Caught in His Gilded World

by Lucy Ellis

  If she let it be.

  She wasn’t going to do that.

  But her fighting words were already beginning to topple, because he might be saying one thing but his body surrounding hers was saying another—and she was fairly susceptible to his body.

  She’d have to watch out for those mixed signals. She didn’t want to get confused. She really didn’t want to find herself jumping through hoops to make him pay attention to her. She’d been there, got the T-shirt.

  No, she needed to hold on to her independence even if it choked her. She was perfectly capable of meeting his sophistication with some of her own. Yes, she’d definitely do that.

  She lifted her chin. ‘Sure.’

  He let her go. Only to slide his hands over her hips and delve down between her thighs. Heat followed those hands and Gigi arched her body helplessly back against him.

  He cupped one breast and plucked at her nipple as his other hand teased and pleasured her. She turned her head to try and kiss him but he was controlling their movements, and when he gruffly told her to put her hands forward on the bench she did as she was told and he entered her.

  The eroticism of the movement took her unawares, and then he was moving inside her, guiding her hips with his big hands, and she couldn’t think—only feel. Her body had become a vessel for their mutual pleasure, until she splintered into a thousand pieces and he followed her.

  Gigi turned, clumsy and off-centre, not sure what had just happened, wanting connection and touch and to be kissed.

  Khaled curved his hand around her cheek and she strained upwards to kiss him. For a moment she thought he was holding back, but something flashed in the back of his eyes and with a groan he lowered his head and kissed her with all the lush romanticism she could have wished for.

  Then he scooped her up and carried her back to bed and began all over again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘HAVE YOU GONE LOCO?’

  Khaled pictured the long-legged, red-haired beauty he’d left less than an hour ago, sleeping like a Burne-Jones pre-Raphaelite maiden wrapped in white sheets, and thought maybe he had.

  This raging possessive feeling inside him was a form of madness.

  Which was why he’d needed to go for a run. Clear his head. Get some space between him and the woman he’d left in his bed.

  Now he was loping back through the park across the road from his apartment building, his phone against his ear, his old friend’s amusement putting some perspective back into the picture.

  Alejandro du Crozier had experienced his own share of media attention. He was one of the world’s highest-paid polo players, and the paparazzi had a love affair with the Argentinian’s private life.

  ‘The press are calling it a kidnapping. I hope she’s worth it, my friend.’

  Khaled frowned. He wasn’t discussing Gigi. Even if her actions had brought much of this upon herself, the woman he’d come to know did not deserve to be the target of spurious stories in the media. And after last night he didn’t want to discuss her even with Alejandro, and they had shared a lot over the years.

  The Argentinian had rolled up in the gorge below Mount Elbrus several years ago, looking for Kabardian breeding stock, and a business relationship had turned into a strong friendship. Khaled was not a man who had many friends, but he took those he had seriously.

  Still, he would not discuss Gigi with him.

  She would be distressed to know he was even talking about her.

  She wasn’t as sturdy as she tried to appear. There was a gentleness inside her that brought out instincts in him he had made a life’s work of repressing.

  The fact that he knew this about her wasn’t what bothered him. It was that he cared.

  She didn’t guard herself or put on a pretence of sophistication—she was simply herself.

  Which was when it struck him that she couldn’t possibly have been a knowing participant in her father’s petty crimes. If he’d ever really believed it.

  She had a redoubtable quality in her that probably made her a good and loyal friend, and that explained why her little flatmate had been ringing the phone off the hook—she was clearly concerned for her well-being.

  Khaled wasn’t unaware that if something happened to him the only people to weep and wail would be his shareholders.

  He liked it that way. He didn’t want people feeling responsible for him.

  His mother had given up any chance of a real life to make sure he was raised in her home village. He hated that knowledge. It had haunted him all his life. So he’d been careful not to form relationships where sacrifice was involved. Of any kind.

  He was generous in his sexual relationships with women. He made sure the women concerned were happy, and usually his money took care of that. Just as he was using his wealth and his influence to shield Gigi from the media. But emotionally he didn’t risk anything—which was why his unease about Gigi was like taking a step into the dark.

  Shaking it off, he turned the conversation back to sport and to horse stock before he finished his call with Alejandro and headed across the road. He was anticipating finding Gigi awake and dressed and off-limits.

  He was just going upstairs when a call showed up from his lawyer in Nalchik. He tore his attention away from a mental image of Gigi naked, with that little half-moon smile tilting her expressive mouth.

  ‘They want to talk.’

  Everything but Gigi’s little smile fell away as he stopped in his tracks, unable to credit what he’d just heard.

  ‘Talk next year or talk in the foreseeable future?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Even as he listened to his lawyer lay it all out he called up the internet sites of Moscow’s major papers. It was all there.

  Kitaev conducts Tartar raid on Bluebird in Paris.

  Bride-stealing gets an update as Russian oligarch plucks his bird of paradise.

  ‘The elders believe you’ve shown respect for tradition. It seems they believe the “romance of the century” story. It’s done the trick.’

  Two years.

  Two years and this was what shifted the balance?

  Khaled didn’t know whether to laugh or curse.

  ‘I’ll fly down tonight.’

  ‘Not just you,’ said his lawyer. ‘You need to bring this woman.’

  For a moment something sharp and hot and entirely violent passed through him.

  ‘This woman,’ he growled, ‘has a name.’

  ‘Miss Valente.’ He literally heard his lawyer swallow. ‘It is advisable, given she appears to have swung the vote.’

  Which meant, effectively, that Gigi wasn’t going home. Not yet.

  Khaled exhaled, shoved his phone into his back pocket and strode energetically down the hall, pushing open the door, struck by how good he felt. He put it down to finally getting his hands on the road.

  Gigi wasn’t in bed. She was sitting on its edge, rolling a pair of tights up her legs. Her incredibly long, dance-honed legs. His eyes followed all the way up to a pair of white cotton panties that somehow did more for him than last night’s teeny-tiny bit of gold dental floss.

  She looked up as the door reverberated on its hinges.

  He whipped his T-shirt up over his head, tugged his sweats and briefs down and powered her back onto the mattress.

  ‘Khaled!’ she shrieked, giggling.

  ‘Gigi.’

  He fastened his mouth to hers and her body leapt under his. He dragged her top up over her head and her hair sprayed everywhere.

  ‘Do you ever wear a bra?’ he groaned, as if it were a complaint—or a prayer.

  Gigi parted her lips to speak but his mouth was there first, and then he began to make love to her until she was wrapping her long legs with those dangling tights around
him, making happy cries.

  She was still panting when he collapsed and buried his face in her lovely silky hair, inhaled the scent of her. He could do it all over again.

  But he’d had a purpose before he’d been distracted.

  He sat up and looked around.

  * * *

  Gigi watched him with slightly glazed eyes. Waking up alone had not been the best of feelings, but she’d tried to be pragmatic about it, given their conversation in the bathroom. This pragmatism was going to be a little hard to hold on to if Khaled insisted on doing this to her every time the mood struck him.

  To her astonishment he vaulted over her and began rummaging in the bedside drawer.

  More condoms? Again?

  Gigi was a little amazed to discover that her blissfully aching body was on board with that.

  But after a few moments he wrenched the drawer loose and emptied it onto the bed.

  She sat up. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘I’m looking for your passport.’

  Gigi went cold.

  She didn’t think—she acted. She grabbed a pillow and whacked him hard across the back with it.

  It was like using a feather to swat a water buffalo. ‘Hey,’ he said, giving her an almost boyishly baffled grin, ‘what’s that for?’

  ‘Timing!’ she hurled at him, and leapt off the bed and marched into the bathroom, slamming shut the door. Then throwing the lock for good measure.

  He thumped on the door.

  ‘Not. Coming. Out.’

  ‘Gigi...’

  He didn’t sound angry. He didn’t even try the lock. She waited a few minutes. Nothing.

  Cautiously she opened the door and found him throwing clothes into an overnight bag.

  She picked up her new grey trousers, which he’d left in a puddle on the floor last night, and threw them at him. Hard. ‘Check the pockets.’

  He retrieved her passport and tossed it to her. ‘There’ll be a border check—you’ll need this.’

  Gigi just stood there, her heart pounding. He wasn’t sending her home?

  ‘You’ll need to pack a bag, Gigi.’

  She folded her arms. ‘I didn’t agree to go anywhere further than this with you. Khaled, I have to go home—my job’s at stake.’

  ‘Your job’s fine. I’m the boss, remember?’

  ‘For how long?’ She hadn’t meant to ask, but now they were having this conversation she intended to find out.

  ‘Long enough for you to pack a bag and come with me now. Listen, I’ll look after it for you—you don’t need to worry about your job, malenki. Come with me now, and when we get back we’ll work something out.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she blurted out. ‘Don’t make out that I’m with you because of what you can do for me. I’ve not asked you for one thing to do with the cabaret since we left Paris. That’s not what this is about. I won’t let you make it into something it’s not.’

  Khaled stilled. ‘What is it, then, Gigi?’

  ‘Great sex,’ she whispered, her chest hurting. ‘I thought that was what we’d agreed—you can’t change the rules now.’

  She waited for him to say that he hadn’t, that he wasn’t looking any further ahead, that he didn’t want to try for something a little more committed. Then she would say, well, she didn’t want that, she was quite happy with what they had. Only maybe one night was enough—because she wasn’t sure her heart could survive any more nights and days knowing there was no future between them.

  But she wouldn’t say the last part, because it made her sound like an unsophisticated ninny.

  ‘So I am no longer great sex?’ His tone was surprisingly gentle.

  Her heart lurched, because he was trying to make her smile, trying to wind this back a notch. And that was a relief—because they were entering territory it was probably best they didn’t.

  ‘Well, you are...’

  He didn’t mean for you to answer, eejit, he meant it rhetorically.

  ‘But I guess you know you are.’ She frowned. She was stuffing this up. ‘What I mean to say is that I didn’t mean to reduce you to something physical. I mean, it’s not like I’m out there every night with men drinking champagne from my shoes or something.’

  Way to go—impress him with your showgirl lifestyle, Gisele. Tell him about your knitting project—that’ll put an end to this.

  ‘You surprise me,’ he said, in that dangerously quiet way of his that made her think he might be laughing at her again. Only when she took a peek he looked a million miles away from laughing.

  It suddenly occurred to her.

  ‘You don’t want me to go? Home, I mean?’

  He said something soft and exasperated in Russian and she stayed where she was as he walked up to her, took her face between his hands and looked at her.

  Really looked at her.

  Gigi got lost in his dark eyes.

  ‘Gigi, I’ve got to go south for business.

  Then he kissed her. And although she’d thought he had already kissed her and she had kissed him last night in all the ways imaginable, this was so lushly romantic, with his hands in her hair, and her hands curled trustingly between them, it felt new. It felt like the first time. Not just between them, but like her first kiss.

  Gigi opened her eyes to find him gazing down at her, as if the kiss had astonished him too.

  ‘My mother’s people are indigenous to the region of Kabardino-Balkaria in the mountains of the North Caucasus.’

  He spoke with a quiet sincerity that moved through her like a promise.

  ‘I tell you this because I have a place down there, at the foot of Mount Elbrus. We can be alone for a couple of days. No work, no interruptions...’ he gave her a smile ‘...great sex.’

  Then he sobered.

  ‘I want to show you where I come from. What matters to me. Give me that time.’

  More time to stumble deeper into this. To lose a little more of her ability to find her way out.

  His next words didn’t make her heart lift as they should.

  ‘Then I promise to return you to Paris.’

  * * *

  He hadn’t told her it would be like this.

  Gigi lay in a cot of marmot fur in Khaled’s strong arms and watched the moon and stars through their own private observatory.

  ‘Why did people stare at me in the village today?’

  ‘You’re the exotic creature I’ve snared in my net. If I’d hunted and skinned you they couldn’t have been more surprised.’

  Gigi frowned. ‘Because of what was printed in the Moscow papers about me being a showgirl? I guess this is a pretty conservative place.’ She raised her head to look at him anxiously. ‘It won’t get you into trouble, will it?’

  He was quiet, and then he said in that low, sleep-gravelled voice Gigi liked to pretend no other woman in the world had ever been privy to and belonged only to her, ‘Other men may try to lure you away...that’s about the extent of it.’

  ‘If they use cake I can’t promise not to go.’

  ‘That’s my girl.’

  She looked up archly. ‘I think you could have left me in Paris.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I don’t think I was in much danger at all. I think it’s perfectly clear you wanted an excuse to act like a Russian he-man—’

  This earned her a squeeze around her waist.

  ‘—to sling me over your shoulder like a kill and bring me with you without the chance that I might turn you down!’

  Khaled put his mouth to the shell of her ear. ‘You’ve found me out.’

  Gigi beamed.

  It had been this way since they’d left Moscow and flown into Nalchik two days ago, and then driven for miles al
ong a highway that could be described at best as bumpy in a landscape that had taken her breath away.

  Deep valleys, high mountains peaked with snow... At one point huge mountain deer had forced them to a stop as they crossed the road.

  He’d brought her in the gathering dusk to a gorge littered with tall stone fortresses. Khaled had told her he’d refurbished this one, all six storeys of it, and they were now on the top floor, with its glass ceiling and panoramic views.

  He had tossed her into this cot filled with marmot furs, pulling off her clothes and some of his own like a man possessed, and had made love to her with such fierceness and tenderness Gigi couldn’t help feeling a little way in over her head.

  After all, he’d made this amazing romantic gesture—bringing her here.

  ‘I’ve never brought a woman here before.’

  Okay. He had her attention.

  ‘Why is that?’ She tried to sound casual.

  ‘Hmm?’

  She frowned at him and wondered if she acted like one of those female mountain goats they’d seen yesterday trying to get a male’s attention, bucking and sending clods of earth into the air so he’d get the message.

  ‘Why have you never brought a girlfriend here?’

  ‘I haven’t had one to bring.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Right. So what was Alexandra Dashkova?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She had herself wrapped in a rug and rolled out before you.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘The other dancers were talking about her,’ Gigi persisted, because Didn’t she? wasn’t going to cut it.

  ‘I’ve met her several times socially—we’ve never been intimate.’

  Gigi didn’t know why, but something very heavy that she hadn’t even known was pressing down on her chest suddenly wasn’t there any more.

  ‘I guess people write all sorts of nonsense about you. I should know.’

  ‘Some of the nonsense I don’t mind. The truth is none of the women I’ve been involved with are the kind of people I’d bring here.’

  There was a lot to unpack there, so Gigi went with, ‘Too glamorous?’