A Bride To Redeem Him
‘I wasn’t at all combative with your father,’ Alex retorted hotly. ‘I’m not a confrontational person.’
‘I find that hard to believe.’ Although, as it happened, he didn’t find it hard to believe at all.
The mutual attraction was messing with his head almost as much.
He folded his arms across his chest, as if entertained. A move that he knew from experience only enhanced the strong muscles in his chest, his biceps, even his forearms. Muscles he had acquired through serious hours pounding the streets or in his home gym in a futile effort to exhaust himself into sleep pretty much whenever he had time on his hands and no stupid party to distract his racing thoughts.
Despite her obvious inner fight, Louis watched as Alex tracked his every movement with her eyes, lingering longer than he knew she wanted to.
‘So you’re Apple Pie Alex.’
‘I’ve never liked that nickname,’ she bit out.
He ignored her, knowing his amusement only riled her up even more and wondering why he felt so compelled to keep pushing her as he was.
‘Why do you suppose your colleagues call you that? Because you’re wholesome and sweet, or because you’re boring?’
For some reason, it cut right through her even though she tried not to let him see it. Instead, she rolled her eyes with a hefty dose of melodrama to distract him.
‘Because apparently I’m comforting. Just like my grandmother’s recipe for apple pie, which I foolishly brought in one day.’
‘Comforting?’ His chuckle rumbled out of nowhere. When was the last time he’d wanted to tease in this way? ‘What? In the same way that a tankful of piranhas is comforting?’
‘I’m very even tempered,’ she snapped.
‘I can see that. And for your next trick...?’
It was intended as a gentle ribbing, but by the expression on Alex’s face she was genuinely struggling with her supposedly out-of-character attitude. He felt chastened, and yet he got a thrill out of this verbal sparring with her.
‘I was polite and respectful with your father,’ Alex said firmly.
‘So, like I pointed out earlier, it’s just me.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, making him grin again, much to her chagrin. ‘No. Oh, you’re impossible. I just meant that I’m more on edge now, after...your father.’
‘You’re even cuter when your temper flares.’
‘And you’re condescending.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ he replied, unfazed. ‘Many, many times before.’
‘We’re just going around in circles here, aren’t we?’ she said through gritted teeth. Then abruptly pushed off the balcony and sashayed past him, apparently tired of the conversation.
He wasn’t sure that anyone had ever tired of a conversation with him before. Certainly they’d never walked away from him. He felt something like admiration surge inside him. As well as something more recognisable. Like lust.
‘Come, now,’ he admonished. ‘You can’t really be leaving. You haven’t even heard how I plan to help.’
She didn’t even turn around, merely slowed her walk and cast her head over one delectably bare shoulder.
‘So you finally do plan to help? That’s a start, I suppose. All you need now is to return to your harem and decide which one of them you’d prefer to join you in no doubt unholy matrimony.’
‘Oh, I’ve already decided that.’
‘Really?’ She spun around in surprise. ‘You really are going to do this, then?’
It was just that Alex was a challenge, Louis told himself. And normally he would relish the challenge. All too often he would have beautiful women falling over each other to throw themselves at him. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he indulged, frequently and indiscriminately, but it had suited his bad-boy reputation and he’d often told himself that he was just a red-blooded male like any other. But sometimes a challenge was fun. Especially if it came in the kind of package standing in front of him and pretending she wasn’t fighting the chemistry sizzling between them.
But right now wasn’t normal.
It all came back to the name he hadn’t heard in years. Decades even.
Rainbow House.
He’d thought about it more tonight than he had in all the last years combined, banishing it from his head to the pitch-black depths of nothing, with all the other painful memories of the happy life before his mother had gone from it. But what had pretending it didn’t exist accomplished? His mother was still gone and Rainbow House had been one of her legacies. Even decades on it shouldn’t amaze him that his old man was still trying to erase every last one of them.
For the first time Louis had a compulsion to stop him. To save at least one good thing his mother had achieved. He told himself it had nothing to do with the captivating woman currently gliding away from him. He couldn’t explain why Alex talking about the place should reinvigorate it with such colour, such life. He only knew he wasn’t ready to relinquish it—relinquish her—just yet.
‘I’ve made my choice, but I might need your help,’ he announced gravely, watching her take a single step back to him almost against her will.
‘My help?’
‘Sure.’ He strode towards her, supressing a grin at the way she flicked a tongue out so deliciously over her lips. ‘You don’t think it’s going to be easy for me to get any potential father-in-law to agree to giving me their daughter’s hand in marriage?’
The closer he got, the more she leaned the top half of her body away from him. But her feet remained planted in place, almost as if her head was telling her to back away but her body was telling her something quite different.
He knew the feeling.
‘Oh, come on.’ She gave a bark of laughter. ‘You can’t really expect me to believe you’d do something so chivalrous?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because...well, because...you’re you.’
‘Nice that you noticed.’ He really shouldn’t be enjoying himself this much. ‘But as it happens, I do like the odd tradition now and then. My family is, as you say, traceable back to the twelfth century.’
‘You don’t say?’ She widened her eyes in mock surprise. ‘Then surely any potential father-in-law would be falling over themselves to literally throw their daughters into your arms. Particularly the classy women you date.’
‘I’m shocked that you would cast such aspersions, Dr Vardy. Nonetheless, I have the distinct suspicion that it was matter of charming half of their daughters into bed out of wedlock that must have turned them against me in the first instance.’
‘Only half?’ she quipped tartly. Too tartly.
‘No, well, one can’t be too greedy.’ He shrugged dismissively, neatly changing the subject. ‘Of course, you appreciate that the more you lean back from me the more you angle your hips towards me? One might even say invitingly.’
Her eyes widened, her scowl deepening, and she faltered backwards just as he’d known she would, giving him the perfect opportunity to reach forward and halt her fall, hauling her body closer to his as he did so.
‘You did that deliberately,’ she said irritably, though he noticed that for all her objection she remained in the light circle of his arm, though she could have pushed him away if she’d really wanted to.
It only served to fuel Louis’s desire. He could tell himself that this was all part of his plan and that he was still in control, but he knew that somewhere along the line, that had ceased to be entirely true. He could no more explain this attraction as he could fight it. He’d been attracted to women—plenty of women, though nowhere near in the disgusting numbers that the papers so deliriously hypothesised—but never like this. Never on a level that he knew wasn’t merely about the physical.
‘I can’t seem to help myself,’ he drawled, his tone intended to conceal just how unexpectedly close to the truth that statement was.
Even now, as his eyes took in the rapid pulse at her neck, the stain of lust spreading over her skin, the sudden huskiness in her voice, doing something as simple as drawing a breath suddenly became an arduous hindrance.
He leaned forward and she stepped back. Right up against the stone balustrade, allowing him to place an arm on each side and effectively cage her.
‘What are you doing?’ she whispered. Hardly a protestation of his position. Still, he needed to be sure.
‘Making sure you don’t run away.’
‘I’m not running away.’ He recognised that hoarse desire in her voice. He’d heard it plenty of times before. But never with anyone who made him as hard as she did.
Like he was some hormone-charged teenager.
‘You know my reputation,’ he ground out. ‘You should be running.’
‘I know your reputation,’ she concurred. ‘But right now I don’t know anyone else who can help me stop your father.’
It was hardly the rebuttal he realised a part of him had been hoping for. As if he hoped she might see past the bad-boy exterior to the honourable man he knew had probably died a long time ago.
Pathetic really.
Louis had never wanted, never sought anyone else’s approval. He would leave that to his father. Though how he was the only person to see through his old man’s veneer to see that he’d only set up the Delaroche Foundation as a way to earn himself a knighthood, he would never understand. Let Jean-Baptiste revel in his unearned glories as much as the vainglorious old man wanted.
His mother would surely laugh out loud to know that Rainbow House was still a thorn in her husband’s side. Even now.
It was only when he caught Alex watching him curiously, his arms still trapping her in place, that he remembered himself, and banished the unwelcome thoughts from his head.
He pushed backwards, releasing her with a theatrical flourish, exultant when she didn’t go anywhere.
‘So, Dr Alexandra Vardy, how about it?’ He flashed her a wolfish smile, playing the habitually drunk playboy role for all he was worth. After all, why else would a bad boy like him make such a ridiculous suggestion? ‘Want to marry me and stop my father from committing any more of his dastardly deeds?’
CHAPTER THREE
‘SOMEONE PAGED ME?’ Louis burst through the doors of the pre-op room, taking in the unfolding events in one careful sweep.
‘I did. I suspect an anaphylactic reaction in your patient,’ Alex answered quickly but calmly, her attention going straight back to the patient in front of her even as she addressed the anaesthetic technician. ‘Freddie, let’s set up an IV. Start with eight milligrams of dexamethasone and point one milligrams of adrenalin.’
‘What happened?’ Louis stepped over quickly without, she just had time to notice, getting in the way of her staff.
Surprisingly he didn’t wade in, but waited silently for her to finish issuing her brief, perfunctory instructions to her team.
It could be no coincidence that she had suddenly been assigned as part of Louis’s on-call team tonight. She’d been avoiding him for two days since she’d walked—though she still had no idea how her legs had kept her upright after his audacious marriage suggestion—away from away him.
Clearly, this was his way of flexing his authoritative muscle. An irrefutable demonstration of the power he wielded in this hospital. She’d spent the last few hours enacting scenarios in her head in which she had confronted him about it. But right now it definitely wasn’t the time.
‘The patient was clearly hypovolaemic when she was brought in,’ Alex informed him. ‘She was clammy in appearance and tachycardic.’
‘She presented in the emergency department a couple of hours ago following a salpingo-oophorectomy three days ago,’ confirmed Louis. ‘All signs led the resus team to suspect intra-abdominal bleeding, which was when they referred her to us.’
Cool, professional, approachable. No hint that he even remembered what had happened between them on that balcony. How she had been within a hair’s breadth of kissing him, of letting him kiss her. If he’d pushed it that tiny bit further, she knew she would have.
Every spare moment since, she’d wondered why he hadn’t.
Was it insane that every time she’d thought of him, a gurgle of laughter had rumbled within her?
The thing about arrogant men was that they had altogether too high an opinion of themselves to be likeable.
Yet Louis was wholly unaffected by his stark male beauty, and he didn’t take himself too seriously. He made her laugh.
It didn’t fit.
Still, she couldn’t afford to dwell on it. Forget her illicit fantasies about him, he was standing right in front of her, right now, and he was all professional. The way she always prided herself on being.
She pulled her head back in the game, relieved to realise that she hadn’t missed a beat.
‘Yes, I completed the handover twenty minutes ago. She appeared calm despite the circumstances. Blood pressure was one-twenty over seventy and heart rate was eighty-four beats per minute. Intravenous access was difficult, probably as a result of the hypovolaemia and the suspected internal bleeding, but she did have a cannula in situ, which we used.’
‘You used it for general anaesthetic induction?’
‘Right, then we intubated.’ Alex nodded. ‘There was an initial delay of results for the carbon dioxide output but the tubes were in correctly, there was misting and the chest was rising symmetrically. I began manual ventilation, which I thought felt restricted, and when I listened to her chest I heard wheezing. I had already started to suspect anaesthesia-related anaphylaxis, which was when I told them to alert you to the situation.’
There had been no need for Louis to come in. As the anaesthetist, this was within her remit rather than his, but she could understand why he wanted to see for himself. In many respects she was still an unknown quantity to his team. Typically Louis.
‘You’re using her foot—?’
‘To gain additional venous access? Yes,’ Alex cut in, straightening up with a satisfied nod and taking the bag of colloid fluid from her team. ‘Good. Right, let’s start infusing and get her blood pressure back up and her cardiovascular volume. Freddie, start drawing up another point one milligrams of adrenalin.’
But before she could get much further the patient went into cardiac arrest.
‘I’ll start compressions.’ Louis moved instinctively to the table, allowing her to continue administering the adrenalin.
They both knew that while in ordinary circumstances the surgical procedure would be called to a halt, due to the acute nature of the internal bleeding, it wasn’t an option in this situation. She had no choice but to get it under control.
Good thing she’d never been one to crumble under pressure.
Still, it was a relief when Louis confirmed cardiac output had been regained and Alex was able to insert both a central and femoral line, even as she issued further instructions to her team to treat the anaphylaxis before continuing their pre-op procedures.
‘You’re re-administering anaesthesia?’ He frowned, still watching her closely.
Her pride kicked in. She couldn’t help it.
‘I thought I might.’ The tongue-in-cheek tone was clear but now the patient was stable, and after the tension the team had been under a little dark humour always worked to buoy morale. It was just the way hospitals seemed to work, in her opinion.
It wouldn’t make the team work any better to keep stress levels high. Still, she kept her eyes on the monitoring equipment as she spoke.
‘If it’s internal bleeding then I can’t imagine you could afford to postpone the operation, and with all the excitement the last thing the patient needs is to come out of the anaesthetic in mid-operation, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘Never preferable,’ he agreed, as she concluded her tasks and gave him a slight nod. ‘We’re ready?’
‘Ready,’ she confirmed, knowing that, even if the surgery was carried out quickly and without incident, the post-operative management was going to be crucial.
It was going to be a long night. And yet, when the patient came out of it treated and cared for, it made it feel like the best job in the world.
If only she didn’t have Louis to deal with at the end of it.
* * *
‘Good call on the anaphylaxis case.’
Alex visibly stiffened as he called to her from across the atrium. It was a deliberate ploy on his part so she couldn’t continue to duck out, having pretended not to see him, as she had been doing for the last nine hours.
And the atrium was the perfect trap. During the day it was a bustling hub of staff, visitors and mobile patients. Right now, it was relatively deserted, save for the trio around Alex’s small table. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen this moment to corner her, when the fewest people were gawking. But she didn’t need to know that.
Let her think he hadn’t considered her at all.
He couldn’t disappoint that way.
He sipped his coffee and sauntered deliberately over to where they sat, pulling out a chair and sliding down easily into it. Alex barely glanced up as the over-eager pair began falling over each other to introduce themselves to him, and he politely acknowledged them then affected insouciance, all the while taking in every possible detail.
By the expressions and body language of the group he’d lay a bet that the two women had barely socialised with Alex before yesterday’s papers had come out, and more specifically the grainy, pixelated image of him escorting her out of the kitchen entrance of the gala event the other night—clearly taken by one of the kitchen staff on their mobile phone, he was already dealing with them—and suddenly Alex had become everyone’s new best friend.
Another thing he was guilty of.
Louis managed to smooth out the grim expression before it could settle on his lips. He refused to apologise or feel remorse. It had been him or being publicly ejected through the main doors by the security team. Though she’d probably have been the first woman to choose the security team after his outlandish proposal to her.
There was no reason for him to still be grinning about it.
‘Ladies, it’s a pleasure to meet you but I wonder if Alex and I could have moment?’
She sucked in her breath audibly and he knew what was coming the moment the women left the room. Sure enough, as soon as the doors slammed Alex practically exploded.
‘Oh, why don’t you just drive a tanker of fuel into the damned fire?’ she seethed. ‘They’ll be gossiping all over the hospital as we speak.’
‘Isn’t that the idea?’ He grinned. ‘Generate publicity and all that.’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘The papers are already speculating, thanks to that photo,’ she hissed. ‘Grubby little rumours about how I’m the latest notch on your bedpost.’
‘Ah, well, the quicker you agree to marry me, the less grubby they can make it. The story will go international and you’ll be the woman who tamed me.’
‘No woman will ever tame you,’ she snorted. From anyone else he would have taken it to be a compliment, but for some reason her contempt needled at him.
He pointedly ramped up his grin.
‘Of course not. But the story is bigger if they think you have. And the more publicity the more chance we can help Rainbow House before my father gets his way.’
She frowned.
‘I thought that if you got married, you got control of the Lefebvre Group and then Rainbow House and others like it would be safe anyway.’
‘You might think that,’ he agreed, carefully concealing his amusement that she’d just revealed she had actually been considering it, despite her rather vocal rejection of the idea last night. ‘But I’ve been looking into the specific clauses ever since the gala. It seems that unless we get married before the official vote on any transfers then any such decisions will still carry through.’
‘For pity’s sake.’ A torn expression contorted her face.
So this was what it felt like to be such a heel, putting more pressure on her than she already had. But, then, she was the one asking for his help. She just needed to set her prejudice against him aside for long enough to agree this was the only way given the short timeframe she’d given him.
Not that he really blamed her for her vacillation. He’d hardly set himself up to be keen to help.
The sound of her fingers drumming on the plastic table echoed in the vaulted space.
‘Why?’ she demanded abruptly.
‘Why what?’ It was a feeble attempt to stall but her question had caught him off guard.
‘Why do you want to help Rainbow House at all?’ She eyed him shrewdly. ‘You didn’t when I first asked you. And then said you did but really it was all a joke to you. Yet suddenly you’re getting me onto your surgical team and trying to collar me in public places. So, what’s going on?’
Louis arched one brow.
‘You know what they say. It’s a surgeon’s prerogative to change his mind.’
‘No one says that, Louis.’
‘I do.’
‘Yeah, well, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t count.’
He feigned a hurt expression.
‘You cut me to the quick.’
‘I highly doubt it. But if I did, I suspect that with the number of women literally falling over themselves to bag you, I’m sure you’ll get over it remarkably quickly.’ She crossed her arms over her chest and he resisted the impulse to tell her that the action only thrust those pert breasts of hers to the fore.
He could save winding her up with that one for another day. Right now he was enjoying the show too much. Namely the Feisty Alex routine; so far removed from the wholesome Apple Pie Alex but which, now he’d done a little digging, he’d discovered was a closely guarded fact amongst a select handful of her closest friends, Gordon being one of them.
What did it say about him that he actually wished to be part of Alex’s select circle?
‘So, should I take that as your answer then?’
He snapped back to the present.
‘Say again?’
‘I asked why you really wanted to help me suddenly. You chose to deflect in your usual manner.’
‘You don’t pull any punches, do you?’ His grin widened.
‘With you? No. I don’t think I can afford to.’
‘I like that,’ he mused, taking another long swig of his coffee. She might want something from him but she wasn’t about to pander to him. He was all too accustomed to people pandering to his wishes. Not least in the bedroom. ‘That why I think you’d be the perfect marriage choice.’
‘I’m flattered,’ she drawled. ‘So why not tell me why you’re so fixated on your marriage idea all of a sudden.’
‘It wasn’t my plan,’ he reminded her smoothly. ‘It was your plan. You’re the one who asked me to help. And you’re the one who suggested I get married simply to satisfy the clause in my mother’s will.’
‘Well...yes,’ Alex faltered. ‘But...but not to me.’
‘You really want me to inflict this charade on some other woman?’
Why was he enjoying this quite so much?
‘I doubt they’d feel remotely inflicted on,’ she sniffed. ‘While for my part, my picture is in the paper as your latest lover. One of hundreds if the papers are to be believed. My reputation is, for want of a better word, tarnished.’
‘All the more reason for you to agree to marry me.’ He shrugged.
‘I don’t know.’ She toyed with the paper cup, long fingers playing with the corner of card, unpeeling it carefully, meticulously. ‘You’re right, I wanted your help but I was desperate. I suppose a part of me never thought you’d agree to it. And now you have... I can’t help but wonder why.’
‘Does it matter?’ he wondered aloud.
‘Yes. Are you motivated by getting one up on your father in this ridiculous game the two of you seem to be permanently playing?’
‘Does that matter?’
‘Yes, Louis, it does. Because you’re infamous for being a loose cannon and if I have any hope of controlling you then I need to know what sets you off.’