Lucy Ellis - Caught In His Gilded World

Something close to amusement shifted in those dark, watchful eyes. ‘What else do you keep in there?’

His voice was pure Russian velvet, quiet and low-pitched, but a bit like a seismic shift in the earth’s plates. You felt it in your bones...and other places.

Gigi experienced a whole body flush and drew herself up stiffly. ‘Nothing,’ she said uncertainly.

A couple of the girls tittered.

Ignoring them, she held out the page until he took it.

Gigi watched him run a cursory glance over the print. She knew it by heart.

Paris is in revolt over the news that Russian oligarch Khaled Kitaev, one of Forbes’ richest men under forty, got lucky in a game of poker.

Kitaev, whose fortune is in oil but who, like most Russian businessmen, seems to have branched out into property and entertainment until his holdings resemble nothing less than the behemoth nervous European business columnists fear will simply devour everything in its path—yes, that Kitaev—has taken possession of one of Paris’s famous cabarets.

And this isn’t just any theatre, people, it’s one of Montmartre’s oldest cabarets: L’Oiseau Bleu. Home of the Bluebirds. A charming, old-time cabaret—but for how long?

Judging from the media reaction, it appears the French aren’t going to take this one lying down.

His hand closed over the piece of paper and crunch —it was nothing more than a small ball in his large fist.

Gigi couldn’t help feeling they were all a little like that ball of paper, and just as disposable.

‘What do you want to know?’

He made it sound so easy, but she wasn’t fooled. His dark eyes had hardened over the course of his cursory glance, and when he raised them there was a warning there.

Gigi told herself they weren’t her words that she’d handed him. But she wanted him to know that this was the position they were operating from. A little information—even if it was misinformation. The sensible thing to do now would be to ask rationally and politely if he foresaw any major changes to the theatre that were going to affect their jobs.

Only then she noticed the subtle movement of his hard gaze over her body. He wasn’t being obvious but she felt it all the same—and, dammit, her nipples stiffened.

So instead of being reasonable she lost her temper and went for broke. ‘We want to know if you’ve any plans to turn our cabaret into a full-on high-octane version of Le Crazy Horse?’

CHAPTER THREE

MARTIN DANTON MADE a groaning sound.

His brother looked poised to take the little redhead out.

Red stood her ground.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ responded Khaled, not taking his eyes off her, ‘never having been inside the Crazy Horse.’

He caught the slight eye-roll and the tightening of her lips. His hand tightened around the crumpled ball of spurious invective this young woman had clearly swallowed whole.

‘Gigi, ça suffit ,’ interrupted Jacques Danton. That’s enough.

But she didn’t back down. ‘I think we have a right to know,’ she protested. ‘It’s our jobs.’

He would have been more impressed if he hadn’t suspected her boss had put her up to it.

‘Your jobs are safe for the moment.’ He threw it in because it was accurate—today. Tomorrow, possibly not.

‘Splendide!’ Jacques Danton beamed.

‘That’s not what I asked,’ Red interrupted, and she lifted those lively blue eyes to his.

Not in appeal, he registered, but setting herself against him. Clearly not fooled one bit—unlike her boss.

For a moment he considered the alternative: that this wasn’t some set-up and that the girl—a lot sharper than the Dantons and, unlike them, willing to take him on—was acting alone.

‘We’re not a strip club, Mr Kitaev, and it would ruin—’

She took a breath and something like anguish crumpled up her striking features. In the time it took her to compose herself Khaled became interested in what exactly she thought he was ruining for her.

But she shook her head and changed direction. ‘Ruin the character of the theatre!’

‘I wasn’t told the theatre had a character .’

More laughter.

She looked around, as if thrown by the lack of support, and unexpectedly his conscience stirred.

‘Nobody is going to be asked to take off their clothes,’ he said, exasperated. Hell, he didn’t know what would happen here. Go on as before, bleeding funds, because after the dose he’d had of French spleen over the place only a fool would touch it? He’d be lucky to give it away.

Red, however, seemed to be under the mistaken belief that there was something here worth saving.

‘Voulez-vous, filles?’

Jacques Danton began clapping his hands at the other dancers and their audience began to break up.

‘ Maintenant , Gigi,’ he snapped.

She was clearly torn between doing as she was told and continuing to question him about their jobs, but Khaled could already see she wouldn’t stand up to her boss.

Just him.

Which was a first, given that men with a lot more wherewithal than this girl—industrialists, Duma members, Moscow gangsters—stepped carefully around him. Then again, those men didn’t have her lavender eyes or, frankly, her sexual pull.

She was by no means the most beautiful girl backstage, but she was the only one he couldn’t take his eyes off.

Something to do with her bold features and lively eyes, and an innate sensuality she appeared to be entirely unaware of.

Pity she danced here...

Shame he was flying out tomorrow...

Another dancer—the frowning little brunette—had edged up to her. She took Red’s hand with a furtive look of disapproval in his direction and tugged her away. Smart girl.

Red... Gigi ...kept glancing over her shoulder at him before the rest of the dancers swallowed her up.

It was a slender shoulder, as finely designed as the rest of her, and it put him in mind of the Spanish painter Luis Ricardo Falero’s amusing, graceful mythological girls. He knew he was done here, and yet he found his eyes following the red pigtails, bouncing amidst the crowd of other girls as the famous Bluebirds vanished into the rabbit warren of corridors.

* * *

That evening the dressing room was noisier and more lively than usual before the first performance.

Khaled Kitaev was the sole subject of discussion.

‘The rumour is that the Russian supermodel Alexandra Dashkova had herself wrapped in a rug, Cleopatra-style, taken up to his hotel suite in Dubai last month and unrolled before him like war booty.’

This was greeted with various ooh s and aah s and had Gigi hesitating in the act of applying three-ounce lashes to her eyelids.

‘No one’s got a chance with him, then,’ groaned Adele at Susie’s announcement, and the cramped dressing room was filled with sighs and grumbles and more speculation.

‘C’est vrai.’ Solange regarded her breasts with satisfaction, adjusting her diamante-studded costume. ‘He’s asked for me by name. I’m having a drink with him after the show tomorrow.’

Gigi’s hand slipped and the fake lashes ended up part-way down her cheek.

‘Great,’ grumbled Lulu under her breath, leaning forward to pluck the feathered blob from Gigi’s cheek and pass it to her. ‘Ten to one she’ll sleep with him and make the rest of us look easy.’ Only being Lulu she didn’t actually say easy —she mouthed it.

There was a neat little division down the centre of the Bluebirds. The dancers who accepted invitations from the visiting Hollywood A-listers and rock stars who came to the shows, and those who lined up each night after the last show for the courtesy bus.