Satin Dreams Read online

  She knew she was supposed to squeal with delight.

  Very slowly, she scooped the mate to the earring out of her champagne glass with her fork, not able to bring herself to raise her eyes to the man across the table who was watching her so intently.

  The waiter had served her a glass of Moet & Chandon Imperial Brut with a pair of diamond earrings inside. Just the sort of ostentatious gesture you would expect of someone like Nicholas Palliades. She wondered suddenly if he would bundle her off in a taxi without the earrings if she turned him down.

  She wasn’t going to turn him down, that was the whole point. The whole, ridiculous situation made her want to laugh. But she knew if she gave into the giggles welling up inside her, she’d ruin everything.

  The earrings were pear-shaped, platinum pendants with small stones studded around a yellowish diamond of about two carats in each. A perfect gift for a date with a nightclub singer, or a struggling young actress. Or a poorly paid couture-house mannequin. If she had to guess, she’d estimate the earrings were worth several thousand dollars. Certainly not as much as the dress she was wearing.

  “Perhaps I should have selected amethysts.” He was watching her closely; to her surprise, he actually sounded hesitant. “To match your eyes. They are an extraordinary color, you know.”

  Alix knew she was expected to say something. Even the cossack waiter was standing by expectantly. “They’re...” Alix searched for the word. “They’re very nice.”

  “Nice?” His black brows came down in a scowl. “They’re more than ‘nice.’ I chose them myself.”

  She couldn’t look at him; her lips were quivering treacherously. “I—I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Say the truth.” He was catching on now, and he didn’t like it. “We both know men are interested in sex,” he said between his teeth, “and women in money. Perhaps you would like something else also? A bracelet? A ring?”

  Good Lord, but he was awful, she marveled. He was the sort of man who thought of fine wines, expensive cars, and beautiful women as equal pleasures. Bought and paid for, all of them. She knew the type.

  Alix stared down at the bowl of beet soup that had been put in front of her. Nicholas Palliades was not only totally unacceptable, he was also exactly what she was running from. He was in the same league as the threatening men on the telephone, men who wanted to trap and imprison her. Men who spared nothing to get what they wanted.

  “The earrings are fine.” She knew now it was stupid to argue. He, too, was the enemy. “For their purpose.”

  “For their purpose?” His mouth flattened, displeased. “They are very nice earrings. The diamonds are real. I remembered that your ears were not pierced, so I selected clips.”

  The cossack waiter took away Alix’s untouched borscht. Other waiters now advanced toward them bearing shashlik: bits of skewered lamb, onions, potatoes, and tomatoes doused with brandy set afire and impaled, incredibly enough, on real cavalry swords. They stood in a circle around the table with their fiery offerings while the balalaika players played and sang the Red Army song “Meadowland.”

  “A gift wasn’t necessary.” She had to raise her voice to be heard. “Besides, they’re too—expensive.”

  He ignored the elaborately flaming display going on around them. “I don’t expect a woman to go to bed with me and get nothing in return.” When she stared, he went on grimly, “And I am very rich, as you undoubtedly know.” He lifted a finger to point. “Put them on. I want to see how they look.”

  Alix slowly dried the earrings on her napkin.

  It wasn’t funny anymore. It was war, and he seized every advantage. Bang! “I don’t expect a woman to go to bed with me and get nothing in return.” Bang! “Men want sex and women want money.” Her redheaded temper simmered. Was this his personal philosophy? Or had he just read it somewhere?

  Alix clipped the diamonds to her ears.

  He studied her, surveying the effect of the jewels against her hair, her creamy white skin, and the glittering green dress. “Don’t sell them,” he said curtly. “If at any time you need the money, I will buy them back from you.”

  The waiters had put out the fires and were busy emptying sizzling meat and charred vegetables onto their plates. “You don’t have to buy them back,” Alix said faintly. Russian food was not one of her favorites. “I won’t sell them.”

  The black wings of his eyebrows arched again. “On the contrary. I know how these things go with you girls at the couture houses.”

  Alix put down her fork and counted to three. “Rudi Mortessier has been very good to me,” she said evenly. This man really was impossible. “I really don’t need expensive presents.” She couldn’t afford to have any complaints filtering back to Mortessier’s. “And Rudi’s generous. He lent me this dress to wear tonight.”

  “Rudi can afford to be generous.” He smiled sardonically. “It’s good publicity.”

  Alix gave up. Palliades wanted Mortessier’s best model, the lovely dress, the evening out with all that it implied, but he wouldn’t grant the couturier a simple publicity break. As she watched him cut his shashlik into small pieces, quickly and economically, she felt a rush of emotion that surprised her. He was the enemy. Their chances for getting through the evening were probably marginal.

  He didn’t lift his head as he asked, “Are you happy working there?”

  She hardly heard him, seething with very satisfying thoughts about what it would be like to bring this bad-tempered, spoiled Greek playboy to his knees.

  “And the designer,” he added, “Gilles Vasse. He is happy working for Rudi, too?”

  With an effort, Alix brought her mind back from thoughts of murder and torture. “What does Gilles have to do with it?”

  “How does the designer Gilles Vasse feel about Rudi Mortessier?” He looked impatient. “Is there a bond there? Strong enough to keep Vasse with Mortessier? Are they lovers?”

  She’d never heard that before. Alix managed a slightly reproving look. “Actually, I think Rudi gets on Gilles’s nerves. Gilles is young and talented and very ambitious. And Rudi—”

  She stopped, suddenly wondering if Nicholas Palliades had hidden motives for taking her to dinner. Every designer in Paris had spies. And couture houses guarded their secrets jealously.

  He waved away the overly attentive waiter. “You haven’t touched your dinner,” he observed.

  Alix looked down at her plate. “I wasn’t hungry.”

  Abruptly, Nicholas Palliades threw his napkin down on the table. “Then we will go.”

  He stood up and tossed a thick bundle of franc notes on the table. The lavish gesture, not even calling for the bill, was a signal for the head waiter to rush up with Alix’s green satin coat. A squadron of cossack waiters crowded around as the band followed them, serenading them out of the restaurant and, unexpectedly, all the way into the street.

  The chauffeur was waiting. He jumped out of the limousine and into the ankle-deep snow to open the rear door. The balalaikas launched into “Dark Eyes,” as Alix slid into the back seat.

  The chauffeur closed the door and plodded through the snow to the driver’s side. Nicholas Palliades picked up the silver telephone. “Avenue Foch,” he ordered.

  Alix turned in her seat to look back as the Daimler slowly and smoothly pulled away from La Veille Russe. The musicians stood on the sidewalk, their fur hats and shoulders thickly sprinkled with snowflakes, playing animatedly in spite of the weather. Nicholas Palliades had undoubtedly paid them well.

  As the car picked up speed, Alix had a feeling that this was all so well-rehearsed that the balalaika band had probably stood like that, playing their romantic Russian tunes for Nicholas Palliades and his beautiful dinner partners, many, many times before.

  Even though her methods were untried, her role unrehearsed, she was playing a game, too.

  Don’t think about it, she told herself as the car raced into the night.

  Five

  The avenue Foch
, the address Nicholas Palliades had given to his chauffeur, was Paris’s—in fact, Europe’s—most elegant street. From the Arc de Triomphe to the end of the Champs Elysees, it housed some of the world’s most patrician names: the Prince and Princess de Polignac, several branches of Rothschilds, the Bourbon Count of Paris, pretender to the French throne. Princess Caroline of Monaco kept up the luxurious residence that had been a favorite of her mother, the former movie star Grace Kelly. Even the notoriously secretive billionaire Greek shipping magnate, Socrates Palliades, had kept an apartment at number 29 since before World War Two.

  The street was slippery with several inches of snow. Nicholas Palliades quickly escorted Alix from the limousine into one of the avenue’s palatial nineteenth-century town houses. In the lobby, a plainclothes security guard let them into a tiny jewel box of a brass elevator that whisked them to the top floor, where an elderly manservant in what looked like a ship’s steward’s uniform let them into a vast, dimly lighted apartment, then discreetly disappeared.

  Rigid with nerves, Alix braced herself for another conspicuous display of wealth. A marble-floored foyer led to a gloomy grande salon decorated in 1940s chrome and glass moderne, with dark mahogany wood veneer covering the ceiling and walls.

  Nicholas Palliades slipped the green satin evening coat from her shoulders and dropped it onto a brown velvet overstuffed chair. “My family has had this flat for over fifty years.” He looked around, frowning. “It’s a little out of date.”

  “A little out of date,” hardly described the apartment, which resembled the interior of a luxury ocean liner of the thirties. A waist-high dado rail of polished aluminum ran around the room. There was a brown and beige geometric carpet underfoot. On the dark, varnished walls, chrome sconces projected pools of light onto the equally dark, varnished wood ceiling. When this room was first decorated, salt-water Art Deco was undoubtedly the last word in chic, Alix couldn’t help thinking. At least for people who made their money in ships.

  She wrapped her arms around her suddenly chilly white shoulders exposed by Mortessier’s glittering dress. She was feeling more and more trapped. This won’t take long, she thought desperately, only an hour or so. She didn’t think she could hold herself together any longer than that.

  Nicholas Palliades moved to open the brown velvet drapes that covered the windows at the end of the salon. As the velvet rolled back, the huge, plate-glass window presented a panoramic night view of the city of Paris.

  In spite of herself, Alix stood transfixed. The view was extraordinary, even for the famed City of Lights. The floodlit fantasies of the Trocadero and the Palace of Chaillot were in the foreground, the glimmer of the wintry River Seine edged with streetlights beyond. Above them rose the black, spraddling ghost of the Eiffel Tower, mysteriously veiled in whirling snow.

  Nicholas turned to face her, his face in shadows. “Would you like a drink?”

  Numbly, Alix shook her head. She couldn’t drink any more; her head was already swimming with champagne.

  “Well, then,” he said.

  Keeping his black eyes on her, he lifted his hands and undid his tuxedo tie, then the top buttons of his shirt. He dropped the black tie on the chair letting it fall on top of her evening coat.

  Alix closed her eyes. She’d sat through supper, she’d endured the awful Russian nightclub, and most of all, she’d endured Nicholas Palliades himself. If this didn’t take more than an hour or two, she was sure she could stick with it long enough to become Nicholas Palliades’s lover. Or mistress. Or whatever you wanted to call it.

  When Alix opened her eyes a second later, he was striding purposefully across the room. She tried not to flinch as he stopped in front of her, tall, darkly inscrutable, and put his hands on her waist to draw her to him. Through the front of his evening trousers Alix could feel a distinct hard bulge.

  It was going to happen.

  She gasped instinctively as he lowered his head.

  “Ah, you’re so beautiful.” His chiseled features, the longlashed black eyes, were right in hers. Nicholas Palliades seemed to want to have sex with her very much; the strong fingers gripping her waist were trembling slightly. In fact, his expression was filled with a hunger that frightened her. “I’m crazy,” she heard him mutter, “to do this, but I had to have you.” His hands laced through her hair, pulling the coppery strands loose around her face. “I thought of doing this, this afternoon when I saw you from the back of Mortessier’s showroom.”

  Alix stood still as a statue, telling herself that everything would go smoothly if she just didn’t panic. She was alarmed, though, at Nicholas Palliades’s burning intensity; it was so out of place in the cool, cynical dinner partner who’d talked of women, and what they would do for money.

  He was looking at her oddly. “Are you all right?”

  She couldn’t even nod. She was standing in his arms rigidly, waiting for his kiss. Wasn’t that what he intended to do?

  His hands pulled the narrow rhinestone straps from her shoulders. “This never happens to me.” He muttered to himself. “I don’t lose my head like this.”

  Under the pressure of his fingers the heavy, beaded bodice fell to the tips of her breasts and caught.

  He regarded it with slitted eyes. “How can one woman be so tantalizing?” She knew he didn’t expect her to answer. “All that fire,” he rasped. “That creamy white skin.”

  Alix tried not to shudder as he lifted his big hand and trailed the tip of his finger, feather-light, down the rise of her breast, testing its silky softness.

  The touch did terrible things to Alix. She jumped so violently, she almost fell out of his arms.

  “My God, I frightened you!” He grabbed her tightly. “No, no, I’m not going to hurt you, you have nothing to be afraid of.” His expression turned dark. “Has someone abused you? Is that what has happened?”

  Wide-eyed, shaken by her body’s curious reaction, Alix could only stare at him, her thoughts in an uproar. “Ah,” she began. “I—”

  He didn’t let her finish. “No, no, it’s impossible, nothing like that could have happened. You look too innocent.” He drew her closer and bent his head. His warm lips brushed hers, traced a line from her cheek to her chin, and then back again, gently parting her lips. “I wouldn’t want to think about anything like that,” he murmured against her opened mouth. “It would spoil this.”

  Eyes wide open, Alix let herself be kissed. The long tangle of Nicholas’s black lashes, the fine lines at the corners of his eyelids, the tendrils of curly black hair against his forehead ... he filled her vision. His body felt vibrant and strong as his warm tongue thrust between her lips, the kiss exploring so sweetly and deeply that she went from frozen resistance to a state of sensuous surprise.

  She closed her eyes, leaning into the feeling with a little thrill of expectancy. But, abruptly, he pulled back from her. His fingers caught the zipper in the back of the dress and pulled it down. “Now I want to see if the rest of you is perfect, too.”

  The heavy, beaded evening dress slithered down and fell to the carpet at her feet. Suddenly she was wearing only sheer panty hose and green satin shoes, her breasts and shoulders bare except for dangling strands of her tousled red hair.

  She heard the quick intake of his breath. “My God, you’re so beautiful you’re unreal.”

  Alix swayed toward him, caught up in a state of strange physical excitement that was terribly distracting; she hoped he wasn’t going to start the business about her hair and breasts again. She couldn’t bear it.

  He murmured, “You haven’t had too much to drink, have you?”

  Drink? The room was swimming, hot as a jungle. She wasn’t drunk, but something definitely was wrong with her. An intense throbbing she’d never known before controlled her body. She was naked, she realized. That in itself was amazing enough.

  Close your eyes, she thought. Don’t think about it.

  It was impossible not to think about it.

  Nicholas Palliades’s li
ps and hands were caressing her; they seemed to be everywhere at once. His fingers touched her breasts, circled the dark pink aureoles teasingly, then pulled the nipples to taut, aching points. Alix sagged in his arms.

  “Yes,” she heard him whisper. Then his mouth touched, kissed, pulled enticingly at her where the clever fingers had been. “Ah, yes, yes,” he groaned against the soft curve of her breast.

  Alix clung to him, her fingernails clutching the shoulders of his tuxedo jacket as he kissed the long column of her throat, the silky length of her shoulders and arms, as though he wanted to leave nothing of her untasted. She could only manage little sultry cries of shock and confusion.

  He answered with a sensuous growl. Still holding her tightly, he yanked off his jacket, then tore at the buttons of his shirt, peeling it away, as he renewed his ferocious caresses.

  “I want you,” he muttered.

  The bare flesh of his chest, hard and muscular with a few wiry black hairs, pressed against Alix’s naked breasts. She twisted her head, her eyes on the window. They were standing in front of an expanse of plate glass so large that all of Paris north of the Eiffel Tower could see them.

  “Yes,” he told her, “I know.”

  He picked her up in his arms and carried her down a shadowy hallway and into a bedroom that darkly resembled the premier luxury stateroom on an old Cunard liner. The bed’s plum velvet coverlet had been turned back for the night, revealing gold-colored satin sheets.

  He lowered her, hurriedly dragging the purple cover out of the way. “This damned place,” he said under his breath.

  He stood back, never taking his eyes from her as he undressed, devouring the sight of her long legs outlined in embroidered black panty hose, the fiery rays of her hair spread out against the pillowcase.

  Alix’s mind was more than a little muddled. It was strange to have her body in such a state that she couldn’t think. She gathered that Nicholas Palliades was finally going to make love to her. It was incredible that the threat she’d made that afternoon in a fit of defiance had led to this. At least it was going quickly now. He’d seemed in a terrible hurry from the moment he’d lowered the zipper of her gown.