A Bride To Redeem Him. Charlotte Hawkes
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