Caught in His Gilded World

That’s right, his id growled, worrying about me is the first smart thing you’ve done all night.

Such was her shock, she didn’t so much as utter a squeak as he hoisted her up over his shoulder. She only began to struggle and scissor her legs as they came offstage, shouting something about him being a madman and telling him to put her down and that he’d ruined the act.

On the contrary—this felt like the sanest he’d been in years.

* * *

Gigi was quickly made aware that they were headed for the exit, with her riding his shoulder like a surfboard, through a sea of gaping showgirls, past gawping stagehands and their own security men, Jules and Jean, who made no attempt to stop him.

‘Put me down!’ she shouted. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘Da.’

‘Where are you taking me?’

‘Out of harm’s way.’ He said this as if it were obvious.

‘Put me back onstage, Mr Kitaev. I have a show to do!’

‘Mr Kitaev?’ he growled.

‘I think we should be professional at work.’

‘Your work—not mine.’

‘I refuse to go with you!’

‘Bad luck. You’re not climbing back in that tank.’

‘It’s my act!’

‘Tonight Paris wants to drown you, and those idiot brothers thought it was a good idea to put you in a tank of water in front of them?’

‘Nobody wants to drown me except the other girls, and now you’ve just made it worse!’

He kept going.

‘You can’t just carry me out of here. What are people going to say?’

‘The same thing they’re already saying,’ he snarled, as if this was the last thing he wanted. ‘That I can’t keep my hands off you.’

There was shouting behind them, but Khaled was kicking open the exit door.

‘You can’t take me out of here—I’m naked!’ she shrieked.

‘Yes,’ Khaled said, and he didn’t sound happy about it, ‘you are.’

The cold air and the night rushed at her, and then she was being lifted into a waiting SUV.

Khaled leapt in after her and the door slammed. They took off at speed.

Gigi scrunched herself up against the opposite door, arms plastered across her chest, legs crossed, horribly aware that she was practically naked, covered in gold paint and dripping wet. Humiliated.

‘Are you insane?’ she exploded.

He reached for her and she began kicking out at him with her feet.

‘Don’t you touch me, you pervert! You’re a madman!’

One of her six-inch stilettos caught against the denim of his jeans and tipped the shoe off her foot. He grasped her other foot and yanked off the second glittery shoe, whisked down the window and threw both of them out into the passing night.

Gigi watched on in utter disbelief.

‘Those shoes are the property of L’Oiseau Bleu! They’re hand-made!’

‘There are paparazzi crawling all over that theatre,’ he snarled, as if this were her fault, and she retreated like a turtle who had stuck its neck out and almost had it cut off—before she realised he was holding a phone in one hand while warding off her pummelling feet with the other. ‘I want to know how and why they got into the building.’

He pocketed his phone and sat forward, to shrug his big shoulders out of his wool coat.

‘The paps will have photographs of us, but they can’t do any more damage.’

‘It was you they wanted!’

‘Don’t be so na?ve,’ he growled, ‘and stop hammering me with your feet.’

‘Then let me out of this car.’ She gave him another ineffectual shove with the soles of her feet, but with no real conviction, only to have him throw his coat over her.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded as he began to feed one of her flailing arms into a sleeve.

‘Keeping you warm,’ he said impatiently. ‘Hold still.’

‘I don’t want to be warm—I want to be back at the theatre, doing my job.’

But even as she protested she was quick to push her fists through the armholes of the coat in an attempt to preserve a little of her modesty.

It was one thing to be onstage, where the audience saw her at a remove, under rose-coloured trick lighting. Quite another to have the man she fancied being treated to this intimate view of her body before he’d even taken her to dinner!

She had a very clear progression programme on this: meet, date, and then, if everything appeared to be going somewhere meaningful—get naked. She didn’t reverse that order.