Caught in His Gilded World

Still, he would not discuss Gigi with him.

She would be distressed to know he was even talking about her.

She wasn’t as sturdy as she tried to appear. There was a gentleness inside her that brought out instincts in him he had made a life’s work of repressing.

The fact that he knew this about her wasn’t what bothered him. It was that he cared.

She didn’t guard herself or put on a pretence of sophistication—she was simply herself.

Which was when it struck him that she couldn’t possibly have been a knowing participant in her father’s petty crimes. If he’d ever really believed it.

She had a redoubtable quality in her that probably made her a good and loyal friend, and that explained why her little flatmate had been ringing the phone off the hook—she was clearly concerned for her well-being.

Khaled wasn’t unaware that if something happened to him the only people to weep and wail would be his shareholders.

He liked it that way. He didn’t want people feeling responsible for him.

His mother had given up any chance of a real life to make sure he was raised in her home village. He hated that knowledge. It had haunted him all his life. So he’d been careful not to form relationships where sacrifice was involved. Of any kind.

He was generous in his sexual relationships with women. He made sure the women concerned were happy, and usually his money took care of that. Just as he was using his wealth and his influence to shield Gigi from the media. But emotionally he didn’t risk anything—which was why his unease about Gigi was like taking a step into the dark.

Shaking it off, he turned the conversation back to sport and to horse stock before he finished his call with Alejandro and headed across the road. He was anticipating finding Gigi awake and dressed and off-limits.

He was just going upstairs when a call showed up from his lawyer in Nalchik. He tore his attention away from a mental image of Gigi naked, with that little half-moon smile tilting her expressive mouth.

‘They want to talk.’

Everything but Gigi’s little smile fell away as he stopped in his tracks, unable to credit what he’d just heard.

‘Talk next year or talk in the foreseeable future?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Even as he listened to his lawyer lay it all out he called up the internet sites of Moscow’s major papers. It was all there.

Kitaev conducts Tartar raid on Bluebird in Paris.

Bride-stealing gets an update as Russian oligarch plucks his bird of paradise.

‘The elders believe you’ve shown respect for tradition. It seems they believe the “romance of the century” story. It’s done the trick.’

Two years.

Two years and this was what shifted the balance?

Khaled didn’t know whether to laugh or curse.

‘I’ll fly down tonight.’

‘Not just you,’ said his lawyer. ‘You need to bring this woman.’

For a moment something sharp and hot and entirely violent passed through him.

‘This woman,’ he growled, ‘has a name.’

‘Miss Valente.’ He literally heard his lawyer swallow. ‘It is advisable, given she appears to have swung the vote.’

Which meant, effectively, that Gigi wasn’t going home. Not yet.

Khaled exhaled, shoved his phone into his back pocket and strode energetically down the hall, pushing open the door, struck by how good he felt. He put it down to finally getting his hands on the road.

Gigi wasn’t in bed. She was sitting on its edge, rolling a pair of tights up her legs. Her incredibly long, dance-honed legs. His eyes followed all the way up to a pair of white cotton panties that somehow did more for him than last night’s teeny-tiny bit of gold dental floss.

She looked up as the door reverberated on its hinges.

He whipped his T-shirt up over his head, tugged his sweats and briefs down and powered her back onto the mattress.

‘Khaled!’ she shrieked, giggling.

‘Gigi.’

He fastened his mouth to hers and her body leapt under his. He dragged her top up over her head and her hair sprayed everywhere.

‘Do you ever wear a bra?’ he groaned, as if it were a complaint—or a prayer.

Gigi parted her lips to speak but his mouth was there first, and then he began to make love to her until she was wrapping her long legs with those dangling tights around him, making happy cries.

She was still panting when he collapsed and buried his face in her lovely silky hair, inhaled the scent of her. He could do it all over again.

But he’d had a purpose before he’d been distracted.