My Funny Valentina Read Online Free PDF Page B

had held in those unkind thoughts, sneaking looks during her and Stash’s visits to his parents’ home at the tiny Greek woman with the same deep, soulful dark eyes her only son shared, whose poochy stomach and saggy bosom attested to her fruitfulness.  Valentina’s own supple, statuesque body had been her livelihood for a long time. That and her face had always been, she acknowledged without being overly vain about it – my moneymakers.  
    They ’d kept a roof over her head and food on her table after she’d officially liberated from her mother at the tender age of sixteen.  Not too long after she’d been scouted by a modeling agency representative who’d spied her walking tall, lithe and strikingly ‘different’ down a Manhattan street, her Brooklyn swagger on full glorious display.
    Her softly waving coppery-red hair had been styled in tight rows of braids down her back – done in fun sitting out on the front stoop by her friend from one brownstone over, Jalissa.  Her long coltish legs had been bare and brown in a pair of ragged-edge denim shorts, the provocative up-thrust of nubile breasts barely contained by the t-shirt knotted high on her slender waist to show off the gold belly chain that had been all the rage in her borough that sizzling summer. 
    After the first iconic test shots had been taken of her by an up-and-coming Chicago-based fashion photographer named Lars Kittson, she’d been signed by the agency immediately.  Pronounced a stunning combination of a pre-Raphaelite angel with a devilish Angelina Jolie-attitude.   Angelina – pre-Brad Pitt and saintly motherhood – that is.  The blood in a vial around the neck, brother smooching, Billy Bob Thornton, Angelina!
    The bad girl attitude hadn’t all been an act.  Back then, if you’d dared her to do anything – she’d do it.  Valentina gave a sad smile for the confused girl she’d once been.  Feeling unloved and unwanted, passed back and forth among so many uncaring relatives, she’d rebelled against anything and everything in her difficult teenage years.  Especially her overwhelmed mother who’d been fighting her own demons, real and imagined.  There’d been so many loud arguments with her mother – their fights growing more heated and intense as her frequently soused mother had struggled to accept her own beauty was fading. 
    J ust as her daughter’s was coming into full glorious bloom. 
    Valentina had often caught her mother gazing at her across their cluttered table with a twisted mixture of sadness and envy as they’d picked at their heated up frozen dinners .   There’d never been any pride in those green eyes that matched Valentina’s own – and now matched the granddaughter’s who she would never meet.  But her stares hadn’t been nearly as bad as the lascivious looks Valentine had endured those last months at home from her mother’s latest lover who’d moved into their Brooklyn row house.  
    Moose . 
    A hulking mass of a ‘New Joisey’ truck driver.  Who’d begun lingering around the bathroom door every morning with what she’d newly learned was lustful male desire in his beady eyes just as Valentina was getting out of the shower before classes. His pervy hand had grabbed her bottom beneath her robe one morning as she’d turned away in disgust. 
    T hat had been the last straw. 
    It had also been h er last day living with her mother.  Valentina had marched into a lawyer’s office picked at random out of the Yellow Pages, shown them her newly signed lucrative modeling contract and quickly cemented her ‘emancipated minor’ status.  The angel of a modeling agency representative who’d first signed her had become a kind of surrogate older sister.  Moving Valentina into her own lavish Hamptons abode the first few months, then into a Manhattan apartment with three other seasoned models who’d shown Val the ropes and protected her from the numerous perils of the industry like a flock of gorgeous