Alix turned away to pick up more boxes. “How did you know—about what was happening?”
“You mean, do I cruise around every night picking up Nick Palliades’s runaway dates in the avenue Foch?” He was still smiling, but his eyes had changed. “I was on my way back from dinner with a photographer who wants the contract for the shoot on this story I’m doing on Jackson Storm. I couldn’t miss you, a damsel in distress, running along in the snow.”
“I—” Alix murmured, “wasn’t really distressed.”
“No? You could have fooled me.”
She let that pass. “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to get in touch with you—get in touch with your magazine, to thank you.”
“Dear lady, it was nothing. The next time I see you running in a snowstorm with your clothes half torn off, you can count on me to rescue you.” When she frowned, he said just as smoothly, “But next time I’ll go back and murder the son of a bitch.”
The boxes Alix had stacked toppled and slid across the table, and she grabbed for them. “It wasn’t as bad as it looked.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” He had stopped smiling. “I don’t know much about Palliades, but the crowd he runs with stink.”
At that moment Nannette came in. “Déjeuner,” the seamstress said and pointed to her watch.
“She’s absolutely right, it’s lunchtime.” Christopher was smiling again. “Look, why don’t we just wait a minute for the press and TV people to clear out, and I’ll take you to a quiet little place for lunch?”
The sound of the Maison Louvel elevator carrying passengers to street level reverberated through the stairwell. Above all the noise, there was no mistaking the peculiarly penetrating voice of Princess Jackie.
Distracted, Alix was telling herself that surely Gilles wouldn’t quit over having to work with a spoiled teenage princess looking for something to do. She heard a door on the floor above slam.
Gilles’s design room.
Watching her, Christopher Forbes asked, “Is there something you need to take care of?”
“No, no,” Alix murmured. Did she want to go out to lunch? She supposed she did. “I’ll get my coat,” she told him. “I’ll just be a moment.”
She needed that moment to think. Gilles worried her. He was too young himself, and didn’t have the patience to instruct a spoiled kid in the finer points of haute couture design. For goodness sake, why hadn’t they just enrolled the girl in art school?
Alix supposed she knew the answer to that. The aggressively bored Princess Jacqueline wouldn’t last two days in a disciplined school environment.
When she came back to the atelier with her coat, Christopher helped her into it. “Covering couture houses on the Jackson Storm story,” he told her as they went out on the landing, “is a whole new area for me. My last profile was Lee Iococca.”
He paused at the stairs to let her go ahead of him. “But it all begins to sound the same. Ever heard how Jean-Paul Gaultier locked out half the women of the American fashion press and kept them waiting for two hours because he said the lighting was better after dark? And then he gave the American reporters such bad seats, they couldn’t see the show.”
When Alix turned to him, he went on, “And then there’s the Dior fashion anniversary party that turned into a shambles.” He took her elbow and drew her to him on the landing. “You have a beautiful mouth,” he murmured. “Or how about Azzedine Alaia? He got into a fight with the fashion editor of the Paris Herald-Tribune because she was being too friendly with Women’s Wear Daily? And Azzedine told her he wasn’t afraid of any damned American, even President Reagan.”
Alix’s lips quivered. “What did President Reagan say?”
“God, I forgot to ask.” He laughed with her. “Haute couture’s just as crazy as the automobile industry. Remind me to tell you a famous story about Henry Ford. We can walk to the Ritz,” he said as they reached the salon floor landing, “it’s not far from here.”
“Is the Ritz your ‘quiet little place for lunch’?”
“Yes.”
The doors to the salon were open. As they passed, Jackson Storm stuck out his platinum head. “I thought I heard somebody out here.” He was looking at Alix. “I was just going to send someone up for you.”
He stepped back, opening the doors to the old showroom a little wider. A tall figure in a dark business suit stood just inside.
“Alix, I want you to meet one of our investors.” Jack Storm favored his house model with a brilliant smile that said there couldn’t possibly be any objection. “Honey, Mr. Palliades is going to take you to lunch.”
Nine
“But I don’t want to have lunch!” Alix cried.
Nicholas Palliades was a major investor in the Maison Louvel, not just an important client; that much she’d understood in those few brief moments in the corridor outside the salon doors. It ws unbelievable, a horrendous, unforeseen turn of events. After she’d gone to all the trouble to quit her job at Rudi’s, she’d fallen into a trap at the Maison Louvel that was worse!
The chauffeur held open the door to the long black Daimler. Nicholas Palliades’s hand, in the small of her back, propelled her inside.
Alix fell against the limousine’s gray velvet cushions, understanding now why Gilles had wanted her to come to the Maison Louvel. Because that was what Jackson Storm wanted. And Jackson Storm wanted her because that was what Nicholas Palliades, his investor, wanted!
Did anyone really care if she was a top-flight model or not? she wondered despairingly. Or was she even expected to work at all? Remembering the morning’s spools of ancient thread, she began to doubt it.
The bottom line, of course, was that after the disastrous evening in the avenue Foch apartment, after his wild rage when he thought she was blackmailing him, Nicholas Palliades now had all sorts of power over her! Her eyes slid to him hesitantly as he dropped his long body into the seat beside her.
“Please let me out.” Alix reached for the door handle. “I really don’t want lunch. I don’t think I can stand another sleazy restaurant.”
He pushed her back into the seat with one hand. “It’s not a sleazy restaurant,” he said stiffly. “It’s l’Escargot Montorgueil near Les Halles, run by a friend of mine, Kouikette Terrail, the sister of the Tour d’Argent’s owner.”
“I don’t care, I’m not hungry!”
It was useless. As the car pulled away from the curb, he kept his hard, sculpted profile rigidly to her, only a tiny vein in his temple throbbing.
He didn’t look deranged, she thought, openly staring. On the contrary, Niko Palliades maintained an image of perfect, icy control. He was impeccably dressed in a gray business suit, black melton Chesterfield overcoat, and carried his usual homburg. She had to admit he was exceptionally handsome in all his dark, muscular virility; he looked like a romanticized movie version of a young Greek shipping heir. But, she told herself, he could still be crazy.
“We’re going to lunch,” he insisted, staring straight ahead. “I want to talk to you.”
They sat in frigid silence for the rest of the journey. When the Daimler rolled up in front of L’Escargot, Alix could see that the hundred-year-old restaurant was completely different from the tawdry La Veille Russe. Nicholas Palliades was taking her to lunch in an elegant setting of velvet banquettes, brass rails, spectacular Second Empire mirrors, and a fabulous painted ceiling.
But as far as Alix was concerned, Nicholas could just as well have taken her to the Burger King on the Champs Elysées. She sat down at their table without removing her coat, and stared at her plate. She couldn’t cope with what was happening to her these days—and certainly not with Nicholas Palliades. She still couldn’t believe he was Jackson Storm’s all-important European backer for the Maison Louvel!
Alix wondered if she could appeal to Jack Storm, explain to him that she couldn’t work for him if he expected her to entertain investors. He knows about it, she told herself. Jackson Storm was not only a part of this, he would proba
bly fire her if she did anything to antagonize his millionaire investor.
Numbly, Alix took the menu the waiter handed her. She knew Rudi was too angry to take her back. And modeling jobs weren’t that easy to get in the spring market. It would take weeks, maybe even months.
With trembling hands, she put down l’Escargot’s parchment menu and stared at the man across the table. After all, this was Europe, not America; a rich man could pursue a young, comparatively powerless woman in any way he wanted. Even better, if he had a lock on her job.
Alix glared at Nicholas’s bent, curly dark head. He’d also made a fool of her in front of Christopher Forbes. She’d let Nicholas Palliades steer her to the Maison Louvel’s elevator, while Christopher watched her being led away like some sort of pet on a leash.
Across the table, Nicholas was silently studying l’Escargot’s elaborate menu. Her eyes dropped to his long-fingered hand holding the folded parchment and the tiny blue anchor tattoo at the base of his thumb. Nicholas Palliades belonged to a family that counted its wealth in billions, and yet he’d worked on one of his grandfather’s tankers as an ordinary seaman. Sitting there across from her now, he looked enigmatic, self-absorbed in his sleekly tailored suit. But why in God’s name was she meekly having lunch with him when she didn’t want to? Was he beginning to have some strange hold over her?
Alix remembered him pacing like a tiger in the avenue Foch apartment, ranting about blackmail plots. Certainly it was some wild dream that he’d been naked, in bed with her. That they’d ever made love!
He lowered the menu to look at her. “Are you all right?”
With a shock her violet eyes met his gaze.
Alix gripped the edge of the table with both hands. How in the world was she going to get out of this? Why wouldn’t Nicholas Palliades leave her alone?
He seemed to be feeling something of the same thing.
“Why do you torment me?” he said hoarsely. He looked exasperated, as though it was the last thing he meant to say. He went on in a grimly controlled voice, “I’m waiting for your demands, you know. You have to give me more information than I’ve gotten so far. I can’t act without it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Alix glared at him. “But then, I never do.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” He bit down on each word. “You went to bed with me, I took your virginity. It was,” he said even more huskily, “a valuable experience. That is, I know there’s a price on all of this. I’m waiting.”
It was her turn to be exasperated. “But losing my virginity had nothing to do with you.” She saw his black eyes widen, incredulously. “I—I mean, it was nothing personal!”
“What?” The menu crumpled into a ball in his hands.
“Oh well, yes, we made love,” she blurted. “Actually, it was just sex.” Around them people were craning, staring; Alix lowered her voice. “But I didn’t mean for you to get so obsessed with it.” She could never tell him that she’d picked him because he was perfect for her revenge—a notorious playboy, outrageously, flamboyantly, undesirable. “It wasn’t you. I mean, it was just supposed to happen, that’s all!”
His expression was savage. “Are you playing with me just to see me sweat? Whose idea is this? Per Ammussen? North Sea?” He was suddenly barking names at her. “Takimoto? Holveig Oil?”
Her mouth dropped open. “Who are they?”
He reached across the table to seize her hand. “Come on, it’s either the Japanese or the Norwegians. There’s no other competition for Greek tankers. Or is it,” he said, squeezing her fingers painfully, “more complicated than just a move to discredit me and make me look bad just as I’ve taken over my grandfather’s company?” His eyes narrowed. “The scheme’s bigger, isn’t it?”
“Scheme?” Alix tried to pull her hand away. “What scheme? You’re the one who asked Rudi Mortessier for permission to take me out. Until that moment I’d never laid eyes on you!”
He made a derisive noise. “Come on, you’ve heard of Iranscam, the war in the Persian Gulf, the arms deal—” He stopped abruptly. “The intrigue that goes on in international oil. You’ve already made one blunder,” he reminded her. “You’ve admitted you went to bed with me for some reason other than because you wanted to.”
“But I wanted to,” she protested. He finally released her hand. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand they paid you,” he flung at her. “You’re on their payroll, that’s what I understand.” His black eyes blazed at her. “I’ve put you under professional surveillance. Having someone watch you twenty-four hours a day will flush out your associates. They’ll have to come forward with their demands, or back off.”
“Associates?” Alix pushed away the menu the waiter offered. “You can’t mean you’re having me followed!”
His mouth flattened disapprovingly. “You never eat,” he observed. “Why aren’t you ordering? Are you starving yourself for this cover of yours, the modeling job?”
She’d never dreamed Nicholas Palliades would have her followed. She was already being watched. The last thing she needed was another set of spies on her tail.
Alix opened her mouth, then shut it again, quickly. She couldn’t explain. That was the trouble. This terrible mess was growing more and more complicated, and it was her fault.
“Where are your clothes?” he demanded.
“Clothes?” She looked down at herself, baffled. “I’m wearing them.”
“I mean clothes.” He motioned to the waiter to give her the menu again. “Real clothes, not these things you have on.”
She was wearing her ski jacket from Levaux, the Parisian students’ version of the army-navy store. Her silk scarf dangled around her neck.
“It’s deliberate, isn’t it?” he said, staring at her broodingly. “The beautiful glittering mannequin, then Cinderella, after work. A subtle metamorphosis, in case I’m turned off by too much glamor.”
“These are my clothes,” Alix snapped “I’m not Cinderella!”
A dark eyebrow lifted sardonically. “I think you’re doing everything you can to hook me until your associates make their next move. And you’re doing a good job.” His voice became a rough growl. “I’m going to take you to bed again. We haven’t even started on this thing.”
Alix pushed back her chair. Any attempt at conversation with Nicholas Palliades was futile; they had nothing to discuss. “I’m sorry, I can’t stay. Besides, the last thing I want to eat right now,” she told him, referring to l’Escargot’s specialty, “is snails.”
He sat back, the hand with the tattoo clenched into a fist against the tablecloth. “I want to talk to you, talk, do you understand? Not have a scene. Do you know what it was like for me to find that you were—” He stopped, his expression strained. “—That no other man had had you? My God, even that I had probably hurt you?”
She stared at him. “Look, you didn’t have to go to bed with me. Don’t worry about it.”
He got to his feet, too. “If they are who I think they are,” he said, leaning across the table tensely, “the people who are using you put a cheap price on such things. They deal in human misery. It means nothing to them—a beautiful girl’s innocence. They wouldn’t consider that a man wants to—” His jaw clenched. “It’s a man’s obligation to make the first time a—a memorable experience for a woman. It’s his duty.”
Her mouth fell open. It was a preposterous statement, resembling a platitude from a sex manual. “You have to forget about going to bed with me. For goodness sake, just wipe it out of your mind!”
“That is, Greek men,” he ground out. The waiter had come up rather hastily with a bottle of Poilly fume. Nicholas pushed it violently to one side. “Greeks feel this way about sex. Naturally, I don’t know how you Americans feel about it. From what I’ve heard, Americans are lousy lovers.”
“I don’t care what you heard,” Alex fumed. “And as for what happened the other night—it was a mistake!”
“Mistake
, hell! There are no mistakes in this game. How much are they paying you? It’s nothing compared to what I can offer you.” His lip curled. “I can give you nearly anything.”
“Nobody’s paying me. And there’s no plot against you! If you’d just—”
“I want you to come back to the avenue Foch flat with me.” At her stunned look he went on, “It’s not necessary to explain to Jackson Storm. He will understand.”
It took a moment for his words to register. “You can’t mean that you want to take me back to your apartment to have sex.” Her temper sputtered. “In the middle of the day? When I’m supposed to be working.”
He smiled coldly. “What does that have to do with it? I told you, Jackson Storm is taken care of.”
“That’s obscene!” Heads were turning in their direction, but Alix didn’t care. “That’s the worst thing I ever heard of. You’re treating me like a hooker!”
He leaned toward her, banging both hands on the table. “My God, how can you deny me? That’s what you’re here for! Do you think,” he growled, “I’ve been able to forget you? Get you out of my head? You’re driving me crazy!”
Alix backed away. “You can’t do this to me, even in France!” When he started around the table, she retreated through l’Escargot’s dining room, followed by their anxious waiter. “If you don’t stop threatening me,” she cried, “I’m going to report you to the police!”
“Go ahead,” he shouted over the heads of three ladies being escorted to their table. “I have many friends in the Surete.”
With a muffled scream, Alix turned and ran through l’Escargot’s Second Empire splendors, zigzagging among the tables. Nicholas Palliades was close behind her as she made it through the front door. He caught her on the sidewalk and held her, shouting for the doorman to signal for his chauffeur and the car.
“Is this how you deal with everything, by running away?” He locked his hands behind her back and held her as she tried to kick him. The Daimler rolled to a stop in front of them. “First the other night in my apartment, now in a public restaurant. I look up and you’re running away from me again!” He jerked open the rear door without waiting for the chauffeur. “You see, you’ve made me lose my temper,” he snarled.
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