A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

it. Birgit, your nose is in the feathers—chin up, right angles—stop.” Click. “Phoebe—shoulder back, right foot out.” Click. “Shoulder down—lift those feathers, there’s a shadow. Good.” Click.

Tor watched everything intently in the darkness: the placement of lights, Georgian’s position on the scaffolding, the trajectory from her cameras to the models, who moved like automatons below the twelve tons of steel and equipment. Finally, he looked down at me with a smile.

“She’s very good,” he said softly.

“Silence on the set!” snapped Georgian, then went on with: “Head down, lift arm, good.” Click.

After nearly half an hour of this mystical staccato code between Georgian and her prey, she pulled her head up from the steel matrix, hung her cameras and loose lenses by their straps over the scaffold pegs, and swung herself down from the ceiling like a monkey.

“Lights,” she called as from somewhere the draperies were pulled back to let the harsh glare of cold winter light flood the room. The models looked suddenly strange and grotesque, disrobing right there—stripping down to their panty hose and rubbing cold cream on their faces, as if no one else were present.

“Good Lord! You’ve come back!” cried Georgian, rushing to me across the room, and ignoring Tor and the others.

She planted a big, wet kiss on my mouth, then hooked her arm through mine, and glanced briefly at Tor. “Don’t mind us—we’ll be right back,” she told him, bustling me through the doors.

“Where on earth did you find him?” she whispered just outside. “For a girl that doesn’t get about much—I’m amazed—he’s sex on a stick!”

“Dr. Tor is a colleague—my mentor, in fact,” I explained, somewhat stiffly. Georgian and Lelia were carrying on as if he were a Greek god.

“I’d like to have a few colleagues like that,” Georgian assured me. “All of mine are the type that stick their pinkie out when they talk to you. Has mother seen him yet?”

“You bet; he kissed her hand,” I told her.

“She’s probably out in the kitchen right now—baking strudel. She doesn’t miss a trick. As opposed to you,” she added, touching my many-layered yardage of clothing as if it were diseased. “You look like a panzer tank in drag. Have I taught you nothing in all these years? Drama—that’s what you’re missing. Introducing him as ‘doctor’ indeed. Doesn’t he have a first name? Philolaus or Mstislav—something sexy, I bet. Or Thor! Thor Tor!”

“It’s Zoltan,” I told her.

“I knew it—I’ll bet she’s making piroshki, too.”

“Who is?”

“My mother, who else?” said Georgian. “Come with me; I’ve got something I need to do.”

She dragged me off through the maze of rooms to her suite at the back, muttering all the way.

Everything about Georgian was dramatic. Her sculptor’s hands with those long, graceful bones—her huge blue-green eyes and wide cheekbones, that chameleonlike face—funny or tragic—flickering with her moods, and her wide, expressive, sensual mouth with rows of straight, white teeth. “With teeth like that,” her mother used to say, “I could have eaten up half of Europe.”

Back in Georgian’s boudoir—a room that seemed designed by a six-year-old, all gingham and ruffles and porcelain—she plopped me down before the dressing table and started brushing my hair and pulling out the pins that had held it in place.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve, criticizing my clothing,” I said, looking at her torn T-shirt. Those holes seemed placed for maximum effect.

“I’ve got plenty of panache—for a deadbeat.” She laughed.

She was glossing my lips and brushing strange things on my face, from the messy assortment of bottles that littered her table. “If you had my style, you’d have them all eating out of your hand.”

“Somehow, I don’t think gold lamé and sparkly pumps would go over at the Bank of the World,” I pointed out. “I’m an executive, not a jet-setter like you, and I simply cannot comport myself—”

“Comport? To hell with that goddamned bank,” she said. “Do they send spies around, to monitor your attire? You come in here, dragging that gorgeous golden hunk—everyone faints on the floor in a sexual frenzy—and you keep calling him your colleague! Your mentor! He wasn’t looking at you just now as if he wanted to teach you all about corporate profit margins, I can tell you that, but you just refuse to see it. Be honest, when was the last time you leaped out of bed, threw open the window, and said, ‘Thank god I’m alive! This is the most glorious day, and today I’m going to do something so fabulous it will change my entire life’?”

“You mean … before coffee?” I said, laughing.

“You’re insane!” cried Georgian, ruffling my hair and pulling me to my feet. “You know I love you. It’s just that I want you to stop thinking your way through life—and start feeling.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked her.

“That’s the point—precisely,” she told me, pursing her lips.

She went to the closet, pulled off her T-shirt, and pulled a fluffy pink sweater over her close-cropped, silvery blond hair.

“Can you honestly say you’re not attracted to him?” she asked seriously.

That question was one I’d avoided even asking myself. Tor was my mentor, even my Pygmalion—but no one ever told the story from Galatea’s point of view! What happened inside her, after she—Pygmalion’s perfect creation—turned from stone to living flesh? With all the problems I already had in my career and my life, I wasn’t ready to solve that one—not by a long shot.

“If you’re not interested, my friend,” Georgian was saying, “I’d be happy to take him off your hands.”

“Be my guest,” I shot back at once, wondering why my voice sounded brittle even to me.

“Ha-ha!” cried Georgian with a devilish grin. “Rather quick on the trigger, wouldn’t you say?”

Suddenly, I deeply regretted having brought Tor here at all. Whenever Georgian got that look of hers, it meant something terrible was about to happen. I didn’t even want to imagine the possibilities.

“I want you to control yourself,” I told her sternly. “He is my colleague, and you’re not to turn this project into your usual