Satin Doll Read Free Page A

me two years’ work and a lot of money?” He appealed now to her reasonableness, her sympathy. “You’re really letting me down, Mindy, you know that?”  
    But for the first time in years Jackson Storm’s executive vice president looked at him with an expression that was coldly unresponsive. The girl thought she was in love with him.  
    “Was I the one,” she said quietly, “who was sleeping with this kid? Was I, Jack?”  
    He glared at her, his face a dark, angry red. Then he turned to the desk and pounded on it with his fists the way he had years ago in the tie factory. “Godammit, I’m telling you she goes to Paris and she gets nothing! That’s what she gets, because that’s what the Sam Laredo thing did for me—nothing!”  
    He drew himself up, an angry, handsome powerful man, Jacob Sturm and also Jackson Storm, the fashion world’s Storm King. She knew he meant it this time.  
     

 
    Part One  
     
    La Terre est une gateau plein de douceur;  
    Te faire un appetit d’une egale grosseur.  
     
    The world is a piece of cake; be wise—  
    You’ll need an appetite of equal size.  
     
    Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil  
     

 
    Le Concept  
    The Idea
     

 
    Chapter One
     
    Approaching Paris from the expressway out of Charles de Gaulle airport was disappointingly like approaching any other sprawling, rather ugly modern metropolis. Sammy Whitfield slumped back in the seat of the airport taxicab and watched mile on mile of working-class suburbs with concrete apartment towers, neon signs and supermarkets, with a jetlagged, dispirited feeling. It was early in the morning, she’d sat up all night on the TWA flight, and she was tired, though she knew she wasn’t supposed to feel that way. After all, as people had gone out of the way to tell her the past few days, this was Paris .  
    One of the last things she’d done before leaving New York had been to write out her monthly check to her mother and enclose a letter which began, “Dear Ma—Guess what? I’m going to Paris for a week. Can you imagine it!!! Me, in a place like Paris? I still can’t believe it!!!”  
    After all these years she still wrote to her mother that way—cheerfully, lots of exclamation points, so that whatever was happening to her, her mother wouldn’t worry. It was silly kid stuff, and she was no longer, at twenty-six years of age, a kid. But her mother, who had scraped and saved to help her through art school, was one of the few good things in her life. The other was Jack Storm.  
    Sam grabbed at the back seat’s leather strap as the driver squeezed between two trucks without diminishing his speed and took a right-hand turn off the expressway. She’d given her mother’s letter to her secretary to mail and when it had still been on her desk at five o’clock, she’d picked it up and mailed it herself from Kennedy airport. Going to Paris was no big deal at Jackson Storm Enterprises, Inc.; having enough real authority to get your secretary to mail your letter was. It will come to you, Jack always told her; authority is a matter of experience in this business, give it time.  
    Jack, she thought. She wished she could stop worrying. He hadn’t been there to see her off at the airport and that was the first time that had happened. Jackson Storm, tall, handsome, commanding, sweeping through the VIP lounge, usually with photographers in attendance, with his arms full of roses to make an occasion of his creation, Sam Laredo. Taking a trip somewhere had become so familiar she didn’t even think about it, but this time Mindy Ferragamo had been there in Jack’s place with the bouquet of roses and a note saying ‘Love.’ It was unsigned, as usual, because Jack Storm was still, in spite of what had happened between them and in spite of his half promises to her, a married man.  
    Nothing was wrong, Mindy had assured her. Jack was in San Francisco, the company jet delayed by weather, nothing more than that. He was depending