Satin Doll Read Online Free Page A

four or five stories above. There was not a soul in sight, but faint noises that drifted down the staircase indicated the Maison Louvel was open. A faint reverberation of voices and footsteps and a slamming of distant doors came to her. A grating howl like a rusty piece of machinery was even louder.  
    Only a few top executives at Jackson Storm Enterprises had known of the purchase of the French textile mill, and even they didn’t have the details. A week ago, in a particularly tense meeting of the Western wear division—consisting of Sy Kingman of Art Hammer Handcrafted Boots of Dallas, Eugenia Kleinberg of the subteen fashion line Junior Lone Star and Sam Laredo of the Western jeans—the group had been looking at a mountain of discouraging sales figures when the subject of the Paris fashion house had come up. “Sammy,” the Storm King had said, fixing his famous brilliant blue eyes on his nominal head of the Western jeans division, “how’d you like to go to Paris?”  
    On the landing, paneled with a large plate-glass mirror veined with age and without some of its silver backing, Sam paused and let the heavy duffel bag slip from her shoulder. She hadn’t looked in a mirror since she’d left New York, and she never saw her reflection, even now, without a small shock. Her hairstyle, created by an avant-garde Greenwich Village hairdresser, had been hot last year when she’d introduced the new Sam Laredo image and had been reproduced on the covers of at least three major national magazines. Her straight, silky tow mop had been razored short and shaggy in front and pulled in strands over her forehead, making her eyes seem even bigger with iridescent gray shadow and a heavy coat of black mascara. In the words of the Jackson Storm marketing expert who had ordered and approved it, the hairstyle was supposed to convey a natural, even unkempt look to go with the Sam Laredo line of casually contrived Western chic. The same marketing genius had also sent for a physical fitness expert to develop what he had called Samantha’s “buns” for the first jeans TV commercials.  
    Now, Sam thought, squinting at herself a little apprehensively, her freckles were covered with make-up foundation, her mouth had been skillfully rearranged in a sensuously curved line accentuated with pale pink lip gloss, her buns were nicely developed thanks to the body-building expert, and Jack Storm himself had drilled into her that cool air of surface assurance that perfected the image. These days, when people didn’t recognize her as Sam Laredo, the star of the Storm King jeans ads, they thought she was a professional model.  
    She knew she still wasn’t anybody to send to Paris as a representative of Jackson Storm, Inc., but that didn’t seem to matter. “The chance of a lifetime, kid,” publicity head Jean Ruiz had told her. And all you ’ ve got to do, Sam told her image in the mirror, is not screw up .  
    She was going to walk into an haute couture house in Paris and introduce herself as a visitor from New York, an informal observer to report on what Jackson Storm International had unintentionally acquired as part of their French textile mill deal. Crazier things had happened in the rag trade, but this one took guts. Chutzpah, Jack called it.  
    Whatever was going on in the Maison Louvel at the moment, she thought, looking up, it was noisy. The last flight of steps to the first-floor landing showed another set of French doors. There were no business signs, dress displays or showcases—it might have been someone’s slightly shabby town house. The noises, as she listened, grew even louder.  
    First there was a woman’s voice raised to an anguished pitch, then a thud as if something heavy had been dropped. The noises seemed to explode. A man’s deep baritone voice shouted out something in French and then the screaming began.  
    Sam grabbed the duffel bag by its strap and took the remaining steps two at a time.  
    She had almost