Satin Dreams (28 page)

They reached the peak at the same time, Alix unashamedly wanton, Nicholas driven to a mindless ferocity. She barely heard his rasping cry as he convulsed, pouring himself into her.
 

When at last he stopped, still quivering with the after-shocks of release, he gasped, “My God, my God,” over and over. His hand groped for her to comfort her. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
 

Alix was still struggling for breath. She stared up into his black, thickly lashed eyes. Because he looked so wild she gasped, “Are you all right?”
 

“Not after this.” He buried his face in her shoulder, laughing huskily. “Alix, you drive me crazy.”
 

She lifted her head to look at him, but he had lowered his face to her breasts and she saw only the crown of his curly black head. She had never heard Nicholas Palliades laugh before.
 

Her own body was shivering, wet with lovemaking, sweetly drained. It had been indescribable. Nicholas was wonderful, she thought, amazed. He was her first, her only lover. Without thinking, her fingers laced softly through his black hair.
 

This couldn’t be happening. Alix wound the soft curls around her fingertips. She had picked him, calculatingly, in bitter defiance, and now she was falling in love with him!
 

Outside, the moan of an arctic wind coming up from the River Seine reminded her of the time. And the night.
 

“It’s Christmas,” she murmured, surprised.
 

She didn’t even know she’d spoken aloud. But against the curve of her breast, Nicholas stirred. She felt him smile. His other hand covered her nipple and stroked it, fingers gently relaxed.
 

“No,
this
is Christmas,” he murmured, content.
 

When she awoke it was gray dawn. Nicholas was gone. But there was a small black velvet box on the pillow next to her.
 

With a sinking feeling, Alix reached for the box and opened it, her hands shaking. The terrible earrings winked at her, all their little yellowish diamonds sparkling, now surrounding very large and expensive emeralds.
 

She fell back against the bed, her hand covering her eyes.
 

In this world, there was a price for everything.
 

Sixteen

Jack Storm held up two of the seventeen Gilles Vasse
fantaisie
designs for the ball at the opera, one in each hand.
 

Each sketch showed a figure that was one-third mythical bird, one-third human, and the remaining third amorphous swirls of lace.
 

Peter Frank hid his nervous smile behind his hand. Candace Dobbs looked dutifully attentive.
 

“So,” Jack asked, looking down the conference table, “have we pulled this thing off or haven’t we?”
 

Candace Dobbs peered over her glasses. “Gilles is so
avant-garde
,” she murmured noncommittally. “Really.”
 

Peter Frank thought the designs, considering what Gilles had had to work with, were remarkable. “I think we’ve got a winner,” he sai, saying what Jack wanted to hear.
 

It was the New York staff’s first meeting since the holidays. Candace Dobbs, Jack’s secretary Trini, Peter Frank, and the Paris public relations woman, Brooksie Goodman representing Prince Alessio Medivani, were seated in the new gray and pink executive meeting room on the second floor of the Maison Louvel for a preview of the designs Gilles had labored, all through the holidays, to finish on time.
 

“We’re going to put the costumes into production in spite of the front page story we got in
Women’s Wear Daily
on the lace. Which,” Jack added, looking at Candy Dobbs meaningfully, “we should have blocked, because we
pay
people who are supposed to be doing things like that.”
 

Candy leaped to her own defense. “Jack, we issued a denial. Some French news stringer in Lyon went out to our silk mill down there—”
 

“Jack,” Peter Frank broke in, “Louis de Brissac didn’t say anything to any reporter from WWD about the lace, and neither did his son. They’re as upset about it as we are.”
 

“Upset?” The blue eyes of the emperor of commercial fashion were arctic. “Who’s upset? Didn’t I just say we have people we pay to keep negative stories out of
Women’s Wear Daily
? Stories that claim Heavenly Lace is a ten-year-old item we found in a warehouse at a chickenshit textile company in central France?”
 

Peter Frank winced. No one knew how
Women’s Wear Daily,
the bible of the rag trade, had managed to dig up the real story of the de Brissac company’s laminated lace. But the paper had given it prime space, a lead feature on the front page. Then it had been picked up by
Time
and
Newsweek.
Coming as it did at the peak of their publicity hype about Heavenly Lace, the news break had not been good.
 

Worse,
Women’s Wear Daily
had been snidely funny about the whole thing. Despite his glamorous, fashion-mogul image, Jack Storm’s cutthroat Seventh Avenue origins always made him a great target.
 

Jack had returned to Paris in a very edgy mood. The rumor was that Marianna and the girls had spent the holidays dodging Jack. They’d ended up at their place in St. Croix, while Jack had flown out to Tahoe looking for them.
 

“It was here, too,” Brooksie Goodman said, “in the Paris papers.” She was wearing a silver-fox trimmed broadcloth suit with a dramatically sweeping black felt hat. “Hey, relax, they didn’t kill you. It was sorta’ mixed. The German papers were crappy, but the French held back. They seem to think this might be some product of French genius whose time has come. So what if it’s been hanging around in a warehouse in Lyons?”
 

Jack Storm eyed her shrewdly. He liked Ms. Goodman better every time he saw her. She was doing a good job with her end of things, getting the opera ball committee people to recruit the titled guests who, in turn, would draw the paying customers. Her client, Prince Alessio Medivani, was guaranteeing some of the biggest names in European aristocracy: the princes and princesses and grand dukes and duchesses and countesses and barons who showed up if, Jack had discovered, you
paid
them.
 

The prices were impressive, if somewhat baffling. A German prince with a castle on the Rhine, wearing full court dress and decorations, could be had for fifteen-hundred dollars American. Five hundred included his wife. A handsome, cultivated descendant of the King of Naples who was related to most of the ruling houses of Europe and Great Britain and who was currently working as loan officer in a bank in Rome, could be had for half that, plus air fare. A clutch of White Russian grand dukes, third-generation, went for simply all they could eat and drink.
 

Peter Frank couldn’t resist saying, “I heard ticket sales are slow. Is Wednesday night going to kill us, after all?”
 

Candace Dobbs glared at him. “Prince Medivani is taking care of that. Jack?” She addressed him directly. “We have this problem with a runway for the models to show Gilles’s
fantaisie
creations. The opera management wants us to just use the grand stairs, but that’s a real bitch. It’s steps all the way down, endlessly, with no place to stop and turn.”
 

The logistics of building a runway that would meet the approval of the opera management had proved to be another budget-buster. But no one wanted to bring it up in the light of Jack’s unpredictable mood and the money clouds existing in New York.
 

“Don’t forget the Greeks,” Peter said, to change the subject. “Give the backers a table right up front with you, Jack, and the prince and his family. I’ve heard the old guy, Socrates, doesn’t go anywhere, but the rest of the Greeks do. There’s a sister, and an aunt, I think. And, naturally, we got Niko Palliades.”
 

Those around the conference table contemplated the mix of millionaire ship-owning Greeks and the gambling casino-owning Balkan nobility. Plus, undoubtedly, Princess Jacqueline and her married but still notorious sister, Princess Catherine, who’d once had a romance with a younger Nicholas Palliades. Candace Dobbs visibly repressed a shudder.
 

“The prince will have his own table,” Brooksie Goodman put in. “He has a lot of important people he has to sit with.”
 

“On the other hand, Nick Palliades may not be there.” Peter had just picked up that bit of news that morning. “Palliades-Poseidon is in court in Germany, answering an indictment on a violation of international trade agreements. They have a court case pending here in France, too.”
 

Jack did not look up from the notes his secretary had taken. “So what about everything here while we were gone?”
 

Peter Frank looked uneasy. He’d told himself several times since he’d returned that it probably hadn’t been the wisest thing for the whole New York staff to go back to the States for the holidays. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something had taken place while they were away. There was a strong sense of hidden—even catastrophic—events swept under the rug. The seamstresses in the atelier were stuffed with it, the porter wouldn’t look you in the eye, and the handyman Karim was everywhere, stomping up and down the stairs in his soccer shoes.
 

And Alix.
 

Their sleeping beauty, Peter mused. She not only had their hot-eyed Greek moneyman, Nicholas Palliades, trailing after her adoringly, but now the young princess was also a big fan.
 

“Hey, the munchkin factory was going full blast.” If no one had noticed the strange undercurrent, he sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up. “Gilles busted his balls turning out those sketches. Alix and the girls finished cleaning up from the party. Louis de Brissac came up from Lyon in the week between Christmas and New Year’s because he wanted to see how the lace was used in the
fantaisie
designs. He was only here for two days, but managed to get in Gilles’s hair. I heard they had a fight because Gilles wouldn’t show him the sketches. The plumbers came back and fixed the john on the fourth floor because I left word we’d sue them if they didn’t.”
 

Jackson Storm got out of his chair and walked to the window that overlooked the rue des Benedictines. He put his hands behind his back. “When we start making up the costumes, I want nobody—but
nobody
—around. That includes the
Fortune
magazine guy. He can wait to finish his piece at the opera ball. His back still turned, he added, “Get outside security if we have to, but keep it secret. Have what’s-his-name, the old guy—”
 

“Abdul,” Candy supplied helpfully.
 

“Yeah, and the big kid, his son. Have them keep a close watch on the stuff in the building.” Jackson Storm put one hand on the window frame as he peered down into the windswept street.
 

He thought suddenly of the fascinating woman he’d met on the Concorde coming back from New York. She was married, she had told him, going on to meet her husband who was stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Bitburg, Germany. But an absolutely exquisite creature, with everything he was attracted to in a woman—tall and slender, with the sculpted features and brunette loveliness he liked.
 

“Remember,” he said, “this ball is intended to showcase Heavenly Lace and the Jackson Storm couture house. When we break the
fantaisie
designs that night, it will be a total press and media splash. We’re bringing in celebrities, luxury class all the way, by Concorde, limousines at the airport, champagne and fruit baskets in suites at the Ritz. We’ve got Barbara Walters, Jane Pauley, Joan Lunden,
Vogue, Harper’s, Elle
, the
Washington Post,
the
New York Times,
Associated Press, UPI—” He leaned forward, distracted by something in the street. “These people won’t be able to spend a dime of their own money.”
 

In the street below, a man dressed as a chauffeur and another, whose heavyset physique indicated he might be a bodyguard, were urging a struggling woman in a model’s skimpy wrapper toward a silver Rolls Royce limousine at the curb.
 

The woman, Jackson Storm saw, fascinated, was his redheaded model, Alix.
 

“Hey,” he said loudly, tapping on the window glass, “what in the hell do you people think you’re doing down there?”
 

Alix had spent the morning with Gilles as he cut and draped large pieces of laminated lace and fitted it to her, mostly unsuccessfully.
 

It was no secret Gilles hated the fabric. He’d muttered a string of caustic comments under his breath about lace in general, which he detested, and then about the de Brissacs of the silk mill in Lyon. Louis de Brissac had come to Paris during the holidays to get a preview of Gilles’s work. The Lyon silk mill family considered themselves “good family,” whereas Gilles was only a poor dressmaker’s son from Nantes. Gilles had taken great delight in throwing the silk mill owner out of his office.