Alix stumbled and went down on one knee, bracing her hand against the side of the limousine. The lunchtime crowd in Les Halle began to gather in front of l’Escargot Montorgueil to watch.
“Aidez-moi,” Nicholas snapped at the restaurant doorman. Between them they dragged Alix back to her feet. The cold wind whipped her long red hair in their faces.
“How can you act like this?” Nicholas said angrily. More passersby stopped, entranced. “Stop fighting me, you stupid girl. I only want to make love to you!”
“Il est fou,” Alix tried to appeal to their audience. “Vraiment!”
The onlookers were only mildly interested. Even if Nicholas Palliades were a certifiable lunatic, Alix saw, she wasn’t going to get any help from Parisians. They thought it was a lovers’ quarrel.
She couldn’t fight both the l’Escargot doorman and Nicholas; in spite of her struggles, they shoved her unceremoniously inside the car. Nicholas jumped in after her, and tripped over her legs. They came down together in a tangle on the limousine’s back seat.
The l’Escargot doorman slammed the door shut, and the crowd on the sidewalk watched as the Daimler shifted into gear and pulled swiftly away from the curb. No one had moved. Some spectators were even smiling.
This, after all, was Paris.
The Daimler careened into the rue de Rivoli at twice its usual speed. Alix had fallen half-off the back seat; only Nicholas Palliades’s big body kept her from sliding to the floor.
“You’re kidnapping me,” she screamed, trying to pry him off with both hands. “You’re going to rape me!”
“My God, don’t say that, somebody will hear you!” Nicholas levered himself up, but as the Daimler swerved again he lost his balance. His muscular length fell down on top of Alix as the big car took a curve into the Tuileries, tires squealing.
With an oath, Nicholas reached out and grabbed the telephone to the chauffeur. “Slow down, you idiot,” he shouted in English. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
He slammed the phone back in its cradle. Alix lay with her scarf awry under him, her hair fanned out in a red halo against the gray velvet of the limousine’s seat. Her ski jacket had come open, showing the quick rise and fall of her breasts under her sweater. Her purple eyes, dark as wood violets, looked up at him not with fear, but with caution.
He forgot what he was going to say as he stared down at her. Still sprawled against her, he felt the imprint of her body and legs burning through his clothing.
“Why do you keep making these scenes?” He was baffled, by this exotically beautiful woman in his arms who was so exasperatingly elusive. “You know I detest them.”
Alix stared up at Nicholas’s hard, chiseled face. “I keep making scenes?” She tried to push at him. “You chased me out of the restaurant! And then you dragged me into this car! I don’t care how much money you’re giving Jackson Storm, I’m not going to let you manhandle me!”
He found it difficult to pay attention to what she was saying as he watched the perfect white gleam of her teeth, the pink, glossy curve of her lips. “Yes,” he murmured. “The Maison Louvel will pay you more money than Mortessier’s. I told them to.”
She stopped struggling.
“You told them to do what?” The purple glimmer of her eyes grew wide.
Nicholas couldn’t resist. He lowered his head and brushed his mouth against the alluring little throb of pulse under the white skin of her throat. When she stiffened under him with a gasp, his body responded wildly. It was all he could do to say, “You’re going to tell me who you’re working for. And what the other night, in my apartment, was all about.” Her warm pulse, his lips told him as he nuzzled her, was racing. “But I don’t intend to starve you.”
Her breath shuddered again, warm against his face. Her eyes, purple lakes heavily fringed with mascara, looked bemused. She couldn’t be as innocent as she seemed, he told himself. She was well-trained, that was all.
“I—I can always leave the Maison Louvel.” The warm lips nibbling the lobe of her ear made Alix breathless. “I’m not going to be in anyone’s power!”
Nicholas was on fire. His mouth touched hers softly, then stopped as he felt the unconscious quiver run through her again. Her responsiveness tore at him. It also made it hard for him to think clearly. The car had slowed; it was easy to slide his hand under her and lift her, soft, warm, and unresisting against him. Even as he cursed himself for wanting her. Even as he cursed the insistent ache of his arousal which he knew she could feel through their clothes.
He was surprised at how much she affected him. This girl, just a struggling couture-house model, had been bought; she was part of a dangerous plot, he would bet his life on it. But he couldn’t respond to the rational part of himself that begged him to stop. Against her sweet, partly opened mouth, he murmured thickly, “Why do you resist me?”
With a throaty moan Alix opened her body to him, thighs relaxing against his tense, pressing frame. Instinctively, she lifted her arms and curled them around his neck, captured by some faint memory of what it had been like that night in his apartment. In the beginning his lovemaking had been heavy, sensuous, mesmerizing; trying to retrieve it, she let her mouth cling to his.
The effect on him was electric. He pushed her back against the plush seat in an abrupt convulsion of need. For the first time, she realized how much stronger he was. She stared up into his face, dark with passion, thick lashes cloaking his eyes. “Don’t,” she moaned.
“Yes, oh, yes.” He breathed the words against her lips. “I want to make love to you. Why would I want to hurt you?” His kiss trailed across her throat. “Why would I want to do anything but make this perfect for you?”
The Daimler had come to a stop. Winter sunshine streamed brightly in through the tinted window glass. Her ski jacket was open, and Nicholas’s strong, heavy fingers were under her sweater, her thrusting breasts filling his palm, nipple budded tightly under the stroking of his thumb. Alix drifted in a heated dream, her hips molded against the rigid feel of his sex.
“You bewitch me,” he was saying softly. “You have to leave these people, stop whatever it is you’re doing, it’s not worth it. This is a dangerous game. You’re not carrying a gun, are you?”
She looked at him from under half-closed lids, mesmerized by his passion, his tenderness. “Did you say a gun?”
“Never mind.” He kissed her again, his tongue exploring her mouth gently, then he pulled back. He slipped his hand between them into his jacket’s inner breast pocket. “God, how I want you,” he muttered as he kissed her again.
Nicholas’s kisses left Alix dreamily helpless. When she opened her eyes and looked over his shoulder, she saw they were parked in the street in front of the Maison Louvel.
Not, she realized quickly, at his town house in the avenue Foch.
He felt her stiffen. He drew back a few inches, looking down at her with glowing black eyes. “Yes, I want you—today, this afternoon. But I can’t force you. I’ve brought you back to the Maison Louvel.” He held up what he’d taken from his inside pocket. The sunlight through the Daimler’s window struck sparks of fire. “I had them reset with bigger stones,” Nicholas Palliades said huskily.
Alix’s senses had been lulled by sheer animal sensuousness. Now she stared, disbelievingly, at the awful earrings dangling before her. Whatever else he offered, Nicholas Palliades was still just as crass, as single-mindedly unacceptable as he’d been the first moment she’d seen him. How had she managed to let herself feel otherwise?
“I don’t want your cheap diamonds!” She struggled to sit up. “I don’t want to be treated like a tart.” She fumbled for the Daimler’s door lock. “This isn’t a plot. You don’t have to buy me off. Just leave me alone!”
“What’s wrong with them?” He hadn’t moved. “What the hell do you mean, ‘cheap diamonds’?”
Alix was disgusted with herself for allowing him to maul her in the back seat of the limousine. “You don’t understand,” she cried.
“I don’t want to be involved with you. This—this was never supposed to happen!”
There was a click as the lock was released, and the limousine’s door came open. Alix stumbled out into the rue des Benedictines.
She started toward the medieval doors that led to the tunnel and the entrance of the Maison Louvel. He followed her, the diamond pendants still swinging from his thumb and forefinger.
“Are you telling me these are not good enough?” He caught her with the other hand and spun her about. “Answer me! What the hell do you mean by ‘cheap’?”
“Cheap,” Alix cried, trying to break out of his grip. “You wouldn’t know what cheap is. But I’m worth more than that!”
“Oh, are you?” His voice was now ominously soft. “Finally we get to the truth. What was the price of the other night? I mean your little virginal roll in the hay. You’ve never told me.”
She jerked back her arm, but he wouldn’t let her go.
“I’ll tell you,” he said, his lips drawn back to reveal straight, white teeth. “I bought your innocent body. That makes you mine. As of now, you’re not working for anybody else, reporting to anybody else. You’re no longer part of their strategy. If you don’t believe that,” he said, his face menacing, “try to get another job in Paris. Try to live where you are, in your little flat in Ranelagh, and see if they will let you stay there. Try to go back to Mortessier’s and see how he welcomes you.”
“You bastard,” Alix breathed. He was rich, and powerful; she knew he could do all of it.
“You belong to me,” he rasped, clamping her arm. “More than you know. You don’t have to accept ‘cheap diamonds.’ If I want to, I can have you without giving you a goddamned thing!”
They were unaware of a figure approaching from the Maison Louvel courtyard, where cars were parked.
“You’re hurting my arm!” Alix twisted in his grip. “I’m not making another scene now—you are!”
As he jerked her to him roughly, a voice said, “Hey, I think the lady wants you to let her go.”
Alix knew what was coming the moment she heard Christopher Forbes’s voice. The writer, bareheaded and without a coat, stepped between them. “She wants you to let her go,” he said again.
Nicholas Palliades hardly looked at him. “Stay out of this. It’s none of your business.”
There was a blur of motion, and Alix heard the distinct sound of flesh hitting flesh. Nicholas staggered back. The burly writer moved in swiftly, but before he could land another punch, the taller man uncoiled a karate blow. She heard a cry of pain.
They had made enough noise to be heard inside the Maison Louvel. Abdul came running out from the courtyard. Palliades’s chauffeur had already leaped out of the limousine. He threw himself on Nicholas and backed him against the Daimler, both men shouting at each other angrily.
Abdul’s son Karim ran up to see if his father needed help. Alix put her hands over her face. Oh, God, all they needed right now was Jackson Storm!
“Vite, vite!” the Arab porter ordered. He pushed Christopher Forbes toward the wooden doors, and Alix followed. Abdul slammed them shut behind them.
In the tunnel, Christopher dabbed at his bleeding mouth gingerly. “That son of a bitch,” he said under his breath. “I had my chance to fix him for the other night, and I blew it.”
“He’s crazy.” Alix leaned against the stones of the tunnel wall, still wondering if anyone else inside the Maison Louvel had heard them. “Are you hurt?”
When she peered at him in the semi-darkness, she saw that he was grinning. “My dentist will be happy to know,” the writer said indistinctly, “that I still have all my front caps.” He wiped away a trickle of red dripping down his chin.
“Don’t look so sad, beautiful,” he told her. “It was worth it. Because now I know who you are.”
“It’s a touchy situation,” Jack Storm admitted.
He lifted his expensively shod feet to the corner of his desk and leaned back to study the newly plastered ceiling of the executive office. The hammering of the carpenters had given way the last few days to the sharp, astringent odor of paint, which meant they were in the last stages of renovations.
Peter Frank looked worried. “You know, Jack, we could have a real kinky situation here. I’ve been trying to track down a rumor that they had a fight a few weeks ago and he tried to tear off her clothes.”
Jack Storm shook his head. “He’d never touch his wife, I know that for a fact. No, it’s the sewing machines. Yeah, I know some of the big houses, Cardin, Lacroix, are calling it ‘demi couture,’ but that’s just a buzz word for partly machine-made. If they can do it, we can do it.” He shrugged. “So he’ll have his fit. He’ll get over it. The girls have to use sewing machines, at least for the seams. It’s cost-effective. Hell, we’re trying to bring this place into the twentieth century!”
Peter Frank looked puzzled. “Jack, I thought we were talking about the—ah, backer. Nick Palliades. And our model, Alix.”
Jack took his feet down from the desk. “I’m talking about Gilles Vasse. Our designer. Not some young stud who has a thing for models.” He paused. “So what about them?”
Peter rubbed his bald spot, a sure sign that he was perplexed. “Jack, please—you’re doing the same with this you do with a lot of other things. You’re just closing your eyes to trouble. For one thing, Alix hates him.”
“She went to lunch with him, didn’t she? I didn’t exactly see her spit in his face.”
“Did she have a choice?” Peter never liked to see Jack operate without Mindy Ferragamo somewhere closeby. But Mindy was tied up in New York. “What about Gilles? What’s he going to do if Alix gets mad and takes a walk?”
Jackson Storm smiled benignly. “She’s not going to take a walk, Pete. Believe me, this Greek kid is going to treat her like a queen, give her anything she wants. It’s just that as an independent American girl, Alix has a little adjusting to do. These European types are very macho—you know, like Italians. But I’m convinced this girl can handle it.”
Peter Frank wasn’t so sure about Alix. Just as he wasn’t sure about Gilles. Jack had failed to tell their young designer about the sewing machines. And Gilles had assumed he was working in the same traditional couture atmosphere as at Rudi Mortessier’s.
It was legendary that you could tell haute couture by turning it inside out; that it was so beautifully finished it could almost be worn that way. Since every inch was hand done, including the seams, “sewing machine” was a dirty word. But times were changing. Prêt-à-porter, the expensive designer boutiques’ ready-to-wear, was now partly machine-made.
However, the situation had been nothing short of traumatic when their young designer discovered the rows of sewing machines in a room beside the atelier. Gilles had hit the roof.
“Jeez, I don’t know.” Peter shook his head doubtfully. “We’re in deep, Jack. How are we going to handle all this before opening time in the spring? And on top of everything else,” he groaned, “there’s the princess.”
Jack Storm’s famous urbane expression altered. The subject of Princess Jacqueline was touchy.
“Jack, this isn’t Seventh Avenue,” Peter Frank went on. “You can’t just let some kid come in announcing she’s going to be a designer’s apprentice.” He took a deep breath. “Gilles has a point, nobody’s been asking him anything.”
“I have plans,” Jack Storm said, “that will take care of all this. Trust me, Peter.”
“Great. We’re going to send Princess Jackie home.”
The world-famous Storm King frowned. “Peter, remember when we had the princess’s PR person here, Miss Goodman, and she suggested some kind of a big bang to get the Maison Louvel off the launch pad? Because it’s too late for us to bring out the spring line, and too early for fall? Well, I’m dreaming up a really unique idea. It will amaze you, it will be the most ambitious, totally ‘now’ project Jackson Storm has ever done.”
“Jack—” Peter Frank began uneasily.
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br /> “Listen.” He held up his hand. “Just listen. We’re going to let Gilles do what he does best—create some wild designs he can have a ball with, without having to worry about commercial appeal. I’m thinking of a show.”
Peter Frank wished even more fervently that Mindy Ferragamo were with them. “Jack, have you seen the figures this quarter for western wear? Look, we’re showing profit problems in our U.S. mass market that are cause for concern. Not that I want to throw cold water on any kind of promotion,” he added hastily, “but a show—any kind of show—is going to cost a lot of money, especially in Paris.”
“I see a very light,” Jack went on, ignoring him, “fantastical play on the spirit of fashion. A dream of an extravaganza that would pay off in worldwide media exposure. We’ll hire the Paris opera and have a formal ball, everybody dress up for charity. In the middle of it we’ll have a—” He lifted his hands, fingers wiggling in a give-it-to-me gesture. “Come on, what do the French call it—’fantaisie?’“
“Hey, Jack,” Peter said anxiously, “have you discussed this with Gilles?”
“Will you just listen a moment?” Jackson Storm sat up in his chair abruptly, his feet hitting the carpet with an audible thud. “In my plan, Gilles designs dream creations—Jesus God, headdresses!” he exclaimed. “The French go nuts for headdresses. The last time Marianna and the girls were here, it was years ago, we went to a costume ball at the Crillon with headdresses and masks.” He was suddenly Seventh Avenue’s Jake Storm, consumed by a brilliant idea. “‘The Ball of the White Birds.’ How do you say that in French?”
“I don’t know.” Peter Frank grimaced. “But whatever you do, Jack, for God’s sake, promise me you’ll ask Gilles. Look, his wife is going to have a baby any day now, the guy’s really pushed, and he hates the kid princess. Ask him,” Peter pleaded. “Ask Gilles if he wants to do costumes for a white bird ball. Okay?”
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