by Lucy Ellis
‘Then let me out of this car.’ She gave him another ineffectual shove with the soles of her feet, but with no real conviction, only to have him throw his coat over her.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded as he began to feed one of her flailing arms into a sleeve.
‘Keeping you warm,’ he said impatiently. ‘Hold still.’
‘I don’t want to be warm—I want to be back at the theatre, doing my job.’
But even as she protested she was quick to push her fists through the armholes of the coat in an attempt to preserve a little of her modesty.
It was one thing to be onstage, where the audience saw her at a remove, under rose-coloured trick lighting. Quite another to have the man she fancied being treated to this intimate view of her body before he’d even taken her to dinner!
She had a very clear progression programme on this: meet, date, and then, if everything appeared to be going somewhere meaningful—get naked. She didn’t reverse that order.
Khaled had bulldozed through it in the space of twenty-four hours and gone straight for the naked.
Although he was keeping his gaze manfully above her chin-line, which was making her feel marginally better.
‘I’ve had threats, Gigi—stupid, puerile threats—a follow-on from all this press coverage about your cabaret slipping into dangerous Russian hands.’
Those hands were currently distracting her by drawing the sides of the coat together to cover her properly.
‘You’ll have noticed, dushka, that you’re not the only person in Paris who doesn’t trust me.’
She did actually trust him—she just wasn’t very happy with him at the moment. But she wasn’t letting on, because clearly give him an inch and he’d take—well, take her offstage in the middle of a performance!
He was securing a couple of buttons on the coat. She could have done it herself, but neither of them seemed about to acknowledge this.
‘The media aren’t giving me much choice about how to handle your safety.’
‘My safety is none of your business,’ she grumbled.
A shiver of reaction shook her and he gave her arms a rub a little roughly, so that her teeth chattered.
‘Stop manhandling me,’ she snapped.
‘You are cold,’ he said, continuing to rub.
‘And whose fault is that? Stop shaking me about! I’m not a chew toy for you to play with.’
He stopped rubbing. ‘A what?’
She wasn’t sure why she’d said that—only he’d gone all physical, and a bit of her was enjoying it, which wasn’t right! ‘Coco has one,’ she mumbled, avoiding looking him in the eye. Then she ploughed on, ‘Look, I won’t go back onstage. Does that solve the problem?’
Gigi noticed that the lining of the coat still carried his body heat, and she was finding it unexpectedly comforting after her shock.
‘This is a start,’ he said, releasing her, and she could feel his gaze, dark and disturbing, on her skin. ‘And now you’re refraining from kicking me we can discuss this like rational human beings.’
‘I am rational,’ said Gigi promptly, pulling the folds of his coat up around her chin, teeth chattering, ‘and if you’ll take me home I would be most obliged.’
‘Don’t be naïve. Paparazzi are camped outside your flat.’
‘My flat? How do you know that? How do they know my address?’
‘You gave those people on the Champs-Élysées your name. I seem to remember you declaiming it like a town crier.’
Gigi instantly felt sick. He made it sound as if she was on the make.
She wasn’t her father—always on the sell, always doing something for himself at the expense of other people. Including her. She tried always to do the opposite. All she’d wanted was to promote the theatre and build up their audience. She’d thought he understood that.
He cut through her muddled thoughts.
‘You are going to need security for a few days.’
‘I can’t afford it.’
He looked at her as if she’d said something absurd. ‘Naturally you will share my security.’
It was ridiculous, but she was sitting down and her legs still felt wobbly.
‘How is that going to work?’ As she spoke she drew her long wobbly legs up onto the seat and under her, so she was more securely covered, and noticed that he noticed them on their ascent.
She tucked the coat more modestly around her and his gaze cut to hers. She was surprised to see a bit of colour riding his cheekbones.
She’d been virtually naked in his arms and he’d covered her up like something in storage—but flash him some thigh and he zeroed in on it with all the subtlety of...well, a man.
Gigi wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but she discovered she no longer felt so diminished.
‘You will stay with me,’ he said, as if there could be no question about it.
The tension in the car was changing from anger and confusion to something more charged.
Given her experience with men was more of the duck and weave variety, not the fly-to-the-Bahamas-with-me-baby, Gigi wasn’t quite sure how to respond.
‘Won’t that just be playing up to this idea that we’re in some kind of nasty beneficial relationship?’
She blushed as she said it.
‘You’re blushing,’ he said, as if this were a wonder.
Gigi looked away. ‘I am not. It’s just hot in this coat.’
Which was when she noticed they seemed to have left the familiar arrondissements. There was less light and more lanes of traffic.
She tried to see out, but with the soft glow of light in the back of the SUV and the darkness outside she could really only see their reflections in the dark glass.
He was watching her as if she fascinated him. The feeling was mutual, but that didn’t mean she was ready to go away with him. They hadn’t even been on a date!
‘I’m not going back to your hotel with you,’ she said. ‘My reputation may be shredded after today, but I’m not buttering it and putting jam on it.’
He gave her an arrested look. ‘What is this jam?’
‘Jam—you know, jam.’
‘Sex,’ he said coolly. ‘No, I am not taking you back to the hotel.’
‘Good.’ Gigi tried not to let her disappointment show, because despite everything a part of her had leapt when she’d seen him striding across the stage towards her. Coming to collect her.
‘We’re going straight to the airport,’ he informed her. ‘I’m taking you with me out of the country—tonight.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE LOOKED LIKE an angel. Her long, coppery red hair was snaking across the black leather of the seat, golden lashes lay recumbent on her high pointed cheekbones. Every last cinnamon-brown freckle stood out against the pallor of her scrubbed clean face. She had one slender hand cradling her cheek as she slept.
Against his better judgement Khaled reached across with one hand and lifted the blanket that had dropped from her shoulders to hang over her knees, and was now threatening to slide off completely. He draped it over her and returned to navigating the long stretch of highway taking them from the airport into central Moscow.
What the hell was he doing?
He’d been asking himself that question for the last three hours. The obvious answer was between his legs. The less obvious conclusion he’d come to was that he genuinely liked her. She might be a con artist and a stripper, but she had a way about her that had caught him unawares. And he could say this for her: he damn well wasn’t bored.
Only now, when he looked at her sleeping, his suspicions seemed laboured and frankly untrue.
It was difficult to match up the wet, naked fantasy who had lied to him, furiously kicking her legs as he’d carried her offstage, with the
soft-featured sleeping girl beside him, her face a study of the angelic, her impossibly long limbs curled up under her, her hair a swathe of burnished colour across the blue of the blanket.
A shower and a change of clothes had taken care of the gold-painted mess and the Gigi he’d spent the day with had been once more beside him. Khaled had been surprised by the level of his own satisfaction on that score.
He knew when she opened her eyes. He could feel them on him.
He glanced her way.
She blinked. Those eyes stayed on him. Very blue. She licked her lips. It should have been sexual. Instead what he felt was a warmth spreading through his chest.
She was safe. She was awake. He had no intention of letting her out of his sight.
It felt good.
She sat up, pushing back her fringe.
‘Where are we?’
‘Quarter of an hour outside Moscow.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Midnight. You lost three hours.’
‘Where did I lose them?’
He tried not to smile. ‘Back in Paris.’
‘Along with my shoes,’ she said. Then furrowed her brow at him. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’
‘You were sound asleep—it was easier to carry you to the car.’
‘You carried me?’
‘It seemed the thing to do.’
She pulled on her sleeves, gave him an awkward sideward look. ‘You’ve turned me into one of those showgirls who goes away with a wealthy man for the weekend.’
‘Is that so?’
‘I’m trying to work out how I feel about that.’
‘Fill me in when you’ve decided.’
Gigi cast him another look. ‘I guess I’m not here to sleep with you, so the nuts and bolts of that kind of thing don’t apply, but nobody else knows that. It looks bad.’
It wasn’t her imagination. He’d definitely tensed. Those capable hands, lightly sprinkled with dark hair at the broad wrists, flexed around the wheel and testosterone began to be pumped out into the atmosphere between them.
‘Why do you care what other people think about you?’
‘Twenty-two people, to be exact. The other dancers in the troupe. They already think... Well, never mind what they think. It’s not true.’
Gigi thrust her hands into her lap and stared straight ahead. Khaled was silent. Apparently telling a man you weren’t going to sleep with him after he’d gone out of his way to rescue you from a media scrum was a bit of a no-no.
Then it occurred to her that he might be tensing up because he had no intention of sleeping with her. In which case it made her sound desperate. Clearly she’d been on her own too long. She’d got cosy, living a charmed Girls’ Own existence with Lulu, allowing her friend’s anxieties about men to shelve her own fledgling sex life—until now, when you put her in the company of a gorgeous, testosterone-charged man and she began fantasising that he wanted her.
Gigi took another covert look at him. Most women would want him. He was built on a scale that made her think about that trip she’d taken to Florence, looking up at Michelangelo’s David. Her attention dropped to the shift of his long, powerfully muscled thigh as he accelerated.
‘I can hear you thinking,’ he said, in that low, strongly accented voice, and Gigi jumped, her gaze yanked back to his.
Oh, God, he’d caught her looking at his groin. She wasn’t doing that—honestly. She wasn’t thinking about what she’d had pressed against her yesterday. Even if it had been memorable and she had been very flattered it had been to do with her...
Was she speaking this all out loud?
He glanced at her again. ‘Don’t worry, Gigi. I’m not listening in to your thoughts.’
Her face felt hot. ‘It wouldn’t matter if you were, I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘Da, I saw that onstage.’
Gigi straightened up. Reviewing her performance was fine by her. She could take criticism. ‘I was on fire tonight,’ she declared.
‘Is that what you call it?’
She made a face. Everyone’s a critic. ‘Pity you had to spoil the act.’
‘You were naked.’
Gigi bristled. ‘I was not! I was in costume.’
‘A piece of string.’
‘Plus gold body paint and pasties. And shoes.’ Her eyes narrowed. She wasn’t going to forget what had happened to her shoes.
‘That’s not a costume—it’s an incitement.’
‘To what?’
He made a derisive sound. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Excuse me? I was not naked.’
‘I saw everything.’
‘You did not!’
‘Maybe not everything,’ he responded, and it was his turn to drop his gaze to her lap, ‘but I saw enough.’
Flustered, Gigi crossed her legs. ‘You saw what you wanted to see,’ she snapped back, feeling ridiculously self-conscious. ‘Lulu’s right. Men have lurid and depraved imaginations.’
‘Lurid and depraved?’
She could hear the disbelief in his voice and it had her sitting up straighter. ‘You make things sexual that aren’t.’
‘You were swimming in a spotlit tank, on a stage, with two pythons wrapping themselves around your naked body,’ he growled. ‘How is that not sexual?’
She looked at him blankly. ‘You mean Jack and Edna?’
‘Who?’
‘The snakes. Edna’s an old softie. Jack’s the one you’ve got to look out for—he can slap you around with that tail. Mind you, they’re both way past retirement age, but Jacques wants to see this season out. The “Snakes in the Amazon” act is one of our most popular.’
‘This would be because it’s dangerous and because you are naked.’
Gigi smoothed her hands over the long, beautifully tailored pants he’d provided for her aboard the jet, entirely grateful that she wasn’t virtually naked now. He was making it all sound grubby.
‘Wow, you are such a prude,’ she said uncomfortably. ‘Who’d have thought it?’
‘After your presentation, Gigi, I was under the impression that the place was a bit more classy. My mistake.’
What exactly was he implying? That she wasn’t classy?
A hot feeling at his unjustified criticism shot through her, but what was sharper was the needling sensation that she had something to be ashamed of.
She didn’t.
She did the best she could with the material she was given—act and costume. She should tell him there was nothing sexy about breath control underwater and managing two temperamental reptiles while keeping a big smile on your face for the patrons. It was hard work!
Besides, she wasn’t keen on the pythons act herself, and she was fairly sure it was her complaints that meant Jacques would be phasing it out at the end of the season, but Khaled had no right to imply that there was anything tawdry about it or her participation in it.
She was already feeling humiliated enough after being trussed up and thrown over his shoulder like a naked turkey.
Better to say nothing.
She folded her arms. She really didn’t want him to know just how utterly out of her depth she was feeling. The most excitement she ever got was pedalling a bicycle down the hills of Montmartre. She might play at being Gigi, Queen of the Amazon, onstage, but frankly she was Gigi, Queen of the Ordinary, in her everyday life. Tearing down a Moscow highway at midnight in a supercharged sports car with a man who dated supermodels wasn’t exactly the usual end to a night onstage for her.
The problem was it seemed to be turning into one of those episodes with her father, where she’d been forced to keep her opinions and fears to herself because he hadn’t wanted to hear them—and even if he had it would just have been something he�
��d expected her to get over.
‘You’ve grown soft, Gisele Valente,’ she could hear him saying. ‘Life’s tough—you need to toughen up.’
‘Gigi?’
She sniffed.
Which was when something landed in her lap.
It was a phone. An elaborate little device.
‘Eight-ten-thirty-three.’
‘Pardon?’
‘The international code to phone Paris. I thought you might want to ring someone,’ he said gruffly. ‘Your friends might be concerned.’
The fact that it hadn’t even occurred to her until now startled Gigi.
Of course Lulu would be frantic! She hadn’t been at the theatre tonight, but no doubt some of the other girls had spread the news of her being carried out in his arms.
Lulu probably had her stepfather pulling all kinds of strings at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he pretty much ran the show.
She made the call. Lulu picked up immediately and shrieked her name, confirming her fears and forcing her to hold the device away from her ear.
It was even more awkward explaining herself with Khaled right beside her.
‘I’m fine. He’s not a murderer.’
She glanced at him, wondering what he was making of this, but Khaled’s expression gave nothing away. She might have been talking about her shopping list.
‘No, it’s okay—I’ll be back in a few days.’ She turned towards the door and tried to keep her voice down. ‘No, it’s not a stunt. I’m in Moscow.’
‘We’re on Kashirskoe Shosse.’ Khaled’s deep voice cut through the shrill sounds of disbelief in her other ear. ‘Your friend can find it on a map.’
‘Did you hear that, Lu? Yes, that’s him. Yes, he is.’ She lowered her voice. ‘No, he hasn’t.’
Khaled shifted beside her and Gigi wished the seat would swallow her up.
Lulu’s description of the protesters’ arrests and the media’s interest was alarming. None of it had apparently been an over-exaggeration on Khaled’s part. Then again, he had not yet struck her as a man given to anything but the stripped-down facts. It was something, given her murky past with her shyster father, she really liked about him.
Had liked about him...before he’d started going on about her act.