The Christmas She Married the Playboy by Louise Fuller

Author:Louise Fuller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2021-09-13T19:03:09+00:00

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Santa stared after him in silence. Civilised? She almost laughed out loud. Louis Albemarle might be a member of the aristocracy, but he was probably the least civilised person she had ever met. It wasn’t just that he said and did such outrageous things...it was that, unlike most people, he refused to be held accountable for them.

So how could he accuse her of making everything harder? He was the one who had feigned sleep on the flight so as not to have to speak to her. And yet, to be fair, he had come up with the only viable solution to their problem. More importantly, she had agreed to it.

Reaching down, she began to unlace her skates.

Of course she had.

It was either marry Louis or risk everything she had worked for her entire life. And it wasn’t just about her. Her father and Kate had sacrificed just as much, if not more, re-mortgaging their house and taking staycations long before it had become a thing. Even her little brothers had gone without.

For her.

They had done whatever was necessary without complaint, and those sacrifices weren’t going to have been for nothing. She wanted to win. She wanted to make them proud and that meant she’d had to marry Louis.

It was time she accepted that, and not just accepted it. She needed to embrace it as a choice she had made, rather than seeing it as something Louis had foisted upon her. Otherwise she would spend the next year feeling like a victim.

Her fingers stilled against the laces.

Been there. Done that. Got the photo.

And she never wanted to feel like that again—so passive, so powerless. That had been the worst part of what had happened with Nathan. Worse than the names he’d called her. Worse, even, than knowing everyone was talking about her.

Not having a voice. Not having a say in her own life.

She had been helpless, paralysed with shock and shame and hurt. All she had wanted to do was crawl under her duvet and hide.

But she couldn’t hide from Louis for a year.

Straightening up, she gazed at the house, her heart thumping. And she didn’t want to. She didn’t need to.

He might be a duke, but she was a duchess now.

She was his equal. Her needs and wishes were as important as his.

Her shoulders stiffened as she remembered what he’d said about his grandmother. There had been an emotion in his voice she hadn’t heard before, and it was obvious that Callière was more than just a business to him.

It was a legacy.

She understood how that worked. Her mother’s dreams had become her dreams, and were all the more important for that.

Perhaps that sense of responsibility was even more true if you were a member of the aristocracy, where your role was to act as a custodian of your family’s future.

She felt a pang of surprise that she and Louis actually had something in common, and remorse that she had misjudged him. Clearly they both wanted and needed

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