Caught in His Gilded World

by Lucy Ellis

  She listened as Lulu described how she’d had to wade through paparazzi to get into the apartment building and how she and Coco were staying with her parents tonight.

  Khaled had told her the truth.

  She glanced at him, feeling a little stupid for all the fuss she had made.

  ‘People at the cabaret are talking about it like it’s the romance of the century,’ Lulu went on. ‘I think some of the girls have even talked to the press.’

  ‘Romance?’ She said it out loud, before she could censor herself. ‘I don’t think—’

  Khaled plucked the phone out of her hand. ‘She’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  Lulu must have said something cutting, because Khaled’s expression was cool as he ended the call.

  ‘She does not like me.’

  What on earth had Lulu said?

  ‘You might want to rein her in on making threats. They’ll get her into trouble.’

  Gigi blinked. ‘It’s Lulu,’ she said faintly. ‘She’s not a threat to anyone.’

  ‘Nor are you to feed stories to her while you are here.’

  ‘Stories?’

  ‘“Romance of the century...”’ he drawled.

  Gigi went hot. He’d heard Lulu’s end of the conversation. He must have ears like a cat. A big, predatory cat—the kind who brought down the unwary.

  She was beginning to feel distinctly savaged herself by this line of discussion.

  ‘It’s not me or Lulu—it’s the other girls,’ she defended herself.

  ‘Who won’t be receiving any bulletins from you, Gisele.’

  ‘You can’t possibly think I want people to be speculating about us—’ She broke off awkwardly, not wanting him to think she thought there was an ‘us’. ‘I mean me.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I think that? This is what you wanted, wasn’t it? To revive interest in the cabaret? As I remember it you put together an entire presentation with that in mind.’

  ‘For you,’ she said, thrown by what he was intimating. ‘I showed that to you—not the rest of Paris!’

  She felt stupidly hurt, because she had been holding on to that interlude as one of the nicer interactions between them—something genuine, when she’d been allowed to show him what she could do. Weirdly, it had felt more personal than when he’d been expertly gliding her under him on the bed.

  ‘You invited the rest of Paris in with that neat little speech on the Champs-Élysées.’ He drummed the wheel with his fingers. ‘Then there was your performance in the lobby of the Plaza.’

  ‘I did not want to go up to your hotel room. You were the one who was so all-fire keen.’

  For the first time it looked as if she’d scored a hit, because he didn’t appear to have anything superior to say.

  ‘You had an injury,’ he said finally.

  She’d had an...

  Gigi pressed her lips together, aware that if she kept this up she was going to say something unwise.

  Something that might see her standing at a bus stop at one in the morning on the side of a Moscow road.

  Did they even have bus stops?

  Light was smearing the windscreen and her gaze was drawn to neon advertisements, the glowing façades of skyscrapers. The tension in her body increased.

  This was the way she’d used to feel with her dad—that airless, suffocating feeling when she couldn’t say the wrong word, do the wrong thing, because then she’d be out. On her own. Carlos’s way or the highway. The only problem was she’d never quite been sure what the wrong thing was.

  A feeling a little like panic began to spiral through her. It was bringing back her dependent teenage years with a thump. No say in where she went, what she did. You’re not powerless any more, she reminded herself. Those days are gone—you have options.

  She had her passport. She could take a taxi back to the airport. She could book a flight and have Lulu pay for it, using her credit card, and pay her back when she got home. She didn’t have to stay with this man.

  By the time they pulled up she had several speeches ready for him. But when she climbed out and looked up, took in the imposing building with caryatids on the stone columns either side of the entrance, and the doorman in uniform, she discovered her overriding feeling was one of nerves.

  She wouldn’t be intimidated. She wouldn’t.

  ‘Come.’

  He took hold of her elbow none too gently and something inside Gigi tugged and tore.

  She yanked her elbow out of his grasp. ‘Stop being so horrible to me!’

  ‘Horrible?’ He stood over her, keeping the wind out of her face with those broad shoulders of his.

  Gigi stepped a little closer, because it was cold, and he was big and warm, and even if he was being a horrible she trusted him.

  ‘I want you to be nicer to me.’

  ‘Nicer to you?’

  He made it sound like a word in a foreign language, and maybe it was. Maybe she’d got this all wrong and she was just a nuisance in his world.

  ‘I just think you could make an effort to be nicer to me,’ she grumbled. ‘After all, I’ve had a rough day too.’

  He didn’t respond, but he was looking down at her as if she had said something weird.

  ‘Don’t worry—forget about it.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked up at the building. ‘Is this where I’m staying?’

  He said something in Russian, but this time he didn’t touch her or hurry her inside.

  She tried not to feel self-conscious as she stood beside him in the lift taking them from the ground to the sixth floor.

  She’d worked out that he wasn’t very happy with her. She guessed she couldn’t blame him. It wouldn’t matter so much, but all the running about with him yesterday, the confidential talks, the amazing way he’d been with her insecurities over her feet, not to mention what had happened afterwards, had...well, had aroused feelings in her.

  She didn’t often have these feelings, and if she’d had a choice in the matter she wouldn’t have picked him as the ideal target for them, but it wasn’t as if she had any say in it. They were her feelings.

  In contrast, Khaled didn’t seem to think she had any—or was it just that he was so used to women falling into his lap?

  She guessed he kissed women as if he was lost in the desert and the woman in question was water every day of the week.

  It wasn’t the same for her.

  Before Khaled had taken her unawares on the bathroom vanity yesterday she actually hadn’t kissed anyone since New Year’s Eve—although that was something she’d be keeping to herself. He didn’t need to know that her private life was the equivalent of a mill pond. She’d be holding on to her out-every-night-showgirl status, thank you very much.

  Then the lift doors opened and she stepped out into what had to be the most glamorous lobby, fitted out in black and white marble and granite.

  ‘Wow...’ she breathed.

  Movement-activated sensors shed low light through the hall ahead of them. It all looked very welcoming and expensive and intimate.

  ‘Will I be staying here?’

  He closed the doors behind them and his hand caught hers. Not a snatch, but a tangling of his clever fingers with hers.

  Gigi’s arm tingled. Her breath caught as he turned her around and she found herself looking up into beautiful dark eyes so thickly lashed it was a wonder he didn’t need splints to keep the lids up. This inconsequential thought flew away with all the other butterfly thoughts about what she was doing here and why she felt so nervous.

  She would never be too sure if she stepped towards him or he to her, only suddenly there was no space between them at all and she was in his arms.

  This was her answer, she thought fleetingly, This was him being nice to her.

 
Very nice to her.

  The need swelled up in her like a symphony as she lifted on her toes and wound her arms around his neck and held on.

  She didn’t know why, but when he kissed her she always felt as if she was on the deck of a ship. Everything was heaving up and down in the most delightful manner and she would lose her footing if she let go.

  He re-angled the kiss, going deeper, moving against her, backing her against the wall. She moaned softly and kissed him back, her heart beating like a drum. She instinctively moved her hips, pressing her pelvis into his groin, feeling the length of him so impossibly hard against her.

  At first all Gigi allowed in was a feeling of relief that finally the torturous suspension of this powerful feeling between them was over.

  But then she discovered she couldn’t shut down her thoughts, even though her body was going crazy with wanting him.

  What was she doing here? Did she really think she could just give in to her feelings and forget about the consequences? She didn’t even know what was in Khaled’s mind. Would he think she was making up to him just for what he could do for her?

  Stop thinking! she shouted at her busy little brain.

  No. She couldn’t give in to this physical longing, because that was all it was, when her motives must appear extremely ambiguous to him.

  She broke the kiss.

  It was the hardest thing to do in that moment.

  ‘I don’t want to be accused of using sex for leverage,’ she panted.

  ‘Ch’to?’ His eyes were heavy-lidded and he was breathing hard.

  ‘All the girls think I slept with you to further my career.’

  ‘This is not a problem for me,’ he responded, and his mouth moved over hers again, making it impossible to do anything but absorb the sensation, the fierce push of his lean, hard body against hers.

  Still her mind kept beating, like the sea against a tethered boat. No...yes...oh, help. It was so unbearably exciting, and so unfair. He was being no help at all with her moral quandary! He branded her with that mouth of his and for a few incredibly exciting seconds she gave way.

  It was even better than before because she just let herself feel. Her thighs literally felt as if a landslide was going on. She could barely hold herself up. But he was there, hard and powerful, doing all the supporting work a girl could need.

  No, there was nothing to stop them...nothing but her conscience. Nosy, interfering thing that it was.

  ‘Khaled?’

  She wedged her elbows in between them to give herself some wiggle room.

  ‘This can’t happen,’ she told him, even as she melted with pleasure over each hot, knicker-elastic-snapping kiss he laid down her neck.

  If the other girls could see me now.

  They’d kill her.

  No, Susie would tell her to go for it—get that squeak fixed. Solange would scoff, because Gigi hadn’t got a promise of anything out of him and she was just offering up the goods without a contract. Lulu would be horrified.

  Forty-eight hours?

  Gigi strained against him as he stroked a searching hand up under her sweater, under the completely unsexy thermal vest, and found a very happy to see him breast.

  Oh, yes, her nipples remembered him.

  Bad, bad nipples.

  He circled one with the broad pad of his thumb and she whimpered, because she felt it directly between her legs.

  He did it again and her knees buckled.

  ‘This isn’t fair...’ she whimpered.

  ‘Life isn’t fair,’ he responded against her mouth, as if he were telling her something she didn’t already know.

  The phone he’d gifted her began to vibrate in her hip pocket. At first it was difficult to tell, given that she was doing some serious vibrating herself in that area—but, no, it was a lozenge-shaped vibration, coming from the general vicinity of where she’d shoved the phone.

  She broke the kiss and reached down between them. Khaled watched her actions as if riveted, and for a moment she wondered if he thought she was going in another direction.

  No—she could have told him she wasn’t that bold. She left that kind of forthright sexual move to girls with a lot more know-how than her. She was more of a wait-and-see-what-he-wants-to-do-with-it kind of girl.

  She held up the phone like a red flag.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he growled.

  ‘Answering my phone,’ she breathed, because he still had one hand cradling her breast. ‘Excuse me.’

  She pushed ‘talk’.

  ‘Hello, Lulu?’

  Khaled stared at her as if she’d developed a second head, and as Lulu’s voice complained at being hung up on she supposed she had. Khaled looked at the phone, and for a breathless moment Gigi wondered if he was going to smash it on the floor.

  The part of her that had been anticipating that was to be severely disappointed.

  He said something in Russian, his hand slid away from her, and she found herself on her own, slumped against the doorframe. Lulu was wanting to know if she was safe and telling her she didn’t sound like herself.

  ‘We’ve just arrived—barely got in the door,’ she breathed, watching him stride away from her down the hall.

  ‘You sound like you’ve been running a race,’ Lulu countered suspiciously.

  Gigi swallowed hard. ‘No, no...just a flight of stairs.’ It was only a little lie, and there was no way she was going into what had just happened. She wasn’t even sure what had just happened. ‘Look, Lu, I’m beat. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. What time is it there?’

  ‘Dawn,’ said Lulu. ‘I’m in bed with Coco, watching all the repeat coverage of what happened last night. They’re saying Kitaev bought the cabaret so he could have you.’

  ‘Have me?’ Gigi knew she was red as a beetroot. ‘I’m not a prop. And besides, he won the cabaret in a card game!’

  ‘Maman says you have a pretty good case for slander.’

  A court case? No, thanks.

  Gigi began to make her way down the hall. Where had he gone?

  Lulu was recounting several cases in which people had been defamed in the press and won huge payouts, but Gigi wasn’t able to concentrate on a word. She needed to go in search of Khaled. Because right about now she was feeling she’d behaved like a rabbit, and she owed him an explanation—besides which, she didn’t even have a bed to sleep in.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SHE PEERED AROUND the corner into one dark room, and then another. Honestly, it was a bit rude, leaving her on her own.

  Which was when he appeared unexpectedly at the end of the hall, shirt unbuttoned.

  ‘I’m not driving you back to the airport tonight.’

  His deep, dark voice startled her, given she still had Lulu’s high, melodious French accent in her other ear.

  Gigi made her choice. She pushed ‘end’.

  ‘I think we should clear something up,’ she said, trying to firm her voice.

  ‘I agree. I know what you’re going to say: I shouldn’t have touched you.’ He headed off around the corner.

  Gigi almost broke into a sprint. No, no—that wasn’t what she was going to say at all. ‘Listen,’ she said, following him down a flight of stairs, ‘what I wanted to say was I know you’re probably going to sell L’Oiseau Bleu.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, and also everything that happened today is my fault and I’m willing to take it on the chin,’ she said in a rush.

  For such a big man he was incredibly light on his feet as he padded down the steps. He’d removed his shoes, and in jeans and an unbuttoned fresh shirt open across his chest he looked incredibly sexy, and for some reason younger, but also entirely beyond her reach.

  ‘You didn’t have to bring me here,
but you did. And I guess you know something about press intrusion and I should be grateful—and I am. But I don’t want you thinking I want something from you.’

  Khaled stopped so suddenly she rammed into his back. Gigi was aware she’d been in this position before.

  ‘Gigi,’ he said patiently, turning around slowly, ‘the only reason we got into all of this was because you want something from me.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  She took a step back, because frankly she didn’t trust herself within bumping distance of him. It took every ounce of her concentration to rip her eyes off his bare chest.

  ‘Look, I know your cynical viewpoint was probably earned the hard way, but my life hasn’t exactly been storybook either. I know well enough how mercenary and self-serving people can be, but that doesn’t mean you have to abandon your best instincts. You’ve certainly spent enough time with me now to form some idea of my character and to know I’m not on the make.’

  He shook his head. ‘Gigi, at the moment I’m too achingly hard to laugh, but your indignation is rich, given the events of the last forty-eight hours.’

  He was...? She tried to ignore the melting response of her body to the news that he still wanted her. God knew she wanted him. They just had things to discuss first.

  Only he kept going down the stairs.

  ‘I guess it suits you to think I want stuff from you!’ she called after him. ‘It means you can keep treating me like luggage and not talk to me about what happened between us in my flat and at the hotel.’

  She shut her eyes briefly. She hadn’t meant to say that.

  ‘Why would I want to talk to you about it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know—because you kissed me?’

  He looked up at her. The way his eyes ran over her body made her shiver.

  ‘It was a mistake.’

  Was it?

  Which was when her stomach decided to yawn open and a noisy, unambiguous rumble made itself known.

  Kill me now.

  He frowned. ‘When did you last eat?’

  ‘Four o’clock. Yesterday.’

  He said something clearly uncomplimentary in Russian.