“And now we are coming to the Palais Royal.”
She could always get on a plane and go back to New York and force Jack to fire her. But Jack was out of town on a trip to the Far East with his wife and loving family, and only Mindy could forward his calls. They had her blocked. After all, she told herself bitterly, what do you do with one of Jack’s girls, his famous discoveries, after he was through with her? She’d been such a dumb fool to think she was in love with a powerful man with a track record like his.
“What would you like to see next?” They were entering the Champs Élysées traffic. The Lamborghini purred by a small Renault taxi and a bus—a black, menacing speed machine. “The Eiffel Tower?”
Sam saw expensive shops on a broad, tree-lined boulevard. The Champs Élysées. She was there, in Paris, and she was so filled with her problems it wasn’t even registering. Think of something to say, she told herself. “Paris—France—is very wealthy, isn’t it?”
“Very wealthy,” he agreed soberly. “France plundered the New World along with the English and Spanish, and it was very profitable.” He took his eyes from the traffic long enough to gauge whether she wanted him to continue. “Unfortunately, all the gold, the enormous riches fell into the hands of only a few. The majority of French people were very oppressed—the cause of the great French Revolution. You do remember,” he said carefully, “our great French Revolution, don’t you?”
Well, she remembered Marie Antoinette and the guillotine. She hadn’t been a great student in school. All she’d wanted to do was draw. It was all she’d ever wanted to be, a designer, until she met Jack Storm. She’d fought and worked to get where she was. Stop thinking about it, she told herself. Just stop it.
“You should read the history of France and the causes of the French Revolution, now that you are here. France was very backward, like the English with their monarchy, but ours was a corrupt nobility, a cruel feudal system, and the people rebelled. The aristocracy had incredible power. You know of the droit de seigneur, don’t you? Look,” he said abruptly, “we are coming to Chaillot Palace. The Eiffel Tower is across the river.”
Sam turned in her seat. The great symbol of Paris was a spraddle-legged iron structure brightly illuminated by floodlights, much larger than she’d expected from the pictures she’d seen. The tower itself was surrounded by a sweep of parks and walkways and stood against the softness of a spring night. Stay in Paris, Mindy had told her.
“Impressive, isn’t it? Now it’s used as a television tower for the entire Paris area.”
But what was she going to do in Paris? Keep right on making some report on the Maison Louvel that nobody cared about? It didn’t make sense. “No, never heard of it,” she told him, “what you just said.”
The Eiffel Tower receded into the night as the Lamborghini turned toward the Seine. “The droit de seigneur? Are you going to be shocked?” He was teasing but his voice seemed to say that whatever was the matter, he wanted to pull her out of her mood. “‘The right of the lord,’ because that is what it means, was a relic of the Dark Ages, when peasants were tied to the land and could be sold with it like so much livestock. The lords were entitled to do whatever they wanted. The droit de seigneur was the privilege of the seigneur to spend the first night with the bride of his vassal. Presuming, one may imagine, she was a virgin and exceptionally pretty.”
Sam slid a cautious look at Alain’s handsome profile. The thought of some feudal lord dragging a peasant’s bride away from him to be the first to have sex with her had to be the French version of some tall story. “Okay, I’ll bite. What did the serf say when the lord wanted to spend his wedding night with his bride?”
He looked genuinely startled. For a moment he took his eyes from traffic to stare at her. “My God, nothing, one supposes. They punished peasants cruelly in those days if they dared defy their lord. Horrible punishments—cutting off their hands, disemboweling, blinding them. Sometimes a defiant serf was even hunted down as a sport, like any other animal.”
Sam stared back. She’d been raised on Western tall stories designed to amaze gullible easterners. “You’re making this up,” she said.
“God, no, it’s all true.” The Lamborghini slowed, turning through a wooded park toward brightly lit docks along the Seine. “It’s horrifying in this day and age, but it was true that the feudal lord could have his subject’s woman before that man could have her himself and that it was made a matter of law, actually.” He paused, somewhat soberly. “Bluebeard was not just a French fairy tale, you must remember. He was a real person, the Count Gilles de Retz. As was the Marquis de Sade. And there”—he lifted a hand from the steering wheel quickly as though glad to change the subject—”is our dinner.”
Sam was still staring at him as he slid the Lamborghini into a parking slot. Beyond, at brightly lit docks extending into the Seine at the Pont d’Iéna were the large, flat-bottomed bateaux mouches, Paris’s sightseeing boats. An even larger vessel was tied up at the far end.
Alain came around the Lamborghini to the passenger’s side to open the door. As Sam slid out of her seat, he took her hand. She looked up at him, seeing his long-nosed, aristocratic face and the sun-gilded hair lit by the parking-area floodlights and ruffled by the breeze from the river. The silk suit molded his broad-shouldered body beautifully; he looked virile, incomparably assured. Alain des Baux was surely the handsomest man in Paris.
He stepped back slightly to give her room, still holding her hand in his. For a moment, with their bodies almost touching, the spring wind soughing in the trees around the Pont d’Iéna and the glimmer of moonlight on the Seine, Sam let herself think that this easygoing, marvelous Frenchman with his perfect manners and slightly mischievous sense of humor was trying his best to make the evening pleasant for her. She smiled up at him tentatively. In the next moment she thought of Jack. How could she even think of another man so soon after what Jack had done to her?
He saw her expression change. “Come along,” he said gently. “This is not the end of the sightseeing. I promised you an excellent dinner, and it’s waiting.”
The restaurant they boarded was a converted yacht. As they went up the gangplank, the imposing figure of the headwaiter in his black tuxedo hurried out to meet them halfway, his manner saying that Alain des Baux was an old and valued customer.
The main dining room was crowded; many of the diners were in formal evening clothes. The restaurant’s decor marked the place as expensive even for Paris, with swagged gray velvet drapes framing the glassed-in sides and charcoal-gray carpeting lush underfoot. Their table, with a huge centerpiece of spring lilacs and white roses, was located in the stern of the boat. It was surrounded by empty tables and a folding screen. Their isolation, Sam saw as she slid into the seat held for her by the maître de, was too obvious to be accidental. The rest of the restaurant was jammed.
“Very pretty,” Alain des Baux said, giving the mass of exquisite flowers in front of them a cursory look. He nodded to the hovering headwaiter. “Now take them away. I want to see you,” he explained. “If you wish, I can have them brought to you later, wrapped as a bouquet.”
Alain des Baux was rich, Sam was thinking as she looked around. She knew what reminded her of Jack Storm: his almost indifferent air of power. It had taken Jack years to acquire it; Alain des Baux acted as though it had been his from the day he’d been born.
“I decided it would be rather intimidating for us, our first dinner together, to dine in an empty boat, a deux.” Alain lowered his menu and gave her his mischievous smile. “So a compromise was made. We have a screen.”
A deux. The two of us, she knew that much French. He was saying that he’d thought about hiring the whole restaurant boat but instead had just bought up the tables around them and ordered the screen to make it more private. She could only guess at the cost. Had the management canceled reservations at the other tables because he’d told them to? She supposed they had.
As she stared at Alain des Baux, Sam was think
ing that she already knew she was attracted to men like this, worldly and powerful; if she was ever going to fall in love again, it would probably be with someone who followed the pattern. Had it really been Jack after all? she suddenly wondered. Or was she always going to fall in love with sophisticated, powerful men that were so different from the men she’d left back in Shoshone Falls?
“Is something wrong?” Alain des Baux was frowning at her.
Oh lord, how I long to tell him what is wrong, she thought, staring at this beautiful man across the table.
“This doesn’t suit you, here?” He made a movement to push back his chair. “We will go somewhere else.”
The restaurant boat was moving away from the dock, but Alain des Baux was halfway out of his seat, determined, imperious. The maître d’ came rushing back. The tall man ignored him, his eyes fixed only on Sam.
“The boat’s leaving. We can’t,” Sam told him.
“That means nothing, that the boat is leaving. I will stop it.” He waved the headwaiter away impatiently. “If this doesn’t please you, tell me.”
God, he is just like Jack Storm, Sam thought, staring up at him. Half the dining room was craning, and an army of waiters came running back to the stern. Alain des Baux was scowling, his linen napkin thrown down on the table, towering over her.
“I can do it,” he told her. “Do you wish to see if I can?”
“No—no, I believe you!” Damn him, he was too good at this. Her lips began to quiver. In a minute he’d even have her laughing. “Just—sit down!”
“Good.” He sat back down again and gave her a glinting look. “I want to make sure you will pay attention to dinner. And,” he added, “to me.”
Unwillingly, Sam had to laugh. “Look, I’m supposed to be here on a business trip, a quiet one, not to start a riot in public places.”
“Ah, yes, the acquisition of the old Maison Louvel by the great Jackson Storm company of New York.”
“By the way, you never mentioned how you knew about that. Don’t tell me it’s all over Paris!”
“No, it’s not all over Paris. They are being discreet at Louvel’s, but then they are still shocked. You can rely on Solange Doumer. She will wait for your company to make the announcement. Actually, I heard of the news because Nannette, the fitter, told my sister. That sort of confidence is hard to prevent—it’s very Parisian. Now,” he said abruptly, “before you become unhappy again, I have this dinner planned for you, and at the same time you will see Paris without tourists clicking cameras and squalling kids. And besides,” he added, flashing his white grin, “the food is not bad.”
Not bad? Their waiters wheeled up a tiered cart of hors d’oeuvres with cold asparagus in mayonnaise, mushrooms en gelée, artichoke hearts with capers, a pâté Normande en croûte, herbed baby carrots à la crême—it was too much to keep track of. Sam closed her eyes in anticipation. She was suddenly so hungry her stomach hurt. All she’d had since the telephone call that had shattered her day was a cup of coffee.
The hors d’oeuvres were followed by a potage madrilene made with red caviar, a whole striped bass stuffed with oysters and an émincé of beef bourgeois. The sommelier in his ropes of gold chains over a forest green uniform opened appropriate bottles of wine with each course—a light, fruity white for the hors d’oeuvres, followed by a crisp Chablis with the fish, then an exquisite Chateau Lafite-Rothschild bordeaux for the beef. At the last, they were served Moët champagne with the dessert of tiny apricots poached in cognac and laced with thick cream.
While Sam ate greedily, Alain des Baux looked amused, his deft questions prodding her to talk a little about herself, even encouraging her to tell stories about her first year in the mass-market fashion world, when, fresh out of art school in Denver, she had ended up not a designer but a Jackson Storm media figure and sometime television model. Her account of her horror over the avant-garde Greenwich Village hairstylist and what he had done to her hair on the order of the Jackson Storm marketing genius made him explode in roars of laughter.
Sam grinned back at him. She owed him a large debt of gratitude, this virtual stranger. He’d fed her and made her have a good time in spite of herself, and she was realizing how kind he had been. She’d only left out the parts about Jack Storm. If Alain des Baux had guessed something was missing, he said nothing.
But then he wouldn’t, he was too well-bred for that, she thought, a little sadly. What would he think of her, this charming, cultivated Frenchman? How would that warm, admiring look change if she suddenly poured out the whole story of how she had thought she was in love with her boss? And she’d been sleeping with him, a married man? The French were supposed to be broad-minded about such things, probably more broad-minded than she was, Sam told herself bitterly.
“For all that it is a crazy business,” he said, taking her hand, “this mass-market fashion and the use of beautiful women to advertise clothes, you are still incomparably lovely. Because nothing has been done to you that is not your own true beauty. Is that not so?”
She let him cover her hand against the tablecloth with his slender, strong fingers, and for once she didn’t try to pull away. She was feeling awful. In spite of what he was saying, she knew he couldn’t understand how she, a girl who had had nothing all her life, had been swept off her feet, made into something resembling a glamorous creature, and then, when she was so overwhelmed and flattered she didn’t know what she was doing, had fallen in love with the man who had created her. But the truth of it was that she’d never known anybody like Jack before. He had coached her, encouraged her, listened with marvelous attentiveness to anything she had to say, told her she was beautiful, took her with him on Sam Laredo promotion trips, had dinner with her, and talked so revealingly of his innermost thoughts that she’d convinced herself he had never told them to anyone else. And then when she was ready—oh so ready, he’d seen to that—Jack had taken her to bed. In San Francisco the first time. Then in New Orleans. Fort Worth and Dallas. Every time they were out of town. It had only happened once in New York, because New York was too close to home, one afternoon at the Hotel Warwick, because Jack couldn’t wait, still intrigued, still teaching her how to please him. Still enchanted with her clumsy innocence. For almost a year and a half she’d been wildly, blindly in love with Jack Storm. Now, here in Paris, with someone else, she was just beginning to realize what a world-class, champion fool she’d been. She couldn’t get over it.
The waiter filled her glass again with champagne. How much wine had she drunk? Sam wondered a little hazily. She hadn’t been listening; she’d lost track of what Alain was saying again.
“—we held it off for years, this wonderful American life-style, but now it is overwhelming us. French kids want to dress like, act like, talk like Americans—le weekend, le drugstore, le sports car—it’s driving the French mad. But then, nothing in Paris is as it was ten years ago.” He took a French cigarette from a gold case and lit it and sat back, looking at her through a cloud of smoke. “And when you turn on the radio, what do you get? Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen—” He stopped abruptly. “I’m not joking. You don’t take me seriously, do you?”
She put down her champagne glass and looked at him. There was more to that question than just a simple answer and his gold-flecked eyes were telling her so. “Yes, I take you seriously,” Sam said finally.
“Good.” He sat back in his seat and looked pleased.
Sam quickly turned to look out the glass that enclosed the stern of the boat, not wanting Alain des Baux to see her face. The city of Paris was going by, a Disney World fantasy of glittering lights. The restaurant boat was moving slowly past the illuminated palaces of the Right Bank, the government buildings on the Rive Gauche, heading down river to the Île de la Cité in the middle of the river and the brightly lit twin towers of the cathedral of Notre Dame. Staring at the beautiful view, Sam felt a little dizzy. One thing right after another was happening to her. Her life was changing so rapidly she couldn’t keep track of it
. Who would think the end of this disastrous day would be like this, dining in luxury on the river Seine with a man who acted as though he served up the whole glittering panorama of Paris just for her?
“You’re happier,” he observed softly.
She didn’t want to turn from the window. “Hell’s afire,” she blurted. “I think I just saw the Statue of Liberty go by!” She put down her champagne glass in a hurry and pushed it away.
He laughed. “It’s only a replica. The original is in New York harbor, a gift from France. This is a copy, at the end of the Île Saint Louis.” He lifted her captive hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers softly. “This is where the boat turns to go back.”
The waiter was clearing away the dessert plates and the coffee cups. “Is there something more you would want?” Alain des Baux asked softly.
Yes, there was something more she wanted, Sam thought, meeting his eyes. She wanted love and happiness. She wanted someone to care for her with no illusions, no deceit, no more false promises that ended with the promiser going back to his wife. And she wanted success, being on top of the world again, the way she’d been this past year, but this time because she’d worked for it, not because she was part of somebody’s master plan that would just fade away when things didn’t work out. It was a large order.
She hesitated a long moment. “No, nothing,” Sam said, looking away.
Alain parked the Lamborghini in front of the Maison Louvel and turned off the lights. “Shall we continue our tour of Paris or are you too tired? Pigalle, naughty shows, the Moulin Rouge? You have only to say it.”
She shook her head. The evening had been wonderful but the day was catching up to her. And, too late, she knew she should have spent at least part of their dinner asking Alain des Baux about the Maison Louvel and what he knew of it—the customers, what had happened to the place all these years, and how it had managed to keep going. Instead, she’d only enjoyed herself, and she’d certainly drunk too much wine. But it still wasn’t too late to ask him about the handyman, Madame Doumer’s great and good friend, Chip.
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