange Mandy's breasts in the décolletage, and it tickled fiercely. “What's with you and Tad?”

“What do you mean?” Mandy demanded, faking confusion and wondering how the heck Sylvie had guessed.

“You two haven't said one word to each other. You're both pretending that the other one isn't even here. Except every time you turn around, he can't take his eyes off you.”

“He…can't?” Surprise blossomed into hope inside Mandy.

“Yeah. Way I figure it, he's afraid you're going to shank him. Because of Luna.”

“Oh.” Mandy's romantic fantasy withered and died. “There's nothing to worry about. Luna's a big girl, she can take care of her own love life.”

“I just thought you'd take her side. You always do, even when she's being a total hag.”

“I don't think she's all that upset, actually,” Mandy said carefully.

“Maybe not now, but I caught them arguing in the break room, didn't know I was there. She accused him of seeing someone else, he denied it, she yelled, he did that stupid strong and silent act, you know…”

They'd argued? Did Luna care more than she was letting on? “What exactly did she say?”

“I think she was accusing him of seeing someone else. She was telling him to at least look like he still cared about her when they were in public.”

“Oh,” Mandy said slowly. What if there
had
been someone else? Maybe several someone elses? Which would make Tad a serial womanizer, and her…just another woman in a series.

Mandy was shocked at how much the notion hurt. After all, she hadn't exactly asked questions before kissing Tad on the beach, before allowing him to carry her to his room, to ravish her mere steps from the door. But what had she been thinking? That it was nothing more than a road-trip hookup, a couple of lonely people taking advantage of an opportunity?

And now she'd not only jeopardized a working relationship, but she had endangered her relationship with Luna. Her priorities needed to shift, and fast. Any hopes Mandy'd had for an ongoing relationship with Tad—or even a do-over of the night before—splintered like shattered glass. Now she had to focus on damage control.

“Well, I'm sure Luna's over it,” she said breezily, turning away so that Sylvie wouldn't notice the tremor in her voice. “And as for me and Tad, well, I'm just trying to focus on the task at hand, considering this is my first ever modeling gig. And he…he's probably got enough names queued up in his phone to last him well into old age, even if he never dates the same woman twice.”

Sylvie laughed. “That's true. Women can't get enough of him. It's that scowling thing he does.”

“Do you, um…have you…” Mandy fumbled, afraid to know the answer.

“Me? Heck no, I have a policy against working that hard for a man. I prefer to be adored.”

“
I
adore you,” Deirdre said sweetly, stepping into the cabana. “But if we're going to get through all these gowns, we need to hurry it up.”

As Mandy allowed herself to be zipped, pinned, and tucked into a shimmering lilac number with a portrait collar, she tried hard to pretend not to be relieved that Sylvie, at least, was immune to Tad's charms.

It didn't matter. No matter how many beautiful women found it in themselves to resist Tad, there would always be dozens more ready to take on the challenge. And how could Mandy ever compete?

CHAPTER EIGHT

By six o'clock Mandy was utterly exhausted. Back in her bungalow, she scrubbed off every last trace of makeup and stood under the shower until all the product was finally rinsed from her hair. She toweled off, dressed in a shapeless tank top and a pair of yoga pants, and collapsed on the bed.

She had planned to stay there all night, but by sunset her hunger pangs had stolen any chance she had at sleep. She had subsisted on model fare all day, eating what Sylvie ate: a plate of sliced fruit midmorning, and half a chicken breast slivered and sprinkled over a mound of arugula and drizzled with lemon juice in the afternoon. Sylvie had claimed to be stuffed, but Mandy was accustomed to much sturdier meals.

She paused in front of the mirror, only to discover that her hair had dried in an asymmetric frizz, lifting up of its own accord on one side. After a couple of attempts to tame it with a comb, Mandy gave up and wet it down, securing it with a barrette. Her cheeks were pink from the vigorous scrubbing, and the net effect was that she looked about twelve.

Why anyone thought she could pull off the modeling stand-in was a mystery. Even now, Deirdre was probably going through her proofs, cursing herself for going along with the crazy plan. And Lark! What would he say when he saw how his precious gowns looked on her? On the arm of Tad or standing next to Sylvie, she probably looked like a potato wrapped in pastel foil. Jayde might have been the same size as Mandy, but she was also statuesque and graceful and her curves looked alluring and inviting, as though they had been lovingly sculpted by Renoir. Staring at her reflection, Mandy knew that she looked like she was headed to the drug store for toilet paper, rather than off for a romantic rendezvous. And Lark had emphasized romance: he wanted his advertising campaign to convince women that the gowns would elevate a special occasion into an unforgettable one.