""Maureen Gallagher, who posed with a giraffe in Peter Beard’s most valuable image and then spent 16 years in an affair with the photographer, has nothing to show for it — except a book. Gallagher, 51, is working on a memoir about the love story that started in 1987 when, as a top model at Elite, she was introduced to Beard by Grace Jones at Heartbreak, a Tribeca nightclub. “He goes, ‘You want to go to Africa?’ I said, ‘Sure.’” Gallagher told me. The next day, my booker called and said, ‘There’s a plane ticket here for you to Nairobi.’” Beard, 78, had intended to bring his Somali discovery, Iman, to his ranch in Kenya to shoot a documentary for ABC, “With Peter Beard in Africa.” But Iman bailed. Gallagher went as her replacement and was soon naked with a giraffe eating out of her hand in an image Beard called “Maureen Gallagher and a night feeder at Hog Ranch 2 a.m.” “I went there for three weeks and stayed there for three months. I canceled all my bookings. I was 22, and I was in love,” Gallagher said. On the way to the airport for her flight back to New York, Beard’s agent-producer Peter Riva, grandson of Marlene Dietrich, told her Beard had married the year before to his current wife, Afghan émigré Nejma. “She knew about us. We never hid it. We lived at the Gramercy Hotel, room 503,” Gallagher said. “Elite would send someone over to bang on the door to wake me up.” Gallagher, who saw Beard again last summer for the first time in a dozen years, said she was never paid for posing in Kenya, and never received a silver gelatin print of her and the giraffe. In 2011, one such print, with additional illustrations from other artists, sold at Sotheby’s for $326,500.