Kept at the Argentine's Command

Sitting at a mirror framed with glowing bulbs, applying powder to her already luminescent skin.

‘Alejandro!’ She dropped the brush and swivelled around in her chair.

He couldn’t get over how she looked. She was wearing a rhinestone bikini, a long ostrich feather tail and towering heels.

She was a showgirl.

Until this moment he hadn’t really believed it.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I came to see the show.’

‘Five minutes until Little Egypt.’ The announcement came over the tannoy.

‘That’s me.’ She shimmied out of her tail in front of him, and Alejandro was confronted by Lulu’s very luscious, very familiar behind in a tiny sparkly G-string.

She was going on stage in that?

Like hell she was!

Lulu began attaching a skirt made of scarves, her hands working fast as she arranged them.

Alejandro relaxed slightly. That was better.

‘Enjoy the show,’ she said, and with an entirely un-Lulu-like taunt of a smile she slipped past him.

Alejandro turne

d around and was confronted by a roomful of semi-naked women, all looking him speculatively up and down.

‘Ladies…’ he said and, feeling ridiculously objectified, waded his way out of the dressing room to find out what Lulu was up to.

He found out from the wings of the stage. Against a set he assumed was supposed to resemble nineteenth-century Egypt, Lulu swayed and manipulated her hips to the snaky, seductive music.

Ridiculous as it was, he had never actually thought about Lulu being a dancer, but her talent was evident. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

The problem was he imagined every other man in the audience was in the same predicament.

As the scarves fell away his tension grew—until there she was, virtually naked behind a semi-transparent screen. Only he could see she was wearing a flesh-coloured bikini.

And as he looked around at the faces in the audience below Alejandro realised half of them were women.

When Lulu wrapped herself in a crimson robe and came out to centre stage there was a burst of thunderous applause and he watched her take a bow, as she must do every night. Alejandro joined in with the applause—and then it occurred to him that she didn’t do this every night and he’d just seen something extraordinary.

Lulu had performed solo.

*

It was a different woman he escorted into an exclusive restaurant overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens.

His gaze dropped to her bottom, now encased in a fishtailed dark purple cocktail dress, but somehow he could still see that strip of sparkles.

She had never looked more beautiful, with her skin luminescent against the coloured silk, cut modestly across her breasts, and her delicate shoulders bare beneath narrow straps.

As he seated himself opposite her Alejandro was very aware that this was how their relationship should have begun.

Dinner. Dancing. Him coming to Paris to see her again and again. Flying her down to his yacht in the Mediterranean. Looking at her through candlelight.