‘Then perhaps it’s time it did,’ he managed. ‘Perhaps they might ask the questions I was always too afraid of you to ask. Such as why such a strong, loyal, connected woman should be so beaten down by her husband that she felt she had no alternative than to do what she did.’
With that, Louis terminated the call. Before any of his father’s poison could get to him. Before he could wonder at how, since Alex had come into his life, he suddenly had the strength to turn the tables on his father.
And that was just the start, he thought triumphantly. With her by his side, he could save Rainbow House for Alex, even if that meant temporarily claiming the birthright he’d refused to pursue all these years. The responsibility that he still didn’t care to take on.
Not that it mattered. Once things had settled down he would appoint a good chairman and leave the ship in some other captain’s eminently more capable control. As long as he had his surgeries. And Alex.
He couldn’t stay in the room any longer. Not after that call. Snatching up his coat, Louis hurried out of the door, barely locking it behind him, and then down the stairs rather than wait for the lift.
In less than an hour Alex would be here. And he found he could scarcely wait.
Take it slowly. Don’t make her bolt.
He could work the rest out from there.
* * *
Alex gazed out of the small aircraft window, trying to quell the muffled rat-a-tat of her heart against her chest and feeling more confused than ever.
When she’d embarked in England not ninety minutes ago, she’d been feeling a horrible combination of irritability and fragility, resenting every moment of what was to come even as the plane had climbed into the grey skies and plunged into the thick cloud cover. She’d tried to lose herself in a book, and when that hadn’t worked, the latest medical journal. She’d refused the first two glasses of champagne that a silent but efficient attendant had brought to her. But at some point, right after the cloud cover had broken and warm sunshine had poured through the tiny window, she’d accepted the third attempt, stopped mumbling her speech and allowed herself to breathe for the first time in days.
Now she gazed down on the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean, glinting like jewels in the brilliant sunlight, and felt that little bit more carefree, that little less drowned in responsibility. Her champagne flute stood freshly refilled, her paperback abandoned on her lap, and her head filled with indecent images of Louis from that morning in his penthouse.
Even the memory of him made her feel alive. The anticipation of seeing him again was creating a low hum in her body that only seemed to grow louder the lower the plane descended through the French skies.
But she’d meant what she’d said when she’d told him it could never happen again.
Now, more than ever, she had to stick to her word. The last few days had been hell. Louis had warned her that the press would be unstoppable but she hadn’t believed him. Instead, they’d been worse.
She turned her head to the tabloid that sat rolled up in the bag by her feet. As if Apple Pie Alex from her colleagues hadn’t been bad enough, in the last couple of days, ever since the Louis kiss in that restaurant, the press had chosen to dub her Vanilla Vardy.
Vanilla Vardy too virginal for Lascivious Louis!
It might have been a compliment to her. It wasn’t. It was as though even her kissing technique was plain and uninspiring and the tone all too closely matched a similar tabloid article from the other day that had breathlessly proclaimed:
Vanilla Vardy wins Luscious Louis Sympathy Vote!
As if they knew how he’d touched her that morning. She may not be a virgin per se, but it had been like she’d never been touched before, and certainly not with such an effect.
As if they knew that her response to him had been so visceral, so carnal that she’d barely even recognised herself.
She wondered if he was laughing at her the way the public would be if they’d seen the way she’d come apart so quickly in his arms. Congratulating himself on ruining her for any other man. Because he surely had.
And yet it took a real effort to bring herself to feel even a degree of remorse. To tell herself that she wasn’t frustrated that they had been interrupted, or that the moment had been shattered, and that she hadn’t had the courage to finish what Louis had started.
Because she’d wanted to. Oh, how she’d ached to. In that moment she’d known that she might never get another opportunity like that in her life, since no other man in her past had even come close to making her lose control the way she had in his bedroom. She couldn’t imagine any other man in her future ever would either.
No one else would ever be able to match Louis, the way he’d made her feel, the way he’d made her writhe, the way he’d made her shatter.
There was only one Louis Delaroche.
Which was why that had to be her one and only slide into temptation. She couldn’t afford to lose herself again. Couldn’t afford to let him get under her skin the way he seemed to be so skilled at doing. Couldn’t afford to indulge in all the fantasies she’d had over the last few nights, in which, instead of simply lying back and letting him pleasure her so thoroughly, she’d met him halfway. Doing things to him she knew she would never have the courage to try.
And that was why she had to keep her head on her shoulders from now on.
Only it wasn’t that simple. Because for her, at least, there had been more than just the sex. Louis had awakened a side to her character that morning that had lain dormant for so many years that even she herself had thought it long gone. That daring, mischievous side to herself that she’d thought had died a long time ago. And she’d accepted that it was gone, almost welcomed its demise.
Who would ever have thought that Louis would be the person to resurrect it?