His Suitable Bride

by Cathy Williams/Abby Green/Kate Walker

‘No? Are you saying no, we should not be straight with each other or no, let us not play games?’

  ‘I’m saying no, this can’t be happening. No, it doesn’t make sense—none of it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  There was no way she could escape the fierce, intensely focused burn of his watchful eyes. They were fixed on her face as she spoke, observing every tiny flicker of emotion across her features, every change of mood, every sign of uncertainty and confusion. Watching her so coldly and unwaveringly that she felt as if she were some small, defenceless harvest mouse, cowering in a corner of a field, vulnerable and exposed and praying desperately that the cruel, hunting eyes of a hovering bird of prey would somehow pass over her and let her escape.

  But Santos was clearly in no mood to ease up on her. He had no intention of letting her get away.

  ‘To me it makes perfect sense. What is wrong with what I am saying? Why can it not make sense?’ Santos enquired with a softness that stunned her as it was so much in contrast to the burn of his gaze.

  ‘Because there is no way you can claim that you want me as your wife.’

  It must all be a pretence. Some sort of dark, twisted game. One that he was playing deliberately to make her squirm, to make her burn up in embarrassment.

  ‘No way that you can say that you came here for that.’

  ‘And why not, hmm?’ Santos shot back.

  ‘Because—because I’m not Natalie!’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that? And do you not realise that that is exactly what makes this arrangement so much better in my eyes?’

  Had he just paid her a huge compliment, or flung another insult in her face? Alexa couldn’t decide and her brain felt too bruised and muddled to work it out.

  ‘How can I want you as my wife? Why not? I told you this before and you reacted as if I had thrown a live snake into your face. As if I had given you the worst possible insult.’

  ‘You had.’

  Anger at the memory of that appalling moment brought a new strength to Alexa’s voice, bringing her chin up defiantly, hazel eyes blazing into his cold silvery ones.

  ‘My proposal of marriage was an insult to you?’ He actually sounded shocked, as if she was the one who had insulted him.

  ‘It wasn’t so much a proposal as a demand that I could take Natalie’s place. One Montague sister was as good as another, you said.’

  And was that really why he was here now? To suggest once again that she could replace her sister as his bride? Her brain threatened to blow a fuse simply at the thought.

  But would he have come all this way if she was simply a replacement? Or was she being totally weak and stupid to allow herself to dream that perhaps, after all, she had made some impact on him? That he hadn’t been able to forget her as she had found it totally impossible to get the image of his dark, stunning face, those pale eyes and the beautifully accented voice out of her mind.

  ‘I was angry when I said that. In that I was wrong.’

  Santos’s response brought her head up sharply, shocked hazel eyes looking into cool grey ones.

  ‘Is that meant to be an apology?’

  ‘It is the truth. I never wanted your sister as I want you. And if she had run to some strange little cottage in the wilds of Yorkshire, then I would have thought twice about following her.’

  ‘It’s not a strange …’ Alexa began but then the realisation of just what he had said sank into her numbed brain. ‘Is that the truth too?’

  ‘Why should I lie to you, belleza? That is exactly the point.’

  His gaze still held hers as he spoke, his eyes so deep and clear that she felt they were like a still, smooth pool in which she risked drowning, going in over her head completely.

  ‘And precisely just what point is that?’

  The look Santos turned on her questioned the justification for her fury, seeming to wonder just why she was overreacting in this way, which of course only added fuel to the fire, making her breath hiss in between clenched teeth, her eyes sparking fury as they glared into his.

  ‘I would have thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Not to me it isn’t! So tell me exactly what point you were trying to make.’

  Santos moved to fling himself down onto one of the small settees, pushed both hands through the dark sleekness of his hair as he lounged back against the multicoloured cushions on the settee, infuriatingly at his ease.

  ‘In Spain you said there was no way you could marry me because we had never even kissed,’ Santos pointed out with exasperating calm. ‘I simply put that right. But I suspected—knew—that there would be more to it than that. And I was proved right.’

  Alexa feared that her head might actually burst open under the pressure of the outrage and fury that was pounding through her. She could have very little doubt as to just what sort of ‘more’ to it there was in what Santos was implying.

  ‘I told you that I never slept with Natalie and you asked—’

  ‘If you believed that if she’d once experienced your love-making she’d never want to get away from you. That she would have become so addicted that she’d have to stay around for more,’ Alexa put in angrily when he hesitated, seeming not to be able to remember just what she had said.

  Too late she realised that she had fallen head first right into the trap that she hadn’t even noticed he was digging for her.

  ‘I never thought that would be the case with Natalie,’ Santos drawled, actually having the nerve to smile up at her as he spoke. ‘But I knew how it would be with you. That if I touched you, you would go up in flames.’

  Alexa’s only response was a furious hiss, like a hostile snake. She tried to find something coherent to say but every single line escaped her and there was no way any words would form.

  ‘And I was right. Which means that I’ve made it so much easier for you.’

  ‘Easier!’ The word exploded from Alexa’s tongue, all the anger, the disbelief she was feeling rolled up into the three short syllables. ‘Easier, precisely how?’

  Santos struggled against the smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. He knew it would only incense her further, her fury giving away just how much he had got to her, which was exactly what he wanted. He wanted her off balance—on edge—just as he was feeling right now.

  There was no way he was going to let her know just how he too had gone up in flames that night; the hell of frustration he’d been going through ever since. The hell he was still experiencing as his aroused body yelled a furious protest at being held back like this, at being deprived of the pleasure and satisfaction it had been anticipating all the way here. The pleasure and satisfaction that had been in his mind from the moment that Alexa had opened the door. Or even before that. As he had driven up the narrow, rutted road that led from the village to this cottage, the image of Alexa that had haunted his dreams and driven him to distraction in the day had been there in his mind, taunting him, tempting him, arousing him.

  And once he had seen her in the flesh again, looking so appealing in the casual red sweater and denim jeans, her hair a soft cloud around her face, he had known that he could never leave again without having her in his bed, without knowing that slender body intimately once more. The problem was that he suspected that ‘once more’ would never, ever be enough and the way that his arousal nagged at him reinforced that idea in a painful way.

  ‘You know how the sex was between us—how it will be again. And so you can see that our marriage will be good for both of us—’

  ‘It will not be good for me—for either of us—because we are not getting married! I will not just replace Natalie as your bride.’

  ‘No,’ Santos agreed with feeling, knowing that he had shocked her by doing so, leaving her gaping faintly in surprise.

  Feeling he might be more comfortable standing up, he got to his feet, that temptation to smile surfacing again as he saw the way her eyes sparked and she edged away like a nervous horse. If only she realised just how much she was giving
away by her unthinking action.

  ‘You will not just replace Natalie in any way because I never felt this way about her. My relationship with her never had this heat, or this intensity.’

  Oh, how she wished that he would stop saying things like that, Alexa told herself. She didn’t want to hear them, didn’t want to believe them.

  And yet they were the things she most wanted to hear in the whole world.

  The thought that a man—this man—this devastatingly handsome, stunning man—might actually prefer her to her sister, that she might have an effect on him that all Natalie’s blonde beauty had never managed, made her head spin and her nerves fizz with purely feminine excitement.

  ‘We’d be good together, Alexa.’

  Hastily she dragged her weak thoughts back from the enticing path they were tempted to follow. A path that might lead to some immediate pleasure, a sort of satisfaction, but one that would never last and that would only leave her so much more lost and bereft when it was over. She had always vowed that she would never lurch into some half-formed or just plain bad idea of a liaison simply because of the attraction she felt.

  But oh, if there was ever a man who could tempt her to go back on that resolve then that man was Santos Cordero.

  As he stood before her, black hair mussed, silvery eyes gleaming, his half-fastened shirt revealing part of the olive-toned chest she had once caressed and kissed, the man was temptation personified. He was the handsome, irresistible, seductive snake in the Garden of Eden. And he had made no secret of how much he wanted her.

  Dear heaven, but she was tempted. Just for once she wanted to let go of all common sense, throw off the restraints she had imposed on herself and enjoy the fizzing, burning, wild, crazy excitement a hot-blooded, purely sexual affair could bring.

  But even as she thought them, the words wild and crazy hit home, forcing her to reconsider. Wild and crazy was not part of her make-up and never would be.

  ‘Good together in bed maybe—but that’s no reason to get married!’

  ‘Is it not? To me it seems like one of the best reasons there is.’

  ‘But we don’t even like each other—except in that way.’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  Santos shrugged off her protest with a lazy lift of his shoulders.

  ‘I know many married couples who openly detest each other and they stay together because of their lifestyle and the fact that one partner is providing what the other one enjoys. At least we would have the passion as well.’

  ‘And that would be enough for you?’

  ‘It would be a damn good place to start.’

  To start.

  No, she was not going to allow herself to read anything into that. Hadn’t he stated openly and bluntly that he didn’t believe in love; that he never had and never would?

  ‘Why don’t you believe in love?’ she asked suddenly, unable to fight the burning curiosity that overcame her, though she was almost as stunned as he looked to hear her actually voice the question out loud.

  But whatever surprise Santos had felt he very soon recovered from, the look of shock fading rapidly from his pale eyes to be replaced by a coldly cynical scorn.

  ‘I have seen no evidence that it exists.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ There was no way she could let him get away with that. No one could get to the age of thirty-three without ever seeing love in some shape or form. ‘You must have!’

  ‘Must I?’

  The enquiry was so calm, so matter-of-fact, almost throwaway, that it sent a shivery sensation over her skin, warning her that she was dealing with something here that she had never encountered in her life before.

  ‘Well, surely your parents …?’

  Santos’s response was a snarl of such bitter, humourless laughter that it made her blood run cold just to hear it.

  ‘Definitely not my parents. There too was a couple who did not need to love each other in order to create another life.’

  ‘Your mother must have loved you,’ Alexa hazarded, her heart suddenly seeming to beat high up in a throat that was tight with tension, making it almost impossible to force the question out past the constriction.

  The icily burning look that Santos turned on her from those amazing eyes threatened to shrivel her to dust right where she stood and it took all her mental courage to stay where she was and not turn tail and run.

  ‘Even if my mother had stayed around long enough to get to know me, I doubt if she would ever have felt anything like the way that love is described in fiction or fairy stories. To be strictly honest, I would find it hard to believe that she would have felt anything at all.’

  ‘But she was your mother!’

  ‘She gave birth to me, es todo.’

  If there was any feeling behind the cold, set mask that was Santos’s face, he was not letting it show. His features might have been carved from marble for all the emotion they revealed, and the glittering eyes had turned as cloudy and opaque as the blank eyeballs of ancient statues.

  ‘And—your father?’

  Alexa didn’t really want to ask the question; she had the nasty feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer one little bit. No one became as cynical as Santos obviously was without good reason, and she was beginning to see that he had more reasons than she had ever suspected.

  ‘My father?’

  The sound of Santos’s laughter made her shrink away inside it was so cold and brutal, and she almost expected to see the words splinter into shards right there on the carpet in front of her.

  ‘I doubt if mi madre even knew who my father was. He could have been any one of a dozen possible candidates. Whoever he was, he certainly did not want to take care of a young boy, either.’

  There was no self-pity in his voice, nothing in it that seemed to ask for any sympathy. Instead he maintained that appalling matter-of-fact tone that made her wince at every word. The stiffness of his long back, the careful blanking off of all expression in his eyes made her want to reach out and touch him, take his hand in hers in an expression of compassion. But even as the thought crossed her mind the immediate recognition of just what his response would be chased it away again.

  He would hate it if she showed any concern for him, and would probably repulse her gesture with a brusque one, though he was so armoured against any sympathy that perhaps it wouldn’t touch him at all. But it was the fear of what any touch might do to her that held her back most strongly. After the incendiary effects of Santos’s caresses and kisses once before, she wasn’t prepared to risk that all over again. She felt as if she had barely escaped unscathed as it was and the danger of putting her hand into the fire all over again was more than she could bear.

  Which reminded her only too sharply of just why he was here in the first place. The cold-blooded declaration he had made on his arrival.

  I’ve come for you …

  She could well believe that he was callous enough to do just that. The man who had declared so openly that he didn’t believe in love and who had only wanted a dynastic marriage to a member of the Montague family—any daughter of the Montague family, it seemed.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how good our one night together was, it was one night and it’s over, I have no intention of repeating it ever again.’

  The look in his eyes, the faint lift of an eyebrow questioned her statement but she ignored it and plunged on.

  ‘I will not marry you. I don’t want anything to do with you.’

  ‘Liar,’ he said softly. ‘Look at what happened when I kissed you.’

  ‘What happened then was lust—it had nothing to do with love.’

  ‘And you need love before you marry?’

  ‘Yes! Yes, I do!’

  ‘Well, forgive me, carina, but I can’t offer you that. But I can offer you a great deal—’

  ‘And I don’t want it. I don’t want anything from you. What?’ she asked as she saw his proud head go back as if in shock, black brows drawing together sharply in a dark frow
n. ‘What have I said?’

  ‘If that is the truth, then I suggest that you talk to your father about this.’

  ‘My father—why?’

  She was thoroughly confused now. There was no reason at all why he should bring her father into this.

  ‘If you really don’t know then he will tell you. It will come better from him.’

  ‘I have no intention of talking to my father. Nothing he can say will make me marry you.’

  ‘Are you sure of that?’

  ‘Positive.’

  Santos seemed to need a couple of seconds to absorb what she had said, and for once his pale eyes were not clear and cold but clouded with something she didn’t understand.

  ‘Do you know why I was going to marry Natalie?’

  ‘Of course—you wanted marriage to found your dynasty of Cordero heirs.’

  That realisation hit home like a blow to her chest, twisting something sharp and deadly in her heart. The image of a child that had Santos as its father, a boy with his dark strength or a girl with a softer, feminine version of that jet-black hair and stunning eyes, floated in her head. Children who would not have learned his cold cynicism and come to deny the idea of love. And children through whom their father might come to see that there was some emotion that he had never known, never understood in the rest of his life.

  ‘And you still do—but you can’t force me to marry you!’

  ‘I promise you that I don’t intend to use force. But you will marry me.’

  ‘No way! Never!’

  The smile that flickered across his lips made her blood run cold, and, even worse, it forced her to look at what she had said, hear it again in her thoughts, and catch the shrillness, the edge of panic in her voice that gave away so much more than was comfortable.

  ‘Is there not a saying about never saying never?’ Santos drawled easily, flashing her that smile once more, but this time there was no charm in it. This time his eyes were pure ice and the curve of his lips was a promise of retribution if she didn’t do things his way.

  ‘There might be, but I think you’ll find that it doesn’t apply to me.’

  ‘Talk to your father, Alexa.’

  It was low, almost soft, but there was a sombre severity about his tone that pulled her up sharp, making her look deep into his face, trying to read something of what was going through his mind in those unfathomable pale eyes. But Santos was giving nothing away. Instead it was as if a heavy metal shutter had clanged to behind his eyes, cutting off everything from her and concealing his thoughts from her totally.