Satin Doll

by Davis, Maggie;

  “The vendeuse is watching you,” Brooksie said from behind her hand, “just in case you want to buy something. You said you wanted to see a big couture house, didn’t you? Just relax.”

  As the Mortessier mannequins danced out modeling the last of the dress collection, Samantha looked around furtively. She appreciated the opportunity to see a Mortessier showing and she wouldn’t be there without Brooksie’s help; getting into a big haute couture salon was a major event for someone whose only training had been in a small design school in Denver, and she’d wanted to see at least one famous collection before she left Paris. But she knew she also had to be careful and not be recognized as a member of Jack Storm’s American fashion empire. The fashion industry was so sensitive, especially in haute couture, that if she were discovered, it would cause more problems and stir up more speculation than sneaking into a showing was worth.

  The vendeuse was announcing in a discreet whisper that the coats, designed by Gilles Vasse for Rudi Mortessier, were next.

  Coats, Sam thought absently. She’d forgotten to bring one with her, and some of the Paris spring nights had been chilly. “I’ve got to do something about my clothes,” Sam murmured, looking down the list of the Mortessier order card she’d been given. The Sam Laredo coordinates she’d packed, assuming she was only going to be in Paris a week at the most, were not only limited, they were becoming something of a liability since they stamped her with an undeniable New York-Jackson Storm signature. She was finding out just how much today, feeling like some sort of Martian in her jeans and Western boots.

  Two models, one a lanky Swedish beauty and the other a beautifully linear black girl, came prancing out wearing the first of the coats. The big, layered arrangements in brilliantly colored wool vaguely resembled the designs from Paris’s wilder-than-wild Japanese couturiers Kenzo and Tohji Yammamoto, who wrapped their mannequins in swathes of material.

  Forgetting herself, Sam sat upright in her seat to stare. Gilles Vasse’s coats were crazy but beautiful. You had to be six feet tall and skinny as a rail to carry all that color and bulk, but she couldn’t help picturing herself in a blood-red wraparound felt with a stand-up collar that looked as though it wouldn’t work but did. Magnificently.

  “See something you like?” Brooksie muttered.

  Like? At the moment Sam was in seventh heaven. As a designer, her head was reeling with ideas already generated by Gilles Vasse’s beautiful creations. She knew she had to make some sketches of her own as soon as she got back to Louvel’s. But as a woman she was thinking it was too bad she couldn’t afford to buy anything at Mortessier’s, where the designs started at five thousand dollars and went out of sight.

  The parade of beautiful coats ended and the salon lights dimmed with sudden drama as the spotlights came up and the recorded music segued into a lavishly orchestrated recording of a French singer rendering “Love in the Shadows.” The first evening gowns were off the shoulder, clinging sheaths in flaming orange and red sequins and glass beads that caught the revolving lights like columns of fire. The models wore headdresses of gold wires and multicolored gems that sprouted in shivering fountains of glitter from matching beaded helmets. The customers in the salon breathed a small ripple of appreciative aaahs.

  But Sam had felt an unpleasant cold draft of foreboding creep down her spine. Perhaps it was the sultry song, “Love in the Shadows,” the theme song from the movie of a few years ago, Thief of Hearts, or remembering the menacing, sexy burglar Steven Bauer had played in the film. Whatever it was, the moment the music had changed to the haunting love music Sam had been overwhelmed by a vivid picture of another face, another macho body she wanted to forget.

  Put Chip out of your mind, she told herself quickly. This is no place to think of that problem. Sam gnawed at her underlip as the throbbing music beat in her ears. It wouldn’t happen with Chip again; she had promised herself it wouldn’t. Clothes, she thought desperately. She tried to concentrate on another pair of mannequins wearing high-necked, long-sleeved evening gowns shimmering with appliquéd black sequins, holding black satin masks to their faces with one hand. When they took the masks away, the models’ faces underneath were painted with yet another mask, eyes outlined with black paint and more sparkling black glitter glued to their cheekbones and lips.

  She had a little money saved up. Her paychecks were being direct-deposited by Jackson Storm Enterprises in the Bank of Paris along with a respectable expense account, and she’d hardly touched them. Now, while she was waiting to hear from Jack about her proposal, she could do something more than just hang around Louvel’s as an observer trying to stay out of the way. She could take advantage of what was, after all, the chance of a lifetime and buy some clothes in Paris.

  It was tempting, Sam thought, watching the models in black leave the floor to be replaced by even more bizarre figures all in glittering white. But if she did it at all, she had to do it carefully, because she didn’t have that much money to spend—at least not in Paris where clothes were fabulously expensive. In New York it would be easy enough with her connections in fashion retailing. In Paris, trying to maintain a low profile and not be discovered as a Jackson Storm representative, it was going to be complicated.

  Looking at the young woman beside her, Sam thought that Brooksie could help by steering her to some of the quieter boutiques. But she needed someone who could speak French, who knew the way around Paris, who had a car.

  Fortunately, she knew just the person.

  Alain des Baux was driving an elegant gold-tone Mercedes sedan when he picked her up. “Company car,” he explained. “Also larger than the Lamborghini, for carrying packages. There will be,” he asked with his teasing grin, “lots of packages?”

  “Only a Frenchman would volunteer to go on a shopping trip with a woman to buy clothes,” she teased back. “That’s why I called you. I’m glad you got my message on your answering machine. When did you get back in town?”

  “This morning.” His expression, as he turned to look at her was warm, intimately caressing. “Have you missed me?” he asked softly.

  That golden look rendered her suddenly breathless. “Look, am I taking you away from work? You sure you shouldn’t be doing something else?”

  “Do you think I would spend my time doing something else when I could be with you?” he said quietly.

  Her heart was doing flip-flops. “Well, I haven’t got all that much to spend. They tell me even the prêt-à-porter places are expensive.”

  “Trust me,” he said confidently. “Going on shopping trips to buy clothes with beautiful women is a Frenchman’s second most important obligation in life.”

  “What’s the first?” Sam said, without thinking.

  Alain des Baux grinned even more broadly as he put the car into gear. “Are you kidding?”

  Brooksie had given Sam a list of Paris ready-to-wear boutiques that included Pluck in Les Halles, the two Place Victoire shops—Joseph Tricot and Victoires—and a couple of small, unadvertised places in the 16th arrondissement adored by the BCBG’s, Paris’s elite bon chic, bon genre.

  “Those are good,” Alain agreed, “but I have another place in mind. Very French, very reasonable, a little out of the way. They copy from the big haute couture houses and the boutiques in Les Halles at prices true bargain-hunting Parisiennes can afford. Are you feeling adventurous?”

  She was, Sam decided. Even when the shop turned out to be the less than exotic basement level in a turn-of-the-century building in the middle-class residential section of Ranelagh. The proprietress, a tall woman in black, looked Sam over with a subtle expression and then greeted Alain des Baux with a broad smile.

  From their rapid conversation in French, Sam gathered the proprietress knew Alain very well. No matter what Alain was telling her, the sleek, black-haired woman had her own ideas about what was going on. Her dark eyes swept over Sam.

  His sister must shop here, Sam convinced herself, looking around. That’s why Alain knows places like this, an
d not because of what the saleswoman is obviously thinking.

  She was still turning it over in her mind when they took their seats on little wire chairs across from a bank of mirrors. The boutique was carpeted in imitation fur, the walls were painted pink and the mirrors reflected the light from one massive crystal chandelier with yellowed prisms that needed cleaning. A salesgirl, hastily summoned from the back, brought out a selection of clothes on their hangers.

  The shop’s dresses, Sam saw, a little dismayed, featured a lot of dresses that had jackets with puffed sleeves, plunging necklines and flaring peplums over rather long skirts. An evening sheath in black crepe, meant to be daring, rather predictably bared one shoulder. A beige silk jersey afternoon dress in a multitude of tiny drapes that defined the breasts and swirled to a full skirt, looked to Sam vaguely like the clothes Givenchy used to design for Audrey Hepburn in her heyday. The fifties look was coming back, the boutique was very current as far as that went, but there were no slacks, no sportswear, no jeans. The designs were very pretty, and rather fussily tasteful.

  “They’re nice,” Sam said politely.

  “Give it a chance,” Alain said, reaching over her to lift the sleeve of a beige silk dress draped over the salesgirl’s arm. “I really would like to see you try on some of Laure’s clothes.”

  “You’re not serious,” she said, surprised.

  “Ah, but I am. Would you believe me if I told you I’ve been thinking about this since I got your message?” He gave her his charmingly mischievous smile, as he sat back in one of the boutique’s rickety little wire chairs and stretched his long legs out in front of him. He looked magnificent in a Cardin suit of charcoal-gray Italian silk and a silk shirt and tie, his sun streaked-hair a little wind-tousled, as though he really had dropped everything to come to take her shopping. “Look, try these.” He lifted a hand with easy imperiousness and the proprietress, Laure, picked up several dresses quickly from the back of a chair. “Yes, the orange crepe,” he said, pulling one out. “Will you put this on for me and let us see how it looks?” he asked softly.

  Sam stared at him. He really was serious, she saw, meeting his wonderfully gold-flecked eyes. How could she refuse him, even with the sort of clothes she’d never worn in her life? “You’re going to hate it,” she said, grimacing.

  But when she came back from the fitting room reluctantly wearing the burnt-orange jersey dress, its silky hem swishing a good three inches from the top of her Art Hammer Western-style boots, Alain put back his tawny head and laughed.

  “That’s pretty damned rude,” Sam put her hands on her hips. “After all, it was your idea.”

  “No, no—forgive me.” He smothered his laughter. “It only needs a few touches. Laure will take care of it.”

  The proprietress was standing at the entrance to the shop with a young man in a yellow hairdresser’s smock who had just come in, and who was now eyeing Sam interestedly.

  “Laure has some ideas, beginning with shoes. Please,” Alain said quickly, “humor me. Call it an experiment.”

  Sam had the feeling this was a put-up job. Alain was obviously having a marvelous time shopping for clothes with her. He was just plain irresistible and he knew it. She gave him a reluctant grin. “This isn’t one of your crazy practical jokes, is it? After all, these people are expecting us to buy something.”

  “They have all the time in the world for us,” he said easily, “if I say so. It was Laure’s idea,” he turned in his chair, looking to the front of the shop, “to call the hairstylist from the shop next door. Naturally, I seconded it.”

  “Alain,” Sam began warningly, but the expression on his face stopped her. She had seen brief glimpses of this before, the look that said here was a man who was not used to being challenged. She gave in. “Just don’t cut my hair, okay?” She still hadn’t forgotten the last hairstyling session for Sam Laredo.

  The young hairdresser in the smock felt the same way, as he seated Sam in one of the rickety little chairs before the mirrors. “New York,” he muttered disdainfully as he lifted handfuls of Sam’s ragged, wheat-colored strands to examine them. “New York, Beverly Hills—c’est incroyable.”

  “Don’t cut it,” Sam said. “Alain—tell him.”

  She needn’t have worried. Alain’s instructions were, apparently, to be conservative. But the young Frenchman continued to mutter as he stuffed his mouth full of hair pins and got down to work. Laure brought cream-colored sandals from the shoe part of the boutique to go with the orange dress.

  “Look,” Sam said, unhappy about the direction the shopping trip was taking, “I was only going to buy a few outfits—”

  “Be patient,” Alain soothed her. “Nothing terrible is going to happen to you. Laure knows what I want.”

  What he wanted? Sam thought, staring at herself in the mirror as the hairdresser lifted her hair and started snipping discreetly. The pink walls of the main room of the shop were covered in gold-flecked wallpaper. The fur underfoot looked to be some sort of dyed rabbit, and hot-pink velvet drapes tied back with gold tassels covered the door to the fitting room. She was going to end up looking the same way, Sam thought, jutting her underlip stubbornly.

  Sam stood in her stocking feet while the hairstylist, still murmuring under his breath, used an electric curling iron to smooth and shape her hair and pull it into a little knot at the nape of her neck. The shorter ends were left, slightly waved, to cup her cheeks and fall slightly over one eye. The salesgirl pinned up the hem of the tangerine-colored dress at the same time Laure knelt to slip the high-heeled sandals onto Sam’s feet.

  Sam opened one eye cautiously. Her first impression was that it was not all that bad. That is, if you could call being changed into someone you didn’t recognize “not bad.” The image in the bank of mirrors was actually that of another woman, someone Samantha would never have thought of as herself. The long-legged, breezy, coltish Sam Laredo was gone—or at least temporarily concealed. The very chic, more natural-looking hairstyle replacing the trendy Raggedy Ann cut emphasized Sam’s good cheekbones, her nicely modeled short, straight nose, the suddenly classic lines of her chin and throat. Most of all, the loose, glittering blonde cap of her hair brought out her wide gray eyes, transforming their rather ingenuous, forthright look into something a great deal cooler and much more sophisticated, even a little mysterious. She had become, Sam thought, startled, a gravely elegant blonde presence: willowy, distinctive and—perhaps inevitably—very French.

  Great God, was all she could think, staring at herself.

  She was still staring when Alain unrolled his long length from the little chair and strode over to her. With both hands at her shoulders as they looked into the mirrors, he said in a low voice, “Tell me that you aren’t ravishing, like this.” The good-humored teasing was gone; he was very intent. “Look at yourself, darling. You are exquisite, truly beautiful.”

  Ravishing? Exquisite? Well, different, anyway, she thought uncomfortably, staring at the strange woman reflected there. Alain’s eyes held a naked look of desire that startled her. “It’s not me,” she whispered, shaken. “It’s someone else.”

  “Ah, yes, it is you,” he murmured. “Much more than what you were before.”

  She watched the man in the mirror put his hands at her throat and lower his face, breathing the scent of her hair. “Samantha,” she heard him murmur, “I adore you. I want to make love to you.” He lifted his head and stared at her, his extraordinary eyes glittering. “I have a place at Fontainebleau, where we can be alone. Say that you will let me take you there for a few days. Now, right away.”

  She couldn’t answer. She was in a mild state of shock at the suddenness of it. This was what she had been waiting for, to hear Alain des Baux say that he wanted her. Was she really beautiful? Sam thought numbly. She had to admit the way she looked now was more like the “beautiful” the world knew and recognized. Alain des Baux wanted her to go away with him. To make love to her. Why was she hesitating?

  She met A
lain’s eyes in the mirror. Do something, her mind was telling her, this is what you want, isn’t it? Her face must have held something that he took as assent because she heard his quick, indrawn breath.

  “I can’t kiss you now,” he whispered against her hair. Laure and the hairdresser were standing right behind them. “But I want to, my darling, believe me.”

  Samantha watched his lips drop a soft kiss into the shining waves of her hair. She could wait as long as he wanted her, she thought. She closed her eyes, telling herself the world had suddenly turned golden.

  At last.

  The telephone was ringing in her apartment when Samantha staggered in with her packages. There were so many that Sam had to leave some of the larger boxes down on the salon floor for the night porter to bring up.

  Sam was still dazed. Alain des Baux had finally said that he wanted her, she told herself as she dumped the parcels and boxes from Laure’s boutique on the floor and made for the jangling telephone in the bedroom. His brief kiss, after he had helped carry her packages to the first floor of Louvel’s, had been only the barest brush of warm lips, but his beautiful eyes had spoken volumes. She snatched up the receiver.

  “Sammy?” An American voice, suddenly familiar. “Sammy? It’s Peter Frank. I’ve been trying to get you for the last couple of hours.”

  “Pete?” Peter Frank was the Jackson Storm vice president in charge of operations and development. She couldn’t say she knew him very well but she had met him several times in meetings. “How’s everything in New York?” It was good news, she was sure of it. But why Peter Frank, instead of Mindy Ferragamo or Jack? “How’s everybody?” She supposed it was all right to ask about Jack Storm directly. “Is Jack back in New York?”

  “Sammy, baby, I’m not in New York,” Pete Frank’s jovial voice boomed in her ear. “I’m standing in a pay-telephone booth here at Charles de Gaulle, waiting to get my flight on to New York. Sammy,” the voice went on, “I’ve been down in Lyons at the silk mill for a week, trying to get their operations problems straightened out, but I wanted to call you before I left. You’re having a big time in Paris, right?”