‘First floor,’ the voice instructed, and the door buzzed and clicked open.
Her heart pounding, she stepped inside, closing the door behind her. She was in a small, narrow hallway, lit up with a row of industrial-design spotlights suspended from the high ceiling; the floor was of bare boards, sanded and gleaming, and the walls were starkly white, hung with several huge framed black-and-white prints of gleaming sports cars, shot close up and from low angles, striking and dramatic.
For a moment she hesitated, a little daunted by the realisation that she was actually here, in Ross Elliot’s studio, and about to meet him face to face. Suddenly it was all beginning to seem less of a good idea than it had when she had planned it so carefully, poring eagerly over every magazine article she could find about the glamorous lives of the super-models who jetted around the world from one catwalk to the next, posing for the world’s top photographers.
But if anyone could make her dreams come true, release her from the stultifying boredom of her nice, respectable, middle-class family and the terminal tedium of school into a world of excitement and adventure, it was Ross Elliot; he was the best, as famous as any of the models he photographed.
And after all, she had come all this way, taking quite a chance of getting caught playing hooky from school—she wasn’t going to chicken out now. Screwing up her courage, she climbed the spiral staircase that led up to the first floor.
She found herself in a spacious reception area, decorated in the same style as the downstairs hall; a large window, draped with a casual swag of bleached muslin, looked out over the lively piazza in front of Covent Garden itself, with its colourful street performers and Aladdin’s cave of exotic little shops and market stalls.
There was a desk in one corner and as she recognised the man standing beside it an odd little frisson of heat feathered down her spine; everything she had read about him had warned her that Ross Elliot was not a man to suffer fools gladly, and that impression was strongly reinforced as she gazed at him in an awe-struck daze.
He had to be something over six feet tall, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt that moulded an impressive breadth of shoulder. His dark hair was drawn back into a ponytail, and he wore a gold earring in one ear, but there was nothing effeminate about him—nothing at all. He was uncompromisingly male, still branded with the stamp of the tough streets of Glasgow where he had grown up. And he had a magnetic physical aura that made her mouth go suddenly dry.
He didn’t even bother to look up as she advanced tentatively into the room; he was bent over the desk, studying a sheet of contact-prints, scribbling over them with a red china-pen, and without lifting his head he called out, ‘Tina?’
A pint-sized dynamo in a scarlet T-shirt and leopard-print leggings darted in through a door behind the desk. ‘Oh, hi,’ she greeted Alysha with a smile as broad as her Australian twang. ‘You’re the two o’clock, right?’ She ran one purple varnished fingertip down the appointment book on the desk. ‘Alysha Fordham-Jones. I’m sorry, I don’t seem to have taken a note of which agency sent you along?’
‘I...wasn’t sent by an agency,’ Alysha confessed apologetically. ‘I made the appointment myself.’
‘Oh...’ The other girl hesitated, uncertain. ‘Ross?’
He straightened, not troubling to conceal his irritation at having to drag his attention away from what he had been doing, and Alysha found herself subjected to a coolly detached appraisal from a pair of deep-set eyes the colour of hardened steel. ‘I only work with girls sent by a reputable agency,’ he informed her dismissively.
She felt a rush of pink to her cheeks. ‘Oh...I’m sorry—I...didn’t know,’ she stammered, disconcerted both by his manner and by something else she couldn’t quite define; maybe it was because for at least the past year she had grown accustomed to invoking stunned admiration in most of the callow young men she was allowed to associate with, and to be confronted with six foot four of mature, hard-ground male who seemed completely indifferent to her charms had come as something of a shock.
‘Well, now you do,’ he responded, turning his attention back to his task.
It was that offhand arrogance that stung her into a countering disdain. ‘I can pay,’ she informed him in a tone of haughty condescension. She put her hand into her bag, and drew out her purse. ‘Cash.’
She had been saving up her allowance for weeks—if she was going to be a model she would have to give up sweets and crisps anyway—and not knowing how much the session would cost she had brought a hundred pounds with her, in crisp ten pound notes she had drawn out of the post office that morning.
Ross Elliot lifted his eyes slowly to look at the money, and then to her face—and the glint of icy anger she saw in them made her insides shiver. Somehow she had insulted him far more than she had intended... She was just about to apologise when he smiled, a smile that didn’t reach those glacial eyes.
‘So you want to be a model, Miss Fordham-Jones?’ he queried, the voice with its rough-edged Glaswegian accent quiet but unmistakably laced with menace. ‘All right.’ He held out his hand, and dumbly she put the money into it. He didn’t bother to count it, just dropped it into a drawer in the desk in front of him. ‘Show her the changing-room, Tina.’
The other girl glanced at him in frank bewilderment, but met only a blank response, so with a small shrug of her shoulders she turned to Alysha. ‘This way,’ she invited, opening the far door and ushering her through into a long, narrow passage. ‘Have you brought some different outfits with you?’
Alysha nodded. ‘Er...yes. A trouser-suit, and an evening dress, and a swimsuit. Is that all right?’
‘Fine. We’ll start with the trouser-suit. And I’ll give you a hand with your make-up and hair—usually the agency would fix up a team to work on the shoot, but...’
‘But I wasn’t sent by an agency,’ Alysha concluded with a wry smile. ‘I’m really sorry about that—I hope...I mean, I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble over it or anything.’
Tina laughed. ‘Oh, no—don’t worry about it,’ she assured her blithely. ‘Look, you don’t want to let Ross scare you, you know—he’s all right really, once you get to know him. His bark’s a lot worse than his bite.’
Alysha cautiously decided to reserve judgement on that one.
Tina opened a door at the end of the passage, and flicked a light switch. Alysha found herself in a small, brightly lit changing-room. There was a white-painted dressing-table, surmounted by a huge mirror with light bulbs all round it, and another long mirror on the wall. On a hatstand in the corner was an eclectic collection of hats and scarves and belts and bead necklaces, and on a shelf above the small hand-basin were rows of half-empty bottles of nail varnish, cans of hairspray, and every shade of lipstick the creative imagination of the cosmetic houses of Europe and America could dream up.
‘Here we are,’ Tina announced. ‘I’ll leave you to get changed, and then I’ll come back in ten minutes and we can start on your face. Oh, and I’ll bring the model-release for you to sign. Ross always insists on it—it’s just so he can use the pictures if he wants to.’
Alysha couldn’t imagine that he would, but she nodded. ‘Oh... Yes. Thank you very much.’
She put down her bag, and sank down on the stool in front of the dressing-table, gazing around her in a kind of awe. Just think of all the fabulous top models who must have sat here before her...! Would she be one of them one day—her services in demand from all the top designers for their catwalk shows, her face on the covers of her favourite glossy magazines?
At this moment, to be honest, she would really much rather have run away, jumped on the train back to school. But she wasn’t going to let Ross Elliot intimidate her. And after all, he had taken her hundred pounds—and she didn’t much fancy the idea