Lucy Ellis - Caught In His Gilded World

Hunkering down, he discovered that on closer inspection, despite her eyes remaining closed, he could see her delicate eyelids twitching.

His mouth firmed.

Little faker.

Looking up, he judged the height and recognised that although she’d fallen she couldn’t have done much damage.

On cue, a clutch of other Lycra-clad, giggling, whispering twenty-something female dancers closed in around him. Khaled had had a similar experience only days ago, in the highlands of the Caucasus with a herd of jeyran gazelles. One minute he’d been naked, waist-deep in a clear stream, the next he’d been surrounded by knobby-kneed deer intent on drinking their fill.

He looked around to note that his security team appeared as bemused as he was feeling.

What were they going to do? Tackle them?

Obviously he’d been set up, and this was a stunt to get him backstage. But the girls appeared as harmless as the deer. He looked down at the one gazelle who’d separated herself from the herd. She lay there, unnaturally still, but those eyelids gave her away, twitching at high speed as if she’d attached a jump lead to them.

He pressed back one of the delicate folds. ‘Can you hear me, mademoiselle ?’

‘Her name is Gigi.’ The curly-haired brunette had crouched down opposite him and supplied the name helpfully.

He was in Montmartre, in a shabby, past-its-use-by-date cabaret, with a cast of showgirls whose cities of origin ranged from Sydney to Helsinki to London—hardly any of them were actually French. Of course her name was Gigi.

He didn’t believe it for a second.

As if sensing his scepticism, she swept up her thick golden lashes with astonishing effect. A pair of blue eyes full of lively intelligence above angular cheekbones met his. Grew round, startled, and bluer than blue.

The colour of the water in the Pechora Sea.

He should know—he’d just flown in from it.

He watched as the points in her face—a gorgeous Mediterranean nose, a wide pink mouth and a pointed chin, all framed by wild red hair—seemed to coalesce around those same eyes.

His chest felt tight, as if he’d been kicked under the ribs.

She sat up on her elbows and fixed him with those blue eyes.

‘Who are you? Qui êtes-vous? ’ Her accent happily butchered the French with the sing-song cadence of Ireland blurred with something a little more international.

Qui êtes-vous?

His question exactly.

He straightened up to assert a little dominance over her and settled his hands lightly on his lean muscled hips.

‘Khaled Kitaev,’ he said simply.

There was a ripple of reaction.

‘Ladies...’ he added. But he didn’t take his eyes off Red as he calmly offered her his hand, and when she hesitated he leaned in and took what he wanted.

* * *

Gigi had been falling professionally since she was nine years old, but that hadn’t prevented her flailing backwards and striking her head and her tailbone on the stage boards. She was currently seeing two hands and was not sure which one to take.

‘Get up!’ Jacques was hissing at her like a goose.

The option was taken out of her hands by Kitaev, who plucked her effortlessly off the ground and deposited her on her feet in front of him. Only the room swayed and her legs weren’t co-operating.

It didn’t help either that she now found herself in the invidious position of having to tilt her head back even though she was five eleven—because he was that big—and he was standing far too close...looking at her.

Boy, oh, boy, the way he was looking at her!

Gigi blinked rapidly to clear her vision.

Sometimes men looked at you as if all they wanted was to see you naked. Gigi accepted this as an occupational hazard even if she hated it. Sometimes they made unwanted and sleazy advances, but she’d learned to combat those too.

This man wasn’t doing any of those things. His eyes weren’t desperate, greedy, pulling at her admittedly ratty leotard as if seeing her naked was all he cared about.

No, this man’s eyes held intent. They said something else entirely. Something no man had ever promised her. He was going to strip her naked and pleasure her body as she’d never been pleasured before. And then he was going to take her job and bin it.

‘You can’t do that!’ Gigi blurted out.

‘Do what, dushka ?’ He spoke lazily, in a deep Russian accent, as if he had all the time in the world.

There was a titter among the other girls.

‘Whatever it is you have planned...’ Gigi’s voice trailed off, because it didn’t sound as if either of them were talking about the cabaret.

‘At the moment,’ he responded, with a flicker of something certainly beyond her experience in those dark and distant eyes, ‘not much besides lunch.’

The laughter around them drowned out any response—which was just as well, because it didn’t take much imagination to see that this man had absolutely no interest in anything here—and Gigi felt her initial frustration build once more.

He didn’t care what happened to this place. The other girls didn’t care. They would care, however, when they didn’t have jobs.

But it wasn’t just about losing a job. This was her home .

The anguish that pulled through Gigi like an undertow was real. It was the only place she had ever felt she really belonged since her mother’s sudden death had upended her safe, secure world.

She’d served her time with her father until she’d been able to make her leap across the Channel onto the stage boards of what had seemed then to be a dream job.

Although, to be honest, if you’d asked her last week about her job she would have rolled her eyes and complained about the hours, the pay and the lousy chorie.

The Moulin Rouge, it wasn’t.

But this wasn’t an average day. This was the day everything she’d stitched together from her earliest life with her mother was threatening to come undone.

Gigi was not going to let that happen. She couldn’t let it happen.

Besides, this wasn’t any ordinary theatre. The most amazing women had danced here. Mistinguett, La Belle Otero, Josephine Baker—even Lena Horne had sung on this stage.

And then there was Emily Fitzgerald. Nobody remembered her—she’d never been famous...just a beautiful chorus girl among many who had danced on this stage for five short years. Her mother.

When she fell pregnant to smooth-talking Spanish showman Carlos Valente she had been forced to return home to her family in Dublin, her Paris dream over. But from the moment she’d been able to stand Gigi had had her feet stuffed into pointe shoes, had been pushed in the direction of a stage and raised on stories of the Bluebird in its fabulous heyday.

Of course it hadn’t been anything like those stories when she’d landed at its door aged nineteen, but unlike the other girls she knew how truly special L’Oiseau Bleu had once been...and could be again.

She’d been working on the Dantons. She’d been sure she was halfway to getting some improvements made to the routines...

Only now he was getting in the way.

At a loss as to where to start, it was then that she remembered she did have something that could speak for her. Folded up and stuck down her sports bra.

She tugged it out, sadly crumpled, and smoothed down the single page. It was a printout Lulu had made from a burlesque blog they both followed: Parisian Showgirl .

She looked up to find Kitaev was still watching her and had probably got an eyeful of her frayed purple bra. She knew this wasn’t looking a whole lot professional, but she hadn’t meant to come crashing down, she hadn’t meant for him to come hunting around backstage, and right now all she had was...this. It just happened to be in her bra.