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‘Alexandra…’
It was her father who stepped forward, obviously determined to intervene, his face alternating between red and pale, his tone and his use of her full name a brusque reproach.
‘Alexandra—please…’
But he stopped dead at a sudden lift of the Spaniard’s hand, an autocratic signal to stop—stay away. Obviously something in what she had said had caught Santos Cordero’s attention. That ‘you impossible man,’ Alexa strongly suspected. She doubted very much that he was regularly subjected to such a contemptuous description—if ever.
‘If you’re really afraid, then we can leave the door ajar so that someone will hear your screams when I…’
But no, she’d gone too far there. If she had meant to provoke him into a decision and action, then she had succeeded. More than succeeded. She had pushed him over some sort of edge that she hadn’t even known was there and he had lost whatever remaining grip he had had on his tolerance, moving from an irritated, barely reined-in impatience in the blink of an eye. She could see it in the flash of cold fire in his eyes and in the way that his beautiful mouth thinned to a brutal, hard line.
And suddenly her heart was thudding in a very different way from the purely feminine response of just moments before. From being at least on secure ground, if not at all confident of her reception, she now felt as if the earth had shifted beneath her feet, opening up the stone flags to reveal a nasty, sucking, dragging swamp that was closing over her feet, starting to drag her in—drag her down.
Her throat was painfully dry and her thoughts spun as she slicked a nervous tongue over parched lips.
‘Believe me, it really would be better if we spoke in private—in there perhaps…’
She waved an arm in a wild gesture towards a door that she presumed led to the church vestry.
Just what she was going to do if he dug in the heels of his highly polished handmade shoes and refused to go anywhere, she had no idea. But it seemed that she didn’t even need to consider the possibility because from his obdurate refusal to co-operate, Santos now launched, suddenly and fast, into action. Swift as a striking snake, his hand came out and clamped hard fingers around her upper arm, their tips digging into the skin.
‘You want to talk?’
His voice was harsh and thick with anger, his accent sounding strongly deep in his throat.
‘Then we’ll talk.’
And he marched her across to the arched wooden door that she had indicated, wrenching on the handle to push it open with scant ceremony. Bundling her inside, he kicked it closed behind him with equal disregard for both the church fitting and, obviously, the idea he had formerly held that being shut in a room with her might prove compromising.
Clearly that idea was long gone. In fact, to prove the point, he leaned back against the old, dark wood and folded his arms firmly across the width of his chest. If she had thought that his jaw was set, his mouth closed tight before, then it was nothing when compared with the hardness of his face now, the ruthless control of all but the single tight muscle that worked in his jaw.
‘Pues,’ he declared after a single flashing glance at the gold watch he wore on his left wrist. ‘You have three minutes in which to explain just what all this is about—and believe me the explanation had better be good—otherwise…’
He let the threat trail off but all the same it still had enough force and note of danger in his tone to send an apprehensive shiver running down Alexa’s spine.
‘So? What do you have to say that is so important?’
‘I…’
Twice she tried to get the words out and both times her voice failed her. Looking into his hard, set face was a mistake. It froze her throat around the words until she could hardly breathe. But looking away was no help either. How could you tell a man that the future he thought was his had been snatched away from him without looking him in the eye?
But looking him in the eye was quite beyond her.
‘You’ve already wasted thirty seconds,’ Santos gibed. ‘Another couple of minutes and I will walk back out there and—’
‘Natalie isn’t coming!’
The words broke from her as any attempt at restraint or control, or even coherence, was impossible. There wasn’t a right way to say this, she told herself, not a good way and definitely not an easy way, so the only thing she could do was to fling the words out into the open and then hope to make a tactical withdrawal, flinching back out of the way of the fallout from the violent explosion that had to result when she made her announcement.
‘Natalie isn’t coming. She’s changed her mind.’
Astonishingly the explosion she had been anticipating didn’t come. But, if it was possible, the sudden dark and dangerous silence that greeted her outburst was actually worse. It was so long-drawn-out and so deep that she felt it take her nerves with it, stretching them out so painfully until she thought she might actually scream out loud with the tension.
‘Changed her mind?’ Santos finally echoed the words as if he couldn’t believe what he had heard or if he did then he didn’t understand just what it meant. ‘Explain!’ he rapped out, the cold command having the force of a bullet fired from a gun.
Well, he’d asked for it. She’d tried to be fair. She’d tried to be considerate. But it seemed that fair and considerate were concepts that Santos Cordero just didn’t understand or appreciate.
‘Natalie isn’t coming to the wedding. She doesn’t want to marry you after all.’
‘Where…?’ Another question was barked at her, the single syllable seeming to spark with anger in the air as it was flung from his lips. ‘Where the devil is my bride?’
Alexa would have sworn that it was impossible for his black brows to draw together any more sharply or for the burnished eyes to blaze any more furiously without smoke actually starting to fill the room, but somehow Santos managed to rein in his anger even though she could practically hear it crackling hot in his veins in contrast to the icy control of his beautifully accented voice.
‘And why is she not here, at my side—before that altar, as she should be?’
‘Oh, please!’
Alexa felt she couldn’t take any more. His anger was one thing, when directed at her, but those words ‘my bride’ had almost destroyed her.
My bride. A word that should have meant the promise of love and joy and happily-ever-afters. But he made it sound so possessive.
‘I’m sorry, but she’s never going to be here, at your side, before that—that…’
The word eluded her overstressed brain and she could only manage a wild wave of her hand in the direction of the doorway against which he stood, meaning to indicate the church and the altar beyond it. The church where everyone—her family and his, his friends—were all still waiting for the wedding to begin. The wedding that would never begin now. Never take place.
‘She’s not coming. She’s not going to marry you. She went to the airport but she’ll be through to the departure lounge by now. She was taking a plane to America with the man she really loves. The man she really wants to marry.’
‘She’s gone.’
That icy precision was back in his voice, making her wince in sharp distress when she heard it. She had never felt quite so low and nasty as she did now, and it wasn’t even her own battle she was fighting. But she couldn’t have let Natalie go through with this marriage, the prospect of which was obviously making her so unhappy.
‘Your sister—has run out on her wedding.’
There was a darkly dangerous note in his use of the word ‘sister,’ one that caught on something raw in Alexa’s heart and twisted, cruelly, painfully. But she didn’t dare to absorb the impact of it, take it out and look at it closely to see what it was really implying or what lay behind it. She didn’t have time either. She’d finally almost managed to complete the mission that had brought her here. She’d told Santos the truth and she could now hope to leave, get out of here as fast as she could.
‘She has jilted me—left me for some other man?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘She really should not have done that.’
‘I know, and I am sorry—she should have told you before now, should have admitted to you that she didn’t love you enough to marry you. I know you must be hurt—’
The tumbling words were starting to fall over each other, tangling together in her nervous haste, but they suddenly froze, shutting off completely in shock, as Santos’s response broke into them.
And it was because it was not at all the response she expected that it caught her up short. In fact it was so much the opposite of the response she had been anticipating that she could only stand and stare, hazel eyes widening in stunned disbelief.
Because Santos had laughed.
When she had said that she understood how he must be hurting he had actually flung back his dark head, closed his silvery eyes briefly and laughed out loud. And it was not a pleasant laugh. It had nothing of any real humour in it, no warmth at all. It was a cold laugh, a harsh and bitter laugh, one that made a thousand tiny electrical shivers skitter over her skin and turn her veins to ice.
‘Santos?’ she queried, wondering if after all she had actually got through to him.
In her nervousness had she really made any sort of sense or had she just confused him? Was it possible that she had somehow made him think that this was some sort of joke—a very dark, sick one, but a joke none the less?
‘Santos—did you hear what I said? You have to understand…’
‘Oh, I heard, belleza, and I understand only too well. Your sister has reneged on her promise and run out on me, leaving you to pick up the pieces. That I understand only too well. What I do not get is why in hell you think I should care.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHAT?’
Alexa found that she was blinking in confusion, trying to make sense of Santos’s words, but most of all trying to understand or even believe in his reaction.
If that laugh had been unexpected, then the rest of his words sounded almost surreal. When she had been expecting distress, anger, bitterness at the way that he had been betrayed and left at the altar by the woman he wanted to marry, instead there was dark cynicism, and an almost careless dismissal of what she had just said.
‘You don’t care? But surely…?’
Santos’s response was a shockingly indifferent shrug of his broad shoulders under the fine cloth of his immaculately tailored jacket, and he pushed both hands through the gleaming darkness of his hair as if relaxing after a long day.
But relaxed was the last word she would use to describe the set of his face, the tight compression of his sensual mouth, the way that a taut muscle jumped in his jaw. And the glittering look he turned on her had nothing that was comfortable or easygoing in it. Instead she was reminded of how, on the day she had first met him, she had believed that he had the coldest eyes of anyone in the world.
‘You expect me to act as if your sister has broken my heart? As if I have lost the love of my life and cannot find the strength to go on—to live for the future?’ he questioned cynically, biting the words out as if they were bones he wanted to snap. ‘Well, then you could not be more wrong. I will have no trouble going on with my life after this—though your family might find it harder to pick themselves up as a result. In fact—’
He broke off as a sharp rap came on the door, someone knocking on the heavy panels from the other side, in the church.
‘Alexandra? Alexa?’
It was her father’s voice, coming sharp and concerned through the thickness of the wood.
‘Is everything all right? What’s going on? Cordero—what—’
‘Momento!’ Santos snapped, tossing the word over his shoulder, his burning eyes still fixed on Alexa’s bewildered face. ‘We will be out in a second and then we will explain all. Or rather…’
The cold, curt tone slid into something else as his eyes seared across her skin, seeming to strip away a necessary protective layer and leave her nerves raw and exposed underneath.
‘You will do the explaining,’ he said and for all the sudden softness and smoothness of his tone Alexa could be in no doubt that it was an autocratic command, one that he expected to have obeyed without hesitation or argument. ‘You will tell your father—your family—what has happened.’
‘But I…’ Alexa began, her voice failing her, the words drying in her throat as she tried to protest. ‘It isn’t up to me now—surely you…’
She couldn’t go out there and tell everyone why she was here. Tell them that Natalie had run out on her wedding— the wedding that had been described in the newspapers and the gossip columns as the Wedding of the Year, the joining together of huge wealth and aristocratic beauty. It was to have been the union of one powerful rich, ultra modern bloodline of the billionaire entrepreneur, and the old, patrician lineage of Natalie Montague, twenty-year-old daughter of Lord Stanley Montague. Santos Cordero who had made his fortune with his own hands and brain, dragging himself up from his lowly and impoverished beginnings to the height of his wealth and power, was marrying into the British nobility, a family whose name had been amongst the highest in the land for centuries past. It had been the stuff that fairy tales were made of, especially when the bride was acknowledged to be a stunning beauty and the groom a hunk whose carved, handsome features and lean, powerful frame had featured in many photographs in the gossip columns and in magazines, usually with some supremely decorative female draped on his arm.
‘I don’t think…’ she tried again, feeling even more lost and adrift than in the first moments when she had arrived in the church and had come under the scrutiny of those coldly burning eyes as she walked up the aisle towards him.
Because the truth was that she didn’t know what she was meant to say or how—and what—she was supposed to explain. Nothing had been as she had expected it. But then how did you know what might happen when you had to break up a wedding by announcing to the groom that his fiancée had jilted him? It wasn’t exactly something that you did every day.
But Santos wasn’t listening to her protests. Instead he had levered himself away from the door and taken two swift strides towards her, his hand coming out and clamping over her arm, just above the elbow, hard fingers digging into her skin as he swung her round to face the door at his side.
‘You will do it,’ he declared, cold and brusque. ‘Your family has messed up my life enough already, so now…’
He was interrupted by another rap at the door and her father’s voice again, sharper this time.
‘Alexandra—what’s going on in there…?’
‘Nothing—I mean, it’s fine,’ Alexa managed when Santos turned a forceful glare on her, the burnished eyes directing a silent command that she should respond. ‘We—we’re coming out now and I’ll…I’ll explain.’
She had no option, it seemed, because that hand that gripped her arm was now pulling her forward, leaving her no choice but to follow.
‘Let go of me!’ she spat in furious protest. ‘OK, so I had to bring you bad news—but there’s a saying about not shooting the messenger. And that’s all that I am—the messenger. Natalie’s the one—’
‘But your sister is not here.’
It was a low growl and he didn’t look at her, didn’t slow his steps towards the door, yanking it open as soon as he reached it.
‘So don’t take it out on me! You can’t drag me about like this—’
She’d taken her attention off her own feet for a moment and as a result she caught her toe against one of the uneven flagstones, stumbling awkwardly in the unaccustomed high-heeled shoes. For a second she thought she would fall but then that cruel grip around her arm tightened even more, holding her upright by sheer force.
‘Don’t yank me about!’
‘I was trying to help.’
The cold flash of his brilliant eyes warned her not to argue but her own temper was bubbling up sharply and she was having to struggle to contain it. How had this happened? How had she come from being just, as she had said, the messenger of bad news, to being the victim of Santos Cordero’s dark disapproval, hauled out into the church by him to face the congregation assembled for his society wedding, without even being aware of just what was involved?
Because something was involved, that much was obvious.
‘Then don’t help.’ She laced her tone with sarcasm to make it clear that helping was the last thing she thought he was doing. ‘I can manage quite well enough on my own.’
‘You might be able to manage,’ he flung back from between gritted teeth, keeping his voice low so that no one, not even her stepmother in the front row, or her father, still waiting by the altar steps, could catch what he was saying. ‘But I would prefer it if you didn’t fall flat on your face and then blame it on me. And I want to make sure that you don’t take off like your sister and disappear out the door.’
‘What would it matter if I did?’
For a second Alexa was tempted to aim a hard, pointed kick at Santos’s ankle but another of those flashing sidelong glances seemed to catch her intent and a grim smile crossed his mouth as he brought them both to a halt right in front of the altar.
‘Alexa,’ her father began once more but silenced himself hastily when Santos turned a burning glare on him.
‘Ladies and gentlemen…’
He barely had to raise his voice to be heard, the church had fallen so silent as soon as they had appeared. Every eye in the place was fixed on them, some faces frowning in confusion and puzzlement, others, like those of her father and stepmother, looking pale and taut with tension. Just what was going on here? What were the undercurrents she was just not picking up on? The things she didn’t understand?
But Santos didn’t seem to be aware of them as he continued to speak as calmly and as confidently as if he were making his after-dinner speech—the one that now would never have to be made.
‘There has been a slight change of plan…’
Slight?
That brought Alexa’s head round to his in a reaction of stunned shock. How could he describe Natalie’s jilting of him, her flight to the airport, as a ‘slight change of plan’?
But Santos ignored her total consternation, her wide, shocked eyes and continued with total control.
‘The wedding is not going to take place.’
‘Not…’
The word was choked from her father as he took an unsteady step backwards. And in the front pew. Alexa saw how her stepmother went even whiter, one expensively manicured hand flying to her mouth as if to hold back the cry of shock and disbelief that almost escaped her.
‘What…?’
It was Stanley Montague, trying again to make his tongue work, to ask the question that was so obviously whirling round and round in his head. Alexa had rarely seen her father looking so shocked and upset. In fact, his reaction seemed out of all proportion to the situation. OK, so it was bad, there was going to be a terrible embarrassment to face, and the aborted wedding would be the talk of their friends—and probably the gossip columns for some weeks to come.
But surely that was better than Natalie making a huge mistake and marrying a man she didn’t love? Better to call the wedding off now than to face a costly divorce—costly in more ways than financial—maybe just months from now? But her father was looking as if the end of the world had come and…
Alexa had no chance to think things through further because at that moment Santos’s firm grip on her arm propelled her forward so that she was standing just in front of him, facing the gaping congregation.
‘Natalie is not coming,’ he said coolly. ‘She has run out on me—that is what her sister came here to tell me. And now she’s going to explain it all to you.’
A forceful little push made her take another step forward in the same moment that it pointedly told her that now was the time for her to speak—to tell everyone the truth.
But what was the truth? Suddenly Alexa was not quite sure. She only knew that it had been obvious that Natalie didn’t want to go through with the wedding. But why had she ever agreed to it in the first place? That question made the earth seem to shift beneath her feet. But she didn’t have time to consider the possible implications of that before her father found his voice.
‘Alexandra? What is happening?’
‘Tell him,’ Santos prompted harshly when she still hesitated. ‘Tell them.’
‘I’m afraid San—Señor Cordero is right…’
The way that her words echoed round the silent church had an eerie, hollow sound but at least her voice had more strength than she had anticipated and she sounded as if she knew what she was talking about. How far that was from the truth only she knew.
‘Natalie has changed her mind. She doesn’t feel it would be right to marry him. Not when she realises that she truly loves someone else.’
And that at least she could say with conviction. In her mind she still had a clear image of the moment that she had looked into her sister’s hotel room and seen Natalie sitting on the bed, staring at the beautiful wedding dress that hung in the wardrobe, her face pale and drawn, her eyes flooded with tears.
‘I thought I could do this, Lexa,’ her sister had said. ‘I really wanted to—but it just isn’t going to work now. If John hadn’t come into my life I would have gone ahead…but he did…and meeting him has changed everything.’
‘She’s truly sorry to have messed everyone about…but she knew it was better to break it off now than to go into a marriage that she knew wasn’t really right for her—’
‘And she did not have the courage to come and tell me herself?’
It was Santos who spoke, his low, darkly dangerous tone drawing her eyes to his face. The black fury that blazed in those eyes, the bitter, insulted pride that tightened his jaw, turned his mouth to a thin, hard line, sent a shiver down her spine as his hard, unyielding gaze locked with hers. Privately she acknowledged that she couldn’t blame Natalie for not wanting to face him. When he looked like this she couldn’t imagine why her sister would ever have wanted to marry him in the first place.
‘No,’ she managed uncomfortably. Natalie hadn’t even dared to face her mother and father with the truth. ‘I’m sorry.’
If the slight inclination of his proud head was meant to be an acknowledgement of her apology then it failed to have any impact. There was no lightening of the coldness of his eyes, no easing of the tightness of every muscle in his powerful frame. And to think that she had once worried that the news of Natalie’s flight might hurt him!
This man looked as if nothing could touch him. As if nothing could penetrate that armoured hide and reach through to find his heart. Right now he didn’t even look as if he had a heart to touch.
‘So where is Natalie now?’
Another question from her father drew Alexa’s attention back to where Stanley was standing, hands clenched tightly together, a frown creasing his forehead.
‘On her way to the airport—no…’
A quick glance at her watch confirmed her suspicion.
‘She must be through to Departures by now. She was getting a plane…’
‘Oh, no! Natalie!’
It was Petra Montague, Stanley’s second wife, reacting in exactly the way that Alexa had anticipated that her stepmother would. Her narrow hands had come up before her face, fluttering weakly against her sculpted cheeks. Above the long, dark red nails her wide blue eyes appeared to glisten with tears that she was fighting not to shed.
‘What has she done? What will we do?’
‘Hush, my dear.’ Stanley’s response sounded almost like a reproach rather than an attempt at consolation as he stepped forward to take his wife’s hands in his and hold them tightly, looking deep into her glistening eyes.