His Suitable Bride

by Cathy Williams/Abby Green/Kate Walker

  The smile that the memory of that desire had brought to her face still lingered as she turned slowly and indolently over in the warmth of the bed, luxuriating in the comfort, the relaxation, even the faint ache of muscles and parts of her body that had received so much attention during the night. And would soon receive that same attention all over again. All she had to do was to rouse Santos from his sleep and …

  ‘Santos!’

  The smile faded from her lips, his name escaping on a cry of shock and horror, and she came fully wide awake in a rush as she took in the sight before her.

  Santos was lying on his stomach, with his face buried in the pillow, the burnished jet of his hair in stark contrast to the crisp white cotton of the covers. The quilt had fallen down to lie across his narrow waist, leaving his long, muscular back exposed. And what brought the sound of shock and horror to Alexa’s lips was the sight of several ugly scars that marred the surface of the beautiful olive skin. There was one high up on his right shoulder, another two lower down, close to his spine. All three were just about identical, almost perfectly circular and slightly indented into the skin. Alexa winced at the ugliness of them, the fact that they were clearly old and had not been made recently doing nothing to reduce her distress at the sight.

  ‘Santos!’ she said again, reaching out an uncertain hand to touch him softly.

  She knew that he was awake and that he’d heard her because of a faint twitch of his dark head, and the way his back tensed under her fingertips, every muscle drawing suddenly tight. But he didn’t look up, didn’t turn towards her.

  ‘What happened?’

  For a long couple of seconds she thought that he wasn’t going to answer and her heart slammed against her ribcage as she waited tensely for his reaction. But then at last he let out his breath in a long, deep sigh and pushed himself suddenly upright, twisting round so that he was sitting with his back against the bed head, the ugly scars hidden from view.

  ‘If you don’t want …’ Alexa began, suddenly afraid that she had intruded where he didn’t want her to be, crossing over some invisible line that she hadn’t even been aware had been drawn between her and the part of his life that he wanted to keep private.

  ‘No …’

  With one hand he waved away her concern, but his eyes remained fixed straight ahead of him, staring unfocused at some spot on the far wall.

  ‘It’s OK. It happened long ago. Almost thirty years.’

  ‘Thirty … you were a child?’

  Santos nodded slowly, still not looking at her. She was sure that he wasn’t actually looking at anything but staring into the distance, seeing only his memories.

  And whatever those memories were, the tension in his face, the frown that drew the black brows together declared only too clearly that they were far from happy ones.

  ‘You remember that I told you my mother didn’t know who my father was?’

  Silently Alexa nodded, afraid to speak, afraid she would distract him.

  She gave birth to me, that is all, he had said. I doubt if mi madre even knew who my father was. He could have been any one of a dozen possible candidates.

  ‘She had no way of knowing which of the men she had been with in the right month or so actually was my father. But she wanted to be on her way, wanted to leave for the new life she was sure was going to be hers in Argentina, with her current man—another new man. Someone who did not want a child, particularly not one fathered by someone else. So mi madre left me with mi padre …’

  ‘But you said she didn’t know …’ It burst from Alexa before she realised just what he had said, what the appallingly cynical emphasis he had given the words mi padre implied.

  ‘She didn’t know,‘ he said now, bringing his knees up under the covers and resting his elbows on them, his face cupped in his hands. ‘She just chose one at random—anyone—the closest one to hand. She left me on his doorstep with a note.’

  ‘She left you …’

  In spite of the warmth of the room, the soft comfort of the downy quilt, Alexa felt shiveringly cold, her blood suddenly ice in her veins. She tried to imagine a small boy, lost, lonely, abandoned, sitting on a doorstep, waiting for the man who might be his father to open the door. Watching his mother walk away from him. All at once she felt she could begin to understand just why he had declared so obdurately that he didn’t believe in love.

  ‘How could she do it?’

  ‘I’m sure she saw it as the perfect solution.’

  Bleak and unemotional, the blank statement slashed at Alexa in a way that any more savage declaration could never do. Santos’s total lack of feeling somehow, his apparent detachment, made everything so much worse than if he had shouted or sworn.

  ‘It was too bad that the poor bastard she left me with did not feel the same.’

  Flinging back the bedclothes, Santos swung his long legs out of the bed, getting to his feet. As he paced across the room, Alexa couldn’t help but stare at the beautiful, lean, strong shape of his body, the powerful legs, tight buttocks, the long, sleek line of his back. Last night she had caressed that body, her hands had clung to his shoulders, fingers digging into his back in the throes of ecstasy.

  Last night she hadn’t known those scars were there.

  Today she could not look away from them.

  ‘What happened?’

  Her voice croaked embarrassingly. She didn’t really want to know, but she knew that she had to find out. Having come this far, there was no turning back.

  ‘What happened?’

  He actually sounded as if he was considering the question. As if he was trying to remember what had happened because it was buried in the mists of time. Alexa had no doubt at all that the truth was the exact opposite. That he remembered far, far too well. And because of that, his pretence at hesitation made the sensation of something vile and slimy sliding over her skin.

  ‘Santos—don’t,’ she tried but he wasn’t listening.

  ‘He kept me—for a while. He thought I might be useful around the house.’

  ‘What could you do? You were what—three?’

  ‘Just. But he did not know much about kids. He thought I would be better at the jobs he wanted done than I was. He hated it when I was slow or clumsy. He hated it especially when he’d been drinking. When he had been drinking then he was impatient—and mean.’

  ‘Santos, what did he do?’

  Santos swung round to face her so that she could no longer see the scars on his back. But she still knew they were there. And even if she had tried to forget them then the hard, tight set of his face would have been a painful reminder whenever she looked at him.

  ‘When he drank, he also smoked heavily. If I got in the way—or was slow …’

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Alexa knew that her face must have revealed how much she understood. How she knew exactly what he was trying to say. And how she wished that she didn’t.

  Oh, no, no, no, no!

  In her mind’s eye she was seeing again those scars, the round shape of them, and at the same time her horrified imagination was showing a smoking, glowing cigarette tip.

  ‘Oh, dear God!’

  ‘And the other scar—the one on your hand …?’ She couldn’t finish the question.

  ‘Yes,’ was all Santos said. It was all he needed to say. There was no way she wanted him to expand on the simple syllable.

  It was no wonder he didn’t believe in love. No wonder he trusted no one, believed in no one. How could he believe in something that he had never learned? Something that no one had ever shown him existed? After a betrayal—betrayals—like that, he must believe that he was unlovable himself, that no one would ever love him.

  Her mind went back to Santos’s declaration that she should marry him—there was no way that she could call it a proposal. Of course he couldn’t couch that in terms of love, she saw that now.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I ran away as soon as I could. I ended up
in a children’s home.’

  ‘And didn’t you tell anyone?’

  ‘What would have been the point? It was in the past—I’d got away.’

  Santos was moving around the room, collecting up his clothes, restoring order. She couldn’t help wondering if he was doing the same in his mind as well.

  ‘And later I’d heard that he’d died—an overdose. There was nothing to be gained from going back over it. I moved on.’

  He’d moved on, but he’d taken the scars with him. Scars on his mind as well as on his body. And although he said he’d put it behind him, it was still there. Still darkening his life, still making it impossible for him to build a loving relationship. But he had opened up to her. He had told her the terrible story of his childhood. Was she a fool to read something into that?

  ‘I’d like to take a shower.’ Santos’s voice, all practicality and matter-of-fact tone, intruded into her thoughts.

  While she had been absorbed in thinking over what he had been saying, interpreting it, finding possible repercussions that might result from it, he had been getting his life back under control. His clothes—and hers—were off the floor and on the bed, and now he wanted a shower. His day was going to begin, it seemed, with everything as normal and the uncomfortable revelations he had made now tidily put away.

  ‘Of course …’

  The way she had been feeling when she had woken this morning she would have suggested that she join him, that they make the shower a way of continuing the sensual pleasure of the night. But there was no way she dared do that now. The mood was gone, every last trace of sensuality between them evaporated as if it had never been. Santos didn’t even have a smile for her now. In fact, he never so much as glanced at her as he snatched up his clothes and headed for the bathroom. A few moments later she heard the sound of the shower water pounding down and it was impossible not to wonder if he was determined to wash the scent of her from his body, sluice away all traces of the night they had shared and so erase it from his memory as well.

  And yet he had opened up to her …

  Why the hell had he opened up to her?

  Santos stood under the shower, the force turned up to the highest it would go, and let the water pound down onto his skull as he went back over what had just happened. Alexa had seen the scars and, inevitably, had asked about them. It had happened before. Other women had seen the marks on his back and some had asked about them.

  But he had never answered anyone truthfully before.

  Every other time he had fobbed them off with some vague murmur about an accident. Nothing precise; nothing revealing. And they had been satisfied with that. As he had been satisfied with not revealing too much about himself.

  But this time it had not been like that. This time he had had to tell the whole damn story. The one he had never let anyone in on before. Alexa would not have let him fob her off; he knew that. And he had shocked her to hell. He’d seen it in her eyes, in the way that that mossy hazel gaze had widened, darkened in horror. He’d shocked himself too with the realisation of how much he had wanted to tell her, how much he had wanted her to know about him.

  And he had never felt more exposed in his life.

  Being naked in a woman’s bedroom wasn’t a new experience. He had had his share of lovers over the years, but this was the first time that he had actually felt naked. And it wasn’t a feeling he liked.

  In fact if the truth was told, he had been feeling this way from the moment he had met Alexa at the party before the wedding. She hadn’t been at all what he had been expecting, and one look at her had rocked his sense of reality, the way he had felt about life.

  If only she had been the daughter he was going to marry. The thought had shot through his head even as he had held out his hand in greeting and felt it taken in hers. If she had been the sister he was to marry then the whole marriage deal would have been a very different prospect. But he was committed, the wedding was planned, and so he had forced himself to hold back, to give nothing away.

  And now Alexa was the sister whose hand in marriage was offered as part of the deal. Her bastard of a father had quite happily agreed to his other daughter being a replacement for the one who had run out on him on the wedding day. Anything to save his own cowardly skin. And if Alexa truly was as innocent as he suspected then learning that would have been almost as devastating for her as the way that his own parent had walked out on him.

  He pushed his head back under the shower, lifting his face up to the force of the water and slicking back his hair with hard fingers that dug into his skull as he tried to close off his mind to the unsettled, restless thoughts that plagued him day and night. There was only one thing he was sure of and that was that he had no intention of letting this Montague daughter run out on him.

  This one he was going to make sure of. This one he wanted willing. And after last night he felt sure that willing was exactly what she would be.

  The telephone was ringing somewhere downstairs as he opened the bathroom door and he heard Alexa running down the stairs as she went to answer it. Santos followed her down, buttoning up his shirt as he went but leaving it hanging loose over the waistband of his jeans.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked as he passed her in the hall just as she reached the phone. She had pulled on a pale blue cotton robe and was belting it around her waist as she picked up the receiver.

  ‘Mmm …’

  Her reply was distracted, her attention on the phone.

  ‘Dad!’

  Of course. He’d told her to speak to her father. But, maldito sea, he thought she’d done that last night. She’d been on the phone when he’d come back to the house. He’d really believed that everything was out in the open then. Now it seemed that that assumption might have been completely wrong.

  Alexa had known that it had to be her father on the phone as soon as she’d heard it ringing. She’d asked him to ring her back as soon as he got her message and this was obviously him doing just that.

  Talk to your father, Santos had said. And she’d planned to do that, determined to do that before she ever saw him again. But last night fate had intervened—she hadn’t been able to get through to her father, and Santos had come back to the house so unexpectedly …

  So would anything have changed if she’d spoken to her father first? Her heart skipped a beat as she asked herself the question. She had let things run away with her last night. Was she going to have to regret being so impulsive? Had she made a terrible mistake?

  How bad could it be?

  ‘Dad, I need to talk to you …’

  But her father wasn’t listening.

  ‘Have you seen him? Have you seen Santos Cordero? He said he was on his way to you.’

  ‘He’s—’ Alexa began but her father cut right across her, wanting to speak first, determined to make her listen.

  So she listened. And with every word that came from her father’s mouth she felt more of the blood draining from her face, the strength leaving her legs until she sagged against the wall for support.

  How bad could it be? she had asked herself. And the answer to that was it could be the worst. The very worst.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALEXA HAD NO idea how long her father had been talking before he finally ground to a halt. She only knew that when he did she barely had enough strength or mental ability to say anything in reply. She could only manage something vague and unformed, something along the lines of yes, she understood. Yes, she saw that he had had no possible alternative, not one that would solve the situation, keep her stepmother from a total breakdown and himself out of gaol.

  Out of gaol.

  There it was. There was the very worst-case scenario summed up right there. She had always known that her father could be totally selfish, the wife he was devoted to even worse—but this!

  Because of his own stupid actions—his stupid, illegal actions—Stanley Montague had risked not only his home and his income but also his own freedom. If Santos had prosecuted hi
m then he would be in prison right now.

  But the prosecution was still only a threat as long as Santos Cordero got what he wanted. And what he wanted was a link to the Montague name through marriage.

  He had meant every single word he said when he had announced that her family owed him a wife.

  I’ve come for you.

  And all the time she listened to her father explaining and apologising, she knew that Santos was waiting in the kitchen with his coffee and his knowing smile. And his damn hateful, arrogant conviction that he had her right where he wanted her.

  Or so he thought.

  But he did, didn’t he? He had her exactly where he wanted her. Where he’d always wanted her right from the very start. He had her trapped, with nowhere to turn, no way out, no possible answer. Not unless she let everyone down, ruined her whole family, very likely drove her stepmother into a mental breakdown.

  And sent her father to gaol for embezzlement.

  There, now she’d admitted it to herself. Because that was what her father had admitted to her in the phone call. That he had been stupid, totally, crazily foolish. He’d squandered every last penny the Montague family owned—with a lot of help from her greedy, grasping stepmother, Alexa had no doubt. And then, to make matters worse, he’d ‘borrowed’ some money from a business deal he had been supposed to be planning, with Santos Cordero as his partner.

  Alexa shook her head in despair, raking both hands through the fall of her hair and then rubbing the palms over her aching eyes. Only her father could call embezzling funds that had been meant for a business deal ‘borrowing.’ Only her father could have then spent that money, sending good money after bad, and so ended up in this terrible position.

  And putting her into a far worse one.

  She knew that her father’s weakness, his selfishness, should hurt her. That his betrayal of her to Santos should wound her terribly. But the truth was that nothing her father said or did could touch her because there wasn’t a spot on her heart that Santos hadn’t already devastated. And Santos’s callousness hurt far more than anything else.