‘Come, now,’ he admonished. ‘You can’t really be leaving. You haven’t even heard how I plan to help.’
She didn’t even turn around, merely slowed her walk and cast her head over one delectably bare shoulder.
‘So you finally do plan to help? That’s a start, I suppose. All you need now is to return to your harem and decide which one of them you’d prefer to join you in no doubt unholy matrimony.’
‘Oh, I’ve already decided that.’
‘Really?’ She spun around in surprise. ‘You really are going to do this, then?’
It was just that Alex was a challenge, Louis told himself. And normally he would relish the challenge. All too often he would have beautiful women falling over each other to throw themselves at him. He wasn’t proud of the fact that he indulged, frequently and indiscriminately, but it had suited his bad-boy reputation and he’d often told himself that he was just a red-blooded male like any other. But sometimes a challenge was fun. Especially if it came in the kind of package standing in front of him and pretending she wasn’t fighting the chemistry sizzling between them.
But right now wasn’t normal.
It all came back to the name he hadn’t heard in years. Decades even.
Rainbow House.
He’d thought about it more tonight than he had in all the last years combined, banishing it from his head to the pitch-black depths of nothing, with all the other painful memories of the happy life before his mother had gone from it. But what had pretending it didn’t exist accomplished? His mother was still gone and Rainbow House had been one of her legacies. Even decades on it shouldn’t amaze him that his old man was still trying to erase every last one of them.
For the first time Louis had a compulsion to stop him. To save at least one good thing his mother had achieved. He told himself it had nothing to do with the captivating woman currently gliding away from him. He couldn’t explain why Alex talking about the place should reinvigorate it with such colour, such life. He only knew he wasn’t ready to relinquish it—relinquish her—just yet.
‘I’ve made my choice, but I might need your help,’ he announced gravely, watching her take a single step back to him almost against her will.
‘My help?’
‘Sure.’ He strode towards her, supressing a grin at the way she flicked a tongue out so deliciously over her lips. ‘You don’t think it’s going to be easy for me to get any potential father-in-law to agree to giving me their daughter’s hand in marriage?’
The closer he got, the more she leaned the top half of her body away from him. But her feet remained planted in place, almost as if her head was telling her to back away but her body was telling her something quite different.
He knew the feeling.
‘Oh, come on.’ She gave a bark of laughter. ‘You can’t really expect me to believe you’d do something so chivalrous?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because...well, because...you’re you.’
‘Nice that you noticed.’ He really shouldn’t be enjoying himself this much. ‘But as it happens, I do like the odd tradition now and then. My family is, as you say, traceable back to the twelfth century.’
‘You don’t say?’ She widened her eyes in mock surprise. ‘Then surely any potential father-in-law would be falling over themselves to literally throw their daughters into your arms. Particularly the classy women you date.’
‘I’m shocked that you would cast such aspersions, Dr Vardy. Nonetheless, I have the distinct suspicion that it was matter of charming half of their daughters into bed out of wedlock that must have turned them against me in the first instance.’
‘Only half?’ she quipped tartly. Too tartly.
‘No, well, one can’t be too greedy.’ He shrugged dismissively, neatly changing the subject. ‘Of course, you appreciate that the more you lean back from me the more you angle your hips towards me? One might even say invitingly.’
Her eyes widened, her scowl deepening, and she faltered backwards just as he’d known she would, giving him the perfect opportunity to reach forward and halt her fall, hauling her body closer to his as he did so.
‘You did that deliberately,’ she said irritably, though he noticed that for all her objection she remained in the light circle of his arm, though she could have pushed him away if she’d really wanted to.
It only served to fuel Louis’s desire. He could tell himself that this was all part of his plan and that he was still in control, but he knew that somewhere along the line, that had ceased to be entirely true. He could no more explain this attraction as he could fight it. He’d been attracted to women—plenty of women, though nowhere near in the disgusting numbers that the papers so deliriously hypothesised—but never like this. Never on a level that he knew wasn’t merely about the physical.
‘I can’t seem to help myself,’ he drawled, his tone intended to conceal just how unexpectedly close to the truth that statement was.
Even now, as his eyes took in the rapid pulse at her neck, the stain of lust spreading over her skin, the sudden huskiness in her voice, doing something as simple as drawing a breath suddenly became an arduous hindrance.
He leaned forward and she stepped back. Right up against the stone balustrade, allowing him to place an arm on each side and effectively cage her.
‘What are you doing?’ she whispered. Hardly a protestation of his position. Still, he needed to be sure.
‘Making sure you don’t run away.’
‘I’m not running away.’ He recognised that hoarse desire in her voice. He’d heard it plenty of times before. But never with anyone who made him as hard as she did.
Like he was some hormone-charged teenager.
‘You know my reputation,’ he ground out. ‘You should be running.’
‘I know your reputation,’ she concurred. ‘But right now I don’t know anyone else who can help me stop your father.’
It was hardly the rebuttal he realised a part of him had been hoping for. As if he hoped she might see past the bad-boy exterior to the honourable man he knew had probably died a long time ago.
Pathetic really.
Louis had never wanted, never sought anyone else’s approval. He would leave that to his father. Though how he was the only person to see through his old man’s veneer to see that he’d only set up the Delaroche Foundation as a way to earn himself a knighthood, he would never understand. Let Jean-Baptiste revel in his unearned glories as much as the vainglorious old man wanted.
His mother would surely laugh out loud to know that Rainbow House was still a thorn in her husband’s side. Even now.
It was only when he caught Alex watching him curiously, his arms still trapping her in place, that he remembered himself, and banished the unwelcome thoughts from his head.
He pushed backwards, releasing her with a theatrical flourish, exultant when she didn’t go anywhere.
‘So, Dr Alexandra Vardy, how about it?’ He flashed her a wolfish smile, playing the habitually drunk playboy role for all he was worth. After all, why else would a bad boy like him make such a ridiculous suggestion? ‘Want to marry me and stop my father from committing any more of his dastardly deeds?’
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