A Bride To Redeem Him
Disappointment bubbled up inside her. She couldn’t explain why she’d imagined she’d sensed a possible ally in Louis, but watching it slip from her grasp was almost like watching her own father slip away from her. They amounted to the same thing.
‘Seriously? You, of all people, are now claiming he’s philanthropic after all?’
‘I’m not claiming anything. I’m simply telling you that selling the site for millions won’t be the reason he’s closing it down.’
‘It’s a much-needed centre. It benefits hundreds and hundreds of children and their families. We work hard to raise our own funds and we don’t ask much more of the Delaroche Foundation than lending their name to it.’
In that instant it was as though everything around them had frozen, leaving only the two of them locked together in some kind of void.
‘You work there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ The question came out of nowhere. Not a challenge but a soft demand. Unexpectedly astute. Unavoidable. As though he knew she had to have a personal connection.
She couldn’t explain it, she only knew—somehow—that it wouldn’t pay to lie to him.
‘I volunteer there,’ Alex began hesitantly. ‘With my father. My brother was... Years ago...we used Rainbow House.’
‘Your brother?’ Louis demanded sharply.
She flicked out a tongue over her lips, managing a stiff nod of confirmation.
‘Yes. Jack.’
‘And now?’ His voice softened a fraction, he sounded almost empathetic. A flashback to the Louis who only usually emerged for his patients.
If anything, that just made it harder for her to keep her emotions in check. Alex fought to keep her voice even, the air winding its way around her.
‘He died. Twenty-one years ago. He was eleven. I was eight.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Simple. Sincere. And all the more touching for it.
‘Thank you.’
Instantly the air finished winding its way around her and instead began slowly constricting her. Like a python immobilising its prey. And she felt she was sinking into the depths of those rich-coloured eyes.
She fought to control her heart as it hammered so loudly within her ribcage that he must surely be able to hear it. And then abruptly, rather than suffocating her, the silence seemed to cloak them, drawing them a little closer together and almost suggesting an intimacy that hadn’t been there before. She realised she was holding her breath, not wanting to break the spell.
Funny, because she was usually so quick to move conversations on from talking about her brother.
‘So that’s why Rainbow House means so much to you.’
‘Right,’ she agreed, shutting off the little voice that urged her to tell him about her father.
Where did that come from? That was no one else’s business but her and her father’s. Certainly not Louis’s. She lifted her head, determined to throw it back onto him.
‘I suppose that’s why I don’t understand why Rainbow House doesn’t mean as much to you. Given what it meant to your mother.’
The icy change was instantaneous. She might as well have struck him physically. He reacted as though she had. Reeling backwards before he could stop himself, even as he recovered his composure.
‘I don’t know what that means. So when is this closure supposed to be taking place?’
It all happened so fast that anyone else might have missed it. They probably would have. But she wasn’t anyone. It was her skill for observing the little things, picking up on the faintest of shifts, whether in patient symptoms, monitor readings or merely attitude, which made her particularly good at her job. A skill in which she had always taken such pride.
Right now, it was an unexpected glimpse of the less-than-perfect image of Louis that he carefully hid from eager media eyes. She couldn’t help pressing him.
‘It means I know your mother was Celine Lefebvre, and I know it was your maternal family who founded Rainbow House over fifty years ago when your aunt, your mother’s younger sister, was diagnosed with childhood leukaemia.’
‘How quaint that you know a little of my family history.’
His voice was as fascinating yet deadly as the ninja stars that her brother had always dreamed of one day being able to master. A dangerous cocktail of sadness, frustration and desperate hope flooded through her.
‘I also know that your mother fought hard to keep Rainbow House open over twenty-five years ago when original Lefebvre Group members who had been appointed were running it into the ground. That was around the time she convinced your father to set up the Delaroche Foundation and oversee the group until you were of an age to take control. I’m guessing that she expected to train you to run it but...she never got the opportunity.’
‘Which means it’s nothing to do with me now.’
She wished more than anything she could decipher that expression behind his concrete-coloured eyes. But the longer she stared into them, the more unreachable he seemed to be. Her voice rose in desperation.
‘She left control of Lefebvre Group to you. You could stop the foundation from doing this. Surely, for the sake of her memory, it shouldn’t be so far beneath your concern?’
‘Careful.’
It was one word of caution and it shouldn’t have sounded so menacing. So full of control. But it had, and Alex shivered, feeling the sharp edges of the stonework cutting into her fingers.
‘Rainbow House meant everything to your mother. The stories people have about her are limitless. She’s a legend with everyone I know there.’
He turned his face a fraction, inadvertently allowing the light from inside to illuminate him. But she wasn’t prepared for the expression of pain that pulled his features tight. It sliced at something raw deep inside her, something that she’d spent decades trying to bury. She slammed it away before it could get to her.
‘I have no intention of getting involved,’ Louis bit out.
‘Is that why you rescued me from your father, then?’
She could hear the quiver in her challenge, knew Louis could hear it, too. Still, she refused to back down.
‘I didn’t want to see you humiliated in front of the press. It wouldn’t have made the Delaroche Foundation look good, especially on such an important gala night.’
‘Rubbish.’
She had no idea where her courage was suddenly stemming from, but she wasn’t about to question it.
‘You wanted to know why we were talking about Rainbow House. You can tell me you don’t want to get involved all you like, but clearly you do want to. Clearly a part of you needs to.’
‘How interesting that you appear to know me so well.’ He flashed his teeth at her in another intimidating non-smile. ‘Let me guess, you know that Jean-Baptiste and I don’t get on so you think I’d be prepared to go up against him with the board because of some sentimentality over a place my mother once patronised.’
‘It’s more than that, and you know it.’
She valiantly ignored the way her heart somersaulted within her chest. The way his mannerisms spoke to something undefinable within her. A blasé attitude that masked a vulnerability he didn’t want anyone to see.
No doubt anyone else would have believed him. He sold smouldering disinterest all too well and even she herself couldn’t help but be drawn in. Louis was stunning, and edgy, and utterly mesmerising. But she was sure she could see past the front. That particular emotional Achilles’ heel was something she recognised only too easily.
‘It’s true that vastly exaggerated stories concerning some feud between Jean-Baptiste and me—his prodigal son—have been gleefully published by the press for almost a decade—’
‘You mean two brilliant surgeons, bonded by blood, united by mutual contempt?’ Alex cut across him. ‘Yes, I might have heard something about that. It’s a media favourite.’
‘Indeed. But that doesn’t mean I care enough to take on Rainbow House merely to thwart him. It would cut into my playboy lifestyle too much—surely you’ve read about that, too?’
‘I think it’s an act,’ she heard herself state boldly. ‘I think you and your father have been in competition for as long as you can remember. He’s one of the most image-conscious men I’ve seen, and I think your infamous playboy routine was your way of sullying the Delaroche name.’
‘Nice theory. And if it was true, I’d say it’s a resounding success, wouldn’t you?’ He quirked an eyebrow as though she amused him.
But Alex wasn’t finished yet.
‘Ah, but it hasn’t worked as well as you’d hoped, has it? Because as much as the media love to hate you, they also hate to love you. If they ever realised quite how much you care for your patients, I think they’d be having bank holidays in your honour. No wonder you keep such a close-knit team around you—can’t have people realising you’re actually a good guy underneath that bad-boy exterior.’
Something skittered over Louis’s face.
‘And that fantastical notion is what you’re basing your hopes on? You’re relying on some non-existent version of me to save Rainbow House?’
‘Why not?’ She shot him an over-bright smile. If he was her last chance then she might as well go down fighting. ‘Besides, it’s not such a fantastical notion if I’m not the only one who thinks you could save the place.’
She had him. She could see it. And it gave her a thrill to realise she had hooked him so easily. But reeling him in, that was going to be the impossible part.
‘Go on then,’ he conceded, and she had to give him credit for not trying to disguise his intrigue.
‘Half of your board.’
‘Allow me to let you onto a little secret. Even if I wanted to save the place, I couldn’t.’
‘You could. All you have to do is take over control from the Delaroche Foundation, the way your mother always intended you to do.’
‘Are you always this argumentative?’ His lips twitched and Alex wrinkled her nose.
‘I’m not arguing, I’m only pointing out—’
‘So it’s just me, then? I suppose I should take it as a compliment that I get under your skin.’
‘You do not get under my skin,’ Alex huffed, before realising that her fists were clenched into balls, hidden as they were by Louis’s jacket. ‘Well, if you do then it’s only because I find it frustrating that you could help us—that you spend your professional life saving people, even if your personal life is in the gutter—and yet you stand on the sidelines and refuse to get involved.’
‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Louis bit out. ‘You’re looking at me like some kind of white knight, but there’s a reason Jean-Baptiste has that reputation and I don’t. Besides, as I was saying before, I couldn’t help you even if I wanted to. My mother might have left control of Rainbow House—or, more to the point, the Lefebvre Group—to me in her will, but not before my father had her insert a clause making one further stipulation.’
‘Stipulation?’
‘I have to be married.’
‘Married? You?’
He simply shrugged. ‘Quite. So you see there’s no point looking to me to rescue you. Unless you care to marry me then I’m the last person who can help you.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘YOU MUST BE DRUNK.’ The disdainful wrinkle of her nose cut him far more than it should. ‘As usual.’
‘Most probably,’ he lied smoothly, knowing he couldn’t blame her low opinion of him entirely on the media.
But the truth was that he hadn’t had a drink in months, maybe even the best part of a year. And even then it had been a rare brandy with a close friend. Ironic how easily water could be mistaken for vodka, if that was what aligned better with people’s assumptions.
Strange thing was that he hadn’t missed the alcohol or the wild parties. The latter had never made him feel any less alone, whilst the former had never even made a dent in the block of ice that had encased his heart for as long as he could remember. Or at least ever since his mother’s...death. But, then, he’d never wanted it to.
Until recently.
If he’d been able to foresee how his first few dates with the it-girls of the moment would have resulted in a sex story that would define his playboy reputation for the next decade and a half, he might have thought twice about something that had been meant to be harmless, private fun.
Now it proved impossible to change. People didn’t want to see him grow up.
Worse, he couldn’t be bothered to prove it to them.
‘Nonetheless, a marriage clause remains,’ he proclaimed. ‘And clearly I don’t intend to satisfy that particular parameter.’
‘Oh, but that’s ridiculous!’ the woman exclaimed, sotto voce, wrenching him mercifully back from the precipice of memory. ‘I know the Delaroche family can trace its ancestry back to thirteenth-century aristocracy, with a palace for a family home, but this is the twenty-first century. Why would they have put such a clause in?’
‘Perhaps for the very reason of thwarting you now.’ Louis grinned, enjoying the way she flailed her arms around in frustration.
‘Very amusing.’ She glowered at him.
‘Thank you.’ He tried for modesty, but not very hard. ‘And it’s twelfth century.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Twelfth-century aristocracy, not thirteenth. And it isn’t a palace but a chateau which, quite frankly, is mostly cold and draughty despite the modern improvements. We do, however, have a moat and a drawbridge.’
‘As so many of us do.’ She affected a deep sigh but her eyes twinkled and sparkled, and made him feel so much more alive than he had felt in...a long time.
He shifted to the side slightly to allow the light from inside to fall on her face. Pretty, wholesome, yet with a mouth that he wondered if she realised was as sinful as it was. He watched in absorbed fascination as emotions danced across her features like any one of the ballets he’d accompanied his mother to on the promise of an afternoon of ice cream and activity of his choice. But it had never been a chore, for either of them.
She’d been fun like that, his mother. And they’d been close. Or at least he thought they had been. He still found it hard to accept that she’d taken her own life. Had chosen to leave him. Even now, when he thought back over his life, those first seven years with her were still in vibrant Technicolor. He could even still hear her laughter, so unrestrained, so frequent. And then she’d...gone, and everything since had just been different hues of black and grey. Only his surgeries gave him that same feeling of invincibility.
And now this woman, whose name he didn’t even know, had streaked into his life with a burst of colour and he couldn’t explain it.
‘You know, you could get married if you wanted to,’ she said, a note of desperation in her tone.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Don’t look at me like I’m mad.’ She scrunched up her face. ‘But you could. Any one of those women down there would leap at the chance to marry you.’
‘Are you suggesting I get married just to inherit control of a place I don’t even care about?’
‘You do care,’ she pointed out. ‘You wouldn’t have rescued me from your father or indeed still be here, talking to me about it, if a part of you didn’t care.’
‘You’re mistaken.’ Louis frowned. ‘And as for the idea of marriage, you really think it would be morally just to inflict playboy me on any woman?’
She actually snorted at him. No one had ever done that in his life. She was either very brave or very foolish.
He found he was intrigued to discover which it was.
‘If you put the idea out there, I can see a whole host of volunteers ready to play the part just to be married to Louis Delaroche.’
‘Is that so?’
‘That’s so.’ She nodded firmly and he tried not to let his eyes slide to the way it made her breasts jiggle in that sexy sheath of a dress.
Man, what was wrong with him? Jiggle? Really?
‘It’s honestly that simple,’ she insisted, dragging him back to the present. ‘You get married and the Lefebvre Group passes to you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he couldn’t help but tease her, ‘you’re putting marriage and me into the same sentence and you’re calling it simple?’
She wrinkled her nose again and the guileless, girlish mannerism shot straight to his sex. So different from the manipulative females he’d been dating for too long. Who he was better off dating, because they were as jaded as he was.
Alex wasn’t jaded.
Alex was vibrant, and direct, and he felt as though she was breathing new life into him.
He should leave now. Before he sucked all the life out of her.
‘And how about you?’ He dropped his voice to a whiskey-gruff tone.
Unable to quash the urge to seduce her.
It worked, as he’d known it would. If she glowed any brighter, one of the helicopters bringing guests in to the ball might have mistaken her for a helipad beacon.
‘Sorry?’
‘How about you? Would you be prepared to play the part, just for me to save Rainbow House?’
He told himself he’d meant it as a joke, to see how far he could push her. He suspected that wasn’t the real reason.
‘Not if you were the last hope for mankind.’
She tipped her chin up with defiance, meeting his gaze as though she was completely immune to the obvious attraction that sparked and cracked between them. But he knew how to read people, how to read women, and the staining on her cheeks revealed that she wasn’t as unaffected as she pretended to be.
‘It seems you have me at a disadvantage.’ He held his hands palms up in placation. ‘Since you know who I am, while, regrettably, I don’t know who you are, shall we start over, this time with introductions?’
She narrowed her eyes, apparently searching for a catch. Her breath was still coming out a little raggedly. He took care not to focus on it. Or the way her pulse flickered at the base of her throat in a way that seemed to scrape inside him.
‘Alexandra Vardy,’ she acknowledged at length, although her tone was clearly still defensive. ‘Alex.’
‘Alex, then,’ he replied. Then frowned. ‘Alex Vardy? I know that name.’
She appeared pleasantly surprised despite herself, even if she subsequently shook her head, as though it didn’t make any difference.
‘I was in your surgery last week.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he challenged her. ‘My surgeries are strictly closed-door procedures. I attract too much press interest. The last thing my patients need are journalists sneaking in because they can watch one of my surgeries without being challenged.’
‘The cervical cerclage on the woman with the twenty-week-old foetus,’ Alex answered softly.
He raised his eyebrows, scrutinising the woman again.
‘Indeed. Well, since you were in my surgery, for the record, her name was Gigi Reed. And she’d already named her unborn baby Ruby, just in case.’
‘You remember their names?’
‘It was a difficult case.’
‘Not for you.’ She eyed him anew. As though reassessing him.
Louis gave himself a metaphorical kick. He shouldn’t have let her know he knew his patients’ names. Gifted but arrogant, that was his reputation and he was fine with that. He didn’t need anyone outside his trusted team to realise that he could probably name every patient he’d ever operated on, as well as linking them to their procedure.
What was it about this woman that fired him up the way she did?
People mattered to him. His patients mattered. They always had.
‘The additional complications in this case and the fact that the woman turned out to be such a high-profile businessman’s daughter have made it a high-interest story.’ He went for one of his famous shrugs. ‘Hard to forget her name.’
‘Except that Ruby’s name has never been mentioned.’
She didn’t let up, this woman. He shouldn’t find her tenacity so appealing.
‘Fine, you’ve got me. I remember my patients’ names. They matter to me. Their procedures matter to me. And Gigi’s was a good operation. She’d suffered three miscarriages in the past, probably what had weakened her cervix. Stitching it closed might help prevent premature labour.’
He didn’t add that the procedure carried significant risks, or that every minute, hour, day was crucial. He didn’t need to. Alex clearly understood that or she wouldn’t have been in his OR. The question was, who had let her in, and did some heads need to roll?
‘It’s a hail-Mary procedure that very few surgeons could have even attempted. Fewer still could have actually pulled it off.’
She bit her tongue before she could add whatever else it was she had been about to say. He found himself strangely curious. About what this woman...what Alex thought of him? He eyed her thoughtfully. Finally breaking free of her spell, falling back on what he knew best.
He advanced on her, watching with grim satisfaction as she braced herself, her eyes darkening with the mutual attraction she clearly didn’t want to acknowledge.
‘So you’re Gordon’s protégé.’
Another humble blush.
‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way.’
‘I would.’ His eyes never left her. He took another step towards her, watching her every reaction. ‘He speaks exceptionally highly of you. He really fought your case for you to be in that surgery. I don’t just let anyone in, you know.’
Was he still talking about his surgeries, he wondered, or had the conversation suddenly split off into a second, less overt direction? When had he let that happen? He deliberately advanced again.
‘You should.’ She almost covered the slight quake in her voice and he flashed another wolfish grin. ‘You’re an exceptional surgeon—any doctor would be inspired by watching you.’
The unexpected compliment caught him off guard. Why did it mean more when it came from this stranger’s lips?
‘Should I be offended that you sound so surprised?’ he drawled in an effort to conceal his rare unsettled state. ‘I understood my reputation as far as my career went was exemplary.’
The hollow, unimpressed laugh unbalanced him even further and Louis didn’t know what to think. He was always in control, always so assured that he found this current state of flux anathema.
‘True, but with your hand-picked teams and closed surgeries, which most of us mere mortals have never actually witnessed in person, you’ll forgive us for considering that your shining reputation could have been coloured by the simple fact that you’re a Delaroche.’
‘Is that so?’
‘It is.’ She affected a shrug. ‘There’s only one thing I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, and what’s that?’
‘The Delaroche Foundation has been given credit for the entire Gigi Reed procedure in the press. His name might not have been mentioned outright but the leaked article in the paper certainly made it appear that Jean-Baptiste was the surgeon, not you. Yet neither you nor any of your close-knit team has bothered to set the record straight.’
Why was it suddenly so hard to shrug it off as he would have had no trouble doing had anyone else been asking him?
‘It’s good for the Delaroche brand.’
The line his father had fed him since he’d performed his first exciting surgery. Jean-Baptiste’s successes were his own. Louis’s successes were those of the foundation.
And he didn’t care. Because, really, what else could his father take from him that he hadn’t already taken? Plus more accolades meant more expectation, which in turn meant more responsibility. And up until recently he’d been content with just his surgeries and his hedonistic lifestyle, as the media seemed so fond of calling it.
‘I’ve heard you say that before.’ She glanced at him astutely. ‘To the press. How many times have you passed up taking credit for something that would have improved your godawful reputation with the media?’
‘What if I don’t want to improve my reputation? What if my playboy label gets me more...benefits than getting the credit for weird surgeries ever would? Besides, despite everything, I already have a good reputation with the media as a surgeon, so why worry about more?’