Nights In Black Lace. Noelle Mack

late.”

      “Excellent. It would not do to be too prompt. I want to whip the audience into a frenzy of longing.”

      Marc snorted. “Speaking of that, I should go to the dressing room and crack the whip on our models.”

      “Yes, please see that they have everything they need and that the hairdresser is not being too cruel to them.”

      “They are such crybabies,” Marc sighed. “It’s not as if they can do their own styles.”

      “I want Nadia’s hair up in spikes.”

      He made a note of it.

      “And Dabra, in ringlets, but pulled back very tight.”

      “Could work,” he said indifferently, making another note.

      “The rest I will leave up to you,” Odette said.

      “Merci, madame.” He gave a mocking little bow and turned to go.

      Marc threaded his way through the backstage personnel, stepping carefully over thick lighting cables and avoiding the technicians who swarmed around the area.

      Odette looked again through the curtain at the handsome American. Besides the unzipped wetsuit jacket that did very nice things for his broad shoulders, he wore a tank top that fit just right over what she suspected was a beautifully muscled chest. And, naturellement, faded jeans. He was perfection.

      By her educated guess, the jeans had not been stonewashed or artificially distressed in any way. No, they were molded to his muscular thighs and calves as if he had worn them for months on end in the California sun. Perhaps he was not only a surfer. That taut, sinewy build could just as well be that of a mountaineer.

      He might be on his way to Alsace to climb—she could think of no reason for a beach god to be in Paris. Ah, there was another possibility. He could be a cyclist. That would explain the magnificent thighs.

      She smiled to herself. An all-around, all-American athlete. Triple A. Exactly what a fling required. Here today and gone tomorrow, always chasing risky new experiences, in love with danger, free as the wind.

      In quick succession, she envisioned him shooting the curl of an immense wave, then dangling from a rope in a climber’s harness, and finally bent over the handles of a racing bike, legs pumping, his sun-warmed skin bared above the waist. No cologne was more intoxicating than that very masculine smell, as far as she was concerned.

      Ah, the pleasures of having an overactive imagination. She felt rather warm herself.

      His hair was thick and wavy, also kissed by the sun, its dark brown glinting with an occasional flash of gold under the catwalk’s pulsing lights. Odette studied his face. High cheekbones, strong jaw, a deeply carved dimple that flashed when he smiled. And such eyes. Soulful. Expressive. Dark and shadowy. She would have to find a way to meet him somehow, and get a better look close up.

      He sat with his legs well apart, and she could not help but notice the other very male characteristics he’d been blessed with under the worn denim. She looked her fill. She doubted that he was wearing underwear. What an animal. His hands were strong and veined, his fingers spread casually open over each solid thigh.

      A sensual vision of him with his ragged fly unzipped and his hands around his erect cock came to her mind. She chided herself for having such wayward thoughts only minutes away from the opening of an important show, then forgave herself immediately.

      Sexual fantasy was her business, after all. And she had been considering a line of men’s underwear to complement the super-sexy lingerie she designed for famous beauties, rock stars, and movie goddesses. Her line had been wildly profitable from the very first year of its existence—of course, charging hundreds of dollars for a few scraps of material had helped. It was all about the image she was able to project, knowing precisely how to do so only too well, as a ex-model herself.

      She’d been on countless covers and strutted the catwalk for every designer in Europe until she’d quit at the age of twenty-five and parlayed her saved income into millions. With the help of a wealthy backer, of course—her former lover, who’d noted her business acumen and obtained the necessary financing. She’d done so well in the previous quarter she would be able to donate her profits to charity after every last supplier and everyone on her staff was paid.

      At the founding of her company, she’d vowed to do exactly that someday to honor her mother, an embroiderer and beader, one of the petite mains, the little hands, who did the fine sewing and finishing for the great couture houses, behind the scenes in workshops on quiet Parisian streets.

      Odette Gaillard now employed several hundred people at her atelier and her showroom. Models flew in from all over the world to work in her dazzling shows, and the most successful men in the world vied for front row seats to watch them.

      She smiled inwardly. Most models were too self-obsessed to pay attention to their status-seeking admirers—at least until they left the business, deciding they had a right to eat more than a few hundred grams of food a day.

      After she’d quit modeling, Odette had indulged herself for weeks, eating napoleons two at a time and slices of cake to her heart’s content, then quit that too, sick of sweets and happy to be done with both extremes. She didn’t envy the models and didn’t find the business of fashion all that glamorous anymore. But she worked hard.

      Surely she was entitled to take a few moments for mental dalliance now and then. Who could he be? She could not remember ever seeing a man so naturally good-looking at one of her shows. Or anywhere else.

      Odette watched as he rose to give his seat to Marie Arelquin’s grandmother, an ancient but still chic relic of the glory days of French fashion. In the early 1960s, Madame Arelquin had been the most exclusive couturier in Paris, limiting her clients to a handful per year. Odette had read up on the period in her mother’s books on fashion, and of course, had pored over Marie’s family scrapbooks.

      Madame Arelquin had been slim and straight as a reed then, with a matchless style that was all her own. She’d favored pencil-slim skirts topped with flyaway jackets cut very full in the sleeve, immense hats designed to cast an air of mystery, over-the-elbow gloves, and clutch purses.

      The Arelquin house had presided over the last era of elegance. After that, it was Courrèges and then Carnaby Street mod and then hippies, until Yves St. Laurent took the look and invented the rich gypsy.

      Madame Arelquin had chosen not to fade away, developing a line of facial rejuvenation creams that seemed to work, even though she’d announced in the notoriously catty fashion press that every woman had to choose between her face and her behind at some point. Madame had let the latter get big and round, so that the former would not look starved and sick.

      The strategy had worked, Odette noticed. Madame Arelquin had to be over eighty, but she had very few lines on her face. She gave her granddaughter a double air-kiss, not wanting to disturb Marie’s maquillage or her own carefully applied red lipstick. Odette smiled.

      The young man managed a half-bow that was charming and not gauche in the least as he gave up his seat to the grande dame. So he had manners. That was a nice plus.

      Odette found herself wondering who had taught him to be so respectful of women, and decided that his mother must have instructed him. Whoever she was, she had raised her son right.

      Madame Arelquin gave him an imperious nod in return and seated herself next to Marie, crossing her legs elegantly at the ankle as she did.

      Odette’s other assistant bustled up and looked over her boss’s shoulder at the restless crowd through the small opening in the curtain.

      “See and be seen. It is always the same,” Lucie murmured. “Ah, there is the winner of the raffle.” She pointed the pink eraser end of her pencil at the man now standing behind the Arelquin women, then flipped through her seating chart and made a note on the front row using her own hieroglyphic.

      Odette could not read it but it didn’t matter. Lucie was a wizard of organization and good