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“Yeah. You know, the sentiments they expressed. Isn’t a man permitted to use the word? You thought so, too.”
Fallon blinked. “Were we talking about me?”
Cullen, who’d hours ago discarded his tuxedo jacket and bow tie, opened the top buttons of his shirt.
“You cried a little,” he said softly. “At the end.”
“Me? Cry at a wedding?” Fallon turned toward him and poked a finger into the middle of his chest. “Cullen. My darling little brother—”
“You’re only a year older than I am, kid. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“The point is, I do not cry at weddings. Why would I? When you’ve been a bride nine trillion times—”
“A magazine-cover bride, six times, and don’t look so surprised. Ma keeps count.”
Fallon looked up at him. “Does she?”
“Damned right. And if you want to know the rest, she sends each of us a copy of every magazine that has you on the cover…As if we all didn’t run to the nearest store and buy up all the copies ourselves.”
Pleased beyond reason, Fallon smiled.
“That’s nice.”
“Nice? It’s necessary. How do you think those magazines stay in circulation? If the O’Connells didn’t buy ’em, who would?” He laughed, ducked away from the fist his sister teasingly aimed at his jaw. “But being a bride on a cover doesn’t make you a bride in real life, babe. We both know that.”
Fallon narrowed her eyes. “What’s happening here? You think, now that Keir’s gone down the aisle, we all should?”
Cullen shuddered. “Hell, no!”
“Good. Because I’m not the least bit interested in getting married.”
“Fine with me. I’m just wondering why you were crying.” His voice gentled. “You okay?”
“Of course I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. If some guy out there hurt you or something—”
“Oh, Cull,” Fallon said softly. Her lips curved in a smile; she clasped her brother’s forearms, lifted to her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”
“Hey, did I or did I not beat up Billy Buchanan for you in fifth grade, when he wrote ‘I Luv Amy’ on that fence instead of ‘I Luv Fallon’ after he’d sworn to be your boyfriend forever?”
Fallon grinned. “Probably because he couldn’t spell Fallon, but yes, you did.”
“Well, any other SOB gives you a bad time, you tell me, okay?”
She stared at Cullen, wondering what he’d say if he knew that she didn’t even date anymore, that one man too many had coveted her as a trophy to be won and ignored her as a woman who wanted to be loved for who she was, not what she was.
“Sis?”
Fallon smiled and looped her arm through his. “Okay.”
They began walking up the hill, toward the turreted stone house illuminated by moonlight.
“It was just that it all seemed so—so right,” she said after a minute, her voice soft and low. “The flowers. The words. The music. The way Keir and Cassie looked at each other. I guess you’re right. It was touching.”
“Sure.”
“Not that I want any of it for myself.”
“Your career,” Cullen said, nodding as if he understood that there was no room in her life for anything else.
Except, how could he understand when she didn’t? After years of hard work, her career was at its peak…and she wasn’t enjoying it half as much as she’d expected.
She’d hit it big at seventeen, just walking along a New York street on a break between finishing high school and starting college. A man had come up to her, shoved his card at her, said, when she jerked back, that he wasn’t a child molester or a lunatic, that he owned a modeling agency and if she wasn’t a fool, she’d come in to talk with him.
Fallon had never been a fool. You didn’t get to be valedictorian of your class or survive a childhood spent moving from place to place by being stupid. She’d checked out the name of the agency, called for an appointment and met with the man who now bore the distinction of having discovered her.
By the time she was eighteen, her face was everywhere. So was she. A week in Spain, another in Paris, long weekends in the Caribbean and on Florida’s Gold Coast that very first year, and scores of places ever since.
Maybe that was why she’d been so emotional yesterday, at the wedding. Maybe it was knowing that Keir and Cassie were going to put down roots.
Maybe it was why she was staring out the jet’s window again, wondering when she’d realized that one ocean was like another, one island like another, one man like another—
“Miss O’Connell?”
Fallon looked up. The cabin attendant was standing over her, smiling and offering the breakfast menu. She shook her head, declined everything but a small pot of coffee.
When it came, she raised her seat halfway and poured a cup.
You had to watch your weight when you modeled, more and more as the years sped by. The svelte figure you had at eighteen wasn’t the same as the one you had at twenty-eight.
Twenty-eight, she thought, sipping at the hot black coffee. Pushing thirty. Not bad in this business. Her body was still all right; hours in the gym kept it that way, but she’d have to do some things to her face soon, if she wanted to keep going. Maybe get her eyelids done or her mouth plumped with collagen. Take a shot of Botox to keep wrinkles from between her brows.
She hated even the thought of doing something so artificial. As it was, there were times she looked in the mirror after someone had done her hair and her face, after someone else had chosen what she would wear, after still another person told her to look soulful or excited or whatever would sell cars or hand lotion, and wondered who she was.
Surgery, injections, little tucks and snips would only make the real Fallon more difficult to find.
Sometimes, she looked in the mirror and wondered what life would be like if she were a real person instead of a woman created by the camera.
Fallon grimaced and put down her cup.
For heaven’s sake, what was wrong with her?
She was Fallon O’Connell, supermodel. Thousands of women would give anything to trade places with her, and every last one of them would tell her she was certifiably crazy not to be happy.
She had a wonderful, exciting life. And she knew, even if nobody else except her family did, that she was more than just a pretty face.
She smiled, remembering the way Sean and Cullen had greeted her at the Hartford airport a few days ago, enfolding her in rib-squeezing hugs, Sean saying he was glad to see she was still as homely as sin, Cullen adding yes, it was true, and wasn’t it a terrible shame?
Fallon chuckled. Her family knew how to keep her grounded.
She pressed the seat button and sat up straight.
Enough of this silliness. She had to concentrate on the job ahead. It was an incredible assignment. She’d be the only model in the shoot, and she’d work with Maurice, her favorite photographer, and Andy, a genius of a makeup artist who’d always been able to make her look ethereal.
Carla—the Bridal Dreams editor who’d set up the whole thing—would be there, too, but that was it. Just their little group, and nobody else, not even the mansion’s owner. That was a relief. She’d done shoots on private property before and sometimes the owners got so star-struck and excited, they got in the way.
Not this time.
This owner, Carla said, was an old man with a bad temper. God only knew what magic Carla had worked to convince him to let them use the site for the shoot. When Fallon had asked, Carla winked and said it was a secret. She’d probably used that same magic to get the old guy out of the way. Carla said she’d given him the option of staying around but he’d refused.
So there
’d be just a handful of people, people Fallon already knew, and the ruins of an old castle, a view Carla swore went on forever, the sun, the sea, the beach…
And the volcano, smoldering in the distance.
She felt better, just imagining it.
She’d been to Sicily before, only for a couple of days. That had been work, too, but she’d been one of three models. The other girls had hated the island. They said it was too rugged, too old-world, too windswept, but Fallon had loved it.
Sicily was reality. Islands where the trees were lush, the land gently rolling, the people smiling and laid-back were fantasies.
A touch of reality was a breath of fresh air in a life where the end product was illusion.
The sound of the jet’s engines changed. It was subtle, but she’d flown enough to recognize the different nuances in tone. The pilot was throttling back. Soon, he’d put down the flaps and lower the landing gear.
Fallon leaned toward the window. The sky was turning light; a slender red thread stretched across the horizon. They’d be over land any minute, touching down in Paris where she’d change planes for the last leg of her flight.
Perhaps, she thought with a little kick of excitement, perhaps Sicily was where she’d finally figure out who she was and what she was going to do with the rest of her life, because the truth was, the future was on her mind lately.
On her mind, a lot.
Fallon shut her eyes, blocked out the sound of the engines and the excited voice of the little boy across the aisle. She took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled slowly and deeply.
A couple of relaxation exercises, she’d be absolutely fine.
* * *
A few hours later, not even a day’s worth of relaxation exercises would have helped calm her nerves.
What kind of place was this?
Was there supposed to be a deluge in Catania at this time of year? Was she supposed to be so wet and cold that she was shivering?
Plus, nobody spoke English. Well, nobody here at the cab stand. Nobody spoke Italian, either. Fallon did, a little. More than a little; she had a good ear and she’d picked up a considerable amount of the language when she lived in Milan for six weeks at the start of her career.
What people were talking here sounded like Italian, but it wasn’t. It was a dialect, sort of what you heard in New York when you went into one of those fantastic little shops all the way downtown where they said “proh-voh-lone” when they meant “prah-vah-lohn-eh” or “scun-geel” when they meant “scun-gee-lee.”
