Caught in His Gilded World

He’d told himself he was not his stepfather.

He didn’t deal in cruelty, and nor did he fashion weapons to turn upon others or himself.

He made the right choices.

Only then Gigi had come along. Gigi had burrowed under his skin. Nothing with Gigi had ever felt like a choice. It was inexplicable to him—this feeling—because it had never happened to him before.

He had no idea what to do about that.

And as he strode through Nalchik’s airport, knocking over a plastic chair that got in his way, cutting through security as he forced his way into the passenger lounge, he was aware that he wasn’t entirely in control any more.

* * *

Gigi was huddled in her oversized cardigan in the airport lounge, staring out at the blinking lights of a plane that wouldn’t take off.

An hour. She wasn’t sure how she would get through the wait so she took it minute by minute.

If she’d felt vulnerable alone in that tower of Balkar stone in the gorge, it was nothing to how she felt now—the only woman as far as she could see, with no luggage, no money, just her passport and the ticket Lulu had organised for her.

It was a far cry from the way she’d come here, wrapped in the luxury of Khaled’s world, trusting as a lemming heading for the proverbial cliff.

She drew her knees up to her chin, thankful for the denim keeping her legs warm.

She glanced around and caught the gaze of two men sitting nearby. They hadn’t been nearby five minutes ago. They’d shifted closer.

Gigi told herself not to be paranoid, but she wrapped her arms a little tighter around her knees.

She was perfectly safe.

An announcement was made in Russian.

Would she even know when her plane was going to take off?

She buried her face against her knees.

Heavy footsteps came ominously close and then stopped. Forcing herself to take a look, she lifted her head slowly.

Khaled was standing over her, in jacket and jeans, twice the size of the men who had been eyeing her up.

He was a wall no one was coming through.

That must be why relief was pounding through her. Now Khaled was here nothing bad would happen to her.

Even as the thought formed a fatal crack appeared in her logic.

Khaled was the bad thing.

‘Gigi,’ he said, and the urge to leap out of her seat and fling herself into his arms was almost overwhelming.

But she couldn’t—not any more.

He was a liar. He’d lied to her. He’d used her. He cared only about his business interests. What had he said to her about the cabaret? I’ll replace you. He’d only keep her in the role as long as she made it pay.

She held her ground.

‘I’ve been out of my mind,’ he said. ‘I came home and found the Jeep gone. Then I got a call from the French Embassy, asking me to report to their consulate in Moscow tomorrow concerning my activities with an Irish national currently resident in France. That would be you, Gigi.’

He seemed angry, but it was anger held in restraint, and Gigi was also getting something else from him. A fierce sort of bewilderment. Crazily, a part of her wanted to take his hand and hold on.

It was what she’d been doing for the last couple of weeks.

But that wasn’t possible any more.

She was so tired and cold, and just worn out from thinking in circles—no wonder she was fantasising like this...she just didn’t know what to do.

‘Lulu,’ she said hoarsely. ‘I rang her for my ticket. Her stepfather—’

‘Is a French government official—so I have learned. So now I must take you home and restore you to your friends.’

‘No, that’s not what I want,’ she began, leaping up. ‘I can go home on my own two feet. I don’t need you organising things for me any more.’

‘But it is what I want.’

‘What you want?’ Gigi could barely look at him she was so angry. ‘That’s all it is to you—what you want. What about me? What I want?’

‘You got what you wanted, Gigi. L’Oiseau Bleu.’

If he’d punched her she couldn’t have been more winded.

But suddenly she could look him in the eye. And she lifted her chin—because she’d learned in the hard school of Carlos Valente that you didn’t stop taking the knocks until you couldn’t get up any more.

‘You knew I was falling in love with you. You can’t have been blind to it. You used my feelings against me, for your own ends, and the joke is I would have helped you had you just asked me. You didn’t. You chose instead to make a fool of me.’