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‘How much guilt do you feel, knowing that she believed in you so much that she bought a house a few streets away from Rainbow House, where she thought you and she could live, and yet you didn’t believe in her enough to trust that she hadn’t taken her own life?’
‘She bought a house?’ Louis echoed dully, as Jean-Baptiste’s face contorted all the more.
‘You must feel sick to the stomach to realise how pathetically easy it was to convince you that she had left you. You didn’t have enough faith in her to question what I told you for even a moment.’
‘You’re sick.’
‘I’m a winner. I do whatever it takes. And you’re just like me. As this...’ he waved his hand over the papers he’d just signed ‘...proves.’
He had a choice. He could let his father get to him, as he had always done. Or he could be the man Alex would want him to be, the man his mother would have wanted him to be, but, more importantly, the man he wanted to be.
And suddenly it was so clear. He was finally free. Free from guilt and responsibility for things over which he actually had no control. Alex had freed him. Maybe she’d started to from the moment they had first met on that balcony, and now it was time he did the same for her.
And he knew just what he needed to do to win her back. If she’d let him, as he knew he’d really hurt her. But he had to try. Starting with resurrecting the plans for the stable block. Taking the papers from his father’s hands and striding across to the door, Louis felt lighter and less weighed down than he had in years. Possibly ever.
‘No,’ he cast over his shoulder with a genuine smile that wasn’t aimed at his father in the least. He felt jubilant, untethered, victorious. ‘I’m nothing like you. I never have been.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE NEWS THAT Louis was back at Silveroaks reached Alex’s ears at the end of a long afternoon of surgeries, her legs wobbling perilously as she checked on her last patient in the recovery unit. It had been three weeks, two days, seven hours and a handful of minutes since that awful row back at the chateau.
She knew the timings by heart. How could she not? The moment he’d walked out of that door it had been as though her life had been stripped of every last drop of colour. And now he was back.
But was it for work? Or for her?
She knew what was most likely, and yet hope still gurgled inside her like a trickling brook. The past few weeks had been like nothing she could describe—a deep, hollow emptiness that tumbled around her chest.
And as much as her heart ached for herself, it also ached for Louis. For what the two of them had almost shared. For how far he’d almost come. For the way she’d hurt him without intending to. He’d hurt her too, she knew that, but it didn’t stop her caring for him. She should have told him that he was becoming more important to her than Rainbow House, than her father. She knew what it was like, playing second best. Why had she made him feel as though he was?
It may not have changed anything, but at least she would have been brave enough to have been honest. For once. Because nothing eased the dull pain that still ached inside her every time she read a news story about a possible sighting of the uncharacteristically low-profile Louis, who still appeared to be working from the relatively secure confines of the chateau. Nothing, that was, until the news had filtered down that he was back.
And despite all attempts by her brain to caution her, it was as though that very fact in itself caused the colour to flow back into her lonely black and white world. And the voice in her head, which she’d been trying to silence for almost a month, finally broke free of its cage.
If you want him, go and find him.
* * *
She had no recollection of moving through the hospital, its maze of corridors which she knew so well, but one minute she was leaving the recovery unit and the n
ext she was outside Louis’s door. She lifted her hand to knock, then decided against it and simply stepped right in. This time her legs really did give way.
The room seemed to shrink around him, as though he overpowered it without doing a thing. Sitting behind the desk as he was, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal his tanned forearms, his tie loose and a stack of paperwork in front of him, how could he have grown more powerful, more handsome, more... Louis in a matter of weeks?
Stumbling back, she felt the door swing with her, heard it slam shut with such force the room shook.
Not exactly the entrance she’d been intending but at least he wouldn’t know just how weak at the knees he made her.
He narrowed his eyes.
‘Alex? What are you doing here?’
Her mouth had never felt so parched. She still couldn’t find the strength to push off the door and so she stayed there, leaning against the cheap wood veneer, effectively trapping him.
‘I came to see you.’
‘Evidently.’
There was no trace of sarcasm in his tone and yet she could feel the heat rising from her toes.
