Page 97 of Triggered By Love
“Isn’t everyone?” She leaned back on the couch, swiveling and resting her head on the arm and putting her feet in his lap. “We’re always looking for the next bright thing. A special canvas to convey a mood, a quality of movement, energy, and glamour. The unique face.”
“And that’s where the agency comes in.”
“Yes, I don’t have time to flip through thousands of FacePlant pictures online or review hundreds of lookbooks. I give Alida’s assistant my list, and she runs them by Ivanna who knows the look I’m striving for. I do make the final cut, but by then, they’ve already been prescreened.”
“In other words, Ivanna is the linchpin on whether a model walks for you.”
“Yes.” She yawned and reached into a cubby. “Speaking of models, here are two passes for the fashion show for Popo.”
“Do you mind if I look through the models you have for the upcoming show?”
“I knew you’d ask.” She reached for her laptop which she kept under the sofa and booted it up. “Everything’s online nowadays, including their lookbooks.”
He eagerly took the laptop from her, leaving her lying on the couch. She had to be exhausted. He was for sure. It was hard to believe he’d woken up with her this morning in his hunting cabin, and now, she was lying on the sofa yawning with her feet in his lap.
He turned his attention to the online lookbooks of Avery’s current group of models. He took screenshots and logged in to a cloud account, uploading everything he could.
There was no objection from Avery, and when he looked over at her, he realized she was asleep.
Hot damn.
He had her laptop. He could dump her entire drive to his cloud account, and he could look at the models she’d used in the past.
His heartbeat racing, he browsed through the folders to the previous year. There was Brando Bonet—looking larger than life in a firefighter’s getup including helmet and axe.
In every picture he shared with Avery, Brando was gazing at her with utter adoration and worship, and she returned his affection with a warmth in her Madonna eyes that Jason had never seen reflected when her eyes narrowed in on him.
Jason gritted his teeth and kept scanning. He studied the other people in the group shots and took note of people caught in the photo who weren’t meant to be caught. Among them were Ivanna, Damon, Alida, Tatiana Renzi, and someone wearing wraparounds—suggesting Larry Leach, but as Avery had reminded him, an easy way to mislead.
At maybe the two to three hundredth image, he stopped scanning and enlarged for more detail.
Joselito was still alive last year, and he was at the Manhattan Fashion Show. He was with a group of models standing around Ivanna who was giving instructions while pointing his direction.
He uploaded everything to his cloud account, but there was nothing he could do tonight. His brain was fried and suddenly, all the caffeine in the world couldn’t keep him up.
Only Avery could, and she was zonked out cold.
Laying his head down on a cushion, he closed his eyes to connect the dots. Ivanna. Joselito. Larry. Alida. Harvey. Saul. Brando. Who was he missing?
And then, as he was drifting off, his eyes popped open.
The shooter.
It was time to take another look.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sometime in the night,Jason must have picked her dead weight up and tucked her into her bed. Avery opened her eyes and closed them again to prolong the early morning peace of the humming air conditioner and faint traffic noises percolating up to her apartment.
She tried to let her mind go blank, the way it had when she must have crashed last night. She’d drained herself. Filtering her memories through a sieve was tiring. She’d given Jason enough background on a few of her parents’ friends without any smoking guns pointing to anyone she cared about.
The Leaches were part of her parents’ social circle. They were a privileged group. Influential people with influential friends, mixing friendship with business and politics. Her dad always aspired to be more than a military man. Her mother didn’t portray herself as the typical military wife. For one thing, she never moved from the house she inherited from her grandparents. There was no such thing as living on a military base for her. She was an artist and hung out in The Village. She was also twenty years younger—an entire generation apart from the dutiful housewife type who juggled babies and puppies in cooking and cleaning.
Dad deployed, and Mom painted and partied. Her father had married late and was close to retirement when Avery was born. While the older three remembered their father going to war, she, Damon, and Harper had a father who commuted no farther than The City.
The Manor was their world, and they’d grown up sheltered and coddled in private schools where everyone won a participation trophy. Success and adulation were bestowed by the sheer fact of their parents’ position on the financial and social hierarchy.
It wasn’t an easy upbringing, and definitely not painless. But in her stiff upper lip world, she didn’t go around crying.
