Satin Dreams (36 page)

“Rudi?” a familiar but totally unexpected voice asked. “Oh, but I am so glad you are there!”
 

“Lisianne?” He couldn’t believe it. “What are you doing? My God, where are you?”
 

“Ah, but that is why I am calling you.” He heard the sound of another curious little gasp. “Rudi, isn’t it wonderful? Have you been watching on television? This is such a triumph for Gilles! Are you not glad for him?”
 

“Very glad.” Of course he was happy for Gilles; anyone who knew him would never doubt that. But why was Lisianne calling him at this hour? “I am looking forward to seeing the
fantaisie
designs,” he said cautiously. “This is not Gilles’s style, costume ball designs, but I want to see what he has done with them.”
 

“Oh, Rudi, really they are wonderful, I saw the sketches. Rudi,” the melodious voice on the telephone cried anxiously, “you do love Gilles, do you not? You do love him as I do, you want to see him have his triumph tonight after these long, discouraging weeks of hard work, yes? So that no one, not even this American dress manufacturer, can take it away from him?”
 

The words made Rudi uneasy. The feeling intensified when he heard another one of those troubling gasps, this time a little louder. “My darling Lisianne, you know I am very fond of Gilles.”
 

“Oh yes, wonderful, wonderful Rudi, you are so kind,” Lisianne said fervently. “You must help me, dear Rudi, because we cannot bother Gilles at this moment.” There was another breathy sound. “Whatever happens, he must be free for his fame and glory,
n’est ce pas
?”
 

Rudi leaned against the dining table, his round face concerned. “Lisianne, what are you telling me?”
 

“Darling Rudi,” the soft voice burst out, “you must come and take me to the hospital. My pains began this morning but you know I have had so many false labors, I could not bother Gilles with it. I would not tell him, anyway. Now, I must go, I
really
must go. You are Gilles’s dear friend, you love him as I do. Will you help me?”
 

Rudi was literally staggered.
Help? Hospital
? He managed to say, “Well, yes, I agree, we must not bother Gilles at this time.”
 

Gilles was at the opera; his all-important show was only moments away. Gilles would go to pieces if he knew. Somehow, Rudi marveled, this dreamy, somewhat vapid girl was being more courageous and wise than he would ever have thought.
 

“Tell me,” Rudi said, his voice considerably firmer, “what do you want me to do? Shall I come with the ambulance?”
 

“
Cher
Rudi, I must ask you—” Lisianne paused to pant again. “I know the exercises, the breathing, that Gilles has been practicing with me. Can you stay with me at the hospital, help me with these? I have the booklet which shows how they are done. Perhaps you can follow it.”
 

Rudi braced his shoulders. “I will stay with you until the very completion, you may count on it.” He was suddenly full of resolve. Gilles would see this gesture of love and respect and know it for what it was. Gilles’s wife needed him to help her! “I will help with the relaxation techniques,” he said warmly, “anything you wish. Dear Lisianne, you have nothing to worry about.”
 

“We will do this,” she said solemnly, “for Gilles.”
 

“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.