Kept at the Argentine's Command (Harlequin Presents)

by Lucy Ellis

Anna clambered off her knees, dusting them off. ‘Well, maybe we can come to some sort of agreement.’

  ‘Oui,’ said Lulu crisply. ‘A signed agreement, before I go on to tell you that the extra pounds are my business.’

  ‘Wow, Lulu, what happened to you in Argentina?’ asked Trixie.

  ‘The mouse roars,’ said another dancer, Leah. ‘We should all get dumped by hot polo stars, girls.’

  Lulu ignored them. All she could think about was what was awaiting her tonight, when the show was over.

  He’d come for her.

  When her period had made an appearance the day after she’d got back she’d cried and cried, and right up until Alejandro had appeared at her door this afternoon she hadn’t really known why.

  At first, as she’d gone about putting into practice all her plans, she hadn’t been able to work out why she wasn’t relieved. It meant all her old goals were still in place—nothing had been shifted. Nothing but her.

  She’d changed. Her priorities were different. She no longer felt the need to prove herself because deep down she knew now that she would make a superlative mother. If only because she would love her baby. It wouldn’t be easy, but nobody’s life was easy, and if she had a little more to overcome than other people it would just make her stronger, more resilient.

  She could actually see herself as a wife and mother, see herself occupying that next stage in life. And it didn’t mean giving anything up.

  She’d rung Alejandro and told him the no-baby news while he’d been on tour. There had been female voices in the background and he’d told her he was in a marquee, picking up an award. He hadn’t sounded very interested in it—it had only been later that she’d learned from the newspapers that he’d picked up that award from royalty.

  Then he’d asked to come and see her and she’d said no.

  She’d thought he was being nice. Tidying up the loose ends.

  So why was he here?

  She faced herself in the mirror. Why would he want to be stuck with someone like her? She might be getting better, but she was never going to be completely without her irrational fears.

  Only wasn’t that falling back into her old patterns of thought? She’d learned that from him—learned to catch herself at it. Alejandro had given her a release from them when he’d talked to her about her father.

  He’d also given her a tool to work with.

  It was that new knowledge which acted as a powerful guidance system inside her. Her daily fear of constant collapse had receded and it was allowing her to see everything a lot more clearly.

  She’d told her parents her plans at her first Sunday lunch back home, and as she’d suspected her mother had had a meltdown. But Jean-Luc had overridden those objections and told her he was proud of her, that they would step aside as she wished, although if she needed them they would always be there.

  Which was when she’d flung her arms around Jean Luc’s neck and told him she couldn’t have a better stepfather if he was Gregory Peck.

  The following weeks had passed in a blur of activity. She’d watched strangers traipse through her flat and she’d wandered through other people’s until she’d found one in the next arrondissement. It took up half of her weekly income, but it had its own bathroom, which was a plus, although no courtyard or anywhere to sit in the sun.

  Still, she wasn’t home much, between working nights at L’Oiseau Bleu and college starting up, and her puppy Coco had to spend more time living at her parents. She seemed to live on the bus between college and the cabaret.

  She told herself it was true independence, but knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

  Nothing worthwhile ever was.

  So facing down Anna hadn’t really been that difficult just now. It was thinking about Alejandro and what his appearance back in her life meant that made everything ache…

  ‘Why don’t you girls all mind your own business?’ said Adele suddenly. ‘Worry about your own love lives or lack thereof!’ She reinforced this uncharacteristic show of support by leaning down and murmuring, ‘I’ve got your back, Lu.’

  That Adele should prove to be her ally wasn’t so unexpected, Lulu guessed. Since she’d stopped worrying about people discovering her condition she’d developed a backbone and had been getting a lot of the respect she’d missed out on in the past.

  ‘Thanks, Lulu, for helping out,’ Romy said, hopping over on one leg and lowering herself into a chair. ‘I just keep it to a figure eight, but make sure you only drop two scarves at a time—no more, or you’ll run out…’

  Lulu waited for more instructions, but Romy had stopped speaking.

  In fact everyone was quiet.

  She looked up and everything went haywire.

  *

  Alejandro had never been backstage at a theatre.

  Up until the moment he’d stepped through the stage door he had pictured L’Oiseau Bleu as a girly joint.

  He hadn’t been far wrong.

  The first person he ran into was a topless peacock, or so she appeared to be, who shrieked, clapped her arms over her breasts—and then changed her mind, asked if he was Alejandro du Crozier, and if so could he sign her…?

  Then he slammed into a stagehand who told him to go around to the front of the building and approach the booking office. No members of the public were allowed backstage during a performance.

  ‘We’ve got a nudity clause,’ the guy said.

  ‘I’m not interested in the nudity. I’m looking for Lulu Lachaille,’ Alejandro told him.

  ‘You’ll have to speak to the manager—’

  ‘Who is on her honeymoon,’ Alejandro cut him off.

  He could hear music. Knew that elsewhere in this place there was a show going on. He wanted to get to Lulu before she hit the stage, because he had this crazy, unrealistic idea that if he didn’t he would have lost her.

  He couldn’t wait until eleven o’clock. He’d already waited six weeks.

  ‘I mean the assistant manager,’ the guy fired back, looking uneasy.

  ‘Who is…?’ Alejandro was ready to slice and dice this guy.

  ‘Alejandro du Crozier!’

  He turned around. The feather-clad blonde hip-swinging towards him was vaguely familiar.

  ‘Susie. Susie Sayers.’ She gave him a speculative sweep, from his boots to the curl of his overly long chestnut hair.

  He remembered. Susie. The bridesmaid with the wandering hands.

  ‘Where is she?’ he demanded without preamble.

  ‘Come this way, gorgeous. Follow Susie!’

  He followed the bouncing ostrich feather tail down a corridor, and he heard the sound of shrill female voices before he saw the dancers.

  A couple of naked women shrieked, and one or two just put their hands on their hips and watched him come in.

  Then he saw her.

  Or he thought he saw her.

  Sitting at a mirror framed with glowing bulbs, applying powder to her already luminescent skin.

  ‘Alejandro!’ She dropped the brush and swivelled around in her chair.

  He couldn’t get over how she looked. She was wearing a rhinestone bikini, a long ostrich feather tail and towering heels.

  She was a showgirl.

  Until this moment he hadn’t really believed it.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see the show.’

  ‘Five minutes until Little Egypt.’ The announcement came over the tannoy.

  ‘That’s me.’ She shimmied out of her tail in front of him, and Alejandro was confronted by Lulu’s very luscious, very familiar behind in a tiny sparkly G-string.

  She was going on stage in that?

  Like hell she was!

  Lulu began attaching a skirt made of scarves, her hands working fast as she arranged them.

  Alejandro relaxed slightly. That was better.

  ‘Enjoy the show,’ she said, and with an entirely un-Lulu-like taunt of a smile she slipped past him.

  Alejandro turne
d around and was confronted by a roomful of semi-naked women, all looking him speculatively up and down.

  ‘Ladies…’ he said and, feeling ridiculously objectified, waded his way out of the dressing room to find out what Lulu was up to.

  He found out from the wings of the stage. Against a set he assumed was supposed to resemble nineteenth-century Egypt, Lulu swayed and manipulated her hips to the snaky, seductive music.

  Ridiculous as it was, he had never actually thought about Lulu being a dancer, but her talent was evident. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  The problem was he imagined every other man in the audience was in the same predicament.

  As the scarves fell away his tension grew—until there she was, virtually naked behind a semi-transparent screen. Only he could see she was wearing a flesh-coloured bikini.

  And as he looked around at the faces in the audience below Alejandro realised half of them were women.

  When Lulu wrapped herself in a crimson robe and came out to centre stage there was a burst of thunderous applause and he watched her take a bow, as she must do every night. Alejandro joined in with the applause—and then it occurred to him that she didn’t do this every night and he’d just seen something extraordinary.

  Lulu had performed solo.

  *

  It was a different woman he escorted into an exclusive restaurant overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens.

  His gaze dropped to her bottom, now encased in a fishtailed dark purple cocktail dress, but somehow he could still see that strip of sparkles.

  She had never looked more beautiful, with her skin luminescent against the coloured silk, cut modestly across her breasts, and her delicate shoulders bare beneath narrow straps.

  As he seated himself opposite her Alejandro was very aware that this was how their relationship should have begun.

  Dinner. Dancing. Him coming to Paris to see her again and again. Flying her down to his yacht in the Mediterranean. Looking at her through candlelight.

  He drew her out on her college course, how she was juggling her two worlds, the new flat, how her parents were dealing with it, and soon her hesitant replies grew more fluid. She lost her self-consciousness and began to talk as he’d never really heard Lulu talk before. She didn’t apologise for anything—she just enthused.

  He’d missed her so much, and yet he knew the woman in front of him had needed that time.

  ‘You haven’t been seeing anyone since you got back?’ With difficulty he kept the question neutral.

  ‘I—I tried. I had lunch with a guy on my course.’ She looked up. ‘He’s nice.’

  ‘Nice?’ Alejandro struggled with that concept and lost. He inhaled. ‘How about me? What am I?’

  ‘You’re you,’ she said in a quiet voice, ‘and you haven’t said what you thought of the show.’

  ‘You performed solo.’

  ‘Only under duress—but, yes, I did.’ She moistened her lips. ‘Nothing else has changed, Alejandro. I’m still seeing my therapist. I still sometimes can’t leave the flat. On my scale I’m doing well, but my scale is much smaller than yours.’

  He frowned, but was careful to keep his voice level. ‘In what way?’

  ‘When I rang you about not being pregnant you were collecting a trophy from the Prince of Wales!’

  He shook his head slightly. ‘And…?’

  ‘That’s your life. You’re out there on the world stage and I’m… I’m on stage at L’Oiseau Bleu, still trying not to lose my lunch.’

  He fingered the stem of his untouched champagne glass, his frustration building. ‘I never hung our relationship on the idea that you would get better, Lulu,’ he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, ‘but I think you did.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think it’s a convenient excuse for you. If you weren’t “sick”, as you call it, what other excuse would you use to not be with me?’

  ‘I’m not making excuses.’ She shifted in her seat, very pale now. Her mouth quivered.

  ‘You have a kind of agoraphobia, and yet you climb on stage with the other Bluebirds every night of the week. You do it because it means so much to you. Yet you won’t take the chance to have a relationship with me because I’m on the world stage? As far as I can see, Lulu, they’re both stages. You choose which one you want to stand on.’

  She was breathing fast. ‘You’re the one who won’t accept me as I am.’

  Alejandro held her eyes with his. He looked so incredibly calm, when she was breaking into a million pieces.

  She willed him to tell her he did accept her. That he would move heaven and earth to be with her. And suddenly she was angry with him.

  What right had he to do this to her? He should have left her alone. Instead he’d dragged her to dinner just to flay her alive.

  ‘Can I give you an opinion you’re not going to like?’

  ‘No,’ she said, in a small, tense voice.

  ‘I think you’ve used your phobia in the past to keep men at arm’s distance. I don’t think you’ve allowed yourself to accept how truly frightening living with your father was.’

  Lulu opened her mouth to disagree, to tell him he was way off base, only…

  ‘You don’t want to find yourself in that situation again, so somewhere inside yourself you’re still that little girl, hiding away.’

  She sat very still, as if he’d opened up Pandora’s Box and what had jumped out was eyeing her. She found she couldn’t move.

  When he spoke again his voice had deepened. ‘What I want to know is why me?’

  She inhaled his warm, musky male scent and the answer was there before she’d even thought about it. Because the moment I clapped eyes on you the backs of my knees went and that had never happened to me before.

  But that wasn’t the only reason.

  ‘You were so awful to me I didn’t have any choice but to fight back,’ she whispered.

  ‘And you never fought back with your father, did you? You always ran away—like your mother told you to.’

  She gave a slight nod, because to have done any more would have shattered her.

  ‘So there we are. It’s not fear that’s holding you back, Lulu, its anger.’

  The powerful wave of emotion that had been pushing its way through her body since he’d arrived on her doorstep that morning broke, and Lulu found herself scraping back her chair from the table.

  Perhaps he said her name—she wasn’t sure, because she was running across the restaurant. She knocked a waiter’s arm and the tray he carried went smashing to the floor.

  Heads turned…there was a flurry of activity around her…but Lulu couldn’t stay.

  ‘I’m sorry… I’m so sorry,’ she muttered, and continued to push her way out of the restaurant.

  And then she was out in the floodlit square, the autumn breeze cold on her bare arms. But there was no going back, and she ran down the street in her clumpy heels, her heart pounding.

  ‘Lulu!’

  Alejandro caught her before she could hail a taxi.

  He turned her in his arms.

  In that moment Lulu wanted to deny it. She wanted to shout at him that her phobias had nothing to do with her, that it was something outside of her. Something she couldn’t control.

  Her father.

  She looked up into Alejandro’s beautiful face, lined with concern for her, and knew he was right. She’d never got the chance to confront him.

  ‘He never loved me!’ she shouted, shoving Alejandro in the chest with both hands, unable even to shift him, which was hugely, crazily comforting. ‘He was so full of anger he couldn’t love anything. How can you say I’m like that? I’m not!’ She stumbled back, hugging herself. ‘I’m not like that, am I?’

  And there it was—her greatest fear. She wasn’t loveable. There was something intrinsically wrong with her.

  The girl with the madman for a father.

  The question was like a knife she’d put to her own throat.

  ‘
No,’ he said in a hoarse voice, stepping up to her, laying that knife down. Offering his large body as both punching bag and shelter. ‘You’re not filled with anger, Lulu, you’re angry. There’s a difference.’

  He put his arms around her and this time she didn’t fight. This time she let him tighten his arms around her.

  ‘You have a right to be angry, amorcito,’ he said, his mouth warm against her temple.

  She clung to him, not caring that they were in the middle of a public place, taking all the skin-on-skin contact she could get from him. And if a small part of her wondered where private, buttoned-up Lulu had got to, the rest of her knew.

  Her family wouldn’t recognise her.

  Nobody would. Only Alejandro.

  He had undone all her buttons from the very beginning. This was the last one.

  ‘You should be angry,’ he reiterated.

  She clutched at him—not because she was frightened, but because she felt that she could.

  She didn’t have to hide her feelings any more.

  ‘I was never allowed to be angry with my mother,’ he told her, his mouth at her ear. ‘That’s why I know how you feel. And because of that I almost lost you. That morning when you told me you didn’t want to see me again I was reacting to old anger, Lulu. And if we hadn’t gone to the castle…if I’d flown off in the other direction…’

  ‘But you didn’t.’ She framed his face with her hands. ‘You stuck around. You made me face you. You made me faces my fears.’

  ‘You don’t have to be afraid any more, little Lulu,’ he said, with infinite understanding.

  And Lulu let herself unravel some more, and when he put her in a taxi with him and tucked her against him she began to feel maybe she didn’t.

  *

  He took her back to her flat but they didn’t stay there. He had understood she would want her little dog Coco with her—her toutou—and he was all they collected.

  The staff at the Paris Ritz didn’t blink an eye as Lulu, still in her cocktail dress, carried her small bichon in her arms across the lobby like a queen. Because this was Paris, and they understood the importance of companion animals, and Alejandro du Crozier was a rich and famous guest and he could do what he liked.

  In his bedroom she turned in his arms and kissed him, stroked him with a fervour she had never shown before, and he wanted her so badly his body felt on fire.