Tycoon's Forbidden Cinderella

by MELANIE MILBURNE

  It nearly tore Audrey’s heart out of her chest to hear him say that word. She had never heard him refer to his father as anything but ‘Harlan’ or ‘my father’.

  Audrey’s mother stood wringing her hands and sobbing uncontrollably. Audrey went to her and gathered her close, trying her best to comfort her but knowing it would never be enough. ‘Try not to panic, Mum. They’ll take good care of him. The sooner he’s in hospital the better.’

  Sibella pulled out of Audrey’s hold. ‘I need to go in the ambulance with him.’

  ‘No,’ Lucien said, stepping in the way.

  Sibella straightened like a flagpole defying a hurricane. ‘You can’t stop me, Lucien. You’re not his next of kin. I am. I’m his wife. We got married yesterday.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  AUDREY HAD NEVER seen anyone look more furious than Lucien at that point. But somehow he managed to control himself enough to step aside to let her mother get into the back of the ambulance. His eyes flashed like lightning when he took Audrey’s hand to lead her back to his car, the grip of his hand around hers painfully tight. ‘No doubt they’ve been celebrating ever since they tied the knot. He’s probably got alcohol poisoning or something. Excessive alcohol can cause swelling on the brain. It can set off seizures.’

  She closed her eyes for a brief moment, wishing she could open them again and find this was all a bad dream. ‘Lucien...there’s something I—’

  ‘You know what really gets to me?’ he said before she could complete her sentence. ‘The way she crowed about their marriage. What was that about next of kin? I’m his only child. I’m his next of kin. She’s just another one of the wives he’s loved and who’s left him.’

  Audrey drew in a breath that clawed at her throat like a fishhook. ‘She is his legal next of kin, Lucien. That’s the whole point of marrying someone you love—so they can be with you at all the important stages of your life. He wanted to marry her and he did. You shouldn’t be questioning it. You have to accept it. They love each other and want to spend any time that’s remaining with each other.’

  She felt his glance like the thrust of a dagger. The silence building in tension, stretching, stretching, stretching like an elastic band pulled too tight.

  ‘You knew they were here.’ He thumped the steering wheel again, his breath leaving his mouth in a rush. ‘You knew they were here, didn’t you?’

  Audrey couldn’t look at him and looked instead at her hands in her lap. ‘I’ve been trying to tell you—’

  ‘When did you find out?’ His voice was so hard she was surprised it didn’t shatter the window on her side of the car.

  ‘Today.’

  ‘Today?’ She could almost hear the cogs of his brain ticking over. ‘Before or after we had sex?’

  Audrey put a hand to her forehead. ‘Don’t do this, Lucien. Please. Isn’t everyone upset enough without—?’

  ‘You’ve taken prostitution to a whole new level.’ The words were as savage as lethal arrows. ‘You saw your mother at the market, didn’t you? You saw her and then lied to me. You lied to me and then offered yourself like some sort of boudoir distraction to stop me from continuing the search.’

  She swallowed without speaking, unable to look at him, unable to witness the caustic loathing and hatred she could hear in his words.

  ‘Answer me, damn it!’

  Audrey flinched and fought back tears. ‘I made a promise—’

  ‘A promise?’ Scorn dripped from his tone like corrosive acid.

  ‘I ran into my mother at the market and she begged me not to tell you that your father was unwell with a brain tumour,’ Audrey said. ‘She wanted to talk him into having surgery. He was refusing all treatment and she was trying to talk him round. She loves him, Lucien, and he loves her. They want to be together with whatever time is remaining. They were both worried you would try and talk them out of being together. I agreed to keep their location a secret because...because I wish someone loved me like that.’

  Her words dropped into a cavernous silence.

  ‘Let me get this straight...you’ve known since earlier today that my father was critically unwell and you didn’t see it as a priority to inform me of that fact?’

  How could she explain her motivations when he put it like that? How could she tell Lucien his father hadn’t wanted him to know about his illness until after he was married to her mother? It seemed too cruel to dump that on him now when he was already so upset. ‘I made a promise to my—’

  ‘I don’t care what promise you made to your mother,’ he said. ‘This is about my father, not your mother. I had the right to know he was unwell.’

  ‘I know... I’m sorry. I should have told you but I didn’t want to hurt her. She trusted me and I wanted to honour that trust.’

  ‘And what about the trust that had developed between us?’ His eyes bored into hers, as determined as a drill through steel. ‘Didn’t that count for something?’

  ‘We’re having a fling, Lucien. It’s not the same as a committed or formal relationship.’

  He pulled into the hospital entrance with a squeal of brakes. He parked the car before he spoke, his hand still gripping the steering wheel with white-knuckled force. He didn’t turn to look at her but stared fixedly straight ahead. ‘Would you have entered into a fling with me if you hadn’t run into your mother today?’ His voice was so cold it made her skin shiver.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I would.’

  His glance was so pointed she felt as if she’d been jabbed with a pin. ‘Sorry but I don’t believe you. You offered yourself to me because you knew it would be enough of a distraction to stop me trawling the streets of the village.’

  She took a breath and continued. ‘That’s not true. I wanted to make love with you. I settled for a fling but I think we could have more than that, Lucien. I think you know that too. We’re good together—you said it yourself. You said how different it was between us than your other—’

  ‘Oh, you thought this was going to go somewhere?’ The derision in his tone was as savage as a switchblade. ‘So you lied to me about that too. You told me you never wanted to get married. But all the time you’ve been hanging out for the fairy tale. Well, guess what? It’s over. I’m ending it right here, right now. I should have trusted my instincts and left you well alone.’

  Audrey had been preparing herself for this moment but now that it had come it was even more devastating than she’d thought. He was upset, of course he was, and he had every right to be. She would be too if the situation was reversed. He needed time to come to terms with the shock of his father’s illness. Maybe he would change his mind once he talked to his father...her stomach swooped...if he ever got the chance to talk to his father. ‘Can we talk about this later, when you’ve had time to—?’

  ‘Did you hear me?’ His voice contained an edge of steel that made every hair on her head shiver at the roots. ‘I said it’s over.’

  Audrey couldn’t look at him and quietly gathered her bag from the floor. ‘I’m just going to see my mother and then I’ll get a cab back to the hotel to collect my things. I’ll stay with her until the...the crisis is over with your father.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Fine? Was that all he could say after what they’d shared? Nothing was fine about this. Audrey’s heart felt like it was jammed between two solid, splinter-ridden planks, every breath she took increasing the pressure. Her eyes stung with tears but she refused to cry in front of him. She couldn’t bear the humiliation of him witnessing her heartbreak.

  She followed him into the hospital but he barely gave her a glance. He went straight to the desk to ask where his father had been taken and Audrey peeled away to find her mother.

  She was in the waiting room outside the emergency room and Audrey went straight to her and enveloped her in a hug. ‘Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry. Is there any news?’

  Sibel
la lifted her tear-stained face off Audrey’s shoulder, her bottom lip trembling. ‘They’re going to do a CAT scan to see what’s going on. They think he’s having some sort of intracranial bleed from the tumour. They’re going to fly him to Paris for surgery because they don’t have the facilities here. I can’t bear the thought of losing him. Not now that I’ve finally got him back.’

  ‘I know, it’s so sad,’ Audrey said, blinking back her own tears. ‘But you’ve been with him for the last few days and made him as happy as you could. Hold on to that.’

  ‘We had such a lovely wedding ceremony,’ Sibella said, taking the tissue Audrey handed her and mopping at her eyes. ‘So intimate and private at the farmhouse in the garden. I’m sorry I didn’t invite you and Lucien but Harlan wanted it to be just us this time. No fanfare. No fuss. Just us.’

  ‘I think you did the right thing,’ Audrey said. ‘I’m glad you two got married again. I couldn’t be happier for you. Well, I could if Harlan wasn’t so unwell.’

  Her mother looked at her with reddened eyes. ‘You really mean that, don’t you?’

  Audrey smiled. ‘Perhaps you and Harlan do belong together. You’re lucky to have experienced such passionate love not once but three times. I hope and pray he gets through this so you can prove all the doubters wrong.’

  ‘Speaking of doubters,’ Sibella said, glancing past Audrey for any sign of Lucien, ‘I hope I haven’t made things difficult between you and Lucien.’

  Audrey wasn’t going to burden her mother with her own heartbreak at this point, if ever. Sibella had enough emotion to deal with without Audrey dumping more on her. ‘No, it’s fine. He’s upset about his father, of course. It’s been a terrible shock for him.’

  Her mother’s gaze searched hers. ‘You’re not in love with him or anything, are you?’

  ‘In love?’ Audrey made an attempt at a laugh but it sounded more like a choke. ‘We had a bit of a fling but we’ve called time on it. It was never going to work. I’m not his type and he’s not mine.’

  Sibella chewed at her lower lip for a moment, her brow creased in a tiny frown. ‘It’s not always about being the right type of person, sweetie. It’s about the right type of love you feel for each other. It took me three times to find that love with Harlan but now I’ve found it I’m going to hold on to it no matter what.’

  ‘Lucien doesn’t love me, Mum,’ Audrey said in a quiet voice. ‘I don’t think he’s capable of loving anyone like that.’

  ‘Mrs Fox?’ A doctor with an English accent came towards them and stopped in front of Sibella. ‘The air patient transfer has been arranged so we’re taking your husband soon. He’s not conscious but if you’d like to spend a couple of minutes with him before the flight to Paris that would be okay.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ Sibella said and followed the doctor away to where Harlan was being held.

  Audrey sighed and went back to the waiting room to wait for her mother to return, wondering if it would have been wiser to leave now before there was any chance of running into Lucien. Had he had a chance to spend time with his father?

  * * *

  Lucien walked out of the hospital after speaking to his father’s doctor and stood for a moment trying to get his emotions under control. His father had cancer. A brain tumour. It was operable but the risks of permanent damage were huge. His fun-loving, irresponsible and reckless father might turn into a comatose body on a ventilator. He couldn’t understand why his father hadn’t told him he was ill. He handled all his father’s financial affairs, fixed up every mess and monitored every detail of his father’s life and yet his father had shut him out of this health crisis. What sort of father did that to his only son? Didn’t his father realise how much he cared about him?

  But it was Audrey’s role in the cover-up that was eating at him the most. She had only slept with him to distract him from finding out where his father and Sibella were. He’d thought...he’d thought... Damn it. He wasn’t going to think about it now. He wasn’t going to think their relationship was different from anything he’d experienced before because it wasn’t different. It was just a fling that had turned sour. But it had only turned sour because she’d deceived him. Openly lied to his face, making him believe...

  No. No. No. Don’t go there.

  He had to stop thinking she might have been The One. The one person—the only person—he could see himself building a future with that involved trust and openness and, yes, even love. But it was all a bald-faced lie. Their relationship had sprung up out of her desperation to keep him from the truth about his father’s and her mother’s whereabouts.

  Had she been working against him from the start?

  He mentally backtracked through the last couple of days, wondering how he could have been so stupid to be hoodwinked by lust. That was all it was, of course. Lust. He refused to consider it as anything else. He’d lusted after her and she’d seen it as an opportunity to manipulate him. Now his father was dying and his next of kin was that attention-seeking, wine-swilling witch Sibella, who gloated over his father’s unconscious body about her brand-new status as his wife.

  For the third freaking time.

  Lucien dragged in a lungful of cool night air, trying to loosen the tight feeling in his chest. It might be hours before his father came out of surgery in Paris. It might be hours, days even, before there was news, either good or bad. He didn’t want to see Audrey. He never wanted to see her again. Seeing her would remind him of every cunning and clever lie she’d told him and how he’d foolishly fallen for it.

  Fallen for her.

  No. Damn it. No. He’d fallen in lust. He wasn’t going to name it as anything else. What was the point in admitting she had done what no other woman had done? What he had allowed no other woman to do. He had lost his head over her. Lost everything he had worked so hard to maintain. Her betrayal had stung him, more than stung him, but it was the fact she had got into his heart that hurt the most. He should never have allowed it to happen. He should have taken greater care. He should have resisted her.

  Lust, not love. Lust, not love. Lust, not love. If he had to say it like a mantra until he believed it then that was what he would damn well do.

  Lust was all it was and now it was over.

  CHAPTER TEN

  AUDREY HADN’T BOTHERED collecting her things from the hotel and had flown with her mother to Paris as soon as she could organise a flight. By the time they arrived at the large and busy Paris hospital, Harlan was still on a ventilator but the bleed had been controlled and a large section of the tumour had been removed. The neurosurgeon had expressed cautious optimism that Harlan would regain consciousness in a few days when the swelling had receded.

  Audrey had been terrified of running into Lucien when she and her mother came to the hospital, but, given the size of the place, somehow she had managed to miss him and hadn’t seen him since the night they’d followed the ambulance to the smaller hospital in St Remy.

  The time spent supporting her mother was just the distraction she needed to take her mind off her own heartache. But in spite of the warm and loving chats with her mother, the visits to the hospital and the day-to-day duties she assigned herself at the small Airbnb they were staying in, Audrey still had plenty of time to feel the stinging pain of Lucien’s rejection. How different would this time be if he’d allowed her to support him as well as her mother?

  How different would it be if he loved her as she loved him?

  Audrey wanted what her mother had with Harlan this third time around. The right type of love. A mature and lasting love. A love that wanted the best for the other partner—a love that gave sacrificially instead of selfishly taking.

  But Lucien had locked his heart away and built an impenetrable fortress around it. It pained her to think he thought so badly of her after all they’d shared. But he had refused to listen to her explanation and had cut her coldly and clinically
and cruelly from his life.

  On day five Harlan woke when his doctors removed him from the ventilator. The first person he asked for was Sibella and Audrey sat outside ICU while her mother was taken in to see him. She couldn’t help thinking how special it must be to be the first person a desperately ill patient asked for when they woke from a coma. Would she ever be that special person to someone? Would anyone love her the way Harlan loved her mother? Or would she always be lonely like this? Sitting alone in the waiting room of life.

  When her mother came out a short time later she was crying but with happy tears. ‘Oh, sweetie, he’s awake and even managed to make a joke. He’s still not out of danger but the doctors think he might be well enough for chemo in a week or two, if we can convince him to go through it.’

  Audrey hugged her mother so tightly she worried she might snap a rib. ‘I’m so glad he’s made it this far. So very glad.’

  Sibella pulled back from the hug but still held on to Audrey’s arms. ‘He’s asking for Lucien. Do you think you could call him? I’m not sure he’ll take a call from me.’

  Or from me.

  Audrey took out her phone and pulled up his number. Even seeing his name there on her screen made her heart clench and her stomach sink. She pressed ‘dial’ and held the phone to her ear but it went straight to his message service. She tried to think of something to say but her mouth wouldn’t cooperate. In the end she hung up the phone and sighed and faced her mother. ‘No answer.’

  ‘I suppose the hospital will call him,’ Sibella said and scraped a hand through her blonde tresses. ‘I could do with a drink.’ She grinned cheekily at Audrey’s frown. ‘Coffee, okay? Harlan and I are booked in to do couple’s rehab. I reckon we’ll have more chance of kicking the habit better together than doing it alone.’

  Audrey smiled and linked her arm through her mother’s. ‘Coffee sounds great.’

  * * *