Caught in His Gilded World

Tough little thing.

Needing her mother and getting what...? The bastard who’d permitted that thing to happen to her growing feet.

Khaled was conscious of a tension in him he could have cut with a knife.

‘Then Dad went bankrupt and we hit the vaudeville circuit,’ she continued. ‘I sang and danced and dad was MC. But it wasn’t like this.’

She gestured towards the window and he surmised that she meant Parisian cabaret.

‘As soon as I could I crossed the Channel.’

‘You came to Paris to follow in her footsteps?’

‘Something like that.’

She smiled at him, and it was that lack of self-pity coupled with her natural buoyancy that hit him the hardest. He was sure he could do something for her before he left Paris.

‘Would you like that tea?’ she asked.

‘No, I don’t want tea.’ He stepped in front of her. ‘I want to kiss you.’

She looked sweetly surprised, and then pleased, and it only made him want to power her back into that sofa over there and lose himself in her soft, sweet warmth. He took her in his arms and promised himself he’d only have a taste. But once her lips parted beneath his everything changed again, and his kiss became a fiercely possessive gesture that only intensified as her tongue tentatively slid against his. His blood roared and his restraint began to unravel fast.

The door behind him closed with a slam.

Gigi jerked in his arms, her head coming up. She made a sound of dismay that might have been funny if she hadn’t then shoved him away from her and immediately begun smoothing down her hair and adjusting her T-shirt, looking guilty as hell and incredibly sexy because of it.

Which wasn’t helping with the stone-cold kick he needed to give his erection.

Because the little brunette from yesterday was standing just inside the door, with a bunch of sunflowers and a bag of groceries. She dropped them on the floor.

It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be.

‘I’m interrupting,’ she said stonily.

‘No...’ choked Gigi.

His personal phone vibrated inside his jacket for the hundredth time since he’d driven the Spyder out into the Paris afternoon. He thought he’d take this call. It had been a lot of years since he’d involved himself with a woman who had a flatmate.

Khaled palmed his phone and turned his back on the girls to give them a minute. ‘Govorit,’ he breathed. Talk.

* * *

‘What is he doing here?’ hissed Lulu, stepping over the groceries.

Gigi opted for a casual shrug. She had no idea how she was going to explain two hundred plus pounds of Russian muscle in their flat, let alone her being welded to him. She had her own questions as to why she’d practically blurted out her entire family history to him.

Lulu looked very angry. She marched into her bedroom. Reluctantly Gigi trailed her.

‘So you’re replacing Solange?’ she demanded as Gigi half shut the door behind her.

‘No!’ Gigi frowned. ‘It’s not like that. He was never interested in Solange.’

Lulu gave a very un-Lulu-like snort. ‘Every man’s interested in Solange.’

Gigi’s stomach curled uneasily. It was true. ‘He told me it was a publicity thing—to have his photograph taken with a showgirl.’

Her best friend’s face told her what she thought of that.

‘So what are you doing here with him, Gigi? How did this come about?’

She told Lulu about being tackled by his security team, about running through the streets, being held up by aggressive strangers and swarmed by paparazzi. When she’d finished Lulu’s mouth was slightly ajar. She shut it with a snap when Gigi came to the part about going up to his hotel room.

‘He took me up to fix my feet.’

‘You let him see your feet?’ Lulu’s voice rose.

‘Shh. He’ll hear you. Don’t make it such a big deal.’ Although it was a big deal. Lulu knew that better than most. ‘We happened to be in the bathroom.’

‘How were you in the bathroom together?’

‘He carried me there.’

Lulu’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘What happened to your ability to walk?’

‘It was compromised by my blisters.’

Her best friend gave her a withering look.

Gigi decided there and then to omit the part about her turning into a nympho on the vanity. Some things were private—and, besides, Lulu wouldn’t understand. The only time she got carried away by her hormones was when they watched old Gregory Peck movies together, and Lulu would hug a cushion and sigh and ask where all the real men had gone.