Satin Dreams (6 page)

My wife,
he thought with an uncontrollable rush of emotion. Gilles was embarrassed to feel so fervently about marriage after three years; it was terribly bourgeois, but he couldn’t help himself. Even after all this time, he loved to sit and study his beautiful wife. His artist’s eye was still entranced with her classic French beauty—sculpted brunette features, and dreamy, dark eyes that conveyed a gentle seductiveness. Unfortunately, even a suspicion that someone might be looking at her these days caused his wife to react violently. Now in her eighth month of pregnancy, Lisianne was convinced she was monstrous-looking. “I’m horrible, ugly, a disaster!” she had screamed at Gilles that morning when he had tried to put his arm around her. He had left her in bed, weeping.
 

Then there was the age thing, Gilles thought, baffled. He was twenty-four. Lisianne was thirty-two. It was ridiculous to consider an eight-year difference important. God, he thought they’d settled that a long time ago!
 

Gilles crumpled the sketch in his fist and tossed it into the wastepaper basket. It was bad to lose one’s concentration like that. Even if he did hate nearly everything he was doing at Mortessier’s these days. He hated designing for the Arabs and the Japanese
nouveau riche.
He disliked creating banal trousseaus for boarding-school virgins of France’s Old Families making “good” marriages. He especially detested adapting the best, the most inspired of the Mortessier collection for aging, unshapely American women. It was small consolation that the dreadful Danish wedding gown he was working on right now would be credited to Rudi, who had built his reputation on just such romantic, overblown styles. It was one job for which Gilles was glad to remain anonymous.
 

The office secretary and the salon receptionist were leaving; their voices floated up the stairwell as they called out their good-byes. The House of Mortessier, while not as big as the mega-businesses of Cardin and St. Laurent, still employed one of the largest haute couture staffs in Paris.
 

Gilles looked at his wristwatch. It was almost eight o’clock. Late enough for a tired Frenchman who wanted his wife, a good dinner, and the comforts of home. He turned off the light over the drawing board and closed the door to his office.
 

As he was going down the stairs, the Ethiopian model caught up with him. “Eh, Gilles, it not too long now before you be a papa, yes?” Raised in the slums of London, Iris spoke with an accent that was half African, half Cockney-English. “Tell me, luv, you still celibate?”
 

Red spots of color appeared under Gilles’s cheekbones.
Merde
, even the models knew how his wife felt about her pregnancy! He muttered something under his breath and hurried ahead, Iris’s knowing giggles following him.
 

The door to the last fitting room downstairs stood open. Gilles paused, letting the seamstresses surge past, wondering if he should interrupt Rudi to say good-bye. The plump figure in the gray suit was on his knees in front of the fittingroom mirrors, pinning up the back of the green beaded evening dress Alix was wearing. It was an unusual position for the great couturier these days. Gilles suddenly remembered the sinister-looking young Greek at the afternoon’s showing.
 

She’s going out with him
, he thought, surprised. Alix was always so aloof, so perfectly contained and Gilles had never known her to date the customers.
 

In the next instant he told himself that models always had affairs with clients. It was none of his business how Alix spent her evenings.
 

Still, he lingered in the doorway. The dress was one usually modeled by Iris, a bright acid green embroidered with thousands of glistening glass beads. The top was a corsetlike bustier above a nipped, tiny waist, and an abbreviated straight skirt, layered with long, beaded fringe. Narrow strings of rhinestone straps held up scraps of unadorned satin over Alix’s pointed little breasts. The bodice, loosely laced, exposed silky white skin all the way to the waist. The dress was pure Hollywood, more a theatrical costume than a couture design. Something Rudi had borrowed, consciously or not, from American designer Bob Mackie, who created clothes for screen stars and rock singers.
 

Gilles hoped Rudi knew what he was doing, lending this number to a model for an evening out. The green dress was incredibly expensive to make, the beadwork all hand-done in Paris. The final retail price would buy a very respectable full-length mink coat.
 

Of course, it was a time-honored custom to outfit a showroom mannequin if an important client wished to date her. A couturier accommodated his richest, most influential customers, and a Greek millionaire was certainly in that league. But my God, the
loss
, if anything happened to that dress!
 

Gilles made himself turn away. What Rudi wished to do was Rudi’s business. Theoretically, the publicity alone was usually worth it, to have one’s designs seen in all the best Paris
boîtes
. Gilles was hungry and anxious to get home. No matter how poorly Lisianne was feeling, like a good French wife she always had an excellent dinner waiting for him. Gilles jammed on his helmet, fastening the strap with eager fingers as he hurried to the side door. He could hardly wait.
 

Alix looked up in time to see Gilles Vasse leave the doorway. She started to call out to him, but the words died in her throat when she saw the expression on his face. The scathing look in his eyes made her cringe.
 

“
Alors
, why are you shaking?” The couturier put his hand on Alix’s kneecap to steady her. “I can hardly finish this skirt when you are moving so violently,” he complained.
 

Alix stared at the empty doorway.
 

“Please!” With his hand on her thigh, Rudi gave her a slight nudge. “Why are you trembling, Alix? Stand still, or I cannot do this.”
 

It’s the dress
, Alix realized. She should have tried harder to persuade Rudi the green evening gown was wrong. She looked like a hooker, she thought, panicked.
 

“Don’t be so foolish,” Rudi said. “Listen, Niko Palliades is a perfect gentleman, like his father and his good friend, Aly Khan.” Rudi grabbed up several pins and stuck them in his mouth. “Ah, you have not heard of the Aly Khan, have you? He married the gorgeous film star Rita Hayworth.” He made an impatient clucking sound, despite the pins. “Alix,
mon Dieu
, I have made clothes for Niko’s mother and his aunts. Would I let you go to dinner with a pervert, a
rapist?
”
 

Rudi thought he knew what was bothering her. The young Palliades heir was rich. Lovely Alix was poor. She was insecure,
pauvre petite.
There was a lot at stake.
 

“Now, now, don’t worry. He will adore you,” he said soothingly. “Did you see how he looked at you in the salon? And you will find him enchanting. Niko Palliades is handsome, passionate—an athlete. He is in all the sports magazines, a champion skier. They invite him to come to Klosters in the winter with all the young English he knows from when he was in boarding school. Those naughty Lady Arabellas and the wicked Lord Henrys. And the lovely young princesses.”
 

Rudi’s small hands moved across the dress, deftly tacking beads onto it with tiny knotted stitches. “
Naturellement,
” he went on, “he has something of a reputation with women. When he was a boy he was the
amour
of Princess Catherine Medivani. He is not royalty, but with that money and his looks, they were mad for him.”
 

Alix stared at Rudi in the mirrors, trying to follow what he was saying. She’d heard of the Medivani princesses. They didn’t get as much publicity as the princesses of Monaco, but then they hadn’t had Grace Kelly for a mother. Princess Catherine Medivani was now married and the mother of small children, but in her day she had been featured in all the tabloids, stoned and falling on the floor in Paris nightclubs, taking her bikini off on the beach in Monte Carlo for photographers, sleeping—it was rumored—with the entire French soccer team during the all-Europe play-offs. This, Alix couldn’t help thinking with a sudden sinking feeling, was the former girl friend of the man who was taking her to dinner?
 

“Niko Palliades,” Rudi went on blithely, “will adore you,
cherie.
He will be very good to you. He gives marvelous presents to all his lovely young women.”
 

Alix stared at the couturier, trying not to laugh. She was doing this deliberately, she reminded herself, so how could she complain? Even about “marvelous presents”?
 

Rudi yanked at the satin skirt, straightening it. This evening dress was his favorite of the entire winter collection. The paparazzi who lay in wait outside Maxim’s or La Tour d’Argent would not be able to resist it. Perhaps even
Paris Match
or the British
Queen
or
Women’s Wear Daily
photographers would be there, since it was now so close to the holidays.
 

He made a sudden, exasperated sound. “Will you stand still? Look, I have punctured my finger! It is bleeding.”
 

“Oh, Rudi, I’m sorry.” Alix realized she had to stop the ridiculous trembling. If she couldn’t get her nerves under control, they’d spoil the whole evening.
 

Rudi stuck his finger in his mouth. “
Écoutez
, Alix dear,” he said more patiently, “you do not have to be afraid. Greek millionaires are not barbarians. Not like Americans think.”
 

Alix stared at the three images of herself reflected in the fitting-room mirrors. The green gown had looked sleek and sophisticated on Iris. But on her slender figure, it was far too provocative—too naked—and she knew nothing about this man she was meeting. She’d wanted to borrow Gilles’s long velvet evening tube, stark, unrelievedly black but flattering to her white skin and blazing hair. Instead her teased hair stood out around her white face in a fiery halo, her purple eyes, still rimmed with the heavy mascara and eyeshadow of the afternoon showing, seemed wraithlike, and she was as garish as a rock singer in all the tight, sexy green glitter. Was this going to be worth it? What was the ultimate price one paid for anger, anyway? And revenge?
 

“It’s nerves,” she mumbled. “I’m not really afraid.”
 

“Nerves. But not afraid.” Rudi rocked back on his heels to survey his work. “They have all the money in the world, you know.” He was trying to reassure her. “In the depression, old Socrates Palliades was able to buy first one old freighter, then two, then three. When Hitler came, Palliades had enough rusty old ships to make a fortune.”
 

How did you know what was right, or what was wrong? Alix wondered, watching the gown glitter in the three-way mirror. She’d thrown away everything when she came to Paris to study music, and she’d been so wrong about that. After two years, she’d suffered a terrible defeat. The Sorbonne’s verdict had been devastating: a nice little talent, but not enough to encourage.
 

She’d fallen into a pit of despair that was almost suicidal, but she’d gotten no comfort, no reassurance.
You made your bed, now lie on it. You’re so headstrong, you never think before you act. You never listen to good advice.
That was Robert, of course. But she’d long ago decided she’d regret nothing; if she’d listened to “good advice,” she’d still be living in hell.
 

Rudi continued rambling on about the Greeks. “Niarchos, Goulandris, Livanos, the tragedies were terrible.” He sighed. “Ari Onassis lost his only son in a plane accident and went mad with grief. Stavros Niarchos may or may not have murdered his wife. Ari’s poor, dead daughter Christina Onassis, thought he did.” He put the straight pins one by one back into their little plastic box and shut it with a snap. “Old Socrates Palliades’s son was killed in a plane crash in an air show. The little boys were in the crowd watching when the father blew up in a ball of fire.” He shook his head. “I remember seeing it on television. It was horrible. The old man and the children, they were right there.”
 

Slowly, he got to his feet. “They say old Socrates is a devil. His grandsons worked on his tankers, that is how the youngest boy was killed, on one of the Palliades tankers. The other Greeks don’t do that, they pamper their children, but old Palliades is from the Peloppenesus. He prides himself on being a Spartan.”
 

At Alix’s uncomprehending look, Rudi sighed.
 

“
Cherie
, you do not have to make love if you do not want to,” he told her. “One can merely say no. Just so you are not accused of being unreasonable.” He paused, leaning forward to pull out a straight pin he’d missed. “But diplomatically, please. The Palliades are good customers.”
 

Rudi Mortessier was being very sweet. The green gown was one of the best in his winter collection. But the contempt in Gilles Vasse’s eyes had been for
her
, Alix knew. Gilles knew where she was going tonight. And with whom.
 

“Tous comprenez bien, cherie?”
 

“Yes, I understand. He—will take me to dinner.” She tried to look assured, more confident than she felt. “The rest is up to me.”
 

She was less confident a few moments later when she realized what Rudi had actually said about the Greek shipping tycoons. It was true, their lives were as lurid as soap operas. Their extravagances, their yachts with priceless paintings in every stateroom, the private islands in the Aegean upon which they lavished millions of dollars, even the women they married were like something out of the Arabian Nights.