Satin Dreams

by Davis, Maggie;

  “Why were you still a virgin?” he repeated.

  “I wanted to study music!” She tried to wrestle her hand free. “Let go of me!”

  His black eyes locked with hers. “One doesn’t have to be a virgin to study music.”

  “I’ve never wanted to have sex with anyone,” she blurted. “I don’t know much about—about—your sort of world! I’ve gone to school most of my life.”

  She didn’t know if he believed her. Nicholas abruptly stood up, pulled off his undershirt, and tossed it to the floor. Alix watched him, her heart in her throat.

  “I don’t really know you.” Her whisper was anguished.

  He sat down and pulled her down beside him. “I don’t know you, either.” He pushed her back against the bedspread and leaned over her, hands braced. “I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your real name. But you haunt my dreams. I saw you in Mortessier’s, and all I could think was, I’ve never wanted a woman so much.” He looked down at her, his mouth curving sardonically. “Do you know what it means to a man like me, to have a beautiful woman who has never loved another? That first time he takes her, feels her trembling in his arms, feels her soft and innocently yielding, and knows she’s his?” He bent, and his lips brushed her mouth. “It’s never happened to me before.”

  She looked up at him with frightened eyes. “It doesn’t mean anything!”

  “Oh, doesn’t it?” His lips touched hers again, another whisper of a kiss. “It means a great deal to me. It means I want to make love to you. Many times.”

  “No, you can’t,” she gasped. “You have to go home.”

  “Lakis has taken the car.”

  “No, I don’t want to. Besides,” she wailed, “I didn’t like it!”

  He laughed softly and drew his fingers lightly down the side of her cheek in a gentle caress. Then, with the merest hint of a sigh, Nicholas lowered his dark curly head until his face nestled in the warm hollow of her throat. She felt the weight of his body move across hers.

  “Put your arms around me.” He kissed the damp skin under her earlobe. “Just hold me.”

  She gulped. “H-hold you?”

  “Yes, put your arms around me.” He nestled closer. “That’s good.” She felt him release a long breath. “Ah, I’m so damned tired of this world.” His voice dropped to an almost inaudible murmur. “Of everything.”

  With her arms around Nicholas, holding him, Alix was overcome with emotion. She suddenly felt warm and safe and cherished. She knew it was merely a fleeting illusion, and yet she longed to make the moment last.

  His mouth moved on her bare shoulder. “Alix?”

  She cleared her throat. “Yes?”

  “I want you to love me. Do you know how to do that?”

  She shook her head, mesmerized.

  “You touch me—” He took her uncertain hand and put it against his forehead, rubbing her fingers back and forth slowly. “Like that. And you say—” He reached to spread her fingers so that he could run them through his thick, curling hair. “You say, ‘Niko, darling.’ Like that.”

  Nicholas guided her hand across the top of his head. Alix trembled, pressed against him, her soft breasts brushing his chest.

  “What are you making me do?” she breathed.

  “I don’t know.” His other hand had crept under the short nightdress, his fingers spread to stroke lightly over the silky bare flesh of her rounded bottom. “You’re so warm, so beautiful. I want to get close. I want to make love to you. And have you make love to me.”

  Alix’s fingers slid to the back of his neck. She was fighting the realization that she was doing everything she had promised she’d never do again. Not after that painful, humiliating episode in his apartment. Yet she felt herself faltering under the inexorable pull of his strength, his almost weary tenderness.

  She lifted her mouth to his and heard his swift intake of breath. “Ah, love,” he whispered.

  He moved his big body over her quickly, his mouth taking hers in such a blaze of hunger that Alix tried to pull back. She fought a strange sense of drowning, of surrendering to a rush of feeling that sensitized every inch of her skin, shot into her flesh and buried itself there, mysteriously. She clung to the man who held her as though the world would come to an end in his arms.

  He dragged his lips away. “Darling, don’t be frightened. I will make it beautiful for you this time, I swear.”

  He held her with one hand while he pulled the filmy gown over her head. Suddenly Alix found herself naked. “I don’t think I can do this,” she moaned.

  He pulled her into his arms. “Beautiful Alix, let me love you,” he murmured. “Close your eyes.”

  His trembling hands swiftly explored her, cupping her breasts, his thumbs teasing and exciting her nipples, then skillfully stroking down her legs and her inner thighs. When Alix moaned, he laid her back down against the bed and got up.

  With somnolent, half-closed eyes, she watched Nicholas Palliades pull off the rest of his clothes, scattering them across the floor. His naked body was singularly graceful, so powerful and muscular, so male. He stripped off his briefs to expose the root of his power, erect and ruddy, amazingly big against a dark background of pubic hair.

  She flinched when he turned to the bed and knelt beside her. “Do you want me?” He reached to pull her into his arms, sensing her resistance. “Be still, be still,” he murmured. “I will just lie down beside you and sleep, if that’s what you want.”

  With a rush of tremulous feeling, Alix knew that despite Nicholas’s desire for her, he would do as she asked. Tentatively she wrapped her arms around him. “I want you,” she whispered.

  “Thank God.” He held her against his warm, naked body as he kissed her face, her mouth, her throat, her bare shoulders in a burst of passion. His long fingers, then his mouth, defined her breasts.

  She clutched his thick hair, making wordless sounds of surprise and delight. She groaned as his fingers found the hot folds of her flesh and carefully, tantalizingly invaded her. When she stiffened, his mouth covered hers in a passionate kiss, coaxing her surrender.

  Did she really want someplace, Alix wondered, where she would be warm, safe and cherished? Was this what she was finding in this tumultuous blaze of heated desire, in Nicholas Palliades’s arms? Certainly nothing could be more tender, more ardent—more mind-destroying! “Nicholas?” she cried.

  Her only answer was his triumphant growl. He took her to a peak of writhing, mindless desire and then drew back, cradling her in his arms as his eyes devoured her tangled blaze of hair, her kiss-swollen mouth, her firm little breasts with their glistening pink buds rising and falling. “Now this is what you want?” He smiled.

  “Nicholas.” Alix could hardly think.

  “You must love me, too.” He took her hand and put it around him, and she felt him, hard, hot, and rigid. When her fingers moved, exploring him awkwardly, he gasped. “Ah, God, gently!”

  But Alix was on fire. “Please, Nicholas!”

  He pulled his head back, hair in his eyes, his face flushed. “You’re not my enemy, are you?” he muttered.

  “No,” she said against his mouth. “No, I am not your enemy.”

  It was the truth.

  He pulled himself over her and shifted her hips under him. His mouth was trembling, too, as it covered hers. Slowly, with excruciating care, he crowded himself into her.

  When Alix stiffened, clutching him, he stopped. “Shhh, it is only your second time.” The words were torn out of him. “Please darling, let me do it.”

  But Alix couldn’t stop. The pressure of his flesh inside her created a driving, searing heat that grew more insatiable. She tried to pull back, then convulsively thrust herself against him. The world began to spin wildly, centered on a burning ache, hot with desire, frenzied with madness. She cried out, winding her legs and arms around his body in a fierce burst of longing.

  The effect on him was just as uncontrolled. With a groan, he battered her with thrusts that drove h
er to the brink of passion, his breath harsh and ragged, his body raking her, almost lifting her from the sheets with his need.

  They reached the peak at the same time, Alix unashamedly wanton, Nicholas driven to a mindless ferocity. She barely heard his rasping cry as he convulsed, pouring himself into her.

  When at last he stopped, still quivering with the after-shocks of release, he gasped, “My God, my God,” over and over. His hand groped for her to comfort her. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  Alix was still struggling for breath. She stared up into his black, thickly lashed eyes. Because he looked so wild she gasped, “Are you all right?”

  “Not after this.” He buried his face in her shoulder, laughing huskily. “Alix, you drive me crazy.”

  She lifted her head to look at him, but he had lowered his face to her breasts and she saw only the crown of his curly black head. She had never heard Nicholas Palliades laugh before.

  Her own body was shivering, wet with lovemaking, sweetly drained. It had been indescribable. Nicholas was wonderful, she thought, amazed. He was her first, her only lover. Without thinking, her fingers laced softly through his black hair.

  This couldn’t be happening. Alix wound the soft curls around her fingertips. She had picked him, calculatingly, in bitter defiance, and now she was falling in love with him!

  Outside, the moan of an arctic wind coming up from the River Seine reminded her of the time. And the night.

  “It’s Christmas,” she murmured, surprised.

  She didn’t even know she’d spoken aloud. But against the curve of her breast, Nicholas stirred. She felt him smile. His other hand covered her nipple and stroked it, fingers gently relaxed.

  “No, this is Christmas,” he murmured, content.

  When she awoke it was gray dawn. Nicholas was gone. But there was a small black velvet box on the pillow next to her.

  With a sinking feeling, Alix reached for the box and opened it, her hands shaking. The terrible earrings winked at her, all their little yellowish diamonds sparkling, now surrounding very large and expensive emeralds.

  She fell back against the bed, her hand covering her eyes.

  In this world, there was a price for everything.

  Sixteen

  Jack Storm held up two of the seventeen Gilles Vasse fantaisie designs for the ball at the opera, one in each hand.

  Each sketch showed a figure that was one-third mythical bird, one-third human, and the remaining third amorphous swirls of lace.

  Peter Frank hid his nervous smile behind his hand. Candace Dobbs looked dutifully attentive.

  “So,” Jack asked, looking down the conference table, “have we pulled this thing off or haven’t we?”

  Candace Dobbs peered over her glasses. “Gilles is so avant-garde,” she murmured noncommittally. “Really.”

  Peter Frank thought the designs, considering what Gilles had had to work with, were remarkable. “I think we’ve got a winner,” he sai, saying what Jack wanted to hear.

  It was the New York staff’s first meeting since the holidays. Candace Dobbs, Jack’s secretary Trini, Peter Frank, and the Paris public relations woman, Brooksie Goodman representing Prince Alessio Medivani, were seated in the new gray and pink executive meeting room on the second floor of the Maison Louvel for a preview of the designs Gilles had labored, all through the holidays, to finish on time.

  “We’re going to put the costumes into production in spite of the front page story we got in Women’s Wear Daily on the lace. Which,” Jack added, looking at Candy Dobbs meaningfully, “we should have blocked, because we pay people who are supposed to be doing things like that.”

  Candy leaped to her own defense. “Jack, we issued a denial. Some French news stringer in Lyon went out to our silk mill down there—”

  “Jack,” Peter Frank broke in, “Louis de Brissac didn’t say anything to any reporter from WWD about the lace, and neither did his son. They’re as upset about it as we are.”

  “Upset?” The blue eyes of the emperor of commercial fashion were arctic. “Who’s upset? Didn’t I just say we have people we pay to keep negative stories out of Women’s Wear Daily? Stories that claim Heavenly Lace is a ten-year-old item we found in a warehouse at a chickenshit textile company in central France?”

  Peter Frank winced. No one knew how Women’s Wear Daily, the bible of the rag trade, had managed to dig up the real story of the de Brissac company’s laminated lace. But the paper had given it prime space, a lead feature on the front page. Then it had been picked up by Time and Newsweek. Coming as it did at the peak of their publicity hype about Heavenly Lace, the news break had not been good.

  Worse, Women’s Wear Daily had been snidely funny about the whole thing. Despite his glamorous, fashion-mogul image, Jack Storm’s cutthroat Seventh Avenue origins always made him a great target.

  Jack had returned to Paris in a very edgy mood. The rumor was that Marianna and the girls had spent the holidays dodging Jack. They’d ended up at their place in St. Croix, while Jack had flown out to Tahoe looking for them.

  “It was here, too,” Brooksie Goodman said, “in the Paris papers.” She was wearing a silver-fox trimmed broadcloth suit with a dramatically sweeping black felt hat. “Hey, relax, they didn’t kill you. It was sorta’ mixed. The German papers were crappy, but the French held back. They seem to think this might be some product of French genius whose time has come. So what if it’s been hanging around in a warehouse in Lyons?”

  Jack Storm eyed her shrewdly. He liked Ms. Goodman better every time he saw her. She was doing a good job with her end of things, getting the opera ball committee people to recruit the titled guests who, in turn, would draw the paying customers. Her client, Prince Alessio Medivani, was guaranteeing some of the biggest names in European aristocracy: the princes and princesses and grand dukes and duchesses and countesses and barons who showed up if, Jack had discovered, you paid them.

  The prices were impressive, if somewhat baffling. A German prince with a castle on the Rhine, wearing full court dress and decorations, could be had for fifteen-hundred dollars American. Five hundred included his wife. A handsome, cultivated descendant of the King of Naples who was related to most of the ruling houses of Europe and Great Britain and who was currently working as loan officer in a bank in Rome, could be had for half that, plus air fare. A clutch of White Russian grand dukes, third-generation, went for simply all they could eat and drink.

  Peter Frank couldn’t resist saying, “I heard ticket sales are slow. Is Wednesday night going to kill us, after all?”

  Candace Dobbs glared at him. “Prince Medivani is taking care of that. Jack?” She addressed him directly. “We have this problem with a runway for the models to show Gilles’s fantaisie creations. The opera management wants us to just use the grand stairs, but that’s a real bitch. It’s steps all the way down, endlessly, with no place to stop and turn.”

  The logistics of building a runway that would meet the approval of the opera management had proved to be another budget-buster. But no one wanted to bring it up in the light of Jack’s unpredictable mood and the money clouds existing in New York.

  “Don’t forget the Greeks,” Peter said, to change the subject. “Give the backers a table right up front with you, Jack, and the prince and his family. I’ve heard the old guy, Socrates, doesn’t go anywhere, but the rest of the Greeks do. There’s a sister, and an aunt, I think. And, naturally, we got Niko Palliades.”

  Those around the conference table contemplated the mix of millionaire ship-owning Greeks and the gambling casino-owning Balkan nobility. Plus, undoubtedly, Princess Jacqueline and her married but still notorious sister, Princess Catherine, who’d once had a romance with a younger Nicholas Palliades. Candace Dobbs visibly repressed a shudder.

  “The prince will have his own table,” Brooksie Goodman put in. “He has a lot of important people he has to sit with.”

  “On the other hand, Nick Palliades may not be there.” Peter had just picked up that bit
of news that morning. “Palliades-Poseidon is in court in Germany, answering an indictment on a violation of international trade agreements. They have a court case pending here in France, too.”

  Jack did not look up from the notes his secretary had taken. “So what about everything here while we were gone?”

  Peter Frank looked uneasy. He’d told himself several times since he’d returned that it probably hadn’t been the wisest thing for the whole New York staff to go back to the States for the holidays. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something had taken place while they were away. There was a strong sense of hidden—even catastrophic—events swept under the rug. The seamstresses in the atelier were stuffed with it, the porter wouldn’t look you in the eye, and the handyman Karim was everywhere, stomping up and down the stairs in his soccer shoes.

  And Alix.

  Their sleeping beauty, Peter mused. She not only had their hot-eyed Greek moneyman, Nicholas Palliades, trailing after her adoringly, but now the young princess was also a big fan.

  “Hey, the munchkin factory was going full blast.” If no one had noticed the strange undercurrent, he sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up. “Gilles busted his balls turning out those sketches. Alix and the girls finished cleaning up from the party. Louis de Brissac came up from Lyon in the week between Christmas and New Year’s because he wanted to see how the lace was used in the fantaisie designs. He was only here for two days, but managed to get in Gilles’s hair. I heard they had a fight because Gilles wouldn’t show him the sketches. The plumbers came back and fixed the john on the fourth floor because I left word we’d sue them if they didn’t.”

  Jackson Storm got out of his chair and walked to the window that overlooked the rue des Benedictines. He put his hands behind his back. “When we start making up the costumes, I want nobody—but nobody—around. That includes the Fortune magazine guy. He can wait to finish his piece at the opera ball. His back still turned, he added, “Get outside security if we have to, but keep it secret. Have what’s-his-name, the old guy—”