He had promised her. He couldn’t just have meant the villa. Saul’s treachery, for that is how she viewed it, was like a body blow so hard it made her muscles ache. It was she, Cassandra, who was in fashion! She was the one with the contacts, the vision! She could have made Milford into a global force. The new Dior – bigger! And now it was over.

The lift pinged, the light flicked to ‘Floor 25’ and Cassandra was brought back to the present. This isn’t over, she thought, as the doors whooshed open and she strode into the Rive office. This is just a setback. Her spike heels clacked along as she looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the north side of the office. At least she had her job; it would see her through while she regrouped and planned how she would seize Milford back. And no jumped-up, middle-management nobody like Emma Bailey was going to stand in her way. Yes, she thought smiling, there was always another way.

‘Morning, Cassandra!’ said a voice to her left. The smile dropped from her face and she glared back, annoyed by the interruption to her thoughts. She was unusually late for a Monday morning and the office was already buzzing. Normally she would have been first in, usually before 8 a.m., but she had been obliged to start the day with a breakfast with the MD of Cartier. She enjoyed beginning the day alone, free from disturbances to collect her thoughts. To plan, to strate

gize. Cassandra was not a team player; she rated her talent and vision so far beyond the rest of her staff that she would gladly have crafted the whole magazine herself if time allowed. But even though she had cherry-picked her staff, she still sometimes felt as if she was dealing with amateurs and halfwits. As she passed through the glass doors into her plush office, her senior assistant Lianne met her halfway.

‘Art need to see you immediately,’ she said handing her a coffee; black, filter, scalding hot. Cassandra nodded and moved into her corner office to take her seat. It was a beautiful space, painted Dior grey and interior-designed to her specification, minimalist and chic. She sat down at her Perspex desk, uncluttered except for a white orchid, one in-tray full of layouts, another stuffed with party invitations and a pile of daily newspapers. Lianne had helpfully put the Time cutting announcing Cassandra as ‘twelfth most important woman in fashion’ in the centre of the glass. She picked it up and dropped it into the wastepaper bin without looking at it. Twelfth, she thought with annoyance.

Cassandra picked up the phone and punched Lianne’s extension.

‘Can you get Laura and Jeremy to step through as well. I want an update on the Friday’s cover-shoot.’

She was behind and it was a feeling Cassandra hated. She loved doing the shows; she never believed those editors who said the collections were a chore that needed to be suffered, but it kept her out of the office for days at a time. Cassandra was a control freak, she hated even the smallest detail of Rive being passed to the printers without her express permission and she didn’t let a minute go by when she didn’t know exactly where the magazine was up to. She looked up at the wall in front of her where miniature pages from next month’s issue had been pinned up: pages of glorious fashion by some of the world’s best photographers, opinion pieces by some of London’s most celebrated columnists. But there was one glaring hole: the cover story. She glanced at her calendar. It was down to the wire.

David Stern, Rive’s art director, came in first, wearing a black polo neck and holding a thick stack of photo paper.

‘I hope that’s the Phoebe shoot you have in your hands,’ said Cassandra.

Stern nodded.

‘I got Xavier to send over what he had. Awkward bastard. Said he wanted to retouch his selection before he would send anything.’

‘To which you replied …’ asked Cassandra.

‘Send over everything you have tout suite before Cassandra makes sure you never work for any magazine in the company ever again.’

‘Good answer,’ she said with a thin smile. She hated the power which photographers seemed to bestow upon themselves. If it wasn’t enough dealing with stroppy publicists, managers and agents, now she had photographers throwing diva hissy-fits. Well, Cassandra employed a zero-tolerance policy. If they wouldn’t play ball – her ball – then they would be dropped without a backward look. Rive was bigger than the sum of its parts; they could get a pensioner with a Brownie camera to shoot a fashion story and he’d be hailed as ‘the next big thing’.

David reverently laid three A4 prints on Cassandra’s desk, the pick of the shots from the Phoebe Fenton shoot. She stood up, and rested the palms of her hands on the Perspex to examine them. They were sensational. All shot three-quarter length, with Phoebe wearing just a pair of high-waisted cream jodhpurs so tight that they looked as if they’d been painted on.

In two of the frames, her long chestnut hair was covering her breasts, with just a cream triangle of navel visible. In the final image her hair had been blown away from her, fanning out like some Greek goddess. Christ she looks good, thought Cassandra. Phoebe Fenton had been the supermodel of the moment a decade earlier, but that was then and twelve months ago Cassandra would have laughed if she had been mooted to appear in British Rive. After Phoebe’s surprise marriage to Ethan Krantz, a New York property billionaire seven years ago, Phoebe had retreated into a world of Upper East Side gallery openings and benefit dinners for land-mine victims. Far too conservative, far too worthy and way, way past it. Phoebe belonged to the US edition of Rive with their airbrushed fantasy versions of big Hollywood stars and wholesome celebrities. But things had changed. Choosing who to put on your cover was not just about who but when. Timing was everything and a sudden scandal in a cover model’s private life could add 50,000 to a magazine’s sales; much more if your timing made it an exclusive. And Phoebe Fenton’s private life had suddenly gone into meltdown; her husband Ethan had run off with a Ukrainian model thirty years his junior. Phoebe and Ethan were now in the throes of a nasty divorce and Ethan was fighting hard for the custody of their three-year-old little girl, Daisy. Rumours were everywhere of Phoebe’s behaviour: drink, bisexuality, orgies, drugs. In the space of weeks, Phoebe had gone from all-American girl to all-American fuck-up. But up until now there hadn’t been anything solid beyond one grainy long-lens paparazzo photograph taken in St Barts of someone who may, or may not have been Phoebe Fenton kissing a mystery brunette and thus Phoebe’s public persona was as beautiful and gracious as it had always been.

Cassandra smiled. The images in front of her were the sexiest pictures she had ever seen of Phoebe. She congratulated herself for having picked Xavier to shoot her because these photos were fresh and fierce, erotic even. Shot by another photographer, Phoebe’s naked breasts might have looked salacious, but in the hands of the man the fashion industry was calling the new Helmut Newton they looked delicate, exquisite, artistic. Pure fashion.

At that moment Laura Hildon, Rive’s pretty blonde fashion editor, ran through the door, already talking.

‘What do you think?’ she gabbled. ‘It was the best we could do, she hated everything except the jodhpurs.’ She looked anxiously at Cassandra who was now holding the bare-breasted shot aloft.

‘What happened to the Vuitton waistcoat?’ she said icily. ‘I told you we needed to get Vuitton on the cover this issue. They haven’t had a cover credit in nine months and they are beginning to get tetchy.’

Laura looked stricken.

‘Actually, I don’t know what happened to the Vuitton top. I came into work to collect the clothes for the shoot on Friday morning and it had gone.’

‘Gone?’ asked Cassandra.

‘I think someone took it from the rail on Thursday night,’ said Laura, embarrassed. ‘I should probably bring this up another time but I think Francesca has been taking things from my selection for her shoots.’

Cassandra flashed a look at David, back to Laura and then waved a hand to dismiss it. ‘We’ll sort this out later. In the meantime, what are the inside shots like?’

It was Laura’s turn to shoot a look to David.

‘Haven’t you told her?’ she asked breathlessly.

David cleared his throat before taking a seat on Cassandra’s sofa.

‘It started off normally enough. Laura managed to get her in a couple of dresses, then after lunch the stylist turns up. Her stylist, I should add. Someone called Romilly, I’ve never heard of. They kept disappearing into the loos and they were glugging champagne like it was water. Phoebe went… well, she went a little weird after that. By five o’clock Romilly was saying that Phoebe wanted to show off her body. That she wanted to do her last great set of nudes.’

Tags: Tasmina Perry Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net