IT SEEMED TO MARGOT that she’d only

IT SEEMED TO MARGOT that she’d only just shut her eyes when the phone rang. Her lids heavy with sleep, she sat up, shoved her hair out of her face, and cast a bleary eye about the room. A momentary panic filled her at the strange surroundings. Where was she, Milan? she wondered.
Then, from beyond the curtained windows, she heard birds singing. Noted, too, the total absence of city noises. The events of yesterday came rushing back—Carlo de Calvi’s fashion show, Jordan’s call, airports, her father … dead. Beneath the quilted coverlet she shivered. She knew where she was now: in her childhood bedroom, which Nicole had stripped of every personal belonging, as if she might thus erase Margot’s very existence.
Her cell pealed again. Margot stretched out her arm toward the bedside table and grabbed the phone. Pressing the talk button, she got her cotton-filled mouth working enough to mumble, “Hello?”
“Margot, that you?” Her agent’s clipped British accent sounded in her ear. “Darling, your voice mail is completely full. I’ve been trying to reach you forever.”
“Hi, Damien.” She glanced at her watch. Still on Milan time. “What time is it?”
“Seven o’clock.”
That meant Damien had already returned from his workout at the gym. He’d be showered and shaved, his wavy black hair perfectly combed. As this was a weekday, he’d be dressed for work: pleated flannel trousers, a custom-made English shirt, Italian loafers. His second cup of cappuccino would be half-empty and sitting near his elbow. “Sorry I didn’t get a chance to call yesterday, Damien. It was—”
“I quite understand, love. Anika rang when she got back to the hotel. Have you seen your father? Is he—”
“Dad died a few minutes after I arrived.” The pain was ragged and raw.
“Oh, Margot, I’m so very sorry. How devastating for you.”
“Yeah.”
Damien fell silent on his end of the line. Margot figured he was remembering those long-ago days when she’d first signed with his agency, back when she was still calling and writing her father. More often than not it was Damien’s silk handkerchief that she wept into after her father once again ignored her attempts at reconciliation. Maybe he was remembering, too, the time she mailed her father her first shot for Vogue, proof that she’d succeeded where he’d believed she would fail. She’d sent an accompanying note, listing her address and numbers, sure she’d get some kind of acknowledgment. But there’d been nothing from him. Nada. Zip. That was when she’d given up trying to contact him, finally convinced that he’d never change his mind, that nothing could sway his heart.
“Listen, love, do you want me to fly down?”
Margot’s mouth curled as she pictured Damien Barnes, the quintessentially hip and sophisticated cosmopolite, transplanted to Warburg, Virginia. Damien liked to order take-out food at ten P.M., and then rent an obscure 1940s Swedish movie at midnight. If he was in the mood to scope out new trends and scout for fresh faces, he’d round up a few of the girls and they’d go clubbing till dawn. Frothy cappuccinos were as essential to him as air and had to be less than a five-block walk away. Yet here he was, willing to leave New York, his beloved adopted city, so he could sit with her and lend his silk handkerchief for her to cry into once again.
She swallowed hard. “Thanks, Damien, really. But I’m okay. Jordan’s here.”
“Oh, good. How much longer do you need to be down there?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll have a better sense after we’ve dealt with the funeral arrangements.”
“As luck would have it, this is a perfect time to take a brief holiday from the cameras. It’ll keep everyone salivating for more Margot. Apropos of salivating, I spoke with de Calvi yesterday. He said you were favolosa. The Times thought so, too. I had Miranda run out at the crack of dawn to get a copy at the newsstand. There’s a fabulous pic of you in the raw silk palazzo pants and the knitted halter top.”
“Really?” Margot tried to inject the proper amount of enthusiasm in her voice.
“Your stock is sky-high, love. Oh, here’s something else to cheer you up. Guess who’s been hired to shoot the Dior campaign?”
“Who?”
“Charlie Ayer,” Damien crowed. “Good ol’ Charlie. God, I adore that man. Nobody makes you look more luscious.”
“That’s just because Charlie feels like he’s got a personal stake in me.”
“A detail he’ll never let me forget. Every time he rings, it’s, ‘Hey, Damien, Charlie here.’” Damien’s accent changed, his crisp vowels assuming a California looseness in a perfect imitation of Charlie Ayer’s laid-back speech. ‘“Listen, I have to borrow Margot for a few days. You’ll waive her fee, of course. Don’t forget, I discovered her.’ The cocky bastard,” Damien continued affectionately in his own voice, sounding more like the fallen aristocrat than ever. “No doubt he’ll be ringing to discuss the shoot. Thank heaven you’re his favorite girl. He’ll be flexible when it comes to scheduling—though I can’t promise the same for the Dior people.”
“I promise I’ll call the second I have a clearer idea of how long I’ll be down here. In the meantime, send Charlie my love.”
“To hear Charlie tell it, your love is all he’s waiting for. Ciao, bella.”
Shaking her head over Damien’s affectionate teasing, Margot turned off the phone, slipped out of bed, and padded into the bathroom. But as she showered away her lingering grogginess, then dressed, donning a pair of pencil-leg sky-blue velvet jeans and an alabaster V-neck cashmere sweater, her thoughts kept returning to Damien’s parting comment.
Ordinarily, she would have brushed off her agent’s remark that Charlie was serious about her, just as she’d brushed off Charlie’s repeated declarations of love.
But as of yesterday, her world had changed dramatically. And now she had to ask herself if she wasn’t being foolish in not giving their relationship a real chance. After all, they had fun together and she enjoyed his happy-go-lucky charm. And she owed Charlie so much.
When he’d obligingly whisked her away from Rosewood in his vintage Mustang, she’d had no idea that she’d just been befriended by one of the hot young photographers in the business or that Charlie Ayer’s work peppered the pages of W, Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. Nor did she have any inkling of how lucky she was that Charlie insisted she go see Damien Barnes first, assuring her that Damien, of all the agents in the business, could be trusted to “treat a kid like her right.”
Damien had done far more than that.
She’d gone to the agent’s Park Avenue South office with no experience, no portfolio, not even a head shot—nothing but Charlie’s business card, on the back of which he’d scrawled “A present for you, Damien. And, dude, I expect major thanks!”
With a weak smile, she’d handed Charlie’s card to the receptionist and taken a seat in a waiting room notable for the sheer number of glossy magazines fanned out on the low, circular coffee tables. An hour passed. And then two. But she’d had nowhere else to go, so she’d sat there as girls, each one more exotic than the last, sauntered through with cheerful calls of “Hi, Miranda” to the receptionist, who waved them into the inner office, the exclusive preserve of the jawdroppingly lovely.
What had she been thinking to believe Charlie Ayer’s promise that Damien Barnes would take her on? What in the world would she do when five o’clock rolled around and Miranda politely and efficiently told her to scat?
“Mr. Barnes will see you now.”
“Wha—what?” Margot had stammered. “You mean me?”
“Yes, you,” came the amused reply before she went and gave a light rap on the door, pushed it open, and motioned Margot inside.
Damien Barnes sat behind a sleek glass desk. “Keep walking. I want to see you move.”
With his sharp gaze riveted on her, she walked about the photograph-lined office, feeling increasingly clumsy and foolish. Just how were models supposed to walk? Should she thrust her hips forward? Wiggle them?
Then the questions began. Damien Barnes fired them off in rapid succession, asking her name, age, hometown, education, weight, height, special talents, favorite exercise, eating habits. Just when her nerves were nearly fried because she couldn’t remember when the last time she’d stepped on a bathroom scale was, and had convinced herself that she didn’t know how to put one foot in front of the other—which made her about the biggest dope in the world—he told her to take a seat.
Without preamble, he said, “So you want to be a fashion model? Why?”
Why? With an eighteen-year-old’s stupidity she’d blurted out, “Because I can’t type?”
Damien had not been amused. “Then you’re wasting my time as well as your own,” he’d replied, his cool tone shaming her. “You’ll never make it as a model with that kind of attitude, no matter how bloody gorgeous you are.”