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‘No. I am who I am. I’m a brilliant surgeon...’ he shrugged as though it was a fact he acknowledged but wasn’t boasting about ‘...but I’m not a good man. I tried to make sure I was nothing like my father, yet everything I’ve done has made me more like him with every day.’
‘You mean the playboy nonsense,’ she sniffed. ‘Why do you insist on punishing yourself with that? It’s only a part of who you were, not even who you are now. You’re a surgeon above all else. You have determination, persistence, passion.’
‘For surgeries, Alex. I have that passion for surgeries. I could carry out procedures day and night and I would never tire of them because they inspire me and every surgery is different. But the Lefebvre Group was my mother’s passion and her footsteps don’t lead somewhere I want to follow. I don’t even like the man I become when I think of that place and everything it took from us.’
‘So if you don’t like that man you become, change him. Turn it into something positive. If anyone can achieve that, it’s you, Louis.’
‘It wouldn’t be enough,’ he said abruptly. ‘Do you think this is the first time I’ve regretted some of my choices? Those first kiss-and-tell encounters that gave me the reputation as a playboy? I’d been trying to hurt my father, damage the Delaroche name, make people look twice and realise that Jean-Baptiste wasn’t their knight-in-shining-scrubs, but a brilliant surgeon with a grubby personal life of his own.’
‘You were eighteen. We all make stupid choices when we’re younger—sometimes when we’re older too—but most of us don’t do it in the public eye where it follows us around for years to come.’
‘That’s hardly the point,’ he ground out angrily, but it was the pain behind it that clawed at Alex, deep inside. ‘I’m not most people. I’m Louis Delaroche. My grandfather was a Lefebvre. I should have known better.’
‘You lost your mother,’ she exclaimed, ‘your guide, over ten years earlier! By your own admission your father was hardly the greatest role model.’
‘I don’t want to enough.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m selfish, just like him. I know the Lefebvre Group needs a chairman, and I know that was meant to be my role. It was what my mother always wanted me to do. But I don’t want any part of it because I can’t get past my own hurt. I’m angry with my father for his affairs, which drove my mother to the edge, and I’m angry with her for choosing the way out that she did. Most of all, I’m angry with myself that I wasn’t good enough to give her something to hold onto.’
It was the most honest he’d been with her and something sang inside her at the knowledge. She was desperate to go to him, to hold him, but she didn’t dare move for fear of breaking the moment. A minute ago they’d been standing across the room from each other, only a few metres but it might as well have been a yawning chasm, and now suddenly it felt like he’d thrown the first rope across the divide. The first step to building a bridge.
The logs spattered and a clock chimed in the entrance hall, the sound echoing along the silent chateau corridors.
It was only when Louis exhaled, moving as though he was about to turn and leave, that Alex finally spoke.
‘I do understand your guilt, Louis. You blame yourself for your mother’s death. I know what it’s like to carry around a burden of responsibility that isn’t your own.’
‘Your brother.’ He blinked, as though remembering it for the first time.
She swallowed, her heart accelerating uncontrollably.
‘Not just my brother. My mother, too.’
Louis stilled, his jaw locked, the pulse ticking away the only tell-tale sign that he wasn’t as calm as he would have her believe.
‘You don’t. Not like this. I know you mean well, but these are my demons.’
Shutting her out like he always shut out everyone. Leaving her no choice but to go to the one place she’d swore she would never go. Even now, she knew it would cost her.
She hoped Louis was worth the risk.
‘I never told you how my mother died, did I?’ she heard herself say.
And suddenly there it was, the pain that was always there—like a dull ache that never, ever went away—but now it was rearing up, sharper and more biting than it had felt in years.
She stuffed it back down and forced herself to meet Louis’s gaze, her momentary pause losing her what little advantage she might have had. He raked a hand through his hair.
‘Alex, I don’t want to get into a “my pain is worse than your pain” contest. I’m just explaining to you why I don’t want to take on the Lefebvre Group.’
‘And I’m just telling you how my mother died,’ she managed quietly, her fingers gripping her book so he couldn’t see how she was shaking.
The air thrummed with tension, breath bated to see who would fold first.
Eventually, Louis dipped his head in perceived acquiescence, moving around the chair and flopping down to lounge in his deliberately insouciant fashion.
She drew in a slow, discreet breath and counted to ten before uttering the words she hadn’t said for decades.
‘My mother died in childbirth. After she’d been in labour with me. The child who had been conceived as a potential saviour sibling for their son, but who would turn out not to be a match, was also the direct cause of her mother’s death. So, you see, I do understand a thing or two about guilt and responsibility.’
She hated that look he shot her then. The look of pity. The one she’d grown to resent so much as a kid that she’d started telling people her mother had died in a car accident.
