Chapter 17
CALLUM
The last worker rolled out the door just after five. I stood in the middle of the showroom listening to the silence settle around me. It had been a wild day. A lot of work had been done. We were so close to things being finished.
I turned in a slow circle in the center of the room and let myself feel it for a moment.
This was actually happening. When my cousins had asked me to oversee this project for the, I honestly thought it was too big.
Too ambitious. But now that I was standing in the center of it, the vision was coming to life.
My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and smiled at the screen.
Victoria: Outside. The door locked?
I crossed the floor and unlocked the front door. Victoria was standing on the sidewalk in jeans and a soft gray sweater, her wild hair pulled up in a loose knot with several curls making a break for it around her face. She was carrying a canvas tote bag over one shoulder.
“You found it,” I said.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been in this area, but not that long.” She stepped past me into the store and stopped walking almost immediately. Her head turned slowly, taking in the full sweep of the space. “Oh wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Callum.” She turned to look at me. “This is gorgeous.”
I was embarrassingly pleased by that. “It’s getting there.”
She walked around, her sneakers squeaking on the marble. She ran her hand along the back of one of the velvet couches. She moved toward the menswear section and looked at the dark wood paneling on the walls, then back across the open floor to where the wedding section would be.
“How big is the square footage?” she asked.
“It’s huge. The open second floor is where the office is and we’ll have other stuff to buy up there. The event space is all down here. That’s a false wall over there. We’ll open it up once we get ideas finalized.”
She was already moving through the store, hands in her back pockets as she took it all in. I could see her calculating and observing.
“This is nothing like I’ve seen before,” she said. “I love that it’s not cluttered. It feels calm.”
“Exactly.” I grinned. “That’s the vision. High end, relaxing. A place you want to spend some time and spend some money.”
She nodded. “I like it.”
I laughed. “I hope it’s not a disaster.”
“Walk me through the event you want to host,” she said. “What were you thinking for the runway?”
“That’s sort of the question.” I followed her to the center of the room.
“My cousin Adrian wants to do a runway show for the launch. Not the traditional kind. Real couples instead of models. Tell a story with the clothes.” I gestured down the length of the room.
“I was thinking the runway could run right through here. Start near the back wall, come down through the main floor. The audience would line both sides.”
She stood where I was pointing and looked in both directions. “How many people can you fit if you do it that way?”
“Probably a couple hundred. It’s intimate.”
“Intimate is good,” she said immediately. “Intimate means exclusive. You’re not trying to fill a convention center. You want the right people in the room, not the most people.” She turned back to me. “And you said you wanted to tie in Mimi’s foundation.”
“Right. That’s where I’m stuck. A runway show is a runway show. I couldn’t figure out how to combine that with a charity fundraiser.”
She looked at me like the answer was obvious. “Auction the clothes.”
I stared at her. “What?”
“The dresses and stuff the models wear down the runway,” she said.
“Each one gets a number. You print a catalog, you give it to guests when they come in, and at the end of the show, you hold a live auction. Every piece that sells, a portion of the proceeds goes directly to the foundation. Or all the proceeds. I’m not sure what the profit margin is there.
” She spread her hands out like it was nothing.
“It’s simple. It’s elegant. It doesn’t interrupt the show.
The guests are already emotionally invested in what they just watched.
The clothes mean something because they’ve seen them in motion, on real people, in the context of a story.
That’s when you ask them to open their wallets.
They’re going to be really looking at the clothes and picturing themselves in the moment instead of just seeing another dress. ”
I looked at her. “That’s so obvious.”
“Most good ideas are,” she said with a laugh.
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you’re busy,” she said simply. “And you don’t work with this kind of stuff every day.”
I turned away from her and walked the length of the proposed runway.
It worked. The space was big for a store, allowing Blackwell to hold small events here.
Adrian and his brothers had thought ahead.
Still, every guest would be close to the action.
They’d be able to see the fabric and the details that made Blackwell Couture worth the price tag.
“We’d need an auctioneer,” I said, turning back. “Someone with personality. Not the charity auction type with the rapid-fire voice. Someone that’s going to make the attendees laugh and maybe shed a tear.”
“I know a guy,” she said. “He does charity galas, very good, very funny, knows how to read a room. I’ll get you his number.”
I nodded. I was already mentally planning the runway in my head. “The window wall is going to be the problem.”
“Why?”
“The natural light is incredible during the day but by evening it goes dark and you lose the whole effect. We’d need to backlight it somehow.”
She walked to the window and looked out, then turned and looked back down the length of the room. “We’ll cover it. Get a giant curtain and just cover it up.”
“You’re very good at this,” I said.
“I grew up going to big parties and events my whole life.”
I thought about what she’d told me at dinner about her family, about where she came from. I didn’t push it. I needed to investigate who she really was. But I didn’t have time. I had way too much going on.
I pulled out my phone and ordered food from the Chinese place two blocks away.
It was going to be a working dinner. I wanted to pick her brain.
The woman was a fountain of creativity and I wanted to tap into it.
Victoria sat down on one of the velvet couches and pulled a notebook out of her canvas tote and started writing things down.
I sat on the couch across from her and watched her work.
“You’re staring,” she said without looking up.
“I’m thinking.”
She glanced up at me, and the corner of her mouth curved. She looked back down at her notebook. “Callum, a proper runway show with a live auction component takes months to plan. You don’t have that kind of time.”
“We already have most of it ready,” I said. “I went and watched my cousins host runway shows, so I know how all that fits together. We have the clothes, the models, and most of the guest list. What we don’t have is the charitable framework and the auction structure, which is where you come in.”
The food arrived forty minutes later. I carried the bags back to where Victoria had spread her notebook and a handful of printed pages across the coffee table. She looked up when I set the bags down and her nose twitched at the smell.
“Is there a breakroom up here somewhere?” she asked, already reaching for her papers and stacking them carefully. “I’m not eating sweet and sour chicken on this couch. Do you know what that sauce does to fabric?”
“There’s a breakroom in the back,” I said. “Come on.”
I grabbed the bags and led her toward the back, where shoppers would never see. It was a different world from the showroom. It was still raw and functional. Exposed ductwork overhead in some spots.
But the breakroom itself was nice. It had four couches and some tables and chairs. The couches were beautiful pieces but they weren’t right for the showroom floor. Wrong scale, wrong tone, wrong everything. So they ended up in here.
Victoria stopped walking when she saw them and looked at me.
“Rejects,” I said.
She smiled and dropped onto the green one. I set the bags on one of the tables and started unpacking containers. Garlic and ginger and something spicy filled the space. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until that moment.
“What did you get?” she asked, leaning forward to look into the bags.
“Everything,” I said.
She laughed and reached for a container. I watched her pry the lid off and investigate the contents before helping herself to what turned out to be the kung pao chicken. She took a few bites and then pulled out her notebook. I noticed she was always multitasking.
“Okay,” she said between bites. “Tell me about the guest list.”
I opened a container of fried rice and considered the question. She was writing while I talked, her fork hovering between bites.
“You need a few names in that group who will post,” she said.
“Not the press. A handful of guests who have personal followings. You want them to share the show with their own opinions. They connect and their followers connect through them. That’s where you get the organic buzz.
That’s worth more than any press release. ”
“You really do know how to do this,” I said.
She glanced up. “I do.”
The more we talked, the more I wanted her. Yes, I wanted sex, but shit, I wanted the woman.