Une Affaire de Loup: Livre l'une des Trilogie Affaire un Lou

"I choose Elias Moreau."

Vivienne's hand pressed down hard on the gray contract.

The ballroom went silent at once.

Beneath the crystal chandeliers, the guests looked at one another. The Moreau family had declared bankruptcy three months earlier. The bank had seized their ancestral house, and even the carriage they had come in tonight was rented.

Father frowned. "Vivienne, are you sure?"

"Of course." She clutched the contract to her chest as if she were holding the future. "I love Elias. Poverty can't separate true love."

At the very back of the crowd, Elias raised his head. He still had the good looks of his youth from the last life, black hair slightly curled, melancholy eyes, an old dress suit that plainly didn't fit. Hearing himself chosen, he looked surprised first, then smiled with relief.

Only I saw the shrewd calculation beneath the smile.

He knew the Montreuil dowry was enough to pay off his debts.

As Vivienne passed me, she said in a voice only we could hear, "Camille, it's time you gave back the good fortune you enjoyed."

She had come back too.

It was the same look she'd had in the last life, swinging the candlestick at me.

"Little sister, I'll make a fine wife for the mayor's chief secretary on your behalf." She leaned close to my ear. "As for the Beaumont family's living corpse, he's all yours."

She thought Elias had risen because his talents had finally been recognized. She thought Alexander refused to touch her because he had no desire.

She didn't know that I had written Elias's first campaign speech, that I had brought in his first political donation, that I had filled three holes in his accounts that could each have destroyed him.

Still less did she know that after my death, Alexander had personally torn apart the lies the Beaumont family had woven around her and taken the estate where she was confined to court.

Father's voice broke into my thoughts. "Then Camille, will you accept the Beaumont contract?"

The crowd parted on its own.

Alexander de Beaumont stood at the far end of the long table. Twenty-eight, dark gray eyes, straight-backed, a royal medal on his chest. He was already the youngest legal counsel to Parliament and the sole heir of the ducal house.

In the last life, he had never once looked at Vivienne like this.

Now his gaze was fixed on my face, his knuckles white with restraint.

I suddenly remembered the year I was seventeen, when he had returned a book of poems to me in the rain. A dried white rose was pressed inside the flyleaf. I had taken it for mere courtesy.

Later I became engaged, and he went alone to the North for four years.

Some answers, it seemed, I hadn't understood even by the time I died.

I picked up the gilt-edged contract and walked to him.

"I accept."

Alexander's ever-composed eyes lit up all at once.

He didn't reach for the contract first. He took my hand and confirmed it in a low voice. "Camille, you chose me?"

"You."

His thumb brushed lightly across the back of my hand, as if touching a treasure lost and found again.

"Then," he bent and kissed my fingertips, "I will never let you regret it."