Authors: Maggie; Davis
Alain was speaking to her, but she hadn’t been listening. “Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said automatically.
“The Metro is beautiful?” He looked at her in some surprise, then back at the traffic. “Well, the Paris subway is clean. Better than in New York.”
Sam stared at the racing car’s dashboard in front of her with its digital readouts in small red numbers. The midnight-black, shark-nosed Lamborghini was an impressive machine. In New York, when Jackson Storm executives like Dennis Wolchek and Art Hammer talked of sports cars, they meant Ferraris and Lotuses that cost $80,000 to $90,000. Lamborghinis, she knew dimly, were even more expensive. Twice as much? She couldn’t remember.
“We are, I think, supposed to be viewing the Louvre.” He gave her another look of patient amusement. “See, there it is.” A massive pile of gray stone was passing on the other side of the rue de Rivoli. “The great Louvre, formerly a royal palace, now a museum.”
Sam turned her face to the window to peer out. She was committed to spending the evening with Alain des Baux, but they probably had nothing to talk about, she was thinking. She’d been half out of her mind when she’d called him, reaching out for somebody—anybody—going crazy to get out of the damned apartment. Maybe she should have stayed back at the Maison Louvel, sitting in the dark, crying and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
“And now we are coming to the Palais Royal.”
She could always get on a plane and go back to New York and force Jack to fire her. But Jack was out of town on a trip to the Far East with his wife and loving family, and only Mindy could forward his calls. They had her blocked. After all, she told herself bitterly, what do you do with one of Jack’s girls, his famous discoveries, after he was through with her? She’d been such a dumb fool to think she was in love with a powerful man with a track record like his.
“What would you like to see next?” They were entering the Champs Élysées traffic. The Lamborghini purred by a small Renault taxi and a bus—a black, menacing speed machine. “The Eiffel Tower?”
Sam saw expensive shops on a broad, tree-lined boulevard. The Champs Élysées. She was there, in Paris, and she was so filled with her problems it wasn’t even registering. Think of something to say, she told herself. “Paris—France—is very wealthy, isn’t it?”
“Very wealthy,” he agreed soberly. “France plundered the New World along with the English and Spanish, and it was very profitable.” He took his eyes from the traffic long enough to gauge whether she wanted him to continue. “Unfortunately, all the gold, the enormous riches fell into the hands of only a few. The majority of French people were very oppressed—the cause of the great French Revolution. You do remember,” he said carefully, “our great French Revolution, don’t you?”
Well, she remembered Marie Antoinette and the guillotine. She hadn’t been a great student in school. All she’d wanted to do was draw. It was all she’d ever wanted to be, a designer, until she met Jack Storm. She’d fought and worked to get where she was. Stop thinking about it, she told herself. Just stop it.
“You should read the history of France and the causes of the French Revolution, now that you are here. France was very backward, like the English with their monarchy, but ours was a corrupt nobility, a cruel feudal system, and the people rebelled. The aristocracy had incredible power. You know of the
droit de seigneur,
don’t you? Look,” he said abruptly, “we are coming to Chaillot Palace. The Eiffel Tower is across the river.”
Sam turned in her seat. The great symbol of Paris was a spraddle-legged iron structure brightly illuminated by floodlights, much larger than she’d expected from the pictures she’d seen. The tower itself was surrounded by a sweep of parks and walkways and stood against the softness of a spring night.
Stay in Paris,
Mindy had told her.
“Impressive, isn’t it? Now it’s used as a television tower for the entire Paris area.”
But what was she going to do in Paris? Keep right on making some report on the Maison Louvel that nobody cared about? It didn’t make sense. “No, never heard of it,” she told him, “what you just said.”
The Eiffel Tower receded into the night as the Lamborghini turned toward the Seine. “The
droit de seigneur?
Are you going to be shocked?” He was teasing but his voice seemed to say that whatever was the matter, he wanted to pull her out of her mood. “‘The right of the lord,’ because that is what it means, was a relic of the Dark Ages, when peasants were tied to the land and could be sold with it like so much livestock. The lords were entitled to do whatever they wanted. The
droit de seigneur
was the privilege of the seigneur to spend the first night with the bride of his vassal. Presuming, one may imagine, she was a virgin and exceptionally pretty.”
Sam slid a cautious look at Alain’s handsome profile. The thought of some feudal lord dragging a peasant’s bride away from him to be the first to have sex with her had to be the French version of some tall story. “Okay, I’ll bite. What did the serf say when the lord wanted to spend his wedding night with his bride?”
He looked genuinely startled. For a moment he took his eyes from traffic to stare at her. “My God, nothing, one supposes. They punished peasants cruelly in those days if they dared defy their lord. Horrible punishments—cutting off their hands, disemboweling, blinding them. Sometimes a defiant serf was even hunted down as a sport, like any other animal.”
Sam stared back. She’d been raised on Western tall stories designed to amaze gullible easterners. “You’re making this up,” she said.
“God, no, it’s all true.” The Lamborghini slowed, turning through a wooded park toward brightly lit docks along the Seine. “It’s horrifying in this day and age, but it was true that the feudal lord could have his subject’s woman before that man could have her himself and that it was made a matter of law, actually.” He paused, somewhat soberly. “Bluebeard was not just a French fairy tale, you must remember. He was a real person, the Count Gilles de Retz. As was the Marquis de Sade. And there”—he lifted a hand from the steering wheel quickly as though glad to change the subject—”is our dinner.”
Sam was still staring at him as he slid the Lamborghini into a parking slot. Beyond, at brightly lit docks extending into the Seine at the Pont d’Iéna were the large, flat-bottomed
bateaux mouches,
Paris’s sightseeing boats. An even larger vessel was tied up at the far end.
Alain came around the Lamborghini to the passenger’s side to open the door. As Sam slid out of her seat, he took her hand. She looked up at him, seeing his long-nosed, aristocratic face and the sun-gilded hair lit by the parking-area floodlights and ruffled by the breeze from the river. The silk suit molded his broad-shouldered body beautifully; he looked virile, incomparably assured. Alain des Baux was surely the handsomest man in Paris.
He stepped back slightly to give her room, still holding her hand in his. For a moment, with their bodies almost touching, the spring wind soughing in the trees around the Pont d’Iéna and the glimmer of moonlight on the Seine, Sam let herself think that this easygoing, marvelous Frenchman with his perfect manners and slightly mischievous sense of humor was trying his best to make the evening pleasant for her. She smiled up at him tentatively. In the next moment she thought of Jack. How could she even think of another man so soon after what Jack had done to her?
He saw her expression change. “Come along,” he said gently. “This is not the end of the sightseeing. I promised you an excellent dinner, and it’s waiting.”
The restaurant they boarded was a converted yacht. As they went up the gangplank, the imposing figure of the headwaiter in his black tuxedo hurried out to meet them halfway, his manner saying that Alain des Baux was an old and valued customer.
The main dining room was crowded; many of the diners were in formal evening clothes. The restaurant’s decor marked the place as expensive even for Paris, with swagged gray velvet drapes framing the glassed-in sides and charcoal-gray carpeting lush underfoot. Their table, with a huge centerpiece of spring lilacs and white roses, was located in the stern of the boat. It was surrounded by empty tables and a folding screen. Their isolation, Sam saw as she slid into the seat held for her by the maître de, was too obvious to be accidental. The rest of the restaurant was jammed.
“Very pretty,” Alain des Baux said, giving the mass of exquisite flowers in front of them a cursory look. He nodded to the hovering headwaiter. “Now take them away. I want to see you,” he explained. “If you wish, I can have them brought to you later, wrapped as a bouquet.”
Alain des Baux was rich, Sam was thinking as she looked around. She knew what reminded her of Jack Storm: his almost indifferent air of power. It had taken Jack years to acquire it; Alain des Baux acted as though it had been his from the day he’d been born.
“I decided it would be rather intimidating for us, our first dinner together, to dine in an empty boat,
a deux
.” Alain lowered his menu and gave her his mischievous smile. “So a compromise was made. We have a screen.”
A deux
. The two of us, she knew that much French. He was saying that he’d thought about hiring the whole restaurant boat but instead had just bought up the tables around them and ordered the screen to make it more private. She could only guess at the cost. Had the management canceled reservations at the other tables because he’d told them to? She supposed they had.
As she stared at Alain des Baux, Sam was thinking that she already knew she was attracted to men like this, worldly and powerful; if she was ever going to fall in love again, it would probably be with someone who followed the pattern. Had it really been Jack after all? she suddenly wondered. Or was she always going to fall in love with sophisticated, powerful men that were so different from the men she’d left back in Shoshone Falls?
“Is something wrong?” Alain des Baux was frowning at her.
Oh lord, how I long to tell him what is wrong, she thought, staring at this beautiful man across the table.
“This doesn’t suit you, here?” He made a movement to push back his chair. “We will go somewhere else.”
The restaurant boat was moving away from the dock, but Alain des Baux was halfway out of his seat, determined, imperious. The maître d’ came rushing back. The tall man ignored him, his eyes fixed only on Sam.
“The boat’s leaving. We can’t,” Sam told him.
“That means nothing, that the boat is leaving. I will stop it.” He waved the headwaiter away impatiently. “If this doesn’t please you, tell me.”
God, he is just like Jack Storm, Sam thought, staring up at him. Half the dining room was craning, and an army of waiters came running back to the stern. Alain des Baux was scowling, his linen napkin thrown down on the table, towering over her.
“I can do it,” he told her. “Do you wish to see if I can?”
“No—no, I believe you!” Damn him, he was too good at this. Her lips began to quiver. In a minute he’d even have her laughing. “Just—sit
down!
”
“Good.” He sat back down again and gave her a glinting look. “I want to make sure you will pay attention to dinner. And,” he added, “to me.”
Unwillingly, Sam had to laugh. “Look, I’m supposed to be here on a business trip, a quiet one, not to start a riot in public places.”
“Ah, yes, the acquisition of the old Maison Louvel by the great Jackson Storm company of New York.”
“By the way, you never mentioned how you knew about that. Don’t tell me it’s all over Paris!”
“No, it’s not all over Paris. They are being discreet at Louvel’s, but then they are still shocked. You can rely on Solange Doumer. She will wait for your company to make the announcement. Actually, I heard of the news because Nannette, the fitter, told my sister. That sort of confidence is hard to prevent—it’s very Parisian. Now,” he said abruptly, “before you become unhappy again, I have this dinner planned for you, and at the same time you will see Paris without tourists clicking cameras and squalling kids. And besides,” he added, flashing his white grin, “the food is not bad.”
Not bad? Their waiters wheeled up a tiered cart of hors d’oeuvres with cold asparagus in mayonnaise, mushrooms
en gelée,
artichoke hearts with capers, a
pâté Normande en croûte,
herbed baby carrots
à la crême
—it was too much to keep track of. Sam closed her eyes in anticipation. She was suddenly so hungry her stomach hurt. All she’d had since the telephone call that had shattered her day was a cup of coffee.
The hors d’oeuvres were followed by a potage madrilene made with red caviar, a whole striped bass stuffed with oysters and an
émincé
of beef
bourgeois.
The sommelier in his ropes of gold chains over a forest green uniform opened appropriate bottles of wine with each course—a light, fruity white for the hors d’oeuvres, followed by a crisp Chablis with the fish, then an exquisite Chateau Lafite-Rothschild bordeaux for the beef. At the last, they were served Moët champagne with the dessert of tiny apricots poached in cognac and laced with thick cream.