Satin Dreams (9 page)

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 “It’s a little out of date.”
 

“A little out of date,” hardly described the apartment, which resembled the interior of a luxury ocean liner of the thirties.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 lips 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.
 

She tried to focus her eyes on the lean, muscular male body hurriedly stepping out of its clothes. Nicholas Palliades had managed to do something mysterious to her; she felt somnolent, confused, dazedly sensuous, waiting there against the gold satin sheet. Not like herself at all.
 

Alix slowly pulled down her panty hose and dropped them over the side of the bed. While she did so, Nicholas kicked off his shoes, his black eyes following the shifting curve of her hips, the flat planes of her belly with its ruddy triangle of curls. He tore off his tuxedo trousers and tossed them away. Black underwear briefs followed. Then suddenly he was standing at the side of the ornate bed regarding her with burning black eyes, powerfully, unselfconsciously nude.
 

After one startled glance she looked away. But a vivid picture remained in her mind of a tanned, sleekly muscled body, black hair that dwindled in a dark line to the slitted indent of his navel, then down into a springy mat with his big, aroused sex thrusting up rigidly in it.
 

Her mouth was dry; her lips wouldn’t move enough to speak. Her throbbing body wouldn’t obey her mind’s suddenly urgent command to get up, get out of the bed, and out of there before it was too late. It took all her strength of will to stay where she was, knowing that if she just waited, everything would be over soon.
 

She saw him turn and reach for the trousers he’d discarded so hurriedly on the floor. He took out a packet and tore it open. Carefully and deliberately, he stroked a silky opaque covering into place.
 

“I have to go,” Alix whispered faintly.
 

The frontal view of his powerful body and the protection he had put in place was boldly provocative. And frightening. Her racing mind told her this was Paris in the here and now, and that someone like Nicholas Palliades wasn’t going to go to bed with a casual partner without protecting both of them. But it didn’t make it any better.
 

Then he was on the bed, kneeling over her.