It was an obviously practiced performance.
“Mademoiselle.” Candace Dobbs was almost wringing her hands. “Qu’est-ce vous—”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” her serene highness screamed, jabbing her finger. “I want her!”
The public relations woman said desperately, “But Alix doesn’t have anything to do with this, she’s only the model here.”
“Wait a minute.” Mindy Ferragamo had come in. She regarded their royal teenager with a no-nonsense expression. “Okay, so let her talk to Alix.”
Alix was sorting old bundles of toiles, the muslin that was used instead of paper patterns by Paris couturiers, and talking to Christopher Forbes when the princess burst in. The princess was followed by the starstruck Karim, who managed always to stay in the vicinity of the teenage problem. Followed by the seamstresses. Then came Candace Dobbs and Mindy Ferraghmo who, Alix gathered, had just arrived back in Paris.
Over Nannette’s head, Alix saw Christopher Forbes smiling at her. It’s all yours, his expression said.
Alix glared at him. She didn’t need Prince Alessio’s turbulent, mixed-up offspring as one of her duties. She said sharply, “Don’t look at me, Princess. You’re not supposed to go in there and bother Gilles.” Nannette and Sylvie were instantly apprehensive; no one talked to European upper classes that way.
Alix only shrugged. It was time someone gave it to Princess Jackie straight. “That’s what you have your own work-room for, actually. And your own drafting table.”
The princess regarded Alix adoringly. “I want to design for you,” she promptly announced. “I don’t need Gilles.” She sprawled in a chair with her Keds stuck out in front of her, not bothering to look at Candace Dobbs, or even allpowerful Mindy Ferragamo for approval. “I’ll make a beautiful white bird fantaisie for you, Alix. You’ll be a beautiful flamingo, with this big feather headdress and an eye mask. You’ll see, it will be fantastic.”
“Flamingos are pink,” Candace Dobbs said quickly.
The princess didn’t even turn her head. “She has red hair, asshole! Can’t you see that?”
Quickly, Mindy Ferragamo held up her hand. “We’re not here to fight.” To Alix she said, “What are you doing now, besides working in here?”
The answer was, of course, nothing. “Gilles isn’t ready for me, yet,” Alix said reluctantly.
“Nothing’s ready around here.” The small woman turned away briskly. “Let the princess set up her drafting table in here. She can draw you and design whatever it is, while you work.”
Alix was dismayed. She preferred sorting pins and dusty spools of thread to Princess Jacqueline’s tempestuous presence. The way the girl looked at her made her nervous.
“And you,” Mindy Ferragamo said. She stood with her hands at her hips, surveying Christopher Forbes. “What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed to be following Jack around.”
The Fortune magazine writer smiled amiably. “I had another assignment. And I was told Jack Storm was out of town.”
“Lyons,” Mindy said shortly. “He’s gone down to the silk mill. But he’ll be back tomorrow.” She crooked her finger at Princess Jackie. “Come on, Your Highness, your bodyguard just came with your car.”
The princess unwound herself from her chair without protest. “But I will make you into a flamingo,” she hissed as she passed Alix. “You will be pink and the rest of them will be white. To hell with them.”
Alix gave her a weak smile.
The seamstresses were the last to leave, carrying the toiles. Nannette closed the door behind them. Christopher Forbes lounged against the windowsill, arms crossed over his chest. “Where did Gilles go? Is our boy wonder going to last around here?”
Alix began to gather up the patterns. This wasn’t what they’d been talking about when all the screaming between Gilles and Princess Jacqueline began; they’d been skirting the difficult subject of Nicholas Palliades. “I think he went home. Besides,” she added softly, “Gilles isn’t going to leave. He has a contract with Jackson Storm.”
“It’s none of my business, but from what I’ve seen around here I’d say it doesn’t pay to give your star designer a hard time.”
Alix looked thoughtful. Chris Forbes was doing a story on Jackson Storm’s empire. She wondered if he’d heard something. “You don’t actually know Gilles is thinking of leaving, do you?”
He shrugged again. “There’s been talk, but Paris is full of talk. In fashion, gossip’s a cottage industry.” He studied her as she turned away with the boxes. “Smart money is on Palliades-Poseidon to step in here and do what a hard-nosed crowd usually does—take over. Socrates Palliades doesn’t put his money into anything he can’t control.”
Alix wasn’t sure what the writer meant. “Jackson Storm is very big and powerful. Storm King fashions are all over the world.”
“Palliades is bigger.”
Alix avoided his eyes. Forbes had frightened her terribly a few days ago when he had told her that he knew who she was. But the rest of his sentence had been, “You’re a person who doesn’t let someone like Nicholas Palliades push you around.”
She should have been satisfied with that, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that something still remained unspoken. Had the ambiguous remark been a test? Had he just wanted to see her reaction?
From the very beginning, that night in the snow on the avenue Foch when he’d given her a lift, she’d responded to Christopher as someone already familiar, someone her instincts told her was totally reliable. They both came from the same sort of people, Alix was sure of it. What would it be like to have Christopher Forbes as a lover? she wondered. Would they make love the way she had with Nicholas Palliades?
Alix averted her face, knowing she was suddenly blushing.
He seemed not to notice. He held the bag for her to fill with the toiles. “I feel like a fool asking you this again. Considering what happened to my lunch invitation.”
Alix knew what he was going to say. She also knew it might cause trouble. But she said impulsively, “All right.”
He looked astonished. “All right? Just like that? Before I even ask?”
“Well,” she said in an awkward rush, “I’d like to go to dinner in the Latin Quarter near the university. You are inviting me out, aren’t you?”
“You just took all the fun out of it. And I am dedicated,” he said slowly, “to giving you fun. You look like you need it.”
“Oh, yes!” Alix’s eyes were glowing. She was on safe, familiar ground with Christopher Forbes as she never was with Nicholas Palliades.
But she stopped short on her way to the trash with the bag of toiles. She realized she couldn’t go out the main entrance on the rue des Benedictines. The last two evenings Nicholas Palliades’s limousine had been there, waiting.
He’d seen her change of expression. “Hey, no problem.” He pushed away from the wall, picking up his coat. “We’ll go through the courtyard and into the next building. Then out into the rue Cambon.”
Alix flashed him a grateful look and turned to the wall switch to put out the lights. Just as she did so, the telephone mounted next to it rang. Alix jumped. The extensions had just been put in. She didn’t think anyone knew the new numbers yet.
She smiled, reassuringly, at Christopher Forbes as she lifted the receiver. It really was a simple thing, to have dinner at some student hangout near the university again, but it made her inexplicably happy. She liked the Fortune writer, she enjoyed being with him. So for dinner, and a little while after, there was nothing in the world—for a change—to worry about. Just to have fun. Just as he’d said.
“Catherine,” the familiar voice said into her ear. It was not threatening, not bullying now; it was sober, very concerned. “You have to come back. We know about Nicholas Palliades. And what you’re doing is very dangerous.”
Eleven
At midnight a gale from the North Sea came across the dry, wintry fields of northern France. It descended on th
e city of Paris, rattling the shutters in Montmartre, barreling like a night demon down the hill toward the avenue Haussman and the place d’Opera. In his flat in the rue de Provence, Gilles heard the wind’s raw keening and turned in his sleep seeking warmth and comfort and the gently rounded mound that was his pregnant wife.
But in an instant Gilles came awake, knowing something was wrong.
Lisianne was not asleep. She lay staring into the darkness, the pale oval of her face framed by the spreading shadows of her silky dark hair.
Oh, God, Gilles thought as he raised himself on one elbow to look down at her, please don’t let it be this again. For the past two weeks his beautiful wife had been secretly terrified that the child she carried had Down’s syndrome. A curious notion, because at only thirty-two, Lisianne was hardly a prime risk. But no amount of medical examination had reassured her. Lisianne had wanted an amniocentesis test, and when her doctor had refused to perform it, she had taken it as a sign that something was wrong.
“My darling?” Gilles whispered. Gently he gathered her into his arms, and saw those great dark, wounded eyes turn to him. “Nothing is wrong. I am here.”
“Gilles.” His name was the barest whisper. “I am going to fail you. I am going to have a girl.”
In spite of tiredness, Gilles had to choke back his laughter. Tiens, another crazy idea! He smoothed his wife’s slightly sweaty hair back from her forehead tenderly. She was so sure she was going to “fail” him; that was the problem.
When she had worked for Ungaro, Lisianne had been Paris’s most beautiful model, far surpassing, in Gilles’s opinion, the American model Alix. But like most models, Lisianne was convinced she was not really beautiful.
It was a strange, if universal malady. In the dressing rooms before a showing, the most gorgeous mannequins would cry despairingly, “Oh, but you don’t see? I have this terrible nose!” Or, equally distraught, “My God, it will never do—my eyes are too close together!” It never ceased to amaze him. These beautiful women were mesmerizingly lovely to everyone but themselves.
Now with his angel wife in his arms, Gilles was baffled and more than a little helpless. Lisianne had never had much love: a brutal father in a small Breton town, a truck driver who had carried her off to Paris when she was fifteen and abandoned her, then a photographer who had picked her up in an all-night roadside cafe and had taken her home with him. He had created her, had taught her how to make the most of her fragile beauty, then left her to fend for herself when he became bored.
Gilles kissed his wife on the forehead. Too late, she had found true love. That’s what his beautiful wife actually believed. She was ten years older; she adored him. But she was sure in a few years that Gilles, too, would abandon her.
On the contrary, at that moment Gilles needed his wife badly. He longed to talk to her the way they had before this business of the pregnancy. He was desperate to tell Lisianne, because only she would understand, about his situation with Jackson Storm and the Maison Louvel. Gilles felt he was being destroyed. His talent was being wasted; the Americans had no interest in art, only what would make money. No one consulted him. He was treated worse than the seamstresses in the atelier. The final indignity was this terrible publicity stunt—hiring the teenage Medivani girl with her drug problems and barely hidden promiscuity. Just like her notorious older sister.
“I adore little girls,” Gilles made himself say, shoving the mental picture of Princess Jackie to the back of his mind. He worshiped Lisianne; he knew he would have the same tender emotion for their daughter. He merely hoped she would never grow up to be an uncontrollable, sullen-faced teenager. “I would love to have a sweet little girl,” he murmured, nuzzling his wife’s smooth cheek tenderly, “just like her beautiful mother.”
Lisianne lifted his hand and put it against the great curve of her stomach. “It is sinful,” she said with entrancing huskiness, “to want to make love to you now. No, it is worse than sinful—it is ludicrous.”
“My darling, don’t feel that way,” Gilles said. “To want to make love is not ludicrous.”
“Not that.” She assumed that expression of melancholy sensuousness that so enchanted him. “But wanting to make love to you—when I look like this!”
Gilles was cautiously elated. “My sweetheart,” he murmured, moving her toward him carefully. “I think if we—”
“No, no!” Now it was she who leaned over him suddenly, her other hand pressing him back into the bed. “I can’t, not like this, I am horribly inhibited. But oh, Gilles—” Her great dark eyes were filled with emotion. “You never let me show you how much I love you. It is always you who love me so much.”
“But of course I let you love me.” Gilles’s bony young face had gone taut with surprise. “That is—” He tried to find the words. “My love, I want to look after you, to protect you, because you are the most beautiful, precious thing in my—”
She put her elegant long fingertips to his lips. “I don’t wish to seem aggressive, but I am feeling so—I don’t know how I feel,” she whispered. “It is very frustrating.”
“Whatever pleases you, my darling.” Anything, Gilles was thinking, other than these brooding depressions. When she had hardly been able to look at herself, there had been no sex at all. “I want you,” he struggled to say, “to be happy.”
She sighed. “Why is this so strange, Gilles, that I feel I don’t want lovemaking for myself? But oh, darling, how I do want to love you! Have you missed me, my love?”
“Every day,” Gilles said truthfully. “But you were so unhappy I couldn’t ask—”
“Shhh.” Under the covers her fingers passed with the lightest of touches along his legs, stroking his thighs, drawing the bedcovers slowly back. Gilles’s youthful body suddenly lay uncovered, dark and potent against white sheets. Somewhat hesitantly, Lisianne touched him, wrapping her warm fingers around the already stiffening stalk of his flesh.
Gilles made a little strangled sound. “My darling,” he said hoarsely, “there are things I can do for you. Let me also—”
“No, no!” Her fingers stroked him delicately, skillfully. At the same time, she leaned over him, her warm mouth trailing kisses across the ecstatically flinching muscles of his belly. “I want to ravish you with pleasure.” She lifted her head and gazed into her husband’s dark eyes, “Gilles, do you like me to love you?”
“I don’t mind, dearest.” He cleared his throat. “And yes, I like that,” he said to encourage her. His wife had forgotten her ungainly body, so absorbed in expressing her love that she was on all fours, her long hair trailing across his legs. Gilles was transported, terrified to give himself over to the passion he could feel coming. His wife was bathing him in exquisite fire.
“Ah, dearest, this is so unfair,” he gasped. “I must do something for you, also.”
Even as he said it, he knew that it was better to leave things as they were. Lisianne was happy for the first time in months. Somehow, he realized as he writhed with unbearable pleasure, it made her feel better to love him like this. For some mad reason she was less conscious of her worries, her inadequacies, even the coming birth of their baby.
It was a miracle, Gilles thought, groaning aloud. He promised himself he would make it up to his adored wife with the most exquisite demonstration of his love in—what? Six weeks—was it six weeks?With what she was doing to him, he couldn’t think.
Anyway, he told himself hurriedly, after the baby was born.
The winter wind roared down the rue Lafayette, following the slope of the hill, around the sumptuous edifice of the Hotel Plaza Athenee. The storm’s low moan shook the windows of Jackson Storm’s tower suite, but the king of mass-market fashion didn’t stir. He had fallen asleep watching television, his handsome silver head thrown back against a brocade bergere in the suite’s drawing room, his mouth slightly ajar, his empty highball glass still in his hand.
Jackson Storm was dreaming of beautiful, elusive women.
The forgotten program
flickering on the television screen was a French variety show featuring the music of Charles Aznavour and the smoky voice of a sixties ballad singer. Some of the sensuous, evocative music had penetrated Jackson Storm’s dormant consciousness. His dream was perfectly lovely, if a little mysterious.
In it Countess Elsa von Trautenberg had appeared, one of the first great Jackson Storm “discoveries.” A sleek, darkly lovely Jewish girl from Prague, she had married Middle-European aristocracy, divorced, come to New York, and started peddling her dress designs.
But a tough nut, Jack remembered. Demanding, aggressive, even in bed. Fortunately, she’d had enormous success with a simple wraparound number, had gotten very rich, and moved on to Beverly Hills. And out of his hair.
Other women glided through his dream with bittersweet vagueness. Even the famous Jackson Storm jeans girl, Sam Laredo, whose All-American beauty had somehow failed, disastrously, to sell western wear.
The parade of lovely women faded into the shadows, and Jack Storm’s dreaming lips quivered. He felt a keen sense of apprehension. Then, almost as if he knew she would, the beautiful woman appeared.
He had dreamed of her several times lately, which was troubling. There she was, inexpressibly exciting, wearing a white headdress of feathers that covered the upper half of her face. She was an eagle. A heron. Some exotically hypnotic bird that drew him with an almost helpless sense of anticipation.
In his chair, Jack squirmed.
It was madness. She would erotically devour him, this inescapable bird-woman.
He felt as though he would die.
My God, he was thinking frantically as the glittering figure in the mask came closer, she is my destiny!
Abruptly, Jack woke up.
He’d gone to sleep in the chair watching television again, he found. He had a crick in his neck from the bergere and could hardly move his head. His mouth was dry from sleeping with it open, and his drink had given him a slight headache. He couldn’t have felt more foul.
Satin Dreams Page 14
