Nights In Black Lace (21 page)

“You want a spanking, don't you?”

“
Oui, m'sieu.
I need one. I crave your firm hand.”

So he was her m'sieu. A man with no name. And she was anonymous, her face unseen, but the most vulnerable parts of her on full display.

Bryan, forgetting about everything but what she'd just said, gave her a good one. His hand stung when he was done, the palm red as her bottom.

Odette had tried to stay still, but he was into it, and did the honors a little more forcefully. The way she shook all over when his hand came down was something he found incredibly exciting.

Bryan straightened up and walked over her, then turned around for the full picture, sitting down in the armchair she'd sat in only minutes ago, masturbating while he watched.

No matter what position she was in, he loved looking his fill. Right now, her panties unzipped in back, her dirty-girl show of her bare buttocks, the glowing color his hands had left on them, the stockings and high heels she still had on—fuck. Better than beautiful.

W
aking up after a night like that, he was unfuckingbelievably relaxed.

And so was she.

Sound asleep, Odette lay in his arms, her lips just touching his right nipple, her even breathing making his chest feel warm.

He turned his head carefully, keeping his body still so as not to wake her, and looked toward the windows. The shutters were closed, but not all the way. The sky of Paris was a pearl gray.

He guessed it was, oh, a little after six o'clock in the morning. Bryan sighed with contentment. He had done his manly duty by her and gotten maximum pleasure out of it.

What a woman. He was going to dream about her in black lace for the rest of his life.

The thought made his heart beat faster. Hell. He looked down at her wonderful face and felt a flash of sudden sadness.

Deep as their sexual connection had been, he wasn't some kid who was going to mistake the way he'd been all shook up by her for love.

Romantic as the city of lights was, he still wasn't walking around in a movie and Paris wasn't a backdrop.

It was her home town. Not his, though. Bryan sighed and Odette stirred in her sleep.

“Sorry, angel,” he murmured.

She moved off him and lay on her side, lost in a dream.

Of him?

He was vain enough to hope so. He even hoped that she wouldn't miss him when the day came—hell. He'd seen her use the little laptop in the kitchen that she kept plugged in to check e-mail and the weather widget. He had to check on the status of the plane ticket he'd put on hold.

And make coffee.

Figuring out what was going to happen next with him and Odette required serious quantities of caffeine.

Bryan eased his naked self out of the bed, trying to rise like he was levitating. He succeeded to some degree, because she still didn't stir. All right. Padding to the kitchen, he found the French press for coffee and got water boiling.

He dumped in several scoops of coffee. On second thought, he dumped in double that. Once done, the brew smelled heavenly and he poured it out into a big cup, pulling the little laptop on the counter toward him. The screen flickered to life when he did.

Raised not to snoop, he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the navigation bar and entered his Hotmail address.

Click and click and click. The airline's reservation advisory service hadn't sent him anything. So he was still in traveler's limbo, after canceling his flight home.

Bryan took a deep breath, not really wanting to check his bank balance. But he had to. He typed in the website and his code, and winced when he saw his balance.

That bad?

It was a good thing Marc had been nice enough to put him up, and Odette had insisted on going to inexpensive restaurants. He felt kinda like a charity case, but he would have been wildly fucking overdrawn if he hadn't been careful.

And now, ta da, he had $2.06 left in his account. Bryan was pretty sure that didn't add up to a whole euro, not at the current dismal rate of exchange.

He signed out of the site and sipped his coffee. If he was going to stay on, he would have to get some off-the-books job. For which he would have to ask for help from Odette.

Way to go, Bachman, he told himself. How to impress a rich chick.

“Bryan?”

Her sleepy voice called from the bedroom. There was longing in it, and a sweetness underneath that he knew he craved. She'd opened him up so much last night that he could think that way.

The last thing he wanted, though, was to
feel
that way.

“Coming, babe.”

He poured another coffee for her and brought both with him back to the bedroom.

“There you are.” She was propped on her elbow, looking totally hot, even with snarled hair.

“Here you go.”

“
Merci
. You are very nice to get up and make it.” She took a sip and grimaced. “It is very strong.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. Want me to put some milk in it?”

“No, that is okay. I should get up.” She put the cup on the nightstand and got up, walking around to find her robe.

The phone rang.

“Now who is that?” Odette glanced at the clock. “It is only six-forty-five.”

“Don't answer it.”

“No?” She gave him a worried look. “What if it is my mother? She usually calls me every Friday or I call her.”

The persistent ringing made him think Odette might be right. It sounded determined and mommish somehow.

Odette picked up the receiver and he could hear someone say her name, followed by a lot of fast French. Her eyes widened.

“
Mon Dieu
,” she murmured. “
Oui, continuez.
”

Whoever it was gave her an earful. Odette's expression grew more and more concerned.

“What is it?” he whispered.

She shook her head and mouthed
shhh.
Five minutes later she hung up the phone. “Krissie's dress was copied.”

“Oh, no.”

She nodded ruefully. “It seems there are pictures of the knockoff all over the internet.”

“That was fast.”

“That is how it happens, Bryan.”

He set aside the coffee he was holding. No loss. It really was pretty vile. “Now what?”

“That was my workroom manager, Fanny. I don't think you met her. Anyway, her daughter is a big fan of Chaos and was looking online for pictures of Krissie. And there she was in the dress.”

Bryan remembered with a sinking heart that the agent had taken his picture with Krissie in the dress, and was too dumb to have figured out how to delete it. Talk about being in a compromising position. Bryan undoubtedly resembled a smirking pervert and for all the world to see.

“Was I, uh, in the picture?”

Odette only laughed. “That is the least of my worries right now. But I don't know. We can go see.”

She found her robe and cinched the sash tightly, going ahead of him back to the kitchen. She pulled the laptop over to her—he was grateful that the screen had gone black, not wanting her to know that he'd used it or why. Odette googled two words:
Chaos
and
Krissie
.

“
Zut
,” she said angrily. “Fanny was right. Look at that.”

Bryan took a deep breath, possibly the deepest breath he'd ever taken. He prayed that the photo wasn't too revealing. Then he looked.

“Okay,” he said. “Not so bad.”

His head had been mercifully cut off. No one would ever know it was him. The agent had focused on Krissie's big, bouncy boobs. It was clear that she was grinding her behind against someone's jeans, but not whose.

Bryan let out his breath in a whoosh of relief. Holy fuck. Saved by incompetence.

Odette enlarged the photo, studying it carefully, and he looked again. His random thoughts were on Krissie now.

Easy to see why one person was born to be a rock star and not others. She hadn't looked that sexy in person. But bent over the way she was, her wide, full mouth open and her white teeth showing, she had it going on, even in a grainy, slightly out of focus cell phone photo.

“There is no way the dress could have been copied from that,” Odette was saying. “Fanny said to look here
…
” The photo disappeared as she typed in other websites. “There it is!”

Bryan saw what he thought was the same dress, although he couldn't say he remembered it all that well.

“But isn't it just, like, black bands of material?”

“No. It is where the black bands were and that she has been photographed in it that makes it worth copying. Chaos is at the top of the charts. Every female under twenty-five knows Krissie and they will want that very dress.”

Bryan nodded. “And I guess it doesn't help that Krissie is a bitch.”

“No.” Odette's tone was curt. “She will be livid. I expect she will call. Her manager will refuse to pay. And I had to pay overtime to the assistants to come in that day.”

“I get it. She thinks the world revolves around her.”

Odette nodded, shutting down the laptop. Without saying another word, she got out a frying pan and the makings of breakfast, bashing and rattling her way through it.

But she slid the final result, a very fluffy omelette, onto his plate with automatic tenderness. “Eat,” she said. “It is going to be a difficult day.”

 

They convened in the workroom, a larger space than the individual fitting room.

“We are the first to arrive, I see,” Odette said, looking around.

“Looks like.”

He glanced around, seeing the familiar dressmaker's things: dummies, and sewing machines and, in the very middle of the room, an enormous table.

Odette went to a chest of very wide, long drawers and used a key to open the top one. “I will brief you before the others arrive.”

“Okay. Sounds very James Bond.”

She shrugged. “Fashion piracy is not violent. But we do lose millions.”

“That must suck.”

“Most of all for the people whose jobs are at stake.” She took an enormous, spiral bound book out of the drawer and laid it on the table. It looked something like her ring binder, but a whole hell of a lot bigger.

“What's that?” he asked.

She flipped it open. “This is the master book. The
vendeuse
uses it to keep track of customer orders in every detail.”

“And a
vendeuse
is—”

“In charge of each creation from start to finish.”

He wanted to look through the pages, but he had a feeling he'd get his hand slapped.

“Every couturier loses money on individual creations. They are simply too expensive to make and there are only a few thousand women in the whole world who can afford it.”

“So
…
” He really didn't want to say
so what.
But he was thinking it.

“It is the cachet of designing for someone as young and famous as a rock star like Krissie that is lucrative. And mass market versions of the design for her that we can license bring in tremendous amounts of money.”

“Is it really that complicated to make designer underwear?”

Way to go. Ask her irritating questions. But Odette didn't snap at him.

“To be registered as a couture house, I have to make fifty new designs for each collection—meaning dresses. You didn't see those, just the underwear.”

“Hey, I'm a guy. I noticed what was important to me.”

She smiled a little ruefully. “We left early, that was all.”

“Right. So you were saying—”

“And I have to show at least two collections a year, and I have to employ at least twenty people in my atelier. I have more than forty.”

“Who sets all these rules?”

“The
Chambre Syndicale de La Couture
. It is done to protect the traditions of
haute couture
. And we get free advertising on state TV.”

“Okay. Sounds reasonable.”

Odette leafed through the book. “I am looking for Krissie's page. We have everyone in here under code names.”

Bryan wasn't sure if he was supposed to look or not.

“Here she is.” Odette looked up as other people entered, holding takeout cups of coffee and tea.

“Here who is?” Marc asked. He had a thick scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Krissie. I wanted to find out what stage her dress was at.”

Sabine, the workroom manager, took off her coat as Marc glanced her way. “We had begun the muslin pattern,” she said to Odette.

Bryan looked hopefully at Marc, who took him aside to clear up his obvious confusion. “I thought that dress was, like, a handful of ripped stuff,” he whispered.

“No, not once Odette draped and styled it on Krissie. From it, a pattern would be made. They had started it but not, apparently, finished it.”

“Didn't you put the original in Odette's safe?”

Marc nodded. “I took it out so work could begin. The original is laid
mis à plat
—flat on the worktable—and the muslin pattern is taken directly from it. It is skilled work, even for such an eccentric design as Krissie's dress.”

Odette had overheard and she took it upon herself to explain more to Bryan. “As flimsy as it looked, it had to last through a performance. And Krissie is a wild woman on stage. We would have made her several, each sewn by hand.”