Bound As His Business-Deal Bride (Mills & Boon Modern)

by Kali Anthony

  So she’d flown back to France, given notice that Knight needed to find another CEO for the French operation, and had walked away from it all. Putting hatred and anyone determined to hang onto it behind her. She’d seen the way that emotion destroyed. It had no place in her life anymore.

  As soon as she packed up her possessions here, she’d move and start growing the plants she loved. A simple life worrying about the soil, sun and scent and nothing much else. At the same time she’d try to heal her broken heart, though she knew that there were some things from which she might never fully recover. Putting her heart back together was one, because some of the pieces were missing. They probably always had been.

  But thoughts of heartbreak weren’t going to get this apartment packed, and the drive to move and move forward was the only thing keeping her upright. Kitchen, she’d do that next. As Eve grabbed a box and began taping it, her intercom sounded. It was the apartment’s concierge. She answered.

  ‘Mademoiselle Chevalier, a delivery.’

  She breathed out a sigh of relief. ‘Thank you. Send them up.’ The extra packing boxes she ordered. At a knock, she opened the door. Only it wasn’t packing boxes, but two men, each holding a vase of flowers.

  These weren’t just any flowers either, but blowsy English roses in a riot of pinks and apricots. Perfect, rambunctious blooms spilling from their containers, filling the hall with a glorious scent.

  Her heart throbbed as she gripped the hard wood of the door, frozen. Staring like a fool at the men, who were only trying to do their jobs. She shook herself out of her inertia, stood back and let them in, asking them to place the roses on the dining table and sideboard.

  ‘Is there any card?’ She didn’t really need one. There was only one person who they could be from. A surge of emotion welled inside, threatening to break her. She bit her lip to tamp it down.

  One of the men shrugged. ‘Non. Only flowers.’

  They left and she moved to close the door but one of the men stopped her with a wry smile.

  ‘There are more.’

  She stood back as the flowers kept coming, filling her apartment. Magnificent vases were placed on every flat surface with roses bursting from them as she directed where they should go.

  She looked around at all the colour overwhelming the space and realised it had never really been a home to her because it hadn’t held all of her heart. Those missing pieces she’d left years ago with Gage. He’d always kept a part of her, always would. She wiped away a tear that threatened to fall. He wasn’t her future. That was now a quiet, peaceful life. Let Gage and her father wage a war of revenge and attrition. Too much had been lost, and for what? She was sick of the game and the hand she kept being dealt, so she’d folded. Tossed her cards on the table and walked away.

  The final vase was placed on a small side table, which looked like it would topple under the weight of the outrageous arrangement.

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked, looking around the room that seemed more like a florist’s shop than an apartment now.

  ‘Not quite.’

  She stilled. That voice, the deep burr of it igniting a fire in her that would probably never go out. She whipped around.

  Gage stood there in the doorway to her apartment, cradling in the crook of his arm a large bunch of purple and lavender roses wrapped in petal pink paper and Cellophane. He wore soft, faded jeans and a crumpled shirt. Stubble shadowed his angular jaw, his golden hair all messy, as if he’d raked through it with restless fingers. It looked like he’d rolled out of bed, thrown on clothes left over from a long night before and run over here. But he couldn’t have done that. Instead, he’d travelled halfway around the world. To see her.

  Her traitorous heart skipped a few beats.

  He was so beautiful it hurt. The way his worn clothes hugged the muscles of his strong body. The planes of his face more angular than she remembered. Honed. Determined. His blue eyes like the summer skies in Grasse that would always haunt her. She’d loved him her whole life, no matter how many times she’d lied to herself, trying to convince her wounded heart they’d never had a chance. Every part of her was attuned to him, even when they’d been apart.

  It was something she had to come to terms with because he couldn’t be the man she wanted. She needed to put the warring behind her. She deserved more than being a pawn on a chessboard built of loathing. The terrible thing was that Gage deserved more too but he wouldn’t see it. She couldn’t bear to witness the man she’d loved for most of her days becoming a slave to hatred, being eaten away by degrees.

  ‘May I come in?’ he asked, still standing outside the door, not even a toe over the threshold.

  She somehow convinced her trembling legs to move and stood back, whilst he edged past. She shut the door with a soft snick behind her and he followed her into the lounge area.

  ‘These are for you.’ He held out the bouquet. She took it from him and buried her nose in the velvety petals, inhaling their scent. Lemon and raspberries.

  ‘I think I probably have enough.’

  ‘You can never have too many flowers.’ He looked around the room, down at the floor, then his gaze rested on the packing boxes. ‘You’re moving. To Grasse.’

  It wasn’t a question. A jolt of surprise spiked through her. ‘Is that an educated guess?’

  Gage ran his hand through his hair. ‘A large parcel of Caron shares has been sold. Your loan’s been repaid. The farm is off the rental market and you’ve resigned as CEO. It’s no guess.’

  She put the flowers on a chair. They could go into water later, once she’d dealt with this and moved on, but tell that to her body, which vibrated at the impossible thrill of having him near, in her space. She cocked her head. ‘You been keeping an eye on me?’

  ‘Always.’ Gage’s voice ground out, wounded and raw. His throat convulsed in a swallow. ‘I don’t know how to look away.’

  And there was the anguish of them, described in one sentence. Neither of them knew how to stop this. For days after she’d come here she’d barely been able to haul her sorry self out of bed each morning. It had been a struggle to simply put one foot in front of the other and not to scour the internet for any news about him. She’d wondered if she’d ever fully get over him and had resigned herself to that answer being ‘No’. He would always be part of her. Even now, she craved to reach out, to touch him. To comfort and be comforted. To trace her hands over his strong arms. Arms where she’d once felt protected. Loved... And yet going back felt like an end, not a beginning.

  Finally, someone had to say enough.

  ‘Gage, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come to talk. I’ve been so focussed on...what’s gone wrong in my life.’

  She planted her hands on her hips. ‘You can say the word. It’s revenge.’ She’d been in denial for so long she refused to accept the same of him.

  Gage nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ve been so focussed on revenge I lost sight of everything that might have been good.’ He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans and for a moment looked like a chastened schoolboy. ‘I’ve spoken to my parents.’

  That conversation must have been awful. Her heart, which she was struggling to harden, softened a little further. ‘I’m sorry to have been the one to tell you, but you needed to know. If only—’

  ‘No.’ Gage shook his head. ‘There’s no need to be sorry. In the end you were the only one with the courage to say anything. I’m glad it was you, and not Hugo.’

  Something inside her unknotted a fraction because that final and terrible decision to say anything at all had tortured her, even though she’d known she’d had no choice. ‘How did the conversation with your parents go?’

  He shrugged. ‘As well as can be expected when finding out the man you’ve loved as a father all your life, isn’t your father. But I learned some things.’

  He took a deep
breath, looked at her with his summer-blue eyes. Her heart broke all over again every time she was close to him. No more. While it was a difficult habit to overcome, she was the priority now. She just had to stay strong.

  ‘Did anyone ever tell you why our families hate each other?’ he asked.

  ‘“Carons are liars and thieves.”’ She repeated the words her family had tried to etch in her consciousness from birth.

  Gage cocked his head. ‘“Chevaliers are charlatans and cheats.”’

  ‘Now we’ve established that, does any other reason matter?’

  It didn’t really. People had choices. You could move forward and get on with your life or you could wallow. Forward was the only direction for her now.

  Yet with Gage here again in her home, surrounded by flowers, the idea of moving forward on her own didn’t seem like a triumph. It seemed like a recipe for loneliness, because even when they weren’t together, he’d always been her destination. She swallowed back the burn in her throat, the stinging in her nose.

  ‘It matters. Because it’s what led us here. It matters because we can’t move on unless we know how it began in the first place.’ Gage took a step forward, flexing his fingers as if he wanted to touch her. She took a step back and steeled herself, when all she craved to do was tumble into his arms and forget warring families. His shoulders slumped for the briefest of moments then he straightened, like a warrior readying himself for battle, and began pacing.

  ‘It started with a business deal between friends, and bringing the telegraph to Mississippi. Your family claimed mine had a side investment in the company supplying utility poles that wasn’t disclosed to Chevalier. Mine say yours inflated quotes to skim the extra and make an outrageous profit at Caron’s expense. The hatred grew from there. It waxed and waned over the years depending on which family was doing better. Those things aren’t really a surprise.’ He stopped tracking across the parquet floor, turned to her. ‘Your dad being engaged to my mom is.’

  ‘What?’ Her legs almost folded under her. Luckily there was a couch close. She sat down hard, her hand to her chest as if that would somehow settle her pounding heart. ‘That’s...that’s impossible.’

  Gage remained standing. ‘My mom said their parents knew each other, were old friends. An engagement between Mom and Hugo was expected. Then she met my dad. He’d come home from college for the holidays and it was love at first sight. They married young and your dad never forgave her. It caused a scandal at the time, given the rivalry between our families. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if Gus secretly liked stealing Mom away from a Chevalier. But things only went nuclear again after Mom had me.’

  Eve wrapped her arms around her waist. Gage’s voice was distant and remote through the buzzing in her ears. She could put a few things together and the truth of them plunged like a knife and twisted. ‘He always wanted a boy. He was jealous of what your mom and dad had. Two girls were never enough for him.’

  ‘He was a fool. You are enough, cher.’ His voice was soft and gentle. ‘You’re more than enough.’

  Whatever the truth in Gage’s words, the realisation still hurt. ‘It’s why he was so happy when he found out about you. It meant the dream he assumed was your parents’ lives wasn’t the fairy-tale he’d imagined.’

  Gage walked forward, sat on the couch but as far away from her as he could, like he was giving her space to glue herself back together. It didn’t matter. Another country was too close where he was concerned.

  ‘Mom and Dad went through a really bad patch in their marriage. They almost broke up. Of the many reasons they objected to us, our being so young was one of the biggest. They wanted me to have lived my life, be older. Be sure.’

  She picked at a loose thread on the knee of her old jeans, anything to resist the urge to close the space, crawl into his arms and never leave. ‘I was sure then. The arrogance and innocence of my young self. I thought love would conquer everything. But we would have burned out.’

  He shook his head. ‘No. We wouldn’t. I was sure back then too, and I’m even surer now.’

  Her heart pounded a wild and desperate rhythm, crushing the breath right out of her. Hope was something she could not allow to spark, not now. Because that tiny pilot light of hope in the face of all the futility surrounding them had the power to burn her to ashes.

  She was terrified of who might rise out of them.

  ‘Gage, stop.’

  He ran his hands through his hair again, some golden strands falling over his brow. It almost undid her, seeing this self-contained man so messy and rumpled, all because of her.

  ‘Tell me you don’t want me, and I’ll walk out the door right now. But I never want you to live under the assumption I didn’t love you. I did. I do. I have for years.’ Gage turned his body to face her, his gaze steady and sure. ‘I’ll never stop.’

  And it didn’t matter what seemed sensible and rational and right. That hope burst to life in a bright, hot conflagration and all she could do was let herself burn.

  Gage sat on the edge of the couch, that precarious position a metaphor for his life right now. All that he desired was in this room. There was no plan B for him. It was a case of either living his best life or merely existing. Eve looked away from him, at all the vases that decorated every surface. This gesture, grand as it appeared, wasn’t enough. In all reality, probably nothing would be enough to earn her forgiveness for how he’d behaved.

  She looked so beautiful and fragile sitting here, like the blooms that filled the room. One wrong breath, a careless touch and the petals would bruise and fall. It was all he could do not to reach out. To brush away the smudge of dust on her cheek. To kiss away the look of sorrow in her eyes, for which he was entirely responsible.

  She shook her head. The crack in his heart widened a little more.

  ‘But...you’ve got no room in your life for me. You want to destroy my family. Life’s about living. Building things, not tearing them down.’

  The look on her face almost broke him; the corners of her mouth trembling in a futile fight not to turn down. Her eyes were a little red, gleaming with tears he knew she refused to shed. He didn’t deserve them anyhow. Didn’t deserve her, but he couldn’t leave without trying. In the end, all he wanted her to know was that she was loved.

  ‘I was wrong. So wrong in so many ways. Pursuing Knight Enterprises like I did. Forcing you into this situation. They were the actions of a cruel man. You were right to accuse me of becoming like your father. Loving someone means letting them go and I should have done that. Instead, I treated love like a possession. But it’s not. It’s something bestowed not something you take and hoard. I love you, Eve, but I will walk away if that’s what you need to be happy.’

  Gage inched closer, close enough so their knees brushed. Even that hint of a touch sent shockwaves right through him. Eve didn’t turn away, she didn’t move at all. This close he could see the tired, dark circles under her eyes that she’d tried to conceal. They reflected his own. Both of them looked wretched.

  She stared at where their knees barely touched, before looking at him. Her brows rose a fraction, eyes wide and blue, the question in them clear.

  ‘Can you promise me no revenge?’

  In the end that was the easy part. Getting her to trust him would be harder and he’d work at it for ever if he had to. Gage nodded.

  ‘All I want is you. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, I just didn’t realise it.’ He took her hands in his own. They were cool and the barest of tremors shivered through them. He hoped he could warm her, now and for ever. ‘I’m so damned tired of looking for the worst in everything. I want to see the best, and you were always the best thing that had happened in my life. I should have trusted you and our love. If I’d come after you back then, rather than believing the lies, maybe things would have been different.’

  She dropped her head, looked at their joined hands.
‘You believed me when I was unspeakably cruel. I can hardly forgive myself for what I said to you because my father demanded it.’

  ‘Your words were cruel, but I should have known they were a lie. I should have trusted you more.’

  Eve squeezed his fingers, and Gage squeezed back, holding on tight.

  ‘I should have fought for us instead of giving up,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t worthy of you then. And I’m sure as hell not worthy of you now.’

  ‘You were always worthy.’ The threatened tears in Eve’s eyes now brimmed and overflowed, tracking down her cheeks. ‘If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have tried to protect you.’

  He couldn’t stand the distance anymore. He reached out to her and hauled her onto his lap. She didn’t resist, nestling into him as he wrapped her tightly in his embrace. Closing his eyes and relishing the feel of her again, all soft and pliant. At that moment something about his upside-down world righted itself again.

  ‘It was my job to protect you,’ he said, murmuring into her unruly hair as it escaped from its tie. He stroked his hand over it, a marvel of twisted silk under his fingers. ‘And I failed, in every way.’

  ‘We were both young, neither of us knew what we were doing then.’ Eve’s fingers traced over his chest, stroking him like some overgrown cat. He could almost have purred at the pleasure of her tentative touches, as if learning him all over again. ‘All I know is that I can’t live with hate. I want to surround myself with love.’

  ‘You’ll have it every day, cher. That’s one thing I can promise.’

  Her hands left his chest, moved to his face and drifted to stroke the bridge of his nose, under his right eye, the places where he carried the scars of that terrible night seven years earlier.

  ‘I’m sorry for these. For my father.’

  ‘I earned them, loving you. You have nothing to apologise for.’ It was all he could do not to take her face in his hands, to kiss her. But he held back. There was more that needed to be said. Building a solid foundation for the future he craved, one with Eve as his wife. ‘Do you want some company growing your roses?’