A Bride to Redeem Him

by Charlotte Hawkes

  ‘But not like your typical Louis Delaroche date.’ She shook her head, toying with the fabric of his shirt, as though she was willing her hands to brace against him and push him away.

  ‘Isn’t that the point? That you’re meant to be unlike anyone I’ve been with before?’

  ‘Still, like you said, I don’t think wholesome, boring, grandmother’s Apple Pie Alex is going to convince the press. Do you?’ She barely gave him time to reply. ‘If we want to convince people that you’re a changed man, we need to give them a reason they’ll believe. A spicy apple pie. The Apple Pie Martini.’

  ‘Sorry, the what?’

  But she didn’t stop to answer.

  Flattening her palms against his chest, Alex propelled herself back and pulled herself up to her full height, more like the confident, feisty woman he’d seen that first night. The smile she cast him shot straight through him and to his sex and then she spun around and glided out the doors and into a sea of camera flashes, appearing for all the world like she was born to a life in the spotlight. Part girl next door but part fierce Amazonian. It filled him with a sense of pride, of...almost possessiveness.

  He couldn’t explain it, all he did understand was that it meant the papers, once they found out who she really was, would be eating out of her hand in days. And that was before they saw the sheer drive and determination that governed her world.

  How much more was there to Alexandra Vardy? What might he discover if he had the chance to peel back one skin after another? Why was he so damned intrigued by this one woman?

  The questions jostled around his head with such eagerness that for a moment he almost forgot to follow her.

  He, who never followed anyone.

  Bursting through the doors, he covered the ground to her in a few long strides. Sliding his hand to the small of her back and guiding her the last feet to the kerb as their car headed towards them.

  ‘Quite a show,’ he murmured, leaning in to whisper in her ear, and exalting in the fact that only he could see her quickened, nervous breathing.

  ‘I think it got the message across.’

  ‘Perhaps. But a kiss would seal it.’

  ‘I don’t want to kiss you.’

  ‘Liar,’ he whispered, angling his head even closer to her ear so that her lips couldn’t be seen by the cameras, but there was no mistaking the way her body trembled. It sent waves of desire through him. ‘Love and lust are easily mistaken for each other. And there’s no denying you and I have the latter. We both feel it.’

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ she refuted, but her voice lacked any conviction.

  ‘Is that so?’ he growled.

  She was going to stall. Louis refused to give her the opportunity. He yanked her in, his mouth claiming hers and silencing any further objections.

  Hot and glorious, and full of sinful promise. It wasn’t like any other kiss he’d ever known. His mouth moved over hers, the whisper of her tongue against his fanning the flames that raged inside him. This was the kiss he’d been imagining all night.

  Maybe even the kiss he’d been imagining his whole life.

  As though she was the drink he’d never been able to find anywhere else, and the only one that could ever quench the thirst that had plagued him for what seemed like for ever. It wasn’t just the way her tongue now scraped over his in sweet response. It wasn’t just the way she tensed, relaxed, and then pressed against him, her breasts splayed against his body, generating a heat that burned right through clothing he desperately wished he could just rip off. It wasn’t the way she tasted of need and longing and ultimately of promise.

  It wasn’t any of that. Yet it was all of it.

  His head was spinning and, as hard as he tried, there was only one thought he could seem to hold onto.

  He couldn’t let her go. Not after this. He couldn’t risk her backing away again. He liked this spiced version of Alex. Maybe a little bit too much.

  When the car came, it was as much an interruption as a relief to break apart and bundle her inside.

  The sudden silence was a jolt after the fracas out there.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Louis asked after a moment.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What’s your address?’ He barely recognised the raw voice but it was hardly surprising when she was still trembling in his arms. And this time, he knew, it had nothing to do with the press.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because we’re heading there now. You’ll have half an hour, forty minutes at the most to pack everything you need and you’ll move in with me.’

  ‘I will not,’ she squeaked.

  He sighed. The sort of gently impatient sigh one might have bestowed on a small child who refused to hear what was being said to them. Alex would never know what it had cost him to rein himself in as he had.

  She opened her mouth to speak but he cut in smoothly.

  ‘You have no choice. Surely that’s obvious to you?’

  ‘Why should it be?’ she challenged uncertainly.

  ‘Because now the press have linked us, they’re going to hound you until they get more. Camp out on your doorstep, harass your friends and relatives. You need to move somewhere it isn’t as easy for them to gain access to you. Not only for your sake but also for the sake of your family.’

  ‘I don’t have a family.’ The words were out before she could bite them back, as she clearly wished she could. She tried to pull out of his arms but he refused to let her. ‘Just my father.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  She flinched, pressing her lips into a thin line, but at least she wasn’t trying to pull away from him any longer. For the first time it occurred to Louis that he’d been so busy telling her things he’d never told anyone before that he hadn’t thought to have her investigated as he usually would have. He vowed to remedy it as soon as he could.

  ‘Either way, I’m sure you don’t want him to see your every movement in the papers when they climb trees, or break into your back garden for the photos that capture a day in your life.’

  He hated the way she recoiled from him.

  ‘Oh, God, my father. He’ll see photos of that kiss in the papers tomorrow.’

  ‘And in the news tonight,’ Louis pointed out gently.

  She covered her face with her hands.

  ‘It’s what we wanted,’ he reminded her. ‘What we needed them to believe.’

  It had just happened faster than he’d intended. And he couldn’t pretend he’d been entirely in control. She had a way of making him act like a desperate kid. Either way, they’d set out their proverbial stall. Now they had to sell their wares, starting with ensuring she now moved in with him.

  The car was pushing through the crowd and somehow he knew he needed to get her to agree now. Before the moment between them was broken.

  ‘Put it this way, I have to go to France for a month or so. There are some cases that I’ve been waiting to complete out there. You’ll be safer in my penthouse than on your own, but you won’t have to worry about me seeing you with bed-hair.’

  He took the snort to be a mirthless laugh. He didn’t know why he was so suddenly desperate for her to agree. It wasn’t just about making sure she was safe, he knew that. He suspected it was something far more primal. And that was dangerous.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Okay.’ She dipped her head fractionally, clouds skittering across her eyes.

  He could read the sense of foreboding that she desperately wanted to shake. Her feeling that she was somehow capitulating and that he had won. But it didn’t feel like a win. He didn’t know what this feeling was.

  He only knew that the very ground was shifting precariously beneath his feet and it was all to do with this one woman.

  Worse, Louis had no idea how to keep himself from plummeting into the void head first.

 
CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘IT’S THE STUFF of spy movies, isn’t it?’ Alex was still struggling to regain her composure after the kiss as the plush lift whisked them silently from the underground garage to Louis’s private penthouse.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She waved a negligent hand in the air, wondering if he could see the way it trembled, even now, at the memory of his mouth against hers.

  ‘I mean, the exclusive key card to access the security pad just so you can enter in some private code. And that’s before the lift had even closed its doors.’

  Alex fought valiantly to appear light-hearted, but how could Louis fail to hear her heart drumming out its wild tattoo on her ribcage?

  ‘That’s what money buys,’ he said with a shrug, that hint of darkness she was beginning to recognise meaning he’d have given it all up in a heartbeat just for one question to be answered. Why his mother had chosen to do...what she had.

  It was a sense of helplessness that she understood only too well. It was getting easier and easier for her to read the man who had confounded the press for so many years. They had him pegged as this complex genius playboy.

  They didn’t understand him at all. And the two of them had a lot more in common than Louis realised.

  She wasn’t sure whether she’d realised it on the drive from the restaurant to her home, or from her home to here. But she’d realised it. She wasn’t foolish enough to think that she’d worked out the entire puzzle box that was Louis Delaroche, but she’d at least figured out the first stage of him. He was as lost and hurt as she was, if for different reasons. And for each of them, that unbearable void couldn’t be filled by another person and so they’d each been driven by their work.

  That was why she felt such a connection with him. And in turn it explained why she’d acted so out of character outside the restaurant back there. Why she’d allowed herself to be kissed so thoroughly in front of a sea of flashing cameras. Why she’d come alive in his arms in a way she’d never before believed possible.

  If only it was that simple.

  If only she could pretend it really was just a mental connection rather than a physical one. How easy and convenient that would be. But there was more to it. It was less cerebral, more visceral. Louis fired up a need in her that she hadn’t even known existed until he had come along. As if he had crept under her skin and infected her with some kind of thrilling fever.

  And she liked it.

  It didn’t matter how many times she tried to tell herself that Louis had only kissed her to distract the press from her obvious gaucheness, she still craved more. Physically she felt drained and yet energised. She ached for him.

  Lifting her fingers, Alex traced them lightly over her lips. She could still taste him on her mouth, feel his solid chest against her tender breasts, recall his strong hands tracing patterns up and down her spine.

  In her whole life she’d always prided herself on her fight over flight attitude, but in this instance she knew if it hadn’t been for Rainbow House she would have turned and run. She couldn’t say how she knew it, but Louis Delaroche had the power to devastate her just as he’d devastated so many women before her. It turned out she wasn’t as immune to that kind of man as she’d always assumed.

  But, then, Louis wasn’t that kind of anything. There were no others like him, he didn’t so much break moulds as stick them on a mine and blow them to a grey mist.

  So, here she was, in the lift to Louis’s penthouse. And on top of all her roiling emotions it was difficult not to feel at least a little intimidated by Louis’s obvious wealth and luxurious lifestyle. Especially when she thought of her own little flat and what he must have thought, pulling his flashy supercar into the communal car park packed with small older cars, scooters and a plethora of battered bicycles chained up together. A world away from the exclusive garage below, adorned with flashy cars recumbent in their generously proportioned, allocated parking spaces.

  ‘Are you coming in?’ The low voice broke through her reverie. ‘Or do you intend to ride the lift all night?’

  With a strangled sound Alex lurched forward, as if her legs didn’t quite belong to her, and out of the lift to where Louis stood at the door to his penthouse. The edge in his voice accompanied by the hard, distant expression—as though he could read her thoughts on their kiss and scorned her for them—only made her fears swell.

  And then she stepped past him into the room and everything rushed from her mind.

  ‘That view is incredible,’ she gasped.

  One minute she was too close to Louis and the next she found herself across the room, palms flattened on a bank of glass looking out at the twinkling city as if she was somehow on top of the world. Or, at least, the closest she had ever come. The lights spread out for miles under a blanket of night and even some of the tallest buildings, which had always appeared enormous to her even from the fourth floor of the hospital, were now dwarfed by the breathtaking views from Louis’s penthouse.

  No wonder Louis walked, talked, acted as though the world was his for the taking. To him, it was.

  ‘Is this how you seduce all your dates?’ she asked, thinking that it really was a breath-taking view. ‘All your real dates, that is?’

  The pause stretched out for longer than was normal but when she turned, she wasn’t prepared for the curve of his lips that developed into a full-blown smile of...warmth?

  It blasted her, as though opening an incinerator door.

  ‘I can’t say any of my previous so-called dates have ever been interested in the view. Not the one out there, anyway.’

  She shot him an exasperated look, and felt a little better.

  If she had to work alongside Louis while such inappropriate longings poured through her then she needed to rediscover the light banter, the teasing back and forth they’d touched on earlier.

  It was better than the alternative. Than the...kiss.

  ‘Are you ever more impressed with anything other than your own brilliance?’

  ‘Aren’t you impressed by my...brilliance?’ He quirked an eyebrow.

  Something rolled and flipped low in her belly.

  ‘I’m more astounded by your indefatigable arrogance.’ She tried for loftiness but her own lips refused to do anything but curl upwards in amusement. His devilish grin of response wrecked her insides.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It wasn’t a compliment.’

  ‘Oh, I would strongly disagree.’ His rich, amused voice reverberated around her.

  Abruptly, he moved to stand beside her, his head turned to the same view she saw, as if trying to see it through her eyes. She suspected he had long become immune to its beauty. She wasn’t prepared for him to grow so quiet and serious.

  ‘But, to answer your original question, lots of things impress me. Even astound me. Especially the strength of some people’s human spirit inside and outside my OR. What you told me about your life back at the restaurant.’

  His unexpected compliment made her yearn for more. Alex clenched her fists against the glass, silently cursing such weakness.

  ‘There was nothing impressive or astounding about my life. People have it far worse.’

  ‘And many don’t. Either way, few of them use it to drive them on to becoming the star pupil of one of the most sought-after anaesthetists in the country, let alone the hospital.’

  She could barely think straight, let alone talk.

  ‘That was just work. And a bit of luck.’

  ‘That was you,’ he corrected softly. ‘You asked if anything impressed me and you’re right that few things do. But I’m telling you that you’re one of them.’

  She hated herself for the way her heart suddenly soared. If she wasn’t careful, the press and the Delaroche Foundation board weren’t going to be the only fools to fall for this charade.

  She really was like a bre
ath of fresh air.

  He’d spent the entire drive fighting the urge to kiss her over and over again. To taste that delicious mouth from every angle. It had been like some kind of torture being so close to her and not allowing himself to indulge. And as for that interminably long ride in the lift...she could never know how close he’d come to hitting the emergency stop.

  Yet now here he was, standing side by side with her and staring at the view as though seeing it properly for the first time in a long time—perhaps the first time ever—because of Alex. Because she was so genuine.

  None of the women he’d ever brought up here had cared about the view. They weren’t the kind of women who would ever have been interested in such simple beauty. But Alex wasn’t similar to those women. She wasn’t swayed by the superficial, she cared about the things that mattered, about people who mattered. She made him start to care again. Not about his patients—that was a given—but about something other than medicine. About Rainbow House.

  He’d never thought anyone could make him do that.

  He’d been fighting an attraction to her ever since that first night on the balcony. Even now, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking how Alex could make a room light up just by walking into it, just as his mother had once done. Alex could make him light up. And he didn’t want her to stop.

  The realisation slammed into him with such force he felt as though every last bit of air had been sucked from his body. As though his lungs were crumpling in his chest. He wanted Alex. Not just to finally wrest his inheritance back from the Delaroche Foundation, as had once been his mother’s intent, and not just to save Rainbow House from his father.

  He wanted Alex because she made him feel. Something. Anything.

  Not for ever, of course, because that would be nonsensical. He didn’t do long-term relationships. He never had.

  But for as long as this charade lasted, he wanted it to be more than simply a charade. He wanted it to be more...real. He wanted her.

  Worse than that. He wanted to know her.

  ‘What is it?’ Alex touched his arm and he realised she must have repeated the question at least once.