A Bride to Redeem Him

He only knew that the very ground was shifting precariously beneath his feet and it was all to do with this one woman.

Worse, Louis had no idea how to keep himself from plummeting into the void head first.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘IT’S THE STUFF of spy movies, isn’t it?’ Alex was still struggling to regain her composure after the kiss as the plush lift whisked them silently from the underground garage to Louis’s private penthouse.

‘Sorry?’

She waved a negligent hand in the air, wondering if he could see the way it trembled, even now, at the memory of his mouth against hers.

‘I mean, the exclusive key card to access the security pad just so you can enter in some private code. And that’s before the lift had even closed its doors.’

Alex fought valiantly to appear light-hearted, but how could Louis fail to hear her heart drumming out its wild tattoo on her ribcage?

‘That’s what money buys,’ he said with a shrug, that hint of darkness she was beginning to recognise meaning he’d have given it all up in a heartbeat just for one question to be answered. Why his mother had chosen to do...what she had.

It was a sense of helplessness that she understood only too well. It was getting easier and easier for her to read the man who had confounded the press for so many years. They had him pegged as this complex genius playboy.

They didn’t understand him at all. And the two of them had a lot more in common than Louis realised.

She wasn’t sure whether she’d realised it on the drive from the restaurant to her home, or from her home to here. But she’d realised it. She wasn’t foolish enough to think that she’d worked out the entire puzzle box that was Louis Delaroche, but she’d at least figured out the first stage of him. He was as lost and hurt as she was, if for different reasons. And for each of them, that unbearable void couldn’t be filled by another person and so they’d each been driven by their work.

That was why she felt such a connection with him. And in turn it explained why she’d acted so out of character outside the restaurant back there. Why she’d allowed herself to be kissed so thoroughly in front of a sea of flashing cameras. Why she’d come alive in his arms in a way she’d never before believed possible.

If only it was that simple.

If only she could pretend it really was just a mental connection rather than a physical one. How easy and convenient that would be. But there was more to it. It was less cerebral, more visceral. Louis fired up a need in her that she hadn’t even known existed until he had come along. As if he had crept under her skin and infected her with some kind of thrilling fever.

And she liked it.

It didn’t matter how many times she tried to tell herself that Louis had only kissed her to distract the press from her obvious gaucheness, she still craved more. Physically she felt drained and yet energised. She ached for him.

Lifting her fingers, Alex traced them lightly over her lips. She could still taste him on her mouth, feel his solid chest against her tender breasts, recall his strong hands tracing patterns up and down her spine.

In her whole life she’d always prided herself on her fight over flight attitude, but in this instance she knew if it hadn’t been for Rainbow House she would have turned and run. She couldn’t say how she knew it, but Louis Delaroche had the power to devastate her just as he’d devastated so many women before her. It turned out she wasn’t as immune to that kind of man as she’d always assumed.

But, then, Louis wasn’t that kind of anything. There were no others like him, he didn’t so much break moulds as stick them on a mine and blow them to a grey mist.

So, here she was, in the lift to Louis’s penthouse. And on top of all her roiling emotions it was difficult not to feel at least a little intimidated by Louis’s obvious wealth and luxurious lifestyle. Especially when she thought of her own little flat and what he must have thought, pulling his flashy supercar into the communal car park packed with small older cars, scooters and a plethora of battered bicycles chained up together. A world away from the exclusive garage below, adorned with flashy cars recumbent in their generously proportioned, allocated parking spaces.

‘Are you coming in?’ The low voice broke through her reverie. ‘Or do you intend to ride the lift all night?’

With a strangled sound Alex lurched forward, as if her legs didn’t quite belong to her, and out of the lift to where Louis stood at the door to his penthouse. The edge in his voice accompanied by the hard, distant expression—as though he could read her thoughts on their kiss and scorned her for them—only made her fears swell.

And then she stepped past him into the room and everything rushed from her mind.

‘That view is incredible,’ she gasped.

One minute she was too close to Louis and the next she found herself across the room, palms flattened on a bank of glass looking out at the twinkling city as if she was somehow on top of the world. Or, at least, the closest she had ever come. The lights spread out for miles under a blanket of night and even some of the tallest buildings, which had always appeared enormous to her even from the fourth floor of the hospital, were now dwarfed by the breathtaking views from Louis’s penthouse.

No wonder Louis walked, talked, acted as though the world was his for the taking. To him, it was.

‘Is this how you seduce all your dates?’ she asked, thinking that it really was a breath-taking view. ‘All your real dates, that is?’

The pause stretched out for longer than was normal but when she turned, she wasn’t prepared for the curve of his lips that developed into a full-blown smile of...warmth?

It blasted her, as though opening an incinerator door.