Satin Doll (35 page)

The moment she uttered the last few words she stopped, realizing what she had said.
She wasn’t in love with him
. She was standing there naked on a cold floor, and the truth had finally come to her. “I really don’t, Alain,” she said slowly. “Oh lord, I thought I was in love with you, but I’m not! But then you’ve never said you were in love with me, either,” she blurted.
 

He quickly slid his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. “No, I’ve been stupid. Oh God, how I’ve been stupid, to treat you like this! If I had only known—of course I had thought you are so glamorous,” he mumbled, “so beautiful—ah, Samantha, don’t go!” He followed her as she gathered up her jeans and shirt from the floor, reaching around her to pull them out of her hands. “This means so much to me.” He held on to her bra, refusing to let it go. “This will work out. Please get back in the bed. Samantha, please, anything you want, darling, you have only to say it!”
 

Good lord, were they back to that again, Alain offering her anything she wanted? What was the matter with her, anyway? Sam gave him a shove with one hand and dragged her bra away. The whole beautiful dream had become a mess. She didn’t want to hear him pleading with her; it was more than she could take. “Alain, please!” She couldn’t fasten the bra and left it open. She yanked on her shirt. “Will you leave me alone?”
 

“Will you stop this?” he demanded desperately. “I won’t touch you; I will only hold you in my arms, sleep quietly with you, I promise. Will you let me put my arms around you just for a moment?”
 

All she wanted to do was get out of there. Sam picked up her jeans, stepped into them and yanked them up to her waist. For the first time in her whole life she wanted to go home. Not back to the Maison Louvel or to New York, but all the way home to Shoshone Falls, Wyoming. She wanted it so much she was amazed.
 

Alain followed her as she tried to find her boots. “Oh God, you hate me,” he groaned.
 

“No, dammit, I don’t hate you.” She found her boots, holding them in one hand as she looked around the bedroom to see if she’d missed anything else. “Alain, I don’t want to leave here with you thinking that, because you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. I just don’t love you, that’s all. If I did, maybe I’d help you—” She closed her mouth on the words abruptly. She wouldn’t help get him ready for another woman. Even she knew better than that.
 

He looked down at her somberly. “You hate me because I am not a man.” He stood with his arms by his sides, hands clenched tightly against his beautiful body. “I am not wonderful, because I am not a man. You can say it.”
 

“And I’m not a drug rehabilitation clinic, either!” Sam yelled. She was so tired, so beleaguered by what she’d found there in the dark bedroom that she was shaking. “Look, give me a break, this has been a bad day for me. I—”
 

She stopped, suddenly wanting to say something that would take the stricken look from his face. “Alain, listen, my brothers—that is, I’ve known people with problems all my life. People with booze problems, with getting into fights, being put in jail, having prison records, just being poor. You don’t know the kind of people I come from, but I know trouble, believe me. Sometimes I feel like I’ve never known anything else.” She looked him straight in the eye. “Right now I’m just not in any shape to handle yours.”
 

“I adore you,” he said quietly.
 

“It’s not enough. I was talking about love.” She turned away from him. “Alain, it was kind of dirty to bring me down here to spend a few days with you when I didn’t know what I was getting into. You thought I was a woman with a lot of experience, didn’t you? Well, I’m sure you would be disappointed.” She couldn’t keep her own disappointment out of her voice. So much for the dreams, she told herself. “Right now all I want you to do is to drive me back to Paris.”
 

“You’re not going to leave.” He stepped in front of her, blocking her way. “Samantha, I need you, can’t you believe what I say? Get back in bed with me. It will be different this time, I promise.”
 

Good lord, he wasn’t going to give up. “I said, drive me back to Paris, dammit!”
 

“I am not going back to Paris tonight.” He reached for her. “And neither are you.”
 

Sam sidestepped him, pointing a finger warningly. “You touch me, Alain, and I’ll slug you.” She meant it. “I’ve had just about all I can take today, so give me the damned car keys. Okay, I’ll do it myself.”
 

They both lunged for the keys on top of the dresser. When Sam managed to scrape them into her hand, Alain caught her by the wrist, trying to pry them out of her fingers. “You can’t go back to Paris. Not tonight. I won’t let you.”
 

Frustration and heartsick fury suddenly burst out of her. She feinted with a rabbit punch to his midsection before she followed through with her fist to his jaw. There was a loud, distinct thud as it connected.
 

Alain reeled back, stunned and surprised, hit the bed and sprawled backward on it. He sat up almost at once. “Have you gone mad?” he muttered, fingering his jaw. “You—you fought me!”
 

“I have four brothers. They taught me how to fight. I told you I come from a tough background.” She turned blindly, feeling she had to get out of there or else she was going to hit him again. “I’m sorry Alain, although I don’t know why I should be apologizing to you—you haven’t been very nice to me. You can pick up your car tomorrow at the Maison Louvel. I grew up driving pickup trucks and tractors—I guess I can drive your damned Lamborghini!”
 

She slammed the bedroom door behind her.
 

At night on the Autoroute du Soleil expressway going north, she had difficulty staying oriented as she fought sleeplessness and her lack of familiarity with high-speed French traffic, with the baffling knobs and dials of the superpowered Lamborghini. The terrible scene with Alain after her long day had drained her; at the Grigny exit she suddenly couldn’t go any farther. She pulled the Lamborghini down the ramp but didn’t quite make the lights of an all-night service station. Sam opened the door on the driver’s side, jerked the racing car to a stop and leaned out far enough to throw up in a patch of weeds at the roadside. In a second she was suddenly weeping and vomiting helplessly.
 

Afterward she sat for several minutes, letting everything settle down. Losing the elegant dinner she’d been served at Alain des Baux’s house, she thought, wiping her eyes, ought to make her feel somewhat better. It was called getting a bad experience out of your system. She needed to go back to the apartment at the Maison Louvel, get a good night’s sleep and pack her things in the morning to leave Paris. She was running away again, and it felt good.
 

It was after one o’clock when Sam connected with the Périphérique beltway that circled Paris, exiting the ramp three separate times to get her directions, fighting down the desperate feeling that the day, the night, would never end. At last, at the right exit for the Place de l’Opéra district, she hit streets that looked familiar. It took another half hour to find her way to the rue Cambon, and once there she couldn’t find the turn off for the rue des Bénédictines. By the time she had circled the block twice, Sam was close to screaming.
 

She pulled the sleek black Lamborghini under a streetlight and just sat there. Okay, where do you go from here? Sam asked herself with the blankness of total exhaustion. So many dreams in her life had collapsed that, sitting there at two o’clock in the morning on a Paris side street, she didn’t even have enough strength to find her way back to bed.
 

Slow tears trickled down her face as she told herself the best dream of them all had been Alain des Baux. Lord, he had been so perfect—so worth loving! She bent her head to the Lamborghini’s steering wheel and rested it there. She wasn’t fooling anybody, she knew now; she was shallow, ambitious, mixed up, so insecure that she’d been turning things into what she wanted to see instead of what they really were. If she wanted to be honest with herself, she’d admit that Alain des Baux was no dream prince, no golden aristocratic god living in a world that dazzled her, but a real person, a man with a terrible problem. And what had she done? She had socked him in the jaw and then walked out on him!
 

Did she have to come to the end of her rope before seeing things as they really were? She hadn’t been in love with Jack Storm, and she hadn’t been in love with Alain des Baux. She knew that now.
 

I’ve got to stop being the poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has to fight for everything she gets, she told herself in a burst of understanding. Now Jack thinks he wants to divorce his wife, and I don’t want Jack. I don’t think I ever did.
 

She didn’t want Alain, either.
 

Time to go home, she thought with a sigh, to bed upstairs in the apartment tonight, then back to New York tomorrow, and maybe all the way home to Wyoming by the end of the week.
 

The rue des Bénédictines was dark, and she slammed the Lamborghini against one of the plane trees at the curb before she managed to bring it to a stop. All she longed for was to creep into bed, get a good night’s sleep and pack to leave Paris as soon as she could.
 

The downstairs of the Maison Louvel was dark. Sam knew the futility of ringing for Albert, the night watchman, to come turn the lights on for her. She opened the door with her key and stepped into the lobby.
 

For once she was so tired she decided she wasn’t going to bypass the treacherous little elevator, because she didn’t think she could climb four flights of stairs to the top floor. But when Sam got inside the cage, it was pitch-black. She had to fumble blindly for several minutes before finding the button for the fourth floor. She braced herself for the familiar sickening drop of the elevator and then its slow, grinding ascent.
 

Between the second and third floors the cage came to a stop. Sam felt a moment of panic in the darkness. Let this night end, she prayed silently. All I want to do is get into bed. She hit the button panel with the flat of her hand. The lift mechanism gave a protesting groan, its gears slipping, and started up again, the sound loud in the silence of the empty building.
 

Home stretch, she told herself, almost hypnotized by the dark, by her tiredness. The elevator cage stopped several inches short of the top floor and the gate wouldn’t open. Sam struggled with it for a long moment and then stopped, temporarily defeated, looking out on the empty fourth floor dimly lit by the faint shine of the skylight one flight above.
 

Damn, her last night in this place and she was stuck in the elevator! She should have known better than to take the thing. And she wasn’t so tired that she didn’t consider, for an awful moment, the possibility of spending the night where she was, stuck just a few inches from where she wanted to be. Sam gave the gate a dispirited kick.
 

The brass bars came partly open. She tugged at the gate, trying to squeeze through the opening. As she managed to push most of her body clear, she heard a voice yell out in the blackness. “Stay where you are!”
 

Then the fourth-floor landing exploded.
 

Flashing streamers of flame tore the air, and the silence ripped apart with strange, staccato burps and hoarse shouts. A force hit Samantha, slamming her to the wall, and a familiar voice growled in her ear, “Damn you, woman, I could strangle you for this!”
 

Sam hit her head on the marble floor. For a moment not all the deafening noises and bursting lights were outside but right there inside her skull. Then, with a sudden jolt of pain, came total, enveloping night.
 

Chapter Twenty

The emergency room of the American Hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly was a surprisingly busy place at four o’clock in the morning. It was no place, Sam was finding, to try to get some sleep.
 

She’d been sitting on a bench in the corridor since the ambulance had delivered her, and during that time a stream of ambulances had rolled up the driveway to bring not only the English-speaking wounded from the Maison Louvel, who were being transferred from French hospitals, but also three Americans who had been in an automobile accident on the Periphérique, a very pregnant woman about to deliver a baby and an elderly tourist couple from Chicago who had been taken from their Paris hotel with a case of food poisoning. The hospital people were having an increasingly hard time getting the arrivals through the growing crowd of newspaper and television crews that gathered in the emergency area parking lot outside, not to mention through the uniformed Paris gendarmes, French Internal Security men and Interpol agents filling the corridors inside the glass doors.
 

The noise, Sam decided, the procession of rapidly rolling gurneys wheeling by the bench where she sat and disappearing into the hospital elevator, made this no place to be if you were sleepy. She was so exhausted that she had long since stopped making much sense. The brusque young man from the American consulate who sat beside her obviously had his own interpretation of what was wrong. He watched her closely.