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CHAPTER ONE
XAVIER LAURAN, chief executive, chairman and majority shareholder of the XeL luxury goods company, whose ornate logo graced so many of the expensive possessions of the rich and famous, scanned down the e-mails on his desktop PC. The words of Armand’s e-mail from London leapt from the screen in front of him.
… she’s the woman of my dreams, Xav—she doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to marry her!
Xavier’s jaw tightened. For a moment he brooded darkly, staring out over the darkening Paris skyline, the Arc de Triomphe visible from the windows of the XeL headquarters, overlooking the Place d’Etoiles. He should, right now, be leaving his office and going back to his apartment to change, ready to escort Madeline to the opera—and thereafter back to her apartment for their usual mutually enjoyable end to the evening. The arrangement suited him. Madeline de Cerasse, like all the women he selected for his leisure hours, knew what he wanted from a relationship and provided him with it—sophisticated companionship at the many social events his position required him to attend, and then, in private, equally sophisticated pleasures of an intimate nature. Physically intimate. Emotional intimacy was something Xavier neither sought nor desired. He was not, he knew with candid self-awareness, someone who let his heart rule his head.
Unlike his brother.
Xavier’s expression darkened. Armand always let his heart rule his head—and the last time it had happened it had been a disaster. With complete lack of judgement, he had fallen into the clutches of a woman who had taken unscrupulous advantage of his good heart, deviously trotting out some rubbish about having to keep her frail grandmother in an expensive nursing home, as well as wringing his heart with tales about the charity for African orphans she’d claimed to work for. Armand had responded generously—until Xavier, with his habitual protectiveness of his younger brother, had had the woman checked out. Only to discover she had been lying through her teeth in order to win Armand’s sympathy and money for herself.
Armand had been duly disillusioned. But his faith in the general goodness of people—and especially women—was undiminished. And now he was talking about marriage.
To whom? Who was this ‘woman of his dreams’? Armand had said nothing about who his intended bride was. Swiftly Xavier scanned the remaining lines of the e-mail.
This time I’m being cautious, Xav, the way you like me to be. She doesn’t even know that I’ve anything to do with you or XeL—I deliberately haven’t told her. I want it to be a wonderful surprise!
But any initial relief that Armand was showing signs of thinking with his head dissolved into deepest foreboding as he finished the e-mail.
I know there will be problems, but I don’t care if she isn’t the ideal bride you think I should have—I love her and that has to be enough …
Grimly, Xavier stared at the screen. This was not good—not good at all. Armand was admitting upfront there would be problems and that his bride was not ideal.
Yet he was still talking about marriage.
Alarm speared through Xavier. If this woman turned out as disastrously as the last one had, extricating his brother would be far more difficult if he married her.
And expensive, too—Armand was not the type to consider a pre-nup. OK, so Armand was only his half brother, and had therefore not inherited the company founded by Xavier’s grandfather, another Xavier Lauran. A company which was riding high—and very lucratively—as one of the world’s most recognisable global brands of luxury goods. The exclusive XeL logo giving cachet and social status to anyone possessing any of the myriad extortionately expensive items, from watches to suitcases, which the company produced. But not only was Armand a very highly paid director of XeL, but his father, Lucian Becaud, whom Xavier’s mother had married after her early widowing when Xavier was a small child, was comfortably wealthy in his own right. Armand would be a rich catch for any woman in search of a moneyed husband.
Was that what Armand’s intended bride was? Armand clearly did not think so. The final lines of his e-mail were adamant.
Xav—this time around, trust me. I know what I’m doing, and you can’t change my mind. Please don’t interfere this time—it’s too important to me.
Xavier sighed harshly. He wanted to trust Armand—but what if his brother were wrong? What if another unscrupulous woman had succeeded in blinding him to her true nature? There would be heartbreak for his brother down the line—not to mention the expense of an acrimonious divorce and the distress to Armand’s parents.
No, he could not take the risk. Not with his own brother’s happiness. He needed to find out who this woman was, and whether his brother was safe with her. Reluctantly, but with grim determination, he reached for the phone on his desk. He would make some discreet enquiries. The company’s security team answered to him alone—and if he required them to keep his brother under surveillance for a short while they would simply assume it was for Armand’s protection. Not that his movements might reveal the identity of this woman so worryingly far from being ‘the ideal bride’, whom he’d already conceded would come with ‘problems’.
As he waited for his head of security to answer, Xavier could feel the thoughts forming in his mind. Maybe he was overreacting. Worrying unnecessarily.
He hoped so—he really hoped so.
But within twenty-four hours he knew that his hopes had been in vain. As he gazed grimly down at the dossier in front of him, freshly delivered by his security team, he knew that without a doubt there was definitely—very definitely—a problem.
Armand had been right—this girl was not ‘the ideal bride’. Xavier’s mouth thinned. But then who in their right mind would think that of a girl who worked as a hostess in a Soho casino?
That she was just that was indisputable. Armand had been followed leaving the London HQ of XeL at the end of the working day, and taking a taxi to a part of South London no one would live in by choice. There, he had been granted entry to a ground-floor flat in a rundown tenement block by a young woman who had welcomed him warmly. He had stayed until mid-evening, when the woman had seen him out. Whereupon Armand had embraced her on the doorstep and spoken earnestly to her. The young woman had then been kept under surveillance herself, and within half an hour had left the flat. She had been followed to Soho, to the casino named in the dossier, where enquiries had confirmed she was employed as a hostess.
Xavier dropped the baldly written report down
on his desk. His stomach clenched. This was the woman Armand intended to marry? To bring home to his family, be the mother of his children?
Was he completely mad?
With a harsh intake of breath, he ripped open the envelope marked with a single name: Lissa Stephens.
Then he slid out a photo, and stared at it. Just what was it that Lissa Stephens possessed by way of charms to entrap his brother?
As he stared, Xavier’s disbelief mounted. As did his bleak dismay. The girl had been photographed at the casino, presumably covertly, by one of his security team’s agents. She could hardly have looked worse.
Blonde, backcombed hair, make-up a centimetre thick, a scarlet slash of a mouth and a skimpy satin low-cut dress. Crudely … blatantly … displayed.
What the hell did Armand see in her?
Revulsion shot through him. How could Armand possibly want a woman like that?
Xavier’s eyes narrowed. Did his brother even know she was a casino hostess in London’s infamous red light district, Soho? He felt the blood run cold in his veins. And was that revelation merely the tip of the iceberg?
He could feel his own revulsion mount in him, and with deliberate effort he contained it. It was essential—to his brother’s happiness, and his parents’—that the right call be made on this Lissa Stephens. Reason demanded that there was a chance—however slim—that appearances were deceptive. Reason, not emotion.
Could it possibly be that the girl was not as bad as she looked?
His eyes went to the photo again. Disbelief shot through him—could this really be the woman his brother wanted to marry? The very thought of Armand marrying such a female, presenting her to their mother, his father, seeing her making herself at home in the beautiful Riviera villa in Menton, watching his brother be first besotted and then bitterly disillusioned, was anathema.
He looked down at the two-dimensional image of Lissa Stephens, trying to see beyond it. He could read nothing from her expression, her make-up was like a mask, but one aspect of her appearance she could not mask.
Her eyes.
They were hard. The eyes of a woman who would see his brother’s good heart as a weakness to be taken advantage of. Armand’s words sounded in his mind.
