His Suitable Bride

by Cathy Williams/Abby Green/Kate Walker

  ‘Just what is going on here?’

  But Santos simply shook his head, his beautiful mouth shut tight over any possible explanation.

  ‘All right …’

  Backed into a corner, she knew there was no other way she could react. But she wasn’t going to let him enjoy his triumph.

  ‘All right, I’ll talk to my father but not now—not with you standing over me like some avenging angel. If I have to do this then I’ll do it in privacy—with you out of the house. Go on …’ she pushed when he didn’t respond, didn’t move. ‘I want you to leave—get out of my house …’

  Just what she would do if he refused to budge, she had no idea. A scary, impossible image of her trying to actually physically move him, pushing him towards the door, flared in her head, making her shudder inwardly at the mere thought. But then, just as she was afraid she might actually have to try it he lifted his shoulders in a dismissive shrug.

  ‘OK,’ he said casually. ‘I’ll leave—for now. I need to check in to my hotel and there are a couple of business calls I need to make. But I’ll be back.’

  The implied threat in the last three words, and the way that he emphasised them, pale, gleaming gaze fixed on her face as if searching for something that only he could see, made her nerves jump.

  ‘You’ll leave and you’ll not come back, not until I say you can! If I say you can. When I’ve talked to my father, if I think we still need to talk, I’ll give you a call.’

  Did she really think she was having any effect at all on him? He might have agreed to leave, but that was because it suited him, for now. His face was closed off again so that she had no idea if she was getting through to him at all. The truth was that she doubted very much that she was. Santos would do things his own way and only that way. He was only going along with what she said because she was doing what he actually wanted her to do. The feeling of having been manipulated, outmanoeuvred by a master was a nasty, creeping one along her skin. Just what would her father have to tell her when she got in touch with him?

  Santos was shrugging himself back into his heavy overcoat, pushing his hand into one of the pockets and pulling out a small silver case. Flipping it open, he pulled out a slip of white embossed card and held it out to her.

  ‘My mobile number,’ he explained when Alexa could only stare in blank confusion. ‘You’ll need it when you ring me.’

  When, Alexa noted. Not if. He was totally sure of himself, and of her, totally in control. She had never felt more like a stiff, wooden puppet, dancing at the command of the man who pulled the strings.

  In a moment of petty rebellion she refused to take the card he offered, her chin coming up defiantly as her eyes locked with his until he gave a small bark of harsh laughter and tossed it down onto the arm of the settee.

  ‘You’ll need it,’ he said implacably. ‘Call me.’

  He was turning away as he spoke, fastening his coat and turning his collar up high against the weather outside. Weather that was getting worse by the second if the wail of the wind howling round the cottage was anything to go by. It seemed amazing to Alexa that she hadn’t noticed the way it sounded before, but then she had been—distracted was all she would admit to herself.

  She hesitated over insisting that Santos should leave when she saw just what conditions were like outside as she opened the door. Not only had the wind increased in both speed and power, buffeting the trees so that they swayed wildly and dangerously in its force, but the rain was lashing down too and some of it was in the form of icy hailstones, battering the few straggly plants in her garden.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’

  ‘What’s this, Alexa?’ Santos mocked. ‘Concern? I’m a big boy …’

  ‘I know you are,’ Alexa snapped, unsettled by both concern for his safety and the fact that she felt it, her stomach clenching unexpectedly at the thought of him having to drive in these appalling conditions. ‘Big enough and ugly enough. But I wouldn’t put a dog out in this.’

  ‘I’ll survive.’

  He shrugged off her concern in a way that, strangely, only made her feel so much worse. From wanting him gone, needing the peace of her home to herself, free from his unsettling presence so that she could contact her father and find out just what was going on, she had veered towards a feeling that she should not let him go. What if something happened to him? The night was closing in and the road towards the village was very badly lit. Its surface was pitted and rough and, even if he knew its twists and turns well as she did, she feared that driving it in these conditions would be an ordeal.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said suddenly, spinning round to face Santos, only to realise that he had already left her side, that he was opening the car door, sliding into the driving seat.

  For a moment she considered running after him. She even lifted her hand to wave, to beg him to stop, but the roar of the car’s powerful engine had her dropping it down to her side again.

  Santos wouldn’t stay to please her, to calm her fears. Why would he want to? And wouldn’t admitting to those worries give him more of a hold over her, knowing that she cared? And so she forced herself to stand there and watch as Santos put the car into gear and set off down the road away from the cottage.

  It was unnerving seeing the way that the vehicle was pounded by the fearsome winds, once even knocked to the side by the force of the gale, but Santos quickly regained control. A moment later he had reached a turn in the road, and even the rear lights of the car had disappeared from sight. As she watched them go, another wild flurry of rain and hail lashed at her face, making her shiver in miserable response. It really was a vile night, and somehow with Santos gone it seemed darker, colder and bleaker than ever.

  Talk to your father, Alexa. Santos’s voice sounded in her head, reminding her of what she must do, and with another shiver, one she wasn’t at all sure was completely physical, she turned and hurried back inside, letting the door swing to behind her as she moved to pick up the phone.

  CHAPTER TEN

  DID ALEXA MONTAGUE really not know what was going on, or was she playing some more complicated, carefully planned game along with the rest of her family?

  The question nagged at Santos’s thoughts as he drove away from the cottage, distracting him dangerously from the control of his car. He really needed all his concentration in the appalling weather conditions.

  But in spite of the fact that he knew he should think of driving and nothing else it was impossible to stop his thoughts drifting back over the time he had spent in the cottage, and the images of Alexa as she had been then.

  He wanted to recall the things she had said, how she had spoken them, and most importantly how she had looked as she’d reacted to him or answered his questions. He needed to be able to interpret her facial expressions, her body language, to try to understand just what was going on here, but the problem was that the memories he needed were not the ones he could recall most easily.

  Instead, the images that flooded his mind were ones from that night in Seville, sensuous, erotic, doubly distracting. In his mind’s eye he could see again the way that Alexa had looked when he kissed her. He could have sworn that he could still taste the essence of her on his lips, and if he licked them to ease their sudden dryness it was as if he had only just lifted his mouth from hers, a memory that set his heart pounding and made the hunger of sensual need clutch at his loins.

  Once again he lived through the moment of looking down at her as she lay under him on the bed, seeing the long strands of her soft brown hair spread out on the pillows around her head. Her eyes had been the deep dark green of a mossy pool, her lips blushing pink in response to the pressure of his kisses. The soft scent of her skin had been all around him, blending with some delicately floral perfume that still lingered in his nostrils even though he was already so far away from her. And under the weight of his own body, her soft curves had been a warm, sensual delight, her breasts just perfectly filling his hands

  ‘Maldito sea, no!�
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  Savagely he cursed aloud, dragging his thoughts back to the present and the hellish road he was trying to negotiate in the pitch-darkness. Even the beam of his headlights was blurred and distorted by the lashing rain and the savage hailstorm.

  And the focus of his thoughts was no clearer. He wanted to be able to think without letting sensual hunger distract him from what mattered. But the truth was that where Alexa was concerned there was no hope of thinking of anything other than the aching sexual hunger she woke in him simply by existing. Even now he was hot and hard just thinking of her, remembering the way she had responded to him, her soft moans when he had touched her, the way she had given herself up to his caresses.

  But had he let that primitive need, that most basic of male appetites, blind him to anything else? Was she truly as innocent as she sometimes seemed, or just pretending to be unaware of the set-up that the supposed wedding had been? And if so, was she—?

  ‘Hell and damnation!’

  The raw, ragged creaking sound alerted him just in time. At the very last possible minute he saw the way that a large tree on the edge of the road was waving more wildly in the wind than all the others. The ominous noise came again, louder this time, audible even above the wail of the wind, and with a terrible wrenching, splintering sound the great trunk split apart and started to fall.

  ‘Madre de Dios!’

  Fingers clenched hard over the steering wheel until his knuckles showed white, he swung it sharply to the left, slamming his foot down on the brakes hard at the same time. He could only pray that he had reacted fast enough as a sound like roaring, deafening thunder crashed through the air.

  Alexa pressed the off switch on the phone and set it back down in its holder with a sigh. This was the second time she’d got the answering machine’s automated voice asking her to ‘leave a message after the tone’ and there was no way that she could say what she needed to say to her father in an impersonal recording. The best thing she could do was to leave a request for him to ring her back as soon as he got in from wherever he’d gone.

  And she’d hope and pray that that would be soon. She had very little belief that Santos would stay away for long. Or that he would wait for her to phone him to say he should come back. Santos Cordero was not a man who waited around for anyone’s permission to do anything he wanted to do.

  The thought had barely faded from her mind when the front door was pushed open suddenly, making her jump like a startled cat, and, as if conjured up by her reflections, Santos himself strode into the hallway in a flurry of wind and hail.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  Irritation at his blatant disregard of her demand that he should not return until she asked him to warred with the unwanted but uncontrollable leap of her heart at the sight of him to create a volatile mood in which she didn’t know what she should be feeling and why.

  ‘Getting out of the wind and rain,’ was the laconic reply as he raked one hand through the black hair that had been blown over his forehead, pushing it back away from his face.

  The howling gale had messed the normally sleek black hair wildly and sparkled it with raindrops and the cold had made his skin glow, the silvery eyes gleaming brilliantly. He had never looked so vividly, so vibrantly alive and the sight of him sent a rush of blood through every vein, bringing with it a flurry of memories of how it had felt to be in his arms, his kisses on her mouth, his hands caressing her skin. She could feel the hot blood flood her cheeks and prayed he would take it as being put there by anger at his reappearance.

  ‘I told you not to come back unless I phoned you. I didn’t phone you.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that …’ Santos began but, launched on this mood of indignation, Alexa found that she much preferred it to the wildly fluctuating feelings she had had as he walked through the door and so she let it carry her onwards, speaking over his words without really listening.

  ‘So what are you doing back here? Walking into the house as if you owned the place. I thought you had things to do—phone calls to make …’

  ‘I do!’ Santos declared in exasperation when she finally drew enough breath to let him get a word in edgeways. ‘And believe me I would have left if I could. Trailing back here in this gale was not exactly my first choice of how to do things.’

  ‘Then why—?’

  ‘I had no choice, Alexa!’ he flung at her coldly. ‘There was nothing else I could do!’

  ‘Nothing else? Do you think I’ll believe that? When you’ve come sneaking back here …’

  ‘I did not sneak.’

  ‘… riding roughshod over what I said I wanted—probably with some other plan to get me into your bed. Do you think I can’t see through you? Oh, come on—’

  But she never completed the sentence, breaking off in shock as Santos lurched forward to grab hold of her arm.

  ‘No, you come on!’

  Before she quite knew what was happening he had grabbed her coat from the hooks on the wall and wrapped it round her.

  ‘You have your shoes on? Good.’

  ‘Santos …’

  She struggled to pull away but he held her close, huddling her against the protection of his chest with one arm as with his free hand he wrenched open the door and headed out into the fury of the gale.

  ‘Santos!’ Alexa protested as the icy winds bruised her face, making her flinch back.

  But a moment later the discomfort eased as she found that he had manoeuvred the hard bulk of his body so that it shielded her from the worst of the elements, pulling part of his coat around her too as extra protection. She was snug and safe in a special cocoon, one in which the heat of his body reached her even through her clothes, and the scent of his skin surrounded her, warm and musky against the bite of the freezing wind.

  In the space of a couple of heartbeats she had forgotten her discomfort, forgotten her annoyance, forgotten everything but the wonderful safe, secure feeling she had being held so close to him, his arm around her shoulders, his chest against her arm, his hip rubbing hers as he strode furiously down the pitted road in the direction in which she had seen him drive just a short time before.

  Another couple of moments more and that safe and secure feeling had given way to something new and very different. In spite of the weather she was almost too warm in her cocoon, her body heated by the heavy pulse of her own blood as it thundered in primitive response to the touch of his hand, the movement of his powerful body. The memory of all that hard maleness crushing her beneath him on the bed, the burning force of his erection pressed into her pelvis, made her mouth dry and blurred her eyes so that she had to be grateful for Santos’s control, the surefooted way he guided her along the gloomy path. The impulse to stop, to turn in those strong arms, and drag his handsome head down to hers, to crush her lips to his in a hungry, yearning kiss, was almost overwhelming and she actually welcomed the lash of the rain in her face as it forced her to keep a hold on reality.

  ‘There.’

  Santos came to an abrupt halt, jolting her out of her heated daydream, sending her sensual thoughts flying as he flung out a hand in an emphatic gesture to draw her attention to the scene before her.

  ‘See …’

  ‘What am I looking at—what—? Oh!’

  Her question choked off on a cry of shock and distress as she saw what was before her; what he wanted her to see.

  The car in which Santos had driven off now stood at a crazy angle, half on the road and half on the grass verge at the edge of it, where it had obviously swerved violently to avoid something. And it was the something that brought the distress into her voice, making her eyes widen in stunned horror as they focused on the broken, splintered trunk of an enormous tree that had come crashing down in the storm and now lay right across the road, blocking the way completely. Several of the smaller branches had broken off and were scattered around the place, and one large, heavy one had actually crashed into the side-window of the vehicle, splintering the glass where it had landed.
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br />   ‘That’s why you—you couldn’t leave—you crashed.’

  Her voice quavered badly on the last word. Somehow actually saying it made it all the more real, all the more disturbing and it brought back the dreadful feeling she had had when she had seen him drive away, the fear that something might happen—something like this.

  She found she was trembling all over and not from the cold. Not any more.

  Just looking at the car she realised what a narrow escape Santos had had. Another metre or two further forward and his car would have been directly in the line of the tree as it fell. The weight of the huge trunk would have flattened the vehicle—and its driver. The thought of Santos with his strong body crushed and broken sent fearful shudders running through her, her legs seeming to turn to water.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  In the shadowy night she turned to him, trying to recall how he had looked when he had arrived back at the house. Dishevelled, windswept, wet—but uninjured.

  He had been unhurt, hadn’t he? She had been too taken aback, too irritated to look closely. She wouldn’t have noticed if there had been anything wrong.

  ‘Santos—are you hurt? Did the tree …?’

  The horror of the possibilities overcame her again and hot tears stung at her eyes so that she had to blink furiously as she tried to focus on his handsome face. Acting purely on instinct, she lifted a hand, fingers shaking, and pressed it to his cheek, needing to feel his warmth, know his strength, and know that nothing terrible had happened to him.

  ‘Tell me you’re not hurt.’

  ‘I’m fine … Truly I am—I got out of the car just in time. Alexa …’

  His hand, warm and strong and comforting, came up to cover hers where it lay against his cheek, pressing it softly so that she was trapped between the two different types of skin. The hardness of his palm and the softer flesh of his face where the evening’s growth of stubble was already starting to show and it pricked at her own palm with a faint roughness that made her fingers want to curve tight against it.