Caught In His Gilded World. Lucy Ellis

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 oldest cabarets: L’Oiseau Bleu. Home of the Bluebirds. A charming, old-time cabaret—but for how long?

       Judging from the media reaction, it appears the French aren’t going to take this one lying down.

      His hand closed over the piece of paper and crunch—it was nothing more than a small ball in his large fist.

      Gigi couldn’t help feeling they were all a little like that ball of paper, and just as disposable.

      ‘What do you want to know?’

      He made it sound so easy, but she wasn’t fooled. His dark eyes had hardened over the course of his cursory glance, and when he raised them there was a warning there.

      Gigi told herself they weren’t her words that she’d handed him. But she wanted him to know that this was the position they were operating from. A little information—even if it was misinformation. The sensible thing to do now would be to ask rationally and politely if he foresaw any major changes to the theatre that were going to affect their jobs.

      Only then she noticed the subtle movement of his hard gaze over her body. He wasn’t being obvious but she felt it all the same—and, dammit, her nipples stiffened.

      So instead of being reasonable she lost her temper and went for broke. ‘We want to know if you’ve any plans to turn our cabaret into a full-on high-octane version of Le Crazy Horse?’

       CHAPTER THREE

      MARTIN DANTON MADE a groaning sound.

      His brother looked poised to take the little redhead out.

      Red stood her ground.

      ‘I wouldn’t know,’ responded Khaled, not taking his eyes off her, ‘never having been inside the Crazy Horse.’

      He caught the slight eye-roll and the tightening of her lips. His hand tightened around the crumpled ball of spurious invective this young woman had clearly swallowed whole.

      ‘Gigi, ça suffit,’ interrupted Jacques Danton. That’s enough.

      But she didn’t back down. ‘I think we have a right to know,’ she protested. ‘It’s our jobs.’

      He would have been more impressed if he hadn’t suspected her boss had put her up to it.

      ‘Your jobs are safe for the moment.’ He threw it in because it was accurate—today. Tomorrow, possibly not.

      ‘Splendide!’ Jacques Danton beamed.

      ‘That’s not what I asked,’ Red interrupted, and she lifted those lively blue eyes to his.

      Not in appeal, he registered, but setting herself against him. Clearly not fooled one bit—unlike her boss.

      For a moment he considered the alternative: that this wasn’t some set-up and that the girl—a lot sharper than the Dantons and, unlike them, willing to take him on—was acting alone.

      ‘We’re not a strip club, Mr Kitaev, and it would ruin—’

      She took a breath and something like anguish crumpled up her striking features. In the time it took her to compose herself Khaled became interested in what exactly she thought he was ruining for her.

      But she shook her head and changed direction. ‘Ruin the character of the theatre!’

      ‘I wasn’t told the theatre had a character.’

      More laughter.

      She looked around, as if thrown by the lack of support, and unexpectedly his conscience stirred.

      ‘Nobody is going to