Satin Dreams

by Davis, Maggie;

  What the hell, he asked himself as he got out of the chair and switched off the television set, was he doing in Paris spending his nights this way—dreaming of women? When he, Jake Sturm, now the world-famous Jackson Storm, could have nearly any woman in Paris? He’d been alone in Paris before, and had had a ball! Why the hell was this year so different?

  With shaking hands, he poured some water from the bar carafe into his empty highball glass and gulped it down. The water didn’t help his mouth. It still tasted like horses had slept in it.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t get in touch with his goddamned wife and family. And for some strange reason, he needed them. He lurched toward the desk and telephone to peer at the tiny ormolu clock. It was a few minutes past midnight in Paris. He could hear the wind howling like a banshee outside. But it was only late afternoon in Connecticut.

  He was not awake enough to remember the right codes without consulting his notebook. Finally, on the third try, he got the Wilton, Connecticut house.

  And spoke to the housekeeper again.

  Marianna and the girls, Mrs. Ansel told him, were in Tahoe.

  For a moment Jack stared at the hotel’s antique walnut desk and gold French telephone without seeing them. How could his wife and daughters go to Tahoe? And not tell him anything about it? Hadn’t he told his secretary to check in with them just a few days ago to find out how they were getting along?

  With considerable control, because his head hurt and his hands were still shaking, Jack dialed the Tahoe Hilton.

  “You’re lucky,” his wife said when she answered. “I was just going for my morning horseback ride.”

  It was morning in Tahoe, he remembered with an effort. “What the hell are you doing in Tahoe?” Jack demanded. “Why didn’t you let me know where you were going? And why aren’t the girls in school?”

  “Dammit, Jack, this is Christmas break!”

  So it was, he realized with a start. He really had been out of touch. “I’ll be home for Christmas,” he said, his tone defensive. “I want to get there in plenty of time to do a little shopping.”

  The arctic wind howled at the corners of the building, and Jack Storm put his finger in one ear to shut it out. The part about shopping he’d just thrown in. He’d actually forgotten about that, too.

  After a long pause, his wife said, “Sorry, Jack, I’m staying in Tahoe.” Her chilly tone matched the weather. “The girls and I will be here through New Year’s.”

  Jack couldn’t believe it. He always spent the holidays with Marianna and the girls at the Connecticut house with its big stone fireplaces, its snow-filled woods, its proximity to New York, holiday parties, and the theater.

  Cool it, Jake, he told himself, don’t fly off the handle. Maybe they want to go to the house in St. Croix for the holidays. Christmas in the Caribbean made him shudder, but he began, “Okay, so we can go to the Islands. Meet in Miami and we’ll fly—”

  “Jack,” his wife yelled, “will you listen to me?”

  Jack closed his eyes. He could almost see Marianna dressed for her morning ride in English riding gear, her dark hair drawn back to fit under the little cap, her wide, beautiful green eyes snapping with fury. Resistant to anything he said. He’d forgotten his wife was a fascinating woman.

  “Jack, stay in New York.” The voice on the other end was determined. “Stay at the Fifth Avenue condo if you want, or go the hell up to Wilton. But frankly, this Christmas I really don’t give a shit.”

  “Marianna!” Jack hardly ever roared. Especially not at his wife, who admired, above all, his legendary unflappable cool. “Jesus, what’s going on?” For the first time in his marriage he was seized with a sickening suspicion. “Is there some man? Is that what you’re hiding from me out there in goddamned Tahoe, some hot young stud you’ve got in your bed?”

  There was another pause on the long distance lines, punctuated by a little static.

  “There’s no man,” his wife’s cold, precise voice came finally, “and there never has been. I don’t know what put that idea into your head. But after Christmas, after the girls go back to school—” Another pause, tantalizingly. “Who knows?”

  He made a wheezing sound of pure frustration. But her voice went on, “Jack, you’ve always been very innovative. I’ve admired that in you. So thanks for the suggestion. I really should find out what it’s like to have a man in my bed again. And now I know what I should look for. Something,” Jack Storm heard his wife drawl, imitating him, “called a ‘hot young stud’, right?”

  Before Jack could speak, a small, decisive click in far-off California broke the connection.

  It was the wind, rattling in the skylight above the grand stairs that brought Karim out of the nightwatchman’s cubbyhole on the ground floor of the Maison Louvel where he had been studying his trigonometry.

  Something had come loose up there, Karim thought, staring up four floors into the darkened stairwell of the old building. He wondered if he should call his father at home and tell him to come into work early, so that the two of them could go up to the roof and see what needed to be fixed.

  It was then that Karim noticed the light, a thin sliver of brightness.

  In seconds Karim’s tall figure in jeans and sweat shirt had bounded up the stairs, crossed the third-floor landing, and burst into the atelier. Panting, he skidded to a stop.

  The seamstresses workroom seemed to be empty. But the drafting lamp was on over Princess Jacqueline’s drawing table.

  The next thing Karim noticed was the smell. Sweetly pungent, like fire mouldering in new-mown hay.

  “J’suis ici,” a throaty voice said in French. “I’m over here.”

  Karim had to bend over to see. She was under the drawing table with a pile of sketch papers scattered all around, her back against the wall, her dirty Keds stuck out in front of her. She held a flattened cigarettelike object from which her lipsticked mouth took rapid, deeply sucking puffs.

  “How did you get in here?” His heart was still pounding. “Where are your bodyguards? Where is your Rolls?”

  In answer, she fished into the front of her Garfield sweat shirt and brought out an object dangling on a string. Princess Jacqueline Medivani grinned at him hazily as she swung the key to the Maison Louvel back and forth.

  “But you’re not on the list.” He sat down on the floor beside her. “How did you get the front door key? What are you doing here?”

  She looked at him through a cloud of exhaled smoke. “Which one,” the little princess said, “do you want me to answer first?”

  He frowned at her. “You shouldn’t be doing that.” He looked pointedly at the joint in her hand. “It’s disgusting. It ruins your body.”

  The moment the words were out of his mouth, Karim regretted them. There was nothing wrong with the princess’s body. That was obvious from the tight green ski pants she wore and the thin Garfield sweat shirt that showed the curves of her young breasts and very plainly the little thrusting points of her nipples, all swaying seductively with her slightest movement.

  Princess Jackie giggled. “This is nothing.” She blew another cloud of verdant-smelling smoke, this time aiming for his face. When he grimaced and flapped his hand to fan it away, she giggled again. “I’m practically a nun, now. I take only a little grass. To relax.” She put her hands behind her head and stretched like a cat. The effect on Garfield’s thin cotton expanse couldn’t be ignored. Karim looked away quickly.

  “What are you doing up here this time of night?” Absently, he picked up one of the papers scattered around them on the floor. “How did you get up here without my hearing you?”

  She hiked her body closer to him. “You were studying. The door was open when I passed you, but you didn’t look up.”

  “Do you come here often to work like this?” He was wondering how many times the princess had been in and out of the building without his knowing it. “You know,” Karim said, turning over the sketches of what seemed to be a strange, beautiful figure of a wom
an dressed like a bird, “these are quite good.”

  Princess Jacqueline gave him a wary look. “What do you know about it? Are you a fashion critic?”

  Karim blushed again. “No, of course not. It’s just that you’re so talented.”

  Their eyes met. They were sitting close together under the drawing table. It was silly, sitting on the floor, Karim thought, confused. And then again, it was not.

  “You didn’t think I was watching you, did you?” Princess Jacqueline said softly. “I knew you were always around when I was here. Are you Algerian?”

  “Tunisian, from the northern coast. Near Sicily.”

  She had taken the sketches from his hand to set them back on the floor. The princess’s other hand lingered, pressing lightly on his thigh. Through the denim her touch burned Karim like fire.

  “You look more like you’re Italian,” Princess Jackie murmured. Her long eyelashes gave her a sleepy look. “Because you’re so tall.” She put her hand lightly on the back of his neck and drew his face slowly to hers. “And you’re beautiful.”

  Her other hand had crept down his front to the straining bulge that was already beginning to pain him. When she covered it with her warm palm, Karim shuddered violently. Princess Jacqueline’s eyes widened.

  “Karim?” Quickly she shifted, then was on her knees, kneeling over him. She took his face between her two hands. “Merde,” she said, her straight black brows meeting over her nose, “you haven’t done this before!”

  “It’s all right,” Karim said hoarsely. “I know what to do.” He took the edges of her sweat shirt with the grinning face of Garfield the cat on the front of it and pulled it over her head.

  He could only stare at her beautiful naked breasts, thrusting, pliant and beautiful as the seventeen-year-old princess herself. The little tips glistened brightly, incredibly pink, like a baby’s.

  “Where is your bodyguard?” he heard himself saying as her hands worked to open his belt.

  “Downstairs, in the car, with the driver. They won’t come up.” She held out the joint to him. “Do you want some? It makes it better.”

  “No.” He pushed her hand away. “I don’t do that stuff. And you shouldn’t, either.”

  “I told you, I’m pure now.” The black-browed little face under the mop of mannish-cut hair looked at him impishly. “Compared to what I used to do.”

  Karim lifted his hand to her cheek, but she brushed it away. “Ah,” said the princess as she jerked his pants down to his knees. “Ah, Karim! What an endowment. C’est magnifique!”

  She began to giggle throatily again as she slid herself under him. “Do it hard,” Princess Jacqueline Medivani ordered.

  The wind tore down past the Trocadero and the great iron frame of the Eiffel Tower into the rue Boulainvilliers, where Alix had gotten out of bed to turn up the electric heater and, since she’d fought an hour of restless dreaming before the gale woke her up, fix a cup of hot tea.

  What a terrible dream, she thought, leaning against the sink while she waited for the water in the kettle to boil. She supposed she could blame the dinner with Chris Forbes in her old university haunts. Eating not only crevettes froid in mayonnaise and bifteck avec frites, but also a cream puff, a napoleon and a crème caramel from the dessert tray. After a model’s starvation diet, the food binge was too much. The result had been a horrid invasion of her sleep by something that could only be called a nightmare.

  It had been such a great evening; she might have known she’d have to pay for it.

  She’d gone to sleep thinking about Christopher Forbes. After the marvelous dinner in the Latin Quarter, they’d driven aimlessly around night-dark Paris for an hour or so while they talked, neither of them anxious to end their time, in spite of a workday ahead. Then, downstairs, he’d kissed her good night.

  His kiss began only to express the warm, half-serious emotion growing between them. And which Alix, at least, thought of as a kind of friendship. But with his mouth on hers, his hands pressed into the small of her back, and the feel of his big, urgent body, the kiss had exploded into something more. It had jolted them both when he’d unexpectedly made a low, hungry growl in his throat.

  Surprised, embarrassed, they’d pulled apart. Rather shakily saying inane things about a little too much wine at dinner. Laughing at themselves.

  But Alix had gone to bed with her thoughts in a turmoil. The dream had been embarrassing, but not because of Christopher Forbes. Alix tried to steady her trembling hand as she poured boiling water over a tea bag. Her dream—nightmare—had been about Nicholas Palliades, the man she should never have met, never have encouraged—never have tried to use as her weapon of defiance.

  Alix threw the tea bag into the sink and lifted the mug in her hands. The china was scalding hot. So were her recollections of her treacherous subconscious.

  Why had she felt so torn, so close to ecstatic weeping, when Nicholas made love to her in her dream? There’d been no physical pain, only a slow, maddeningly gentle possession of her, impassioned kisses covering her face and throat and shoulders as he thrust into her. She shivered.

  I need you. That harsh, husky plea still rang in her ears. Don’t say no to me.

  Alix dropped the cup and saucer into the sink hastily. As she turned out the light over the sink and crept back across the icy floor to her bed, she knew that somehow, in some way, she had to stop it.

  Nicholas Palliades saw the light in Alix’s apartment wink out. He leaned forward to speak to the man in the chauffeur’s seat.

  “He’s still there.” The glass partition was rolled down, making it unnecessary to use the telephone. He tapped on Lakis’s shoulder, and the chauffeur shook out a cigarette from his pack and held it over his head so that Palliades could help himself.

  Lakis jerked his head toward the street. “Eight hours, he’s been there without even a pee break. And baby, it’s cold.” He pulled the cigarette lighter from the limousine’s dashboard and handed it back. “They rotate eight-hour shifts, midnight to eight. Someone will be coming to relieve him soon.”

  They watched the shadow in the doorway they knew was stationed to watch the girl in the building opposite.

  “I don’t understand it,” Niko said in Greek. “Do they wait to see if I will come to her? So that they can spring the trap?”

  His friend shrugged. “Who knows? She has been watched for weeks. There were men watching her, looked like pros, before she even worked at Mortessier’s.”

  The grandson of Socrates Palliades drew deeply on the cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke, eyes narrowed on the just-darkened windows above them. The most beautiful woman he had ever desired had gone back to bed. Alone. He had made sure of that, waiting in the parked Daimler until the American journalist brought her home from their dinner date. He had watched Christopher Forbes kiss her, passionately, at the downstairs door.

  He was still fighting the surge of rage that had flamed up in him when he had seen her arms go around the writer’s neck during the kiss, her body moving closer to cling to him. It had almost sent him charging out of the Daimler and into the street to pry them apart.

  “There is still nothing on her passport,” Lakis said. “We have been checking, but so far we have only what we already know—that she is working here in Paris under an assumed name.”

  Nicholas was silent. He was not certain who they were dealing with, that was the damnable part. But he knew he was a primary danger to them. And in danger himself.

  The presence, though, of beautiful Alix worried him; he had not yet fully figured out what part she was supposed to play.

  “None of this makes any sense,” Nicholas muttered almost to himself. “Except, obviously, the trap is for me.”

  Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, Madame.

  Las, le temps, non: “Nous nous en allons!”

  Time goes away, you say? Ah, no!

  Alas, Time stays—we go.

  —Ronsard

  Twelve

  Alix s
tood under a wooden framework covered with puffs of silk-laminated lace that formed a bower at one end of the crowded Maison Louvel’s grand salon. Directly over her head, in fresh-cut pine branches imported from Norway by Lachaume, Paris’s most elegant florist, was a sign:

  JACKSON STORM INTRODUCES ... HEAVENLY LACE!

  The bower’s pine branches, in the areas that were not covered by laminated lace, had been sprayed with pink paint—the Art Deco color was still very fashionable that year—with large, raindrop-shaped fake pearls glued to the pine needles.

  Alix wore a Marie Antoinette court gown with panniers and long train in the same lace-laminate material, the stiff bodice cut so low it barely covered her nipples. Her red hair was piled high in an exaggerated pompadour in the style of the French court at Versailles, with dangling sausage curls over each shoulder entwined with strings of pearls. She looked ravishing. As nearly all Jackson Storm’s guests had remarked.

  But under all her heavy finery, Alix was overtired and feeling the strain of the press party’s hurried arrangements. In the hour or so she’d been standing in the bower, she’d been unconsciously twisting her hands together, enough to make her fingers ache. The PR woman, Candace Dobbs, had come over twice and hissed at her to stop it, that it wrecked the effect of the tableau.

  But Alix couldn’t help it. She was on edge. With all that was going on, who wouldn’t be?

  The promotion party to introduce Jack Storm’s “miracle fabric” was packed with people, some of whom were obviously gate crashers. Gossip and wild speculation had made the Jackson Storm press party a hot ticket in the Paris fashion world. Alix recognized staffers from the houses of Scherrer, Galanos, Miyake, and many more, who had obviously bootlegged invitations. The French press and European television crews, too, were vying with each other to get the story. And Candace Dobbs had arranged to have a group of New York socialites, Hollywood stars, and Storm King executives flown in by chartered jetliner.