Caught in His Gilded World

by Lucy Ellis

  ‘This is your mother?’ he said.

  Gigi put down the cups she was setting out and came over, settling her gaze on the picture with an oddly protective look on her face.

  ‘That’s right. Her name was Emily Fitzgerald. She danced at L’Oiseau Bleu for five years—same as me.’

  ‘Your mother was a showgirl?’ Khaled gave a soft laugh. ‘Well, well...’

  ‘She was amazing. A much better dancer than me. She had real presence. Those fans she’s holding she had made for her. They were her signature. They weigh a ton. I know, because they were the only thing she took back to Dublin, the fans—oh, and her shoes. I used to waddle around in her shoes, trying to carry one of the fans. I couldn’t have been more than five or six. She said if I practised I could grow up to be another Sally Rand.’

  ‘Who was Sally Rand?’

  ‘An American burlesque star—famous for dancing naked behind an ostrich feather fan. She started out in the circus too.’

  She spoke so matter-of-factly that Khaled decided not to raise the subject of all this pointing towards a rather unusual upbringing.

  ‘I gather your mother gave up the stage to have a family?’

  Gigi’s mouth tightened. ‘You could say that. She fell pregnant to my father. Not the most reliable man in the world,’ she added.

  Khaled thought of the marks on her feet and decided this was Gigi’s version of understatement.

  ‘She decided to go home to her parents and I was born in Dublin. I didn’t know my dad until I was eight or nine.’ She reached out and straightened the picture, although it was already dead on. ‘This photo was taken when she was pregnant with me. She had it done knowing her time was running out. She kept dancing right up until she started to show.’

  ‘Do showgirls come back to work after pregnancy?’ He had no real interest, but he wanted to hear her story—because it was clear that here on this wall was the reason Gigi was so anxious to protect the cabaret.

  ‘If your body snaps back. A couple of the dancers have kids. The Dantons aren’t great about childcare.’ She folded her arms. ‘That’s something else you might want to look into.’

  In truth Khaled had forgotten this was the bone of contention between them. He’d been enjoying watching all the emotions crossing Gigi’s face, like sunlight and cloud and little storms. She was so passionate.

  He looked again at the photograph. Emily Fitzgerald looked serene as a sunset.

  ‘She must be proud of you.’

  ‘She doesn’t know. She died.’ A muscle jumped in Gigi’s throat. ‘She went into hospital for a day procedure, to fix some nodules that had formed on her larynx, and she never came out from under the anaesthetic. It was her heart—it was weak and no one knew, and it just gave up. It was sixteen years ago, but it’s still hard to grapple with.’

  She’d been just a child.

  Khaled straightened. His voice was gravel. ‘I’m sorry, Gigi.’

  He had the unfamiliar sensation of not quite knowing his footing here. But this girl did that to him.

  His own parents had been gone by the time he was thirteen, and it had given him a terrible freedom.

  He frowned. ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘My dad turned up to collect me.’ She put her hands on her hips, as if to counteract the wealth unsaid in that statement. ‘That’s when I went on the road with Valente’s International Circus.’

  ‘An itinerant life for a kid... Did you enjoy it?’

  She shrugged. ‘It was different. I threw myself into learning the life. I so wanted to please my dad, and it taught me lessons in discipline and the importance of practice.’

  Khaled had a visual of the marks on her feet, and those words assumed a darker significance.

  It wasn’t hard to picture Gigi all those years ago, skinny instead of shapely, all freckles and bereft. They weren’t so different. He knew all about trying to please the only person you had left. In Gigi’s case it had involved climbing those ropes, her feet bearing the scars to this day.

  Tough little thing.

  Needing her mother and getting what...? The bastard who’d permitted that thing to happen to her growing feet.

  Khaled was conscious of a tension in him he could have cut with a knife.

  ‘Then Dad went bankrupt and we hit the vaudeville circuit,’ she continued. ‘I sang and danced and dad was MC. But it wasn’t like this.’

  She gestured towards the window and he surmised that she meant Parisian cabaret.

  ‘As soon as I could I crossed the Channel.’

  ‘You came to Paris to follow in her footsteps?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  She smiled at him, and it was that lack of self-pity coupled with her natural buoyancy that hit him the hardest. He was sure he could do something for her before he left Paris.

  ‘Would you like that tea?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I don’t want tea.’ He stepped in front of her. ‘I want to kiss you.’

  She looked sweetly surprised, and then pleased, and it only made him want to power her back into that sofa over there and lose himself in her soft, sweet warmth. He took her in his arms and promised himself he’d only have a taste. But once her lips parted beneath his everything changed again, and his kiss became a fiercely possessive gesture that only intensified as her tongue tentatively slid against his. His blood roared and his restraint began to unravel fast.

  The door behind him closed with a slam.

  Gigi jerked in his arms, her head coming up. She made a sound of dismay that might have been funny if she hadn’t then shoved him away from her and immediately begun smoothing down her hair and adjusting her T-shirt, looking guilty as hell and incredibly sexy because of it.

  Which wasn’t helping with the stone-cold kick he needed to give his erection.

  Because the little brunette from yesterday was standing just inside the door, with a bunch of sunflowers and a bag of groceries. She dropped them on the floor.

  It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be.

  ‘I’m interrupting,’ she said stonily.

  ‘No...’ choked Gigi.

  His personal phone vibrated inside his jacket for the hundredth time since he’d driven the Spyder out into the Paris afternoon. He thought he’d take this call. It had been a lot of years since he’d involved himself with a woman who had a flatmate.

  Khaled palmed his phone and turned his back on the girls to give them a minute. ‘Govorit,’ he breathed. Talk.

  * * *

  ‘What is he doing here?’ hissed Lulu, stepping over the groceries.

  Gigi opted for a casual shrug. She had no idea how she was going to explain two hundred plus pounds of Russian muscle in their flat, let alone her being welded to him. She had her own questions as to why she’d practically blurted out her entire family history to him.

  Lulu looked very angry. She marched into her bedroom. Reluctantly Gigi trailed her.

  ‘So you’re replacing Solange?’ she demanded as Gigi half shut the door behind her.

  ‘No!’ Gigi frowned. ‘It’s not like that. He was never interested in Solange.’

  Lulu gave a very un-Lulu-like snort. ‘Every man’s interested in Solange.’

  Gigi’s stomach curled uneasily. It was true. ‘He told me it was a publicity thing—to have his photograph taken with a showgirl.’

  Her best friend’s face told her what she thought of that.

  ‘So what are you doing here with him, Gigi? How did this come about?’

  She told Lulu about being tackled by his security team, about running through the streets, being held up by aggressive strangers and swarmed by paparazzi. When she’d finished Lulu’s mouth was slightly ajar. She shut it with a snap when Gigi came to the part about going up to his hotel r
oom.

  ‘He took me up to fix my feet.’

  ‘You let him see your feet?’ Lulu’s voice rose.

  ‘Shh. He’ll hear you. Don’t make it such a big deal.’ Although it was a big deal. Lulu knew that better than most. ‘We happened to be in the bathroom.’

  ‘How were you in the bathroom together?’

  ‘He carried me there.’

  Lulu’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘What happened to your ability to walk?’

  ‘It was compromised by my blisters.’

  Her best friend gave her a withering look.

  Gigi decided there and then to omit the part about her turning into a nympho on the vanity. Some things were private—and, besides, Lulu wouldn’t understand. The only time she got carried away by her hormones was when they watched old Gregory Peck movies together, and Lulu would hug a cushion and sigh and ask where all the real men had gone.

  Gigi suspected she had one, in the other room, but letting Lulu know that wasn’t going to help.

  After all she’d said about him over the last couple of days, she couldn’t blame Lulu for being suspicious.

  ‘I gave him the presentation and he seemed interested. Then he ran me home because of the journalists.’ Even as she said it, it sounded weak.

  He’d brought her home and effectively diverted her from her task, which had been to show him the old memorabilia, by asking her about her mother.

  Then he’d kissed her. Tenderly at first. She touched her lips.

  Lulu’s eyes zeroed in on the gesture and her expression turned mutinous. ‘Has he even said anything about the cabaret? Or is this all just about getting in a showgirl’s knickers?’

  Lulu blushed as she said it, but she said it nonetheless.

  ‘It’s not like that!’

  Lulu folded her arms. ‘“Nobody should date Kitaev”—quote, unquote.’

  ‘I know...I know.’

  Lulu’s expression softened to its more natural lines. ‘Gigi, just think for a minute. How are you going to explain any of this to the other girls?’

  ‘The other girls won’t know.’

  The words just slipped out, and Gigi knew then that she was sunk.

  ‘You want to do this behind everyone’s backs? Really, Gigi?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Lulu knew about her past. Knew how fiercely she felt about deceit.

  Her father had put her on the vaudeville circuit at the age of fourteen—a front for his petty crime spree as they travelled from town to town. And four years later, when she’d confronted him outside the court on that rainy day when he’d been convicted and she’d got a slap over the wrist, he’d told her that he hadn’t thought it would matter as long as she didn’t know...

  Ignorance wasn’t an excuse for culpability under the law—she knew that now, better than most.

  She’d made a vow when she’d walked away from court that morning seven years ago that she was going to look life straight in the eye.

  She looked Lulu in the eye now. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  She couldn’t promote the theatre and compromise her position.

  The world could be a cold, hard place, but you didn’t need to cheat and steal to survive in it. She had fought to make her own colourful, honest corner and she wasn’t going to mess it up now.

  Khaled was still talking on his phone when she re-emerged. Lulu followed her, arms folded. He indicated the door with a nod and headed out, clearly expecting her to follow him.

  ‘Do not make any plans with him,’ whispered Lulu.

  No, no plans.

  Outside on the stairs he pocketed his phone and said briefly, ‘We’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  She had a huge problem, given she still couldn’t pull her eyes off him. But she was guessing it wasn’t such a big problem for him, because she was looking at his back and he was taking the steps by threes, those big shoulders squared as he headed back out into the big, bad world.

  ‘There are photographs of us in the lobby of the Plaza.’

  That wasn’t the problem she’d been thinking of, but... ‘Okay...’

  Because, really, what did he want her to say? She was sorry, but she had told him she was happy to go on her way. He was the one who’d gone all he-man over fixing up her feet. Her heart performed a little tumble and roll at the thought.

  ‘No, it’s not okay, Gigi.’ He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned around. His expression was taut. ‘They imply a sexual relationship.’

  Gigi rocked back on her heels. Okay. She could deal with that. Just. The other girls were going to kill her, but it wasn’t the end of the world. Was it?

  She examined his fierce expression. Told herself she wasn’t bothered that he seemed to think this was a disaster. I mean, some guys actually thought she was pretty hot stuff. She might not be beating them off with a stick, like most of the other girls, but she got asked out, a lot...and if she wasn’t working most evenings she’d probably go...

  ‘I suggest you don’t step onstage for the next few nights.’

  What had he just said?

  ‘But that’s impossible!’

  ‘Nyet, it’s very possible. You need to keep a low profile—although after today it’s probably asking the impossible.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  He leaned against the banister, effectively keeping her on the second to last step, which gave her a slight height advantage although he still made her feel tiny.

  ‘Dushka, you’re a walking headline right now.’

  ‘Excuse me? There were two of us on the Champs-Élysées, and you were the one attracting all the attention. All I did was speak up for you.’

  He looked at her with those unfathomable dark eyes. ‘Yes, you did, and if you’d kept your mouth shut you’d just be the pretty, unidentified girl in some photographs of me out jogging. But you’re a Bluebird, and you announced it to the whole world.’

  He looked over her shoulder, up the flight of stairs, and Gigi turned around to see Lulu standing on the landing, arms folded.

  Oh, honestly! Gigi jumped down the final two steps and headed confidently for the door. Lulu couldn’t spy on them if they were outside.

  Khaled’s arm came down in front of her, effectively barring the door.

  ‘Being seen in public together probably isn’t our wisest step at this point,’ he said, with calm certainty.

  She looked up. ‘But this isn’t public. This is my street.’

  ‘Nevertheless, there could be paps—stay put.’

  She folded her arms, looking away. ‘Fine.’

  His mouth moved as if he were suppressing a smile and he picked up the ends of her hair and gave the silky weight a gentle tug, which felt oddly more intimate than that kiss upstairs.

  ‘No more ambushing men in hotel lobbies, dushka.’

  She bit her lip and gazed up at him, fighting the urge to move a little closer.

  He dropped her hair as if he’d just realised what he was doing and cleared his throat. ‘Next time you have a proposal to put forward pick up the phone and make an appointment.’

  Gigi nodded, although she knew very well that if she had picked up the phone she never would have got anywhere near him.

  Not the man who was solidifying to granite rock in front of her eyes.

  This was the man she’d first seen yesterday—a monolith of inaccessibility. The open-necked shirt and jeans might as well have been a suit.

  She guessed that if he’d been wearing a watch he’d be glancing at it.

  A busy man, with places to be and people to do his bidding.

  It was disconcerting to think she’d been kissing him upstairs not so long ago, but it helped her sudd
enly fragile ego to remind herself that there hadn’t been anything inaccessible about the way he’d been acting then. It wasn’t just her imagination. He’d been moulding his hands around her bottom and bringing her in tight against his erection. You couldn’t fake that.

  She hugged to herself the very female knowledge that he’d been putty in her hands for a few minutes there.

  ‘So, will you keep in mind everything I’ve shown you?’

  Her words prompted Khaled’s attention to drop to her breasts. When he realised what he was doing he dragged his gaze away from her nipples, prominent against the T-shirt fabric between those glittery letters, and gritted his teeth.

  He had to stop making this sexual—he would defeat it. Gigi was looking up at him as if she expected something from him. Only it wasn’t sexual. She was still holding out hope for that damn cabaret.

  He looked down into her anxious expression and almost told her the truth. He was selling up. She’d come to the wrong man. But the minute he did that all of Paris would know and the queue of prospective buyers would evaporate.

  He did, however, want to do something for her before he walked out of her life. ‘Have you thought about upscaling?’

  ‘Upscaling?’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘It sounds like a disease.’

  ‘Paris is full of venues. Isn’t the Lido still going strong?’

  ‘Why are you talking about the Lido? I’d never get into the Lido.’

  ‘I could pull a few strings...’

  She pulled her generous mouth tight. He was beginning to recognise the gesture.

  ‘That’s not why I came to see you today. I don’t need a handout. I came for the cabaret.’

  ‘It’s not a handout, Gigi, it’s a word in someone’s ear. It happens all the time.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want underhand things going on.’

  Underhand? Khaled tried not to laugh, but she looked so indignant. ‘Gigi, how did you get the job at L’Oiseau Bleu?’