Caught in His Gilded World

by Lucy Ellis

Struggling out of the grip of her depression, Gigi turned to her friend. ‘What didn’t you realise?’

  ‘That you love him.’

  It moved through her like sunlight.

  ‘Well, of course I love him, you eejit—I loved him from the moment he washed my feet!’

  Lulu was still crying in earnest, and Gigi wrapped her arms around her best friend’s shoulders.

  ‘I didn’t come home because he shut the Bluebird down, Lu. I came home because he’s given me a job.’

  Lulu gave a sniff. ‘What sort of job?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘You’re talking to the new manager of L’Oiseau Bleu.’

  Lulu dropped her handbag. ‘You’re the what?’

  Despite everything. Gigi found it in herself to laugh—even if it was a watery one. She bent down and handed Lulu’s bag to her.

  ‘Oh, Lord, if even you don’t believe it I haven’t got a chance with anyone else.’

  Lulu dabbed at her nose with her wrist. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you, but of all things... You must be so happy, Gigi!’

  ‘I—I am.’

  Only she wasn’t happy, and from the way Lulu was looking at her—had been looking at her since her arrival—her misery was plain to see.

  She hadn’t known how miserable she was until this moment. It was like being drenched with a bucket of cold water.

  She wasn’t happy, and no amount of telling herself that this was her dream come true was going to change the fact that what mattered more to her than the realisation of her dreams for the theatre, more than the knowledge that the jobs of her friends were safe—more even than doing something to preserve the memory of her mother—was telling Khaled that she loved him. She loved him in all the ways a woman could love a man.

  Only all that mattered to him in the end was himself. His comfort, his financial success, having all of it his way.

  That night as she lay alone in her bed, rendered cold and narrow and not like hers at all, she couldn’t sleep. She climbed out of bed and went to her window. She could see the corner of the theatre’s peaked roof further down the hill. That old theatre held so many of her childhood dreams, but it didn’t hold her attention as it once had.

  She looked up into the sky, unmarked by pollution on this cold winter’s night, and wondered if Khaled was looking up at the same wedge of moon and sprinkling of stars in that fearsomely clean sky over the gorge. Was he thinking of her? Was he remembering how it had felt to lie in that cot of marmot furs, sharing body heat and stories? Was he thinking about how good it had felt to fall asleep like that? Was he thinking about her at all?

  * * *

  ‘He thought you were Rita when we all know you’re Katharine Hepburn. So you got burned.’

  Susie said this so pragmatically Gigi couldn’t be offended. But then, she’d made an art form of not being offended. Until Khaled had torn the blinders off her eyes.

  ‘Rita?’ Adele frowned.

  ‘Hayworth. Married all those larger-than-life men who disappointed her one way or the other.’

  ‘Khaled virtually gave her the cabaret to manage—that’s not a disappointment,’ said Leah, but everyone stared at her until she hung her head.

  The girls had turned up at the theatre this afternoon to stick their noses in. As long as they wore hard hats that wasn’t a problem on-site.

  But as Gigi walked away with Lulu she said, ‘He did give this cabaret to me, and that makes me the lowest common denominator.’

  Lulu screwed up her nose. ‘The what?’

  ‘I’m the lowest common denominator,’ Gigi said desultorily. ‘He gave it to me because I slept with him.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone makes a fortune with bad business decisions, Gigi. He clearly thinks you’re capable.’

  That was the nicest thing Lulu had ever said about Khaled, and it had a ring of truth.

  * * *

  Gigi stood in her hard hat as the carpenters swung hammers overhead and dust rose from the curtains every time something got shifted on the stage.

  This wasn’t her usual environment, although in the past four weeks she had learned to read the builder’s plans—well, she could make sense of where they were putting the toilets. Her real role was organising the talent. She’d already lined up a choreographer and costumier for the new show, which was far more up her alley than chip dust and power saws.

  Only today she’d got a message to say they were bringing in the flooring and wanted her to approve the colour.

  ‘He’s doing this for you,’ Lulu insisted, looking around.

  Gigi flinched. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about him any more?’

  Lulu eyed her nervously. ‘Sure. Only he’s standing over there.’

  For a few beats it had sounded as if Lulu had said, He’s standing over there... Which was when she turned around and...

  Gigi almost dropped her clipboard.

  Lulu evaporated like smoke—along with the workmen, the noise, the past few weeks.

  He filled all her available vision and everything else was reduced to the horizon.

  She took a step towards him. Stopped. He looked different. He’d cut his hair, and although he remained clean shaven there was stubble. He wore a suit.

  She hated suits. But maybe it was better to see him like this. As he was. A ruthless businessman with his own agenda.

  Only the eyes that met hers were not those of a businessman.

  They were hot—and starved.

  He stepped out of the gloom and into the light and the dust motes.

  She wouldn’t be surprised if he was just a figment of her imagination.

  Then, ‘Gigi...’ he said. His voice was low and rough...and so familiar.

  She pulled herself together. There would be no fainting at his feet on her watch.

  Gigi was highly aware that this was approximately the spot where she’d landed at his feet just a few weeks ago.

  Given the cabaret was now a shell around them, and the place looked as if a bomb had gone off, it was somehow appropriate.

  He’d hit her life like a meteor, and if L’Oiseau Bleu was in the process of transformation she could be said to be too.

  Only Gigi didn’t hold by all that hokum. She had always been capable—she just hadn’t been given the means by which to bring things off.

  ‘You’re cutting it fine,’ he said, in that dark, roughened voice, stepping towards her.

  Six weeks and that was what he said to her?

  ‘On the contrary,’ she said, and her voice only shook a little bit, ‘we’re ahead of schedule.’

  ‘The press conference, Gigi. It’s in an hour.’

  ‘I’m not going to that.’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s in your contract. You did read your contract, didn’t you?’

  ‘I read enough.’ He was so close now she had to tilt back her head.

  Actually, she hadn’t read anything—but she had used a lawyer, and she knew there was something about media appearances in it, but until now hadn’t made that link.

  Why on earth would anyone want to hear from her?

  ‘You should have had a closer look at what you signed on for.’

  She didn’t respond.

  He was looking at her with the strangest look in his eyes and giving her all the wrong messages again.

  ‘I’ll drive you over.’

  Every kind of refusal was on her lips, but what came out was an exasperated, ‘All right.’

  He didn’t touch her as he walked her out into the street but she could feel him—and it was a special kind of wonderful torture.

  In the bright daylight she could see there was a grey tinge to his skin. He didn’t look well.

  ‘Have you been ill?’ She had to
ask.

  ‘Flu,’ he said, and shrugged, all the while holding her with his eyes.

  ‘Me too,’ she mumbled, and then noticed the limo hovering.

  ‘Not the Spyder today,’ he said, as if reading her mind. ‘I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About my job?’

  ‘No, Gigi, about us.’

  She began to shake. She couldn’t look at him.

  She shook her head. ‘No, no, no...’ And kept walking.

  ‘Gigi! Be fair!’

  Somewhere she found it in herself to shout, ‘Life’s not fair, Khaled! I’m going home to change. I guess I’ll see you at the press conference.’

  * * *

  There was no way she was climbing into the back of that car with him.

  Everyone would talk.

  She couldn’t bear it—not when she’d made a little progress over the last month or so. She might not have everyone’s respect, but she had their co-operation and that was a start. She told herself she wasn’t risking that by hopping in and out of limos with their billionaire boss.

  Gigi went home and took a quick shower, and she almost put on her version of a suit she wore to most meetings when her eye was caught by the white and scarlet frock she’d picked up on a whim under Lulu’s influence in a vintage clothing sale.

  She had it on and her hair swept up when Lulu walked in.

  ‘You are so not wearing that to the press conference?’

  But Lulu sounded thrilled.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Gigi, knowing now what Lulu meant when she said that some days the right frock was the only thing that stood between you and despair.

  Well, only vintage Givenchy was going to hold her together this afternoon.

  ‘In that case,’ said Lulu resolutely, ‘we all will.’

  * * *

  The press conference was being held in a reception room on the ground floor of a luxury hotel.

  Half of Paris seemed to have turned up, and the audience had spilled over into the lobby. The hum of preparation and the sound of chairs being shifted ceased as the doors swept open and the Bluebirds arrived en masse.

  Gigi led them, in their showy old-time frocks: twenty-four glamour girls lined up in a row.

  Clicking cameras responded.

  ‘It’s like something straight out of Fashion Week,’ said one journalist.

  ‘No, it’s called making an old-time entrance,’ said another.

  Gigi indicated the need for chairs for the other twenty-three dancers and as she took her own identified where Khaled was in the room.

  She sat with her girls and glared at him.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen...’

  One of the suits launched into the press release.

  Questions erupted.

  Gigi listened to Khaled answer all the questions in that same deep voice that had haunted her dreams for six awful weeks.

  She tried not to stare too long at him, but he was magnetic, charming the pants off all the females in the room with that quiet Russian drawl.

  Although she knew now he wouldn’t be taking advantage of that particular skill. He wasn’t that man at all.

  He was her man.

  Only he didn’t want to be.

  ‘Why have you chosen to do this, Mr Kitaev?’

  ‘Some people have called this your love letter to Paris. Is there any truth in that?’

  Khaled leaned forward, his eyes focussed on her, and said in that low, deeply accented voice, ‘It’s my love letter to a particular woman.’

  He had clearly gone off-script, because the suits looked alarmed and there was a flurry of hands raised as everyone vied to ask the next question, given the answer to that one wasn’t in the information sheet.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Is she French?’

  ‘Is she a Bluebird?’

  Gigi struggled to understand his meaning. She wanted to leap to her feet and demand to know exactly who he was sending love letters to when he’d told her love didn’t even exist!

  There was a low murmur among the girls, and a rustle of skirts, and Gigi suddenly became aware that twenty-three mascara-laden pairs of eyes were glued to her.

  Khaled gave the cameras the half-smile that had caused all this trouble to begin with and said directly, ‘She’s Irish. She is a Bluebird. She’s the reason I’ve moved heaven and earth to have you all here today. Exactly six weeks from the day she first dropped so fatefully into my life. She’s the person two million Parisians have to thank for saving their cabaret.’

  Adele drummed her feet enthusiastically. Susie gave a thumbs-up, and Leah looked so sour her drooping mouth might drop off.

  Gigi only knew this afterwards—when Lulu filled her in—because at that very moment she couldn’t take her eyes off the man telling the world—well, what was he telling the world?

  ‘My last visit to Paris was the most memorable of my life, because I met the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.’

  The cameras exploded in a flurry that sounded like applause.

  Gigi didn’t know she was on her feet until she was halfway out through the side door.

  ‘Gigi!’

  She heard him call her name, but didn’t wait to find out why.

  Khaled scraped back his chair.

  There was another flurry of questions, but he didn’t hear a word as he shouldered his way out of the reception room.

  Gigi was exiting through the entrance doors when he exploded out into the lobby.

  She was on the avenue outside, getting into a taxi, when he hit the pavement. He saw the flash of her skirts and began to run.

  He grabbed the door as she went to shut it and jumped in alongside her.

  ‘Get out of my taxi!’

  He gave the driver an address in Montmartre.

  Gigi folded her arms. ‘I’m not sharing this taxi with you.’

  She was, he thought, the most amazing girl, with her hands balled into fists, looking ready to belt him one. But her eyes gave her away, and they made him feel...made him feel...

  Khaled gave a groan of sheer frustrated happiness and pulled her forward into his arms.

  She went. But she was rigid, and she fought against him a little, and dipped her head so he couldn’t kiss her. He understood, because she needed words, and he was struggling to find the ones that would make sense of the enormous reservoir of feeling he had stored up these last weeks without her.

  Because there had never been any doubt for him: from first sight she had been the one.

  After all, she’d thrown herself off a tank, turned up at his hotel, had herself papped as if they were Jagger and Faithfull back in the day and let him lock her up in a tower.

  They were stories to tell their grandchildren. Because there would be grandchildren, after a tribe of children—a family he would build with her. A home...

  But all he wanted right now was to be where he was: in the back of this taxi, holding her in his arms and knowing she was safe and sound and would be his, as he was hers. If he could find those damn words.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said.

  That wasn’t the right word, but from Gigi’s soft lips it was a kiss.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, holding her strong yet fragile body against him. ‘I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you on that stage floor. I’ve missed you every moment of every day. I should never have let you go. And if I want to give you a cabaret as a gift I damn well will and Paris can go hang.’

  They might have been the words she wanted, but she gave him a hard shove in the chest all the same. ‘You made me choose between you and the theatre.’

  ‘Have them both—have it all.’ He kissed her in between promises. Her temples, her eyelids, her nose, her mou
th. ‘Never again, malenki. You do not leave me ever again.’

  Given she was kissing him back, with damp, tear-salty lips, the ground beneath his feet began to feel more solid.

  They sailed up the hill without either of them really noticing, until the driver was tapping on the window. Khaled got out and gave her his hand.

  ‘Where are we?’

  It was a pretty narrow street at the top of the hill. There was a house with cream walls and square windows behind a high stone wall.

  He drew her by the hand into the rambling garden behind the wall.

  ‘The ten-kilometre rule,’ he said, locking the gate behind them.

  ‘What...?’ she choked.

  ‘You once told me you had a rule about the men you dated—they couldn’t live outside a ten-kilometre radius of Montmartre. So I bought a house within your exclusion zone.’

  ‘A house? But you live in Moscow.’

  ‘Here...there. I can run everything from my phone—or so you tell me. It’s a little smaller than the cabaret, but it’s big enough. For us. For any children we have.’

  A slow smile began to blossom on her lips.

  Which was when he knew those were the words they both wanted.

  Gigi looked up at him. Something wonderful was happening inside her. Everything was opening up and she felt love pouring through her like an elixir.

  Khaled stood four-square in front of her, a wall that nothing was getting over, through or around. Her wall.

  He framed her face.

  ‘Marry me, Gigi. Have children with me. Grow old with me.’

  In response Gigi wrapped her arms around his neck, and he pulled her against him and proceeded to kiss her passionately, thoroughly, and without much respect for the garden and its bed of long, soft grasses.

  Several of which Gigi was plucking out of her hair as they ambled, arms entwined, down the road at twilight back to her flat. Below the rooftops of Montmartre glittered and deep shadows sprang up to cast everything in a mysterious heady glow.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE PRICE OF HIS REDEMPTION by Carol Marinelli.

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