“For Gilles,” Rudi said, his voice trembling, “so that he may have his hour of glory, undisturbed.”
Nicholas Palliades stood out, handsome and darkly aloof in his white tie and tails, in the midst of the turmoil of the models’ makeshift changing area. Alix, though, felt like a Moulin Rouge showgirl in Princess Jackie’s version of a fantaisie flamingo. She was already perspiring under the indecently skimpy maillot and the towering peach-pink feather headdress.
For once, Nicholas Palliades’s eyes did not skim over her appreciatively. His chiseled features were perfectly impassive. Still, Alix felt a warm, fluttering rush of feeling in the center of her body. She could never look at him now without thinking of the perfect, absolutely wonderful way they made love.
“What are you doing here?” she asked tremulously.
He gave her a long, assessing look that surprised her. “Take them,” he said, holding out his hand, palm up. The diamond and emerald earrings lay sparkling against his flesh.
Alix stared at the jewels as though they weren’t real. Her earrings?
“Where did you get those?” She was already beginning to quake. It hadn’t taken him long to find out where they were and get them back from the plant manager at Richard et Cie! Several desperate lies occurred to her, but she knew none would work.
It was better to tell the truth, anyway. He still held out his hand. “You promised me you wouldn’t sell the jewelry I gave you,” he said flatly.
Why did he find it so easy to hate her? Alix wondered. He was always so ready to believe the worst of her. Was it because he hated himself for wanting her? He certainly wanted her—she had no doubt of that!
“I told you I would buy them back from you,” he reminded her bleakly. “You lied to me. You are always lying to me.”
“I didn’t sell them!” Heads turned toward them, and Alix lowered her voice. “If you sent your detectives out to Pantin to get my earrings back from our dry cleaner,” she hissed, “I hope they paid him the deposit!”
A nervous Nannette had come to stand at Alix’s shoulder.
“They didn’t pay him a damned thing. The cleaner handed them over when they told him to.” His black eyes glinted at her. “I can’t trust you in anything. Why the hell don’t you tell me what else you have done?”
Nannette made a little apprehensive sound, and Alix turned to glare at her. Was everyone afraid she was going to annoy their millionaire backer? Well, at the moment he was annoying her! What was so important, she fumed, that he had to come here, at this moment, in the middle of all the pre-show confusion, to argue with her about a pair of earrings?
“What did you do,” Alix said witheringly, “to get the earrings back?” She jabbed several bobby pins into the feather headdress to hold it in place. “Beat up the dry cleaners, set fire to their plant? Or did you run Richard et Cie out of business? Like Jackson Storm?”
She saw him scowl. “I did not run Jackson Storm out of business.” He stepped aside grimly to let one of the owls pass. “I don’t know who the hell told you that. It is not even a buy out. We merely took control of his European company.”
So it was true. Alix stopped what she was doing for a moment to stare at him. The lights in the foyer were dimming. Sylvie came rushing up. “Nannette, move her! Alix, for the love of God, you are first!”
Nicholas brushed Sylvie out of the way impatiently. “Can’t you tell me the truth for once?” he growled. “What do you need money for?”
Alix hurriedly patted the pink-feathered headdress, making it sway and sparkle. It was useless to even begin to explain. Too many people were listening. Then she saw a black-clad figure coming through the press. Oh God, especially not in front of Gilles!
Gilles came to her elbow, shushing the excited models around them. “Alix, do you understand where you are supposed to be when the music begins?” He looked at Nicholas Palliades vaguely, as though he had never seen him before.
The other man ignored him. “The money,” Nicholas ground out. “I will give you the earrings now, and I will return them each time you sell them. But I want to know—why in God’s name did you sell them to that fool in Pantin!”
“I didn’t!” Alix shot a panicked look at Gilles. If she didn’t stop him, Nicholas was going to spoil everything. And Gilles was almost catatonic with stress as it was.
“I lied to you,” Alix said desperately over her shoulder as Nannette and Sylvie steered her to the head of the models’ line. “Just as I always do.” She shuddered when she saw the startled look in Nicholas’s eyes. For the moment, he was too stunned to speak.
She had to think of something else to keep him speechless. Alix thought of the big, burly blond Alsatians. “I gave them to the plant manager,” she cried, doing the second most impetuous thing in Paris she was sure to regret, “—because he’s uh—my lover!”
The house lights were out, and Alix was pushed out into the gallery above the main foyer before she had a chance to see the reaction on Nicholas Palliades’s face.
Gilles watched the glittering line of exotic birds led by a magnificent pink flamingo grope their way in the sudden darkness to the apex of the grand staircases.
His costumes, Gilles was thinking rather dazedly, were surprisingly good. For show costumes. He was not sure how he felt about finding himself in a part of the fashion business he’d never dreamed of. But then nothing at the Maison Louvel with the Americans had turned out as he’d expected.
Something nagged at Gilles as he watched the girls take their places on the darkened steps. It had been hanging in the back of his mind all evening. Something about the visit of that pompous ass, the silk mill owner, at Christmas. That had been a bad moment; Gilles hadn’t liked being patronized, and he had thrown out the bourgeois fart when de Brissac wanted to see his costume sketches. But at one point the man had been trying to tell him something.
Gilles hadn’t been listening. If he had been, he would have remembered what Louis de Brissac had said to him those weeks ago about the experimental lace laminate.
And—what the devil was it? Dry cleaning fluid?
Twenty-Two
Jackson Storm had mixed feelings as he took the last telephone call from New York, the one that revealed the name of the invidious party brokering Jackson Storm Enterprises corporate paper. It was almost like the old days when Jake Sturm of Seventh Avenue could make a fortune—or go bust in a minute.
This time, of course, it hadn’t been the crude cheating and backstabbing of the long-ago garment district, but a smooth, skillful international job, as silent and clean as the fall of the steel blade of the guillotine.
Jack leaned back in his chair at his table of socialites and international celebrities, and smiled deliberately, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. Yeah, you’ve been guillotined, Jake, he thought. The image appealed to him. He was going to file it away for the time when, God forbid, he should write his memoirs about opening a couture house in Paris.
That goddamned world-class Greek bastard, he told himself as be bent an attentive ear to something Meta Ertegun was saying. Niko Palliades had yanked his whole Jackson Storm European operation out from under him while he wasn’t looking.
The effect was so much like the old days that Jack had reacted in much the same way. He’d turned his face to a hostile world and maintained his famous urbane cool. More than that. His New York guests, when he picked them up from their suites at the Crillon in several thousand dollars worth of rented limousines, had seen Jackson Storm looking as charming, handsome, and masterfully confident as he’d always been. If his cool facade had slipped at all, it was during the moment when he’d entered the grand foyer of the Paris Opera and had to pass the table where his former Greek backers, the Palliades family, now the controllers of Jackson Storm International, were seated.
Screw them, too, Jack Storm told himself, giving the cameramen his genial, unfocused smile. The only thing he regretted was that he’d given Nicholas Palliades a hit on the beautiful dolly
, Alix.
Well, Jake, enjoy, he told himself as he looked around the Bal des Oiseaux Blancs and Paris’s social elite dancing clothed as mythical masked white birds. Because this is the experience of a lifetime. Worry about the rest of it tomorrow.
Just as he was thinking of excusing himself to go to the adjoining table to ask Prince Medivani’s oldest daughter, Catherine, to dance, he spotted her. A tall woman, slender as a reed, in an enchanting white gown with the floating, gauzy empire lines Jack liked, standing in the crowd across the dance floor, lifting a glass of champagne to her lips.
Her eyes met his.
She wore a simple white mask that flared on either side of her eyes in hawklike, feathery wings. She glittered from the top of her long waving black hair that fell over her bare shoulders, to the tips of her glittering, beaded white shoes. She was, Jackson Storm realized with some shock, the woman in his dreams. It was impossible. He didn’t really believe in such things. But it was true.
And she was smiling at him.
For the first time in many years, probably since his awkward adolescence, Jackson Storm was not at all sure of himself. His suave persona faltered. Before he could stop, he had grinned and pointed to himself, deprecatingly. Who, me? You mean me?
Christ—she nodded yes!
He felt like a total ass. A schoolboy. But he knew what he wanted. This was a woman at a ball in Paris, but it was also the woman of his dreams. It took him only seconds to scramble out of the close-packed tables in the VIP section and start after her. His heart was beating like a trip-hammer. He hadn’t done anything so romantically nuts in years. Chasing a woman across a dance floor like a twenty-year-old stud with the hots! He was amazed at himself—and wildly euphoric.
His progress was impeded by the sudden lowering of lights that was the cue for the fantaisie show to begin. A few yards ahead, that wonderful glittering figure swept past the security guards and headed for the opera’s main doors and the street.
She was going outside.
Peter Frank loomed up in the dimness to grab at him. “Jack, where are you going?” the vice president whispered. “Hey, the big show’s just beginning!”
Jack shook him off, leaving Peter staring after him.
Someone else stepped toward him, the opera’s hard-working assistant manager. “Monsieur Storm,” the shadowy figure said politely in English, “congratulations, it is a marv—”
Jack shook him off, too. Through the opera’s glass doors he could see that the shimmering, mythical beauty with her dark hair and provocative hawk mask had paused on the steps, waiting for him.
It had been a disastrous day. Palliades’s lightninglike take-over of the European division. The lunch with the Italian boutique promoter who’d copped out. This goddamned fantaisie show. Jack hadn’t known how much, until that moment, he’d wanted to run away from it all. Toward his destiny, if that was what it was.
He didn’t even pause for his coat.
At the top of the opera’s grand staircase, Alix stood poised in the rustling dark.
A moment before the lights had gone down, she’d caught a glimpse of the great foyer below with its costumed crowds. Nicholas Palliades was seated at Prince Alessio Medivani’s table, talking animatedly to a regal-looking blond woman she guessed was the prince’s oldest daughter, Princess Catherine.
The sight had wrenched her with an unexpected, violent feeling. Alix tried to put everything in perspective. Nicholas Palliades was an arrogant, utterly ruthless man, involved in obsessive power games, such as taking over Jackson Storm’s corporation, without regard to the suffering it caused. Alix, Nannette, Sylvie—even Gilles—had no idea who they were working for now, or even if they would have jobs after tonight. But this wasn’t important to Nicholas Palliades.
Still, Alix couldn’t bear to watch the blond whispering and smiling at the dark, impassive face of the man who, like it or not, was her lover. Had been her lover, she corrected herself angrily. She was sure he wasn’t any longer, not after the terrible thing she’d said to him a few minutes ago.
“Alix—stand still,” Nannette whispered to her as the stairs went dark. “Or you will fall.”
Their cue was spears of laser lights that imitated lightning, rushing across the opera’s vaulted mural ceiling three stories above. Then the spotlights would focus on Alix in Princess Jackie’s flamingo costume. With Stravinsky’s Firebird music in the background, she would slowly descend the marble expanse of the grand stairs, turning at the dance floor to start back up again.
Then, with bursts of light and synchronized electronic noises enhancing Stravinsky’s score, Gilles Vasse’s owls, egrets and cranes would begin their dancelike movements, until they filled up the giant staircase in a silent tableau. Alix would appear again at the finale, having changed to Gilles’s magnificent pièce de résistance: a strange, alien bird creature from a distant star who had come to reign supreme over all other birds. Or so the program explained.
Alix found Princess Jackie’s flamingo costume difficult to manage. She’d tried it out on the stairs at the Maison Louvel and could hardly walk in the abbreviated skirt. Some last-minute help from Gilles, without the princess’s knowledge, had straightened out the major glitches.
Laser lightning roared across the mural on the dome of the opera, and then the first light cue came up. A spreading glow picked out Alix at the top of the stairs. She started slowly down.
Stravinsky’s Firebird music jumped and dazzled. Alix lifted her shell-pink flamingo wings.
From the beginning, the problem with the costumes was that they all had to utilize a certain amount of Heavenly Lace. Princess Jackie had designed a long train that spread in back from Alix’s tight, hip-length skirt and, in front, left her long legs bare. Unfortunately, the lacy train had a tendency to slither ahead of her on the stairs. Alix had to hurry to keep ahead of it. She realized she was moving too fast.
There was no way not to try to outrun the train. It was either that or have it overtake her. Almost at a run, Alix reached the bottom of the stairs before the train did, and turned before the dinner tables with weak-kneed relief.
Going back up was not so simple. For some reason, the yards of laminated lace in the dragging train felt unusually heavy. Not for the first time, Alix regretted the secrecy that had prevented them from having a real dress rehearsal.
She lifted her head, pink and white feathers waving solemnly, to see Gilles’s great white fantaisie birds coming slowly into position on the stairs above her. The Firebird suite filled the grand foyer with artful dissonance accompanied by truly impressive lighting effects.
Applause from the distinguished audience built like a storm. Although the reception for Princess Jackie’s flamingo had been lukewarm, Alix had still seen, when she made her turn on the dance floor, Vogue photographers grabbing shots of the grinning, preening princess at her table. However, there was no mistaking the enthusiasm for Gilles’s designs that followed.
A crane turned as Alix passed and said in a mask-muffled voice, “Mademoiselle Alix?” The crane tried to peer at her. “Look,” it said plaintively, “c’est impossible, but I think I’m losing my front!”
Alix pondered the crane’s message as she reached the top of the stairs. Nannette shoved her toward the dressing area while the hairdressers took off her headdress and began fluffing her hair for Gilles’s space bird costume. Gilles himself brought over his fantaisie creation carefully cradled in his arms.
Outside the applause was thunderous and almost non-stop. It nearly drowned out the Firebird music and the electronic sizzles and futuristic zaps of the light show.
Alix gasped as Nannette yanked the zipper of the bodice up, squeezing her rib cage and thrusting her breasts against the lacy fabric.
“Gilles, something is happening out there.” She had to bend forward as Gilles adjusted her lacy wings covered with seed pearls and fiery silver sequins. She looked around as Sylvie knelt to slip on her white satin shoes. “Are you listening?”
Plainly, they weren’t.
“A crane going down,” Alix persisted, “was holding the front of her bodice together. And she still had to turn and come back and stand on the—” She flinched as the hair stylist yanked a handful of her hair and sprayed it to stand out around her face. “—stairs,” she finished hurriedly. “You know, I think there are pieces of that lace all over the landing.”
“Aaaah,” Nannette said appreciatively as the hairdresser finished.
It was the first time that Alix had been fitted in the entire space bird costume. Her body was covered in tight, almost transparent gauzy lace from the tips of her half-naked, out-thrust breasts to her hips. Long slivers of laminated lace wafted around her long legs that were encased in sheer, silver-threaded tights. She wore no mask, only a sprinkling of silver-white sparkle applied with the tip of a paintbrush, covering her cheekbones, enhancing her violet eyes. An almost invisible wire net anchored to her spray-stiffened hair held clear plastic rods from which dangled glittering, shimmering Mylar strands in an unearthly halo. Above it all, attached to Alix’s shoulders and back by a plastic harness, rose gigantic space bird wings of delicate, exquisitely white-on-white patterned Heavenly Lace.
Now that the owls, egrets, and cranes were in place outside on the stairs, Alix would begin the finale by entering, coming down the stairs and, after circling the dance floor once, ascending to take her place as their space-bird queen in the center of the Y-shaped staircase. The space bird was the last, the most dazzling and inspired of Gilles’s costumes.
Gilles and Nannette pushed her gently to the door at the top of the stairs.
“Wait a minute,” Alix said, twisting to see. “You won’t believe this, but I think one of those slivers of my skirt just came off.”
But there was no time to stop.
As Alix appeared at the top of the stairs as the queen of the space birds, the applause became a continuous thunder of approval. Alix could see better now, without the flamingo’s helmetlike mask. She held up her arms to support her wings and looked straight ahead in the classic model’s hauteur that deliberately disdains to watch where the feet are going, even on a staircase. But something told her she was on more than just the smooth surface of marble.
Satin Dreams Page 25
