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‘No, it’s called making an old-time entrance,’ said another.
Gigi indicated the need for chairs for the other twenty-three dancers and as she took her own identified where Khaled was in the room.
She sat with her girls and glared at him.
‘Ladies and gentlemen...’
One of the suits launched into the press release.
Questions erupted.
Gigi listened to Khaled answer all the questions in that same deep voice that had haunted her dreams for six awful weeks.
She tried not to stare too long at him, but he was magnetic, charming the pants off all the females in the room with that quiet Russian drawl.
Although she knew now he wouldn’t be taking advantage of that particular skill. He wasn’t that man at all.
He was her man.
Only he didn’t want to be.
‘Why have you chosen to do this, Mr Kitaev?’
‘Some people have called this your love letter to Paris. Is there any truth in that?’
Khaled leaned forward, his eyes focussed on her, and said in that low, deeply accented voice, ‘It’s my love letter to a particular woman.’
He had clearly gone off-script, because the suits looked alarmed and there was a flurry of hands raised as everyone vied to ask the next question, given the answer to that one wasn’t in the information sheet.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Is she French?’
‘Is she a Bluebird?’
Gigi struggled to understand his meaning. She wanted to leap to her feet and demand to know exactly who he was sending love letters to when he’d told her love didn’t even exist!
There was a low murmur among the girls, and a rustle of skirts, and Gigi suddenly became aware that twenty-three mascara-laden pairs of eyes were glued to her.
Khaled gave the cameras the half-smile that had caused all this trouble to begin with and said directly, ‘She’s Irish. She is a Bluebird. She’s the reason I’ve moved heaven and earth to have you all here today. Exactly six weeks from the day she first dropped so fatefully into my life. She’s the person two million Parisians have to thank for saving their cabaret.’
Adele drummed her feet enthusiastically. Susie gave a thumbs-up, and Leah looked so sour her drooping mouth might drop off.
Gigi only knew this afterwards—when Lulu filled her in—because at that very moment she couldn’t take her eyes off the man telling the world—well, what was he telling the world?
‘My last visit to Paris was the most memorable of my life, because I met the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with.’
The cameras exploded in a flurry that sounded like applause.
Gigi didn’t know she was on her feet until she was halfway out through the side door.
‘Gigi!’
She heard him call her name, but didn’t wait to find out why.
Khaled scraped back his chair.
There was another flurry of questions, but he didn’t hear a word as he shouldered his way out of the reception room.
Gigi was exiting through the entrance doors when he exploded out into the lobby.
She was on the avenue outside, getting into a taxi, when he hit the pavement. He saw the flash of her skirts and began to run.
He grabbed the door as she went to shut it and jumped in alongside her.
‘Get out of my taxi!’
He gave the driver an address in Montmartre.
Gigi folded her arms. ‘I’m not sharing this taxi with you.’
She was, he thought, the most amazing girl, with her hands balled into fists, looking ready to belt him one. But her eyes gave her away, and they made him feel...made him feel...
Khaled gave a groan of sheer frustrated happiness and pulled her forward into his arms.
She went. But she was rigid, and she fought against him a little, and dipped her head so he couldn’t kiss her. He understood, because she needed words, and he was struggling to find the ones that would make sense of the enormous reservoir of feeling he had stored up these last weeks without her.
Because there had never been any doubt for him: from first sight she had been the one.
After all, she’d thrown herself off a tank, turned up at his hotel, had herself papped as if they were Jagger and Faithfull back in the day and let him lock her up in a tower.
They were stories to tell their grandchildren. Because there would be grandchildren, after a tribe of children—a family he would build with her. A home...
But all he wanted right now was to be where he was: in the back of this taxi, holding her in his arms and knowing she was safe and sound and would be his, as he was hers. If he could find those damn words.
