Satin Dreams (14 page)

Currently, Niko Palliades appeared only occasionally in newspapers as a top-string polo player and one of the best skiers in Europe. But in the recent past he’d run with the same set as Princess Caroline of Monaco, the Prince and Princess von Sturm und Taxis, and the present Duchess of York when she was plain Sarah Ferguson, living out of wedlock with race driver Paddy McNally in Switzerland.
 

There was an interesting footnote. Niko Palliades had no drug record, which was surprising, considering his Princess Catherine days. And he had no close friends with one exception. Old Socrates Palliades had turned his grandson over to the care of a young Greek sailor on the Palliades yacht after the death of his father. The old man wanted the boy to have a good role model and companion—one who was definitely heterosexual. Dmitri Lakis, not much older than his charge, had been all of that.
 

Jack Storm couldn’t help a snort of laughter. There was only a blurry picture of a good-looking young sailor in the stern of the Palliades yacht in the harbor of Pireus. Lakis had looked after young Nicholas each year during summer vacations, until he went away to get his degree at Stanford.
 

The old fox, Jack thought. With a kid that good-looking and that rich, Socrates had taken no chances.
 

One more item caught his eye. Nicholas Palliades’s birth date. The world-class bastard who’d given him such a hard time wasn’t even thirty. As far as Jack was concerned, Nicholas Palliades could have his redheaded dolly and be happy. As long as the Maison Louvel got Palliades’s money.
 

He still needed someone for dinner.
 

There was only one person who’d made his day interesting. Ms. Brooksie Goodman was hardly a beauty, too short, a plain-looking girl in spite of her expensive French clothes. But hell, she could talk, she had ideas, and Jack needed to be entertained. He had liked Brooksie Goodman’s ideas of what they needed for the Paris venture. And he remembered the throwaway about introducing a new fabric, something as innovative as ultra-suede.
 

He swiveled his chair to the darkened window and ran his fingers through his hair, squinting at his reflection. Hell, he was acting as though he couldn’t get a dinner date! He was still trim and flat-bellied. The gray flannel Armani suit looked good. The hair was still good. His French barber had put a rinse on it that upped the platinum, and set off the famous Jackson Storm blue eyes. The silver hair and sharp blue gaze had made a thousand sales.
 

And hundreds of beautiful women.
 

Somewhere, Jack thought, there was a woman. Today.
This year.
Tall, beautiful, cool, and poised, like Jaclyn Smith in her heyday. Or like Marianna, his wife, when she’d been New York’s top model. Marianna had been one of the most beautiful women to face a camera anywhere, anytime.
 

He swiveled his chair back to his desk and reached across it to grab the telephone. After a moment’s thought he punched in the international code for the United States. Then the number of his house in Wilton, Connecticut.
 

The housekeeper answered.
 

It was six o’clock in Paris, which meant it was about noon in Wilton. He was stunned to find no one at home except the housekeeper, Mrs. Ansel.
 

His daughters, Mrs. Ansel told him very patiently, were in class at Hodgkins Country Day School and wouldn’t be home until five-thirty or later. Mrs. Storm was at a horse show in Fairfield.
 

Disappointed, Jack told Mrs. Ansel she was doing a good job and hung up the telephone. So much for having a wife and family around when you needed them. He didn’t know why he felt angry. He wasn’t even sure why he felt he had to call home. He hadn’t talked to Marianna in days. Jesus, Jake, his inner voice reminded him, it’s not days. It’s been
weeks.
 

He couldn’t believe it. His secretary always put in his calls to ask how everybody was at home, and see if they needed anything.
 

More than ever he wanted someone to eat dinner with him. A simple meal in a restaurant wasn’t too complicated, was it?
 

Jack stared at the papers on his desk. He couldn’t be seen eating dinner alone in Paris. It would make all the gossip columns. He could go back to the Plaza Athenee and order dinner in his suite while he watched French television. It was, he reminded himself, what he’d done last night.
 

Jack looked around his partly dismantled office that awaited the plasterers in the morning. He was tired of working in chaos. This Paris thing was beating him into the ground.
 

As he picked up his overcoat, he thought about Nicholas Palliades and his beautiful redheaded model. Maybe after a few weeks the novelty would wear off. Then he could have a talk with Alix about launching an ad campaign using her for Storm King fashions here in France. Maybe throughout Europe.
 

Hell, the United States.
 

Maybe, Jackson Storm thought as he shrugged into his fox fur-lined coat and buttoned it,
worldwide.
 

Gilles Vasse’s resignation had been so abrupt, no one at Mortessier’s had thought to give him a present, or even a small going-away party. Still, Alix wasn’t prepared for Gilles’s cold, furious attitude as he prepared to ride his motorcycle home from the avenue Montaigne for the last time.
 

“Gilles, I can’t leave Mortessier’s,” she told him. “I have
job security
here.”
 

He shook her off. “I’m the one who hired you. Rudi didn’t want you. Without me you wouldn’t even be a model!” He made a melodramatic gesture with the hand that held his motorcycle helmet. “I can’t go to the American house without you. I thought you understood that. Now what do I do?”
 

Alix hated to have Gilles leave on a note of anger, but she couldn’t console him. He stormed down Mortessier’s backstairs.
 

Most of the atelier was waiting at the bottom. They clustered around Gilles, some of the seamstresses weeping. It was going to be a very French farewell, after all, Alix thought helplessly, with everyone in tears.
 

She came down slowly, buttoning her jacket against the cold. Alix longed to join the women surrounding Gilles. Even the tall, aloof
seconde
from the showroom had joined them, dabbing at her eyes. But Gilles was furious with her, and she didn’t want to incite his anger any more.
 

Beyond the iron door of the employees’ entrance it was nearly dark. The winter-bare branches of the plane trees in the parklike median winked their little golden holiday lights, but the snow of the past few days had turned into slush and then frozen again, covering the ground with a layer of ice. Alix stepped gingerly in the twilight, wisps of hair from under her scarf blowing around her face. She was conscious only of a tall blot of shadow, seconds before the hands grabbed her.
 

“Get in the car,” a husky voice said. “I want to talk to you.”
 

She was too startled to scream. Nicholas Palliades’s huge glossy Daimler was parked at the curb. The uniformed chauffeur loomed at the open car door.
 

Alix charged into him, sending him off-balance. “Leave me alone,” she cried.
 

She tried to push past him, but he grabbed at her again. “What are you doing? Are you crazy? I’m not going to hurt you!”
 

“Let me go,” Alix gasped, outraged. The man thought he could buy anything. “You’re assaulting me! I’ll call the police!”
 

His face was close to hers. “Don’t be ridiculous, I only want to talk to you. Here,” he said, as she tried to kick him, “I wish to give you these.”
 

With one hand he dangled glittering objects in her face. His other hand held her tightly. “I had them reset with amethysts. I was right, this is better. This color goes with your eyes.”
 

Alix threw her head back to examine the objects at the end of her nose. There were the same earrings, now with square-cut purple stones in their centers.
 

She didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. “You’re a lunatic! I don’t want these things. I want you to let me go!”
 

Almost desperately, he jiggled the earrings in her face. “Isn’t this what you want? Or do you want money?” His expression grew stony. “I’ll give you money. I’ll pay you, but only until I know whether or not you’re pregnant. And I want the names of the people who hired you to do this.”
 

Alix managed to break away. For one long moment her violet eyes regarded him as though he were an alien from another planet. He really was crazy.
 

“I have to get away from you,” she gasped. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I have to!”
 

Then she bolted and ran.
 

“Come back!” he shouted.
 

Alix dragged open the door to Mortessier’s back entrance and almost fell inside against the hard, unyielding chest of Gilles Vasse in his leather motorcycle jacket. The designer’s arms went around her to hold her upright.
 

Alix jammed her heels against the door to hold it shut. “I’ll go with you!” She clutched the front of Gilles’s jacket with both hands. “I can’t stay at Mortessier’s anymore,” she sobbed. “I have to get away from here!”
 

Eight

A white marble
fin de siècle
staircase ran up through the interior of the Maison Louvel, an ancient building very different from Rudi Mortessier’s trendy glass and chrome town house in the avenue Montaigne.
 

The wide sweep of the “grand stair” began at ground level, rose to the European “first floor”—the couture house’s reception area converted from what had once been the Louis Quatorze grand salon—up five and a half stories to the top. On any landing, one could lean into the stairwell and peer over the concentric circle of polished marble balustrade straight to the bottom. The staircase terminated on the fifth floor at the foot of a small iron stair that led to a storeroom and then to the roof.
 

In the past centuries the marble stairs had been a thoroughfare for servants carrying the things necessary to maintain the historic old
hotel particulier
that had been built, the story went, by the Sun King, Louis XIV, to house one of his favorite mistresses. In modern times a small antique brass elevator provided much of the transportation from floor to floor, leaving the circular hole of the staircase to function as a marvelously effective amplifier of activities going on in haute couture. Everything, from the ringing of the doorbell on ground level to the slam of the iron storeroom door above carried through the middle of the house like a gigantic speaking tube.
 

Each morning Abdul, the Maison Louvel’s Tunisian porter, swept the staircase with a push broom, then plugged in the vacuum cleaner to clean the carpet in the salon. Thus it was Abdul who found Alix at the ground level doors at eight o’clock on her first day of work.
 

“
Eh bien
,” the North African said as he let her in, “so you are the new model. You are early.” His aquiline features looked faintly disapproving. “Not that there’s anything for you to do. Young M’sieu Gilles, he is still getting the workroom together. It will be months before there are any clothes for you to wear.”
 

Though Abdul’s bark was fierce, there wasn’t any bite. The porter brought her coffee from the electric pot he kept downstairs in the broom closet, and several crusty slices of French baguette with butter and jam. Alix suspected that the taciturn but soft-hearted Arab knew models were always hungry.
 

A few minutes later, Alix heard the French workmen enter the building. And by nine-thirty when Nannette, acting
maitresse
of the atelier, brought Alix a stack of cardboard boxes filled with spools of thread, they could hear Jackson Storm arriving with his New York staff after their daily breakfast meeting at a nearby brasserie.
 

Then the telephones began to ring.
 

The temporary offices, Alix learned, handled calls from New York headquarters and places like Hong Kong and Mexico City, where Storm King jeans factories were located. Down the hall, the business of decorating, acquiring furniture, purchasing for the atelier, stocking fabric, and hiring personnel was handled by Peter Frank, Jackson Storm’s director of international development. Everything else, especially inquiries from the press and electronic media, were handled by Candace Dobbs and her public relations assistants working in what had once been a storeroom for cutting tables.
 

Alix was given the job of sorting spools of thread. There wasn’t anything else for the house model to do in these early weeks of organization. As she worked, she discovered that she could sit at a table in the atelier on the third floor and follow nearly everything that went on in the building. It was eavesdropping, of course, but Alix found it fascinating to sit stacking hundreds of spools according to their colors while keeping track of almost everything going on. There was a certain rhythm that gave the old house a life of its own.