His question exactly.
He straightened up to assert a little dominance over her and settled his hands lightly on his lean muscled hips.
‘Khaled Kitaev,’ he said simply.
There was a ripple of reaction.
‘Ladies...’ he added. But he didn’t take his eyes off Red as he calmly offered her his hand, and when she hesitated he leaned in and took what he wanted.
* * *
Gigi had been falling professionally since she was nine years old, but that hadn’t prevented her flailing backwards and striking her head and her tailbone on the stage boards. She was currently seeing two hands and was not sure which one to take.
‘Get up!’ Jacques was hissing at her like a goose.
The option was taken out of her hands by Kitaev, who plucked her effortlessly off the ground and deposited her on her feet in front of him. Only the room swayed and her legs weren’t co-operating.
It didn’t help either that she now found herself in the invidious position of having to tilt her head back even though she was five eleven—because he was that big—and he was standing far too close...looking at her.
Boy, oh, boy, the way he was looking at her!
Gigi blinked rapidly to clear her vision.
Sometimes men looked at you as if all they wanted was to see you naked. Gigi accepted this as an occupational hazard even if she hated it. Sometimes they made unwanted and sleazy advances, but she’d learned to combat those too.
This man wasn’t doing any of those things. His eyes weren’t desperate, greedy, pulling at her admittedly ratty leotard as if seeing her naked was all he cared about.
No, this man’s eyes held intent. They said something else entirely. Something no man had ever promised her. He was going to strip her naked and pleasure her body as she’d never been pleasured before. And then he was going to take her job and bin it.
‘You can’t do that!’ Gigi blurted out.
‘Do what, dushka?’ He spoke lazily, in a deep Russian accent, as if he had all the time in the world.
There was a titter among the other girls.
‘Whatever it is you have planned...’ Gigi’s voice trailed off, because it didn’t sound as if either of them were talking about the cabaret.
‘At the moment,’ he responded, with a flicker of something certainly beyond her experience in those dark and distant eyes, ‘not much besides lunch.’
The laughter around them drowned out any response—which was just as well, because it didn’t take much imagination to see that this man had absolutely no interest in anything here—and Gigi felt her initial frustration build once more.
He didn’t care what happened to this place. The other girls didn’t care. They would care, however, when they didn’t have jobs.
But it wasn’t just about losing a job. This was her home.
The anguish that pulled through Gigi like an undertow was real. It was the only place she had ever felt she really belonged since her mother’s sudden death had upended her safe, secure world.
She’d served her time with her father until she’d been able to make her leap across the Channel onto the stage boards of what had seemed then to be a dream job.
Although, to be honest, if you’d asked her last week about her job she would have rolled her eyes and complained about the hours, the pay and the lousy chorie.
The Moulin Rouge, it wasn’t.
But this wasn’t an average day. This was the day everything she’d stitched together from her earliest life with her mother was threatening to come undone.
Gigi was not going to let that happen. She couldn’t let it happen.
Besides, this wasn’t any ordinary theatre. The most amazing women had danced here. Mistinguett, La Belle Otero, Josephine Baker—even Lena Horne had sung on this stage.
And then there was Emily Fitzgerald. Nobody remembered her—she’d never been famous...just a beautiful chorus girl among many who had danced on this stage for five short years. Her mother.
When she fell pregnant to smooth-talking Spanish showman Carlos Valente she had been forced to return home to her family in Dublin, her Paris dream over. But from the moment she’d been able to stand Gigi had had her feet stuffed into pointe shoes, had been pushed in the direction of a stage and raised on stories of the Bluebird in its fabulous heyday.
Of course it hadn’t been anything like those stories when she’d landed at its door aged nineteen, but unlike the other girls she knew how truly special L’Oiseau Bleu had once been...and could be again.
She’d been working on the Dantons. She’d been sure she was halfway to getting some improvements made to the routines...
Only now he was getting in the way.
At a loss as to where to start, it was then that she remembered she did have something that could speak for her. Folded up and stuck down her sports bra.
She tugged it out, sadly crumpled, and smoothed down the single page. It was a printout Lulu had made from a burlesque blog they both followed: Parisian Showgirl.
She looked up to find Kitaev was still watching her and had probably got an eyeful of her frayed purple bra. She knew this wasn’t looking a whole lot professional, but she hadn’t meant to come crashing down, she hadn’t meant for him to come hunting around backstage, and right now all she had was...this. It just happened to be in her bra.
Something close to amusement shifted in those dark, watchful eyes. ‘What else do you keep in there?’
His voice was pure Russian velvet, quiet and low-pitched, but a bit like a seismic shift in the earth’s plates. You felt it in your bones...and other places.
Gigi experienced a whole body flush and drew herself up stiffly. ‘Nothing,’ she said uncertainly.
A couple of the girls tittered.
Ignoring them, she held out the page until he took it.
Gigi watched him run a cursory glance over the print. She knew it by heart.
Paris is in revolt over the news that Russian oligarch Khaled Kitaev, one of Forbes’ richest men under forty, got lucky in a game of poker.
Kitaev, whose fortune is in oil but who, like most Russian businessmen, seems to have branched out into property and entertainment until his holdings resemble nothing less than the behemoth nervous European business columnists fear will simply devour everything in its path—yes, that Kitaev—has taken possession of one of Paris’s famous cabarets.
And this isn’t just any theatre, people, it’s one of Montmartre’s
