Satin Doll (26 page)

“They’re nice,” Sam said politely.
 

“Give it a chance,” Alain said, reaching over her to lift the sleeve of a beige silk dress draped over the salesgirl’s arm. “I really would like to see you try on some of Laure’s clothes.”
 

“You’re not serious,” she said, surprised.
 

“Ah, but I am. Would you believe me if I told you I’ve been thinking about this since I got your message?” He gave her his charmingly mischievous smile, as he sat back in one of the boutique’s rickety little wire chairs and stretched his long legs out in front of him. He looked magnificent in a Cardin suit of charcoal-gray Italian silk and a silk shirt and tie, his sun streaked-hair a little wind-tousled, as though he really had dropped everything to come to take her shopping. “Look, try these.” He lifted a hand with easy imperiousness and the proprietress, Laure, picked up several dresses quickly from the back of a chair. “Yes, the orange crepe,” he said, pulling one out. “Will you put this on for me and let us see how it looks?” he asked softly.
 

Sam stared at him. He really was serious, she saw, meeting his wonderfully gold-flecked eyes. How could she refuse him, even with the sort of clothes she’d never worn in her life? “You’re going to hate it,” she said, grimacing.
 

But when she came back from the fitting room reluctantly wearing the burnt-orange jersey dress, its silky hem swishing a good three inches from the top of her Art Hammer Western-style boots, Alain put back his tawny head and laughed.
 

“That’s pretty damned rude,” Sam put her hands on her hips. “After all, it was your idea.”
 

“No, no—forgive me.” He smothered his laughter. “It only needs a few touches. Laure will take care of it.”
 

The proprietress was standing at the entrance to the shop with a young man in a yellow hairdresser’s smock who had just come in, and who was now eyeing Sam interestedly.
 

“Laure has some ideas, beginning with shoes. Please,” Alain said quickly, “humor me. Call it an experiment.”
 

Sam had the feeling this was a put-up job. Alain was obviously having a marvelous time shopping for clothes with her. He was just plain irresistible and he knew it. She gave him a reluctant grin. “This isn’t one of your crazy practical jokes, is it? After all, these people are expecting us to buy something.”
 

“They have all the time in the world for us,” he said easily, “if I say so. It was Laure’s idea,” he turned in his chair, looking to the front of the shop, “to call the hairstylist from the shop next door. Naturally, I seconded it.”
 

“Alain,” Sam began warningly, but the expression on his face stopped her. She had seen brief glimpses of this before, the look that said here was a man who was not used to being challenged. She gave in. “Just don’t cut my hair, okay?” She still hadn’t forgotten the last hairstyling session for Sam Laredo.
 

The young hairdresser in the smock felt the same way, as he seated Sam in one of the rickety little chairs before the mirrors. “New York,” he muttered disdainfully as he lifted handfuls of Sam’s ragged, wheat-colored strands to examine them. “New York, Beverly Hills—
c’est incroyable
.”
 

“Don’t cut it,” Sam said. “Alain—tell him.”
 

She needn’t have worried. Alain’s instructions were, apparently, to be conservative. But the young Frenchman continued to mutter as he stuffed his mouth full of hair pins and got down to work. Laure brought cream-colored sandals from the shoe part of the boutique to go with the orange dress.
 

“Look,” Sam said, unhappy about the direction the shopping trip was taking, “I was only going to buy a few outfits—”
 

“Be patient,” Alain soothed her. “Nothing terrible is going to happen to you. Laure knows what I want.”
 

What
he
wanted? Sam thought, staring at herself in the mirror as the hairdresser lifted her hair and started snipping discreetly. The pink walls of the main room of the shop were covered in gold-flecked wallpaper. The fur underfoot looked to be some sort of dyed rabbit, and hot-pink velvet drapes tied back with gold tassels covered the door to the fitting room. She was going to end up looking the same way, Sam thought, jutting her underlip stubbornly.
 

Sam stood in her stocking feet while the hairstylist, still murmuring under his breath, used an electric curling iron to smooth and shape her hair and pull it into a little knot at the nape of her neck. The shorter ends were left, slightly waved, to cup her cheeks and fall slightly over one eye. The salesgirl pinned up the hem of the tangerine-colored dress at the same time Laure knelt to slip the high-heeled sandals onto Sam’s feet.
 

Sam opened one eye cautiously. Her first impression was that it was not all that bad. That is, if you could call being changed into someone you didn’t recognize “not bad.” The image in the bank of mirrors was actually that of another woman, someone Samantha would never have thought of as herself. The long-legged, breezy, coltish Sam Laredo was gone—or at least temporarily concealed. The very chic, more natural-looking hairstyle replacing the trendy Raggedy Ann cut emphasized Sam’s good cheekbones, her nicely modeled short, straight nose, the suddenly classic lines of her chin and throat. Most of all, the loose, glittering blonde cap of her hair brought out her wide gray eyes, transforming their rather ingenuous, forthright look into something a great deal cooler and much more sophisticated, even a little mysterious. She had become, Sam thought, startled, a gravely elegant blonde presence: willowy, distinctive and—perhaps inevitably—very French.
 

Great God, was all she could think, staring at herself.
 

She was still staring when Alain unrolled his long length from the little chair and strode over to her. With both hands at her shoulders as they looked into the mirrors, he said in a low voice, “Tell me that you aren’t ravishing, like this.” The good-humored teasing was gone; he was very intent. “Look at yourself, darling. You are exquisite, truly beautiful.”
 

Ravishing? Exquisite? Well, different, anyway, she thought uncomfortably, staring at the strange woman reflected there. Alain’s eyes held a naked look of desire that startled her. “It’s not me,” she whispered, shaken. “It’s someone else.”
 

“Ah, yes, it is you,” he murmured. “Much more than what you were before.”
 

She watched the man in the mirror put his hands at her throat and lower his face, breathing the scent of her hair. “Samantha,” she heard him murmur, “I adore you. I want to make love to you.” He lifted his head and stared at her, his extraordinary eyes glittering. “I have a place at Fontainebleau, where we can be alone. Say that you will let me take you there for a few days. Now, right away.”
 

She couldn’t answer. She was in a mild state of shock at the suddenness of it. This was what she had been waiting for, to hear Alain des Baux say that he wanted her. Was she really beautiful? Sam thought numbly. She had to admit the way she looked now was more like the “beautiful” the world knew and recognized. Alain des Baux wanted her to go away with him. To make love to her. Why was she hesitating?
 

She met Alain’s eyes in the mirror. Do something, her mind was telling her, this is what you want, isn’t it? Her face must have held something that he took as assent because she heard his quick, indrawn breath.
 

“I can’t kiss you now,” he whispered against her hair. Laure and the hairdresser were standing right behind them. “But I want to, my darling, believe me.”
 

Samantha watched his lips drop a soft kiss into the shining waves of her hair. She could wait as long as he wanted her, she thought. She closed her eyes, telling herself the world had suddenly turned golden.
 

At last.
 

The telephone was ringing in her apartment when Samantha staggered in with her packages. There were so many that Sam had to leave some of the larger boxes down on the salon floor for the night porter to bring up.
 

Sam was still dazed. Alain des Baux had finally said that he wanted her, she told herself as she dumped the parcels and boxes from Laure’s boutique on the floor and made for the jangling telephone in the bedroom. His brief kiss, after he had helped carry her packages to the first floor of Louvel’s, had been only the barest brush of warm lips, but his beautiful eyes had spoken volumes. She snatched up the receiver.
 

“Sammy?” An American voice, suddenly familiar. “Sammy? It’s Peter Frank. I’ve been trying to get you for the last couple of hours.”
 

“Pete?” Peter Frank was the Jackson Storm vice president in charge of operations and development. She couldn’t say she knew him very well but she had met him several times in meetings. “How’s everything in New York?” It was good news, she was sure of it. But why Peter Frank, instead of Mindy Ferragamo or Jack? “How’s everybody?” She supposed it was all right to ask about Jack Storm directly. “Is Jack back in New York?”
 

“Sammy, baby, I’m not in New York,” Pete Frank’s jovial voice boomed in her ear. “I’m standing in a pay-telephone booth here at Charles de Gaulle, waiting to get my flight on to New York. Sammy,” the voice went on, “I’ve been down in Lyons at the silk mill for a week, trying to get their operations problems straightened out, but I wanted to call you before I left. You’re having a big time in Paris, right?”
 

Peter Frank was at Charles de Gaulle? The Jackson Storm vice president in charge of operations had been in France for a week, passing through Paris to and from the airport, but he hadn’t stopped in Paris to see her? All she was getting was a last-minute telephone call from Charles de Gaulle.
 

A creeping sense that there was something wrong swept over her. What she had suffered in the past few weeks still held her in a fearful grip. “Pete, what have you heard—” Bad business, to think and talk at the same time. “Pete—have you heard about my report? I sent one in to Mindy about a week ago. I—I thought I’d hear from New York by now.”
 

“Love your reports, honey. Everybody does. Don’t worry about it. Sammy, they’re calling my flight, I’ve got to cut this short. Everybody,” Pete Frank added, his voice fading momentarily as though he had turned away from the telephone to check something, “likes the reports. Keep them coming, sweetheart. Sorry about not calling you earlier. Jack has been”—there was only the slightest hesitation—”very tied up since he got back from the Far East.”
 

Had Jack told Peter Frank to call her? If she needed any confirmation of how things stood, Pete Frank’s last-minute telephone call was it.
 

“Pete,” she said desperately, remembering one of his jobs was development planning, “the Maison Louvel here in Paris could be a really big opportunity for Jackson Storm International. I sent Jack a proposal about it.” She knew she was talking too fast, blurting out everything, but he’d said he was just about to take a plane. “Someone needs to—”
 

The voice on the other end of the line stopped her. “Sammy, wait—Sammy, will you listen to me? Look, I hate to say this, kid, but don’t call Mindy’s office anymore. It’s not going to do any good. This is straight from Mindy:
Don’t call.
Don’t bother Julie or anybody else, do you read me? Am I getting through to you?”
 

After a long moment’s silence Sam said, “Yes.”
 

“Good.” She thought she heard him sigh. “Don’t send any reports to Jack. He won’t read them. The office is busy as hell right now getting ready for the big July publicity push. And even if anybody had time to get to them, the word is out—don’t bother. Now, Sammy—Jesus, are you crying?”
 

“I’m not crying.” She bit her lips, fighting back the tears.
 

“You know how these things go,” Peter Frank said uncomfortably. “Hell, if you didn’t know how Jack operates before, you do now, right? Cut your losses, Sammy. You want to walk away from this with your dignity intact, because you’ll thank yourself for it later.”
 

There was another pause. Sam said, “Do I come back to New York now, Peter?”
 

“You can do what you want, Sammy,” the voice on the other end said quietly, “but if you come back to New York, you don’t come back to Jackson Storm.”

Chapter Fourteen

Samantha started carrying clothes down from the storeroom to the design room by the armfuls. She knew that sooner or later someone in the Maison Louvel would discover what she was doing and she wasn’t disappointed; on her third trip she found Solange Doumer waiting for her at the bottom of the narrow flight of stairs.
 

The directrice, her creamy skin and dark red hair enhanced by her usual long-sleeved black dress, held her hands propped on her hips, her face an angry white mask. “
Mais d’où venez-vous?
” Madame Doumer demanded.
 

“Don’t start that,” Sam said, brushing past her. “I think you understand more English than you let on. And I haven’t got time right now to play games.”