A Bride to Redeem Him

by Charlotte Hawkes

  ‘It isn’t who I want you to be,’ she pressed. ‘It’s simply who you are. You must see that. You’re a good man. Everyone who works with you knows that. Brigitte was telling me that only tonight. Every single one of your surgical team, eager to please you every chance they get, knows it. Even the press know you’re a good surgeon. They laud you every time you operate.’

  ‘Brigitte said it?’

  ‘Brigitte told me she’d worried when you’d first told them you were bringing someone to the chateau, but that since she’s seen us together she hopes our marriage will be a very happy one.’

  ‘Our marriage is a sham.’ Louis frowned.

  It hurt far more than it should. Alex struggled to answer him.

  ‘Of course I know that. But the point remains, people want the best for you. Did you know she also told me that she knew we were trying to regain control of the Lefebvre Group?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as secrets in a place like this.’ Louis shrugged, his shuttered expression only heightening her frustration.

  ‘According to Brigitte, your mother once intended for the stable blocks here at the chateau to be turned into a respite centre. Holidays for families from places like Rainbow House and the other charities sponsored by the Lefebvre Group.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Louis gritted his teeth. It was a warning she should heed, but she couldn’t. Or she didn’t want to.

  ‘It is. Brigitte said your mother even got planning permission, and that your father signed documents to that effect.’

  ‘My father would have long since got rid of any such papers.’

  ‘Not if your mother lodged them at her own solicitors. In trust.’

  It was a dangerous game, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Aside from their silly argument, things had seemed so positive between them before they’d got the message about Florien. And even then, they’d worked together harmoniously, just as they always did. She felt as close to Louis as she was likely to get.

  So why did that knowledge deflate her so?

  ‘Let me guess, Brigitte thinks that, too.’

  ‘Right.’ Alex nodded, shoving her misgivings aside. ‘You could reinstate your mother’s plans and make it one of the first successes of the Lefebvre Group.’

  ‘And call it Rainbow House the Second? Maybe Rainbow Court?’ His anger was apparent. ‘Alex, how many times can I tell you that I don’t want to take over the Lefebvre Group? Or the Delaroche Foundation. The Lefebvre Group was my mother’s drive, her passion, because it was something away from my father. But to me, it holds too many bad memories. The Delaroche Foundation has only ever been a vehicle for my father to gain a knighthood. It has never been about helping people, for him.’

  ‘So you can be different.’ She stood up, took a step forward and then stopped, her arms dropping to her sides helplessly as Louis folded his own arms across his chest as though warding her off.

  ‘No. I am who I am. I’m a brilliant surgeon...’ he shrugged as though it was a fact he acknowledged but wasn’t boasting about ‘...but I’m not a good man. I tried to make sure I was nothing like my father, yet everything I’ve done has made me more like him with every day.’

  ‘You mean the playboy nonsense,’ she sniffed. ‘Why do you insist on punishing yourself with that? It’s only a part of who you were, not even who you are now. You’re a surgeon above all else. You have determination, persistence, passion.’

  ‘For surgeries, Alex. I have that passion for surgeries. I could carry out procedures day and night and I would never tire of them because they inspire me and every surgery is different. But the Lefebvre Group was my mother’s passion and her footsteps don’t lead somewhere I want to follow. I don’t even like the man I become when I think of that place and everything it took from us.’

  ‘So if you don’t like that man you become, change him. Turn it into something positive. If anyone can achieve that, it’s you, Louis.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be enough,’ he said abruptly. ‘Do you think this is the first time I’ve regretted some of my choices? Those first kiss-and-tell encounters that gave me the reputation as a playboy? I’d been trying to hurt my father, damage the Delaroche name, make people look twice and realise that Jean-Baptiste wasn’t their knight-in-shining-scrubs, but a brilliant surgeon with a grubby personal life of his own.’

  ‘You were eighteen. We all make stupid choices when we’re younger—sometimes when we’re older too—but most of us don’t do it in the public eye where it follows us around for years to come.’

  ‘That’s hardly the point,’ he ground out angrily, but it was the pain behind it that clawed at Alex, deep inside. ‘I’m not most people. I’m Louis Delaroche. My grandfather was a Lefebvre. I should have known better.’

  ‘You lost your mother,’ she exclaimed, ‘your guide, over ten years earlier! By your own admission your father was hardly the greatest role model.’

  ‘I don’t want to enough.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m selfish, just like him. I know the Lefebvre Group needs a chairman, and I know that was meant to be my role. It was what my mother always wanted me to do. But I don’t want any part of it because I can’t get past my own hurt. I’m angry with my father for his affairs, which drove my mother to the edge, and I’m angry with her for choosing the way out that she did. Most of all, I’m angry with myself that I wasn’t good enough to give her something to hold onto.’

  It was the most honest he’d been with her and something sang inside her at the knowledge. She was desperate to go to him, to hold him, but she didn’t dare move for fear of breaking the moment. A minute ago they’d been standing across the room from each other, only a few metres but it might as well have been a yawning chasm, and now suddenly it felt like he’d thrown the first rope across the divide. The first step to building a bridge.

  The logs spattered and a clock chimed in the entrance hall, the sound echoing along the silent chateau corridors.

  It was only when Louis exhaled, moving as though he was about to turn and leave, that Alex finally spoke.

  ‘I do understand your guilt, Louis. You blame yourself for your mother’s death. I know what it’s like to carry around a burden of responsibility that isn’t your own.’

  ‘Your brother.’ He blinked, as though remembering it for the first time.

  She swallowed, her heart accelerating uncontrollably.

  ‘Not just my brother. My mother, too.’

  Louis stilled, his jaw locked, the pulse ticking away the only tell-tale sign that he wasn’t as calm as he would have her believe.

  ‘You don’t. Not like this. I know you mean well, but these are my demons.’

  Shutting her out like he always shut out everyone. Leaving her no choice but to go to the one place she’d swore she would never go. Even now, she knew it would cost her.

  She hoped Louis was worth the risk.

  ‘I never told you how my mother died, did I?’ she heard herself say.

  And suddenly there it was, the pain that was always there—like a dull ache that never, ever went away—but now it was rearing up, sharper and more biting than it had felt in years.

  She stuffed it back down and forced herself to meet Louis’s gaze, her momentary pause losing her what little advantage she might have had. He raked a hand through his hair.

  ‘Alex, I don’t want to get into a “my pain is worse than your pain” contest. I’m just explaining to you why I don’t want to take on the Lefebvre Group.’

  ‘And I’m just telling you how my mother died,’ she managed quietly, her fingers gripping her book so he couldn’t see how she was shaking.

  The air thrummed with tension, breath bated to see who would fold first.

  Eventually, Louis dipped his head in perceived acquiescence, moving around the chair and flopping down to lounge in his deliberately insouciant fashion.

 
She drew in a slow, discreet breath and counted to ten before uttering the words she hadn’t said for decades.

  ‘My mother died in childbirth. After she’d been in labour with me. The child who had been conceived as a potential saviour sibling for their son, but who would turn out not to be a match, was also the direct cause of her mother’s death. So, you see, I do understand a thing or two about guilt and responsibility.’

  She hated that look he shot her then. The look of pity. The one she’d grown to resent so much as a kid that she’d started telling people her mother had died in a car accident.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Louis.’

  She braced herself for the platitudes.

  ‘How? How did she die?’

  As though he could read her. She cast him a ghost of a grateful smile.

  ‘Placenta percreta. The placenta had grown through the uterine wall and invaded her bladder. They couldn’t do anything. Everything ruptured and she bled out.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t imagine...’

  ‘I content myself with the knowledge that she got to hold me, at least for a few moments. And she told my father to love me and made him promise to tell me every time I needed him to that she was grateful for the chance to meet me.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘No. He never told me. He tried to, in his own way, but he couldn’t bear talking about her. In the end it was my grandparents who used to tell me but it wasn’t the same. I always felt he blamed me, deep down. And so I blamed myself. When my brother died, my father retreated even more and so I took on that responsibility, too.’

  He shook his head, his fist balled as though he was angry on her behalf. As if he wanted to protect her.

  As if he cared.

  ‘I didn’t tell you this because I wanted your sympathy.’ She made her voice crisp, unemotional, telling herself that she’d dealt with that pain even though she could still feel it, rattling the heavy chains on its prison door, even now.

  ‘I told you because I wanted to show you that I let that experience drive me to become a doctor. To become someone she would have been proud of. I know you play the bad boy because you think it’s somehow your punishment, but honestly I think that’s nonsense.’

  She knew he was about to stop her but she held her hand up to silence him. If she didn’t tell him now, she’d never get the chance to say it.

  ‘You were seven, a child. You can’t hold yourself responsible for someone else’s happiness. You could be doing so much more. Even if you can’t do it for her, you owe it to yourself to be the kind of man you have the potential to be. If only you’d forgive yourself.’

  He’d only felt helpless once before in his life. The night his mother had turned her back on him.

  Louis was determined tonight wasn’t going to be the second time.

  But seeing Alex so distressed, and knowing how worthless her father had made her feel—not by hurling the kind of vicious jibes that his own father had but by staying silent and withholding his love—made Louis furious, powerless and mournful all at once.

  And yet he couldn’t let her off so easily.

  ‘You talk about me forgiving myself. But have you?’

  He could tell by the rush of panic in her eyes that he was right.

  ‘Of course. That’s why I can volunteer at Rainbow House. I’ve confronted my ghosts.’

  ‘I don’t buy that, Alex. I know you volunteer to maintain that last connection with your father. But if you forgave yourself then you wouldn’t need to hang onto him. You’d tell yourself that it was time he met you halfway.’

  ‘Who said I didn’t enjoy volunteering there for myself?’ she blustered.

  ‘You. You’ve never once given that as a reason. You’ve always linked it to your father.’

  She stilled. He thought she’d even stopped breathing. Then she blinked rapidly, as if tears were stinging her soulful eyes, and guilt poured through him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘But you were right,’ she whispered. ‘I’m just as tethered to my past as you are. I wanted to help you see that you weren’t helping anyone by punishing yourself. I thought I could help you move on.’

  He didn’t remember standing up or crossing the room to scoop her into his arms. But suddenly they were there together and all he could do was to hold her body close to his, try to make her feel safe and secure. And cared for.

  So what did that mean?

  He let the question wash over him as her blinks gave way to the first silent tears. He carried her out of the door, up the grand, sweeping staircase and to her room. And he let her hold onto him as if she would never let go as he settled her on the bed, nodded wordlessly when she begged him not to leave her, lay down beside her and cradled her as sobs racked her, crying for probably the first time in decades. Finally allowing herself to grieve for the things she’d lost as well as the things she’d never had. Finally letting go after years of trying to build bridges with her father and holding her feelings inside.

  And when the tears at last began to ebb and the hiccups subside, when, exhausted and depleted, her eyes tired and swollen, sleep crept over her, he continued to hold her. Long after the house fell silent and the fire died in the hearth. Long into the night until the tendrils of slumber wisped around him. Right into the first hints of light and the sounds of the dawn chorus.

  As his eyes began to open again, Louis tipped his head from one side to the other to ease the crick in his neck. After last night he ought to feel drained. Wary, even. Instead, he just felt as though a weight had finally been lifted from him. Hearing Alex share her story with him and knowing she hadn’t told anyone else had changed things for him somehow.

  Suddenly, he no longer felt the isolation he’d never realised he’d been experiencing. His brain was fired up with renewed drive. An energy effervescing in blood that coursed eagerly through his veins. If he could only work out what to do with it.

  He’d spent years playing genius, playboy Louis, convinced there was a reason that he was renowned for his surgical skills on the one hand and his sexual prowess on the other. But the truth was that he’d been little different from any other nineteen-year-old kid with money and women throwing themselves at him. The only thing that set him apart was the name he’d been forging for himself in the surgical field.

  The press had only jumped on the playboy story because it had sold more papers for them. And he’d let them because it had seemed easier. Because it had been convenient. But Alex made him want something different. Something...more.

  Maybe, and he wasn’t saying definitely, taking on the role of Chairman of the Lefebvre Group was something he should consider. Maybe he and Alex could make their sham marriage work for them, and pull together to really achieve something good. Maybe their marriage could be more than just... No, that was going too far.

  But still they could make a good business team. No one else could ever have dared to talk to her the way he had last night. He, in turn, could never have trusted anyone else with the truths he’d told her this past week.

  Easing his hand from under her neck, Louis slid off the bed, covering her with a blanket and taking his time so as not to disturb her. The hot, powerful jets of the shower sluiced over his body and, with it, any residual anhedonia of the previous night, of the previous decade.

  He barely brushed the towel over his body before pulling on jeans and a tee, clothes that he hadn’t worn in years but which welcomed him from the back of his burr-walnut wardrobe. Louis snatched up his phone, his fingers scrolling efficiently through old contact numbers. With a final glance at Alex’s sleeping form, he slipped out of the room.

  * * *

  It was well into the morning before Alex appeared, having tracked him down to where he was meeting someone in the east wing drawing room. She looked as deliciously fresh and bewitching as
ever. He forced himself not to stare at her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ She backed up immediately. ‘I didn’t realise you were in a meeting.’

  ‘Don’t leave.’ He waved his hand immediately to beckon her over. ‘Étienne is just leaving, we were finishing up anyway.’

  She only hesitated for a moment before advancing with a sweet smile, her hand outstretched in greeting as the man dropped a light kiss on her hand, making his introductions and apologies as he excused himself to run to another meeting.

  ‘Étienne Morel is a lawyer. His father was my mother’s personal lawyer, who never had much time for Jean-Baptiste.’

  ‘You’re looking into what Brigitte said last night,’ she breathed, the expectation dancing in her eyes almost too much for him to stand.

  ‘I’m making tentative enquiries, shall we say,’ he cautioned. ‘I cannot promise anything. I will not promise. Don’t get ahead of yourself, Alex. I am simply...weighing the options.’

  He could see by her body language that his words were falling on deaf ears but her delight got under his skin in a way that wasn’t prudent and, if only for a short while, he gave in to the temptation of indulging her.

  ‘Étienne’s also looking into finding the Lefevbre Group tie-in with the Delaroche Foundation—maybe fresh eyes can see a loophole. In the meantime, he found the plans Brigitte mentioned easily enough. The idea was to convert the old stables into small holiday apartments for disabled people and carers. They already had made provisions for wheelchair access and additional security features.’

  He waited with a strange tenseness as she perused the drawings, her finger tracing every last inch of space, her soft voice reading the French aloud, translating.

  ‘Right. Accessibility but with more practicalities. This could be safety gates, well-fenced gardens, and ensuring doors and windows can be locked to prevent any little Houdinis.’

  ‘Perhaps building a couple of swimming pools but ensuring they were both secured.’

  ‘Perfect.’ The look she sent him pulled straight down to his sex. He thrust it away. ‘For some families it might be more about assuring them that they’re coming somewhere safe and secure, and assuring them they can relax in the knowledge that no one is going to be judging them.’