Wolfe’s hands clenched into fists when Gilles put his arm around her shoulders. ‘Don’t be silly, Ava. You can’t be alone at a time like this.’
‘Shouldn’t your priority be to your new wife and your house guests?’ Wolfe hated himself for reminding Gilles so flatly. Hated himself for the stab of jealousy over a woman he’d never planned to see again.
‘Would you two stop?’ Ava demanded. ‘I am more than capable of—’
‘Getting on my plane and letting me escort you home,’ Wolfe commanded.
She scowled up at him. ‘I don’t want to put you out.’
Wolfe didn’t know if she was being stoic or just obstinate, but he knew he wasn’t letting Gilles take her to Anders. ‘Too late,’ he growled.
When the butler approached Gilles again Wolfe stepped closer to Ava, invading her personal space. ‘Is that your only suitcase?’
She stepped back. ‘I told you before. I don’t get off on barbaric men.’
Her view of him grated but he pushed his feelings aside. ‘Do you really have time to argue?’
‘No.’ His words seemed to trigger something inside her and her eyes grew distant. She paced. Looked at Gilles and then turned back to him. ‘Fine. You may take me.’
Wolfe mentally shook his head, almost awed at the way she’d managed to turn her acceptance into an order.
* * *
Ava was functioning on autopilot and barely registered Wolfe buckling her seat belt while the plane taxied down the runway. Somehow he had got her to Lille and on board a plane without her conscious awareness of it.
Her brother was dead.
The news was shocking. Indescribable.
A helicopter accident. Ava couldn’t think about it, her mind incoherent with grief. Her brother was the rock of the family. The future heir. He was five years younger than her and, while they had struggled to be close after her mother died, she had always looked out for him. Anticipated that he would always be there. He couldn’t be gone. He was only twenty-four.
She shivered and felt a soft blanket settle over her shoulders. She clutched it.
Wolfe placed a glass of water on the table in front of her. ‘Do you need anything else?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m fine.’
‘So you keep saying.’
But he didn’t push it, and Ava was grateful. She watched him return to his seat. When he’d come across her in the foyer her heart had turned giddy at the sight of him. It had taken a lot of effort to remind herself that there was no point in seeing him again and even less in sleeping with him! His increasing anger at her response had thrown her a little but then he’d confirmed that, no, he didn’t want more than sex from her, and she’d known she had made the right decision.
After they arrived in Anders she would likely never see him again, and that fact made her feel instantly bereft.
Her mind linked the feeling with a time when she was fourteen and her father had continued with a state trip even though she’d been hospitalised with chicken pox. He’d monitored her condition from afar, as usual, but coming so soon after her mother’s death his behaviour had done little to alleviate her loneliness and her sense of powerlessness at being alone.
That same sense of helplessness and loneliness engulfed her now, and she pushed it back. Her father would expect her to demonstrate more fortitude than that.
More childhood memories tumbled into her mind, like dice on a two-up table. Memories of Frédéric as a boy. Of her mother.
Rather than becoming more available after her mother’s death from cervical cancer, Ava’s father had withdrawn and focused on his work, seeming not to know how to connect with her. He had been fine with Frédéric. Ava had grown more and more resentful of the disparity in the way in which he treated his children, and more and more determined to show him that his views of women were archaic and demeaning.
But nothing she did ever seemed to be good enough for him. Perhaps if she’d been more like her mother, had been able to put his needs first, they might have seen eye to eye. But Ava couldn’t. She had witnessed her mother’s sadness whenever her father chose duty over family, and it had made her want something entirely different for herself.
Now, with Frédéric gone—a thought that just wouldn’t stick in her head—she was next in line to the throne. She could only imagine how her father must be cringing over that, and she felt slightly nauseous at the prospect of having to step into the role.