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Cleve took a deep breath, thought happy thoughts, like not dropping his aitches, and the deep tissue massage he’d have after he knew Sweet Celestia was his. Like hoping Brandon got another job offer.
Of course he was aware of the girl. He hadn’t had the delicious feel of a girl’s skin under his hands for months, and that girl was more than a dolly bird; she was genuinely beautiful, slender and steely strong like a ballerina, with clouds of almost-white hair and Elizabeth Taylor eyes.
But she also wasn’t much more than a walking manicure. Her job was to hold Sweet Celestia in her buffed and polished hands, adding warmth to cold perfection while the stone was captured in digital glory.
The girl, whose name was Melody Solo, wasn’t famous. She’d had all the usual physical attributes: height, slim form, barely enough curves to count, and a symmetrical face, as well as the relevant career milestones—beauty pageant, catalog, catwalk, magazine fashion layout—to her name. But she’d been chosen for this job because she was no doubt cheap and available and looked a lot like the famous model she was replacing at the last moment.
It was Cleve’s job to know these things, just like he knew the photographer’s assistant with the ginger hair was having an affair with the PR flack, and the dresser, Katerina, was soon to launch her own label, and the guard with the cauliflower ears liked to bake, so yes, he’d noticed the girl, and she was indeed a bit of all right.
Given the chance, he’d stay in bed for her.
But she was eleven thousand miles away and within the next hour would be irrelevant.
She was also silly as a box full of kittens. She tittered, she fluttered her lashes, she had trouble walking in the jewel-encrusted shoes she wore. He might wrinkle a sheet for her because he was, after all, hard up, but he would most definitely kick her out of bed in the morning. He had no tolerance for silly—tried it, not to his taste. He’d apparently been ruined for silly for all time by the professor’s daughter.
On the screen, Annie swallowed her gum and the redhead positioned Melody on the chaise lounge as if she was a bendable Barbie.
The professor’s daughter was two years younger than him, sixteen going on juvenile delinquent when they met. Half her hair was dyed burnt orange and the other half of her head was shaved and later adorned with a tattoo of two crossed bones. It was a joke, skull and crossbones, and Cleve had loved her for that alone. She had a pierced tongue, a savage wit, a healthy disrespect for authority, and her favorite shoes were steel-capped boots. She’d been expelled from more schools than Cleve had bothered to bluff his way into, and she was the hottest, wildest, smartest woman he’d ever kissed.
The professor forbade him to talk to her. “It’s very simple. If you speak to her, I will turn you in. If you touch her, you die,” he’d said, with the same student-friendly tone he used to say, “Of course you can have an extension on that paper.”
A decade later Cleve had never quite recovered from his first love. Neither the high of risking his life to fall in love with her, nor the devastating low of losing her, raising the earth to find her, and coming up with nothing but empty whispers. She was a ghost, but the memory of her magnificence had stayed with him.
When a score went bad, you cleaned up, covered your tracks and moved on. He’d never quite been able to move on from Aria Harp and doubted he ever would.
