Caught in His Gilded World

He should have been analysing that the moment her thighs had locked decisively around his hips and her breasts, like the plump little weapons of male destruction they were, had hit his chest—not being concerned about her well-being and whether he was pushing this too quickly, and exactly how fast was too fast to peel her jeans off.

Yanking on his own pair of jeans and fighting into a fresh shirt, he wondered at his own credulity.

He’d been on the receiving end of women looking for a pay-off too many times to be this careless.

The problem was it had been her obvious distress and confusion when the paps had descended which had muddied his reactions.

She didn’t act like a woman on the make—she came across instead as a lively, extroverted girl who incidentally had a cabaret to promote, and in the next breath as a vulnerable young woman with a past that sounded at best colourful and at worst abusive, given he’d seen her feet.

It had been instinct that had had him tugging off his T-shirt and showing her his own scars, wanting to take the sting out of her embarrassment about her own. He hadn’t counted on how good her hands had felt on his body, and for a few minutes there she’d been utterly happy to accommodate him on the bathroom vanity. Seemingly gratis. No emotional fallout or extended lines of communication required.

It was a scenario that didn’t happen in his life any more. Not since he’d made his first million. There was always a catch.

What he had discovered now wasn’t unfamiliar, but somehow he’d let down his guard with her, and oddly her departure felt like a kick to the guts.

He snorted.

Focus, man.

She hadn’t got what she wanted and she was gone—simple. Now he needed to make an overdue call to his personal legal advisor and find out what he could do about those photos.

CHAPTER EIGHT

KHALED HAD HIS phone out as he wandered barefoot into the main living room, with its explosion of taffetas and velvets, but he never made that call.

Sitting on the sofa, with her impossibly long legs curled under her, her coppery head bent as she worked, was Gigi.

With a laptop.

He moved up silently behind her. A part of him was asking what the hell he was doing. What had he expected? To find her uploading photos of his hotel room? Possibly. Privacy was something nobody could take for granted any more.

He stopped behind the sofa. The screen in front of her was full of images of L’Oiseau Bleu.

‘Gigi?’

She almost jumped off the sofa. ‘Oh, Mary and Joseph, you scared me.’

After an initial moment of eye contact she guiltily returned her attention to the screen almost immediately.

His instincts prowled. He glanced at the screen—more in an attempt to work her out than out of any real interest in what she was doing. ‘What is this?’ he asked, more abruptly than he’d meant to.

‘I’m just gathering some things I want to show you about the cabaret’s history...its importance to Paris. I thought seeing as I’m up here...’ Her voice ran away and she clicked on another image—one of the cabaret in its heyday.

Khaled was more interested in the laptop. Had she run with that in her backpack?

Come to think of it, the thing hadn’t been light when he’d been carrying it around.

‘Maybe this is a bad idea,’ she said, still intent on avoiding eye contact. ‘You probably don’t have time to take a look. I should probably get out of your hair.’

She was putting down the lid on the laptop and unfolding her long legs.

He moved fast and dropped down onto the sofa beside her, reached for it.

‘Show me what you’ve got.’

He’d jumped her in the bathroom—he could give her five minutes.

What she had was clusters of images, reviews, articles, all informatively cascading one after the other.

‘This is our current show—we’ve been performing it for the last three years.’

The screen was filled with colour and movement and cheesy eighties dance music.

He was about to tell her she could skip this part when he zeroed in on Gigi, descending the stairs with a line of other showgirls.

She looked like a glittering peacock, dragging a shimmering tail. Her arms were gracefully outstretched, an elaborate neck-piece of glittering rhinestones falling from her throat to cover her chest, but doing nothing to hide the fact that all the girls who weren’t wearing rhinestone bras were topless.

The warmth of Gigi’s very real body beside him and the memory of the very real breasts he’d had his hands on was making a mockery of his decision to keep his hands off her.