She’d actually opened her mouth to agree, had formed the word ‘yes’ on her tongue when bitter truth hit home once again, forcing her to adjust what she had been about to say.
‘And why do you want to marry me?’
‘Because I want you, damn it!’
Striding swiftly across the room, he caught hold of her hands, held them tightly, both her fists surrounded by his broad palms, his long fingers. His touch was warm and strong and it should have felt comforting, balm to her wounded heart. But the truth was that it felt exactly the opposite, twisting the brutal knife even deeper into her desolated soul.
‘I want you so much that I feel I’ll go mad without you in my life, in my bed. Didn’t last night tell you that?’
‘Last night …’ Alexa began, then broke off, unable to complete the sentence.
Last night I thought you cared, she wanted to say. Last night I thought that when you called me querida you meant it. If last night had been just the beginning then I might have been able to accept it, to think that there was so much more to look forward to, that one day you might come to love me.
But that had been before she had woken up today and seen those scars on his back. Before she had realised how deep the scars on his mind, on his heart had gone. How they had killed every hope there had ever been that Santos could feel love. And today, with every word that he had said he had only dug the grave of those hopes deeper and deeper.
He had wanted her. He still wanted her. But wanting was not love.
It wasn’t enough. Not when she needed so much more from him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘DON’T TELL ME that you didn’t enjoy last night,’ Santos said now, his voice rough and raw, his searing gaze burning into her. ‘Don’t tell me that it wasn’t what you wanted—what you still want. Let me—’
No, Alexa wanted to cry, seeing what was in his eyes, knowing what he intended and wanting desperately to avoid it. But the word was never spoken aloud, pushed back into her throat by the rapid descent of his mouth, the fierce pressure that forced her lips open under his, crushing them in the force of his passion.
And for a moment she yielded. For the space of several frantic heartbeats she could do nothing else. She wanted his kiss, wanted it desperately and although it tore at her wounded heart she couldn’t hold back her response, couldn’t stop herself from putting all her love and her hunger into kissing him back. Feeling it, Santos caught her up in his arms, crushing her closer, taking her mouth with the force of the primitive male passion that had him totally in its grip. And just for a moment or two Alexa let herself enjoy the bitter-sweet delight that it brought her.
But only for a moment or two. The second it went on longer than that the bitter-sweet tipped over into agony, into something she couldn’t bear any longer, not knowing that it was all she could feel. And so, summoning up all the strength she possessed, and some she had no idea she could be capable of, she pressed her hands up against the wall of his chest and pushed as hard as she could, wrenching her mouth away from his with a force that drove her halfway across the room, panting with distress and unable to look him in the face for fear of the cold flames of anger that she knew must burn in his eyes.
‘No!’ she managed at last, her voice cracking desperately under the force of her despair. ‘Last night was—was fun. I enjoyed it, yes. But that’s not all there is to marriage.’
‘It was more than fun.’
Santos too was breathing hard, each breath seeming to rasp rawly in his chest, and his eyes seemed totally colourless, almost translucent above cheeks that had lost all colour in the intensity of his response.
‘It’s what I want from marriage. And I want more of it.’
And so did she, Alexa admitted to herself. So why was she holding out like this? Why should she deny herself this, at least, when it was what she wanted so much?
‘I want more of it too,’ she admitted and watched his head go back sharply in disbelief, seeing something that flashed in his eyes that startled and stunned her.
It amazed her so much that she suddenly had the courage to take a huge chance; to risk everything she had on one enormous gamble. What did she have to lose anyway? There was nothing more that could be taken away from her. It was all or nothing anyway.
‘I’m prepared to share your bed—in fact I’ll enjoy that—but I will not marry you.’
All or nothing. But she knew that she had gambled and lost when she saw how Santos’s expression changed, his face closing up in rejection of what she had said.
‘It’s marriage or nothing,’ he flung at her, a cold, hard verbal challenge.
‘Why are you so insistent on marriage?’
And why did she have to keep asking? Why did she keep laying herself open to the pain she knew that he could inflict with just a word, just a look?
‘You know why. I want children—heirs. And I want you.’
At least he’d spared her the added misery of reminding her that the status the Montague name brought was important to him too. Not that it could make her feel any worse. She had never believed that a heart could break. But she felt now that she knew that it could, cracking into many pieces inside her chest.
He saw something in the look that she gave him, something she couldn’t conceal, no matter how hard she tried.
‘What else do you want?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Don’t ask for something I can’t give you.’
‘Marriage or nothing?’ she said softly, sadly, knowing there was no other answer. At least the pain was so bad that it actually stopped the tears at the backs of her eyes. There was no way she could have endured to let them fall. ‘Then I’m afraid that it has to be nothing.’
If he had argued, she knew she would have gone to pieces. She could fight herself or she could fight him, but she couldn’t contend with them both at once.
But Santos didn’t even try to persuade her into any other frame of mind. Instead with one long, searching look into her face, he turned and went silently out of the room. Standing frozen in misery in the middle of the kitchen, she heard him heading upstairs to fetch his shoes, then come down a few moments later. Far too few moments later, Alexa acknowledged as she watched him grab his coat from the hook in the hall and pull it on before without another word he headed for the door.
Look back at me—just once, Alexa begged him in the privacy of her own thoughts, then immediately contradicted herself, pleading with him not to turn round, knowing it was more than she could bear if she saw his beloved face one more time and saw stamped on it the determination to leave her, never to have loved her.
‘Adios.’ Santos flung the single word over his shoulder as he turned the key in the lock, wrenched open the door. And then, just in case she hadn’t understood, ‘Goodbye, Alexa.’
Goodbye. She let the word form silently on her lips but couldn’t bring herself to say it. Goodbye, my love.
Tears were blurring her eyes and she blinked them fiercely away, needing to be able to see him clearly this one last time. She watched his tall, straight back stiffen, saw him square his shoulders as he prepared to step out into the morning air, cold and still after the wild storms of the night before.
And stared in disbelief as he hesitated, stopped.
‘No lo puedo,‘ he said. ‘I cannot …’
‘You …’
For several long, fraught moments Alexa struggled to find the strength to say anything. She couldn’t see Santos’s face and so she had no idea what thoughts were going through his mind.
‘You can’t—what?’
Slowly he turned to her once again and she could barely recognise his face, the skin was drawn so tightly across his cheekbones, and his eyes were dark with shadows that he didn’t try to hide from her.
‘Don’t ask me to leave. I cannot do it.’
Twice Alexa tried to form the question. Twice her voice broke, failed her, and she had to swallow hard to relieve the tension in her throat. But Santos waited, seeming to understand i
ntuitively just how important this was.
‘Why can’t you do it?’ she managed at last.
‘I can’t leave you.’ It was as simple and as straightforward as that.
‘Santos …’ Alexa began but he lifted up a hand to silence her, his burning eyes intent on her face.
‘No—let me. I’ll give you answers. I don’t know if they are the answers you want but they’re the only ones that I have. Please listen and then …’
He broke off as if unable to say—or to face—what would happen ‘and then …’
And it was the simple fact of the way that Santos, normally the one so totally in control, so totally sure of what he wanted to say, so sure of what should be said, was unable to finish the sentence, was hesitating over what to say next, that kept her frozen, silent, waiting until he could find the words that were needed.
She didn’t know where this was heading. She only knew that Santos had been about to leave and then he had turned back. But he still stood between her and the door, with it hanging wide open behind him. All he had to do was to turn in that direction again, and walk, and she knew she would have lost him. For good.
But for now he was here. And she needed to listen to him.
‘Tell me.’ She spoke softly, knowing there was nothing else she could say.
Santos nodded slowly, drew in a deep, uneven breath.
‘Just over a week ago, I had my life all planned out. I was supposed to be getting married to a woman who would bring me everything I wanted—everything I thought I needed. It was all carefully rationalised, totally under my control …’
And control was what he had needed. The adult male was determined to enforce the control that the little boy who had been abandoned, who had been abused, had never had over his fate.
‘And I knew that it would work. Natalie and I were a well-planned business deal. But I would have treated her well. She would have wanted for nothing. But then …’
He hesitated, raked both hands through his hair, his eyes looking clouded and distant as if he was focusing on something a long way away, something he could barely see.
‘Then at the party before the wedding I met someone else. My bride-to-be’s sister …’
At Alexa’s sudden gasp of surprise those silvery eyes came up to hers in a swift, flashing look, one that focused intently on her face—and stayed there, watching every flicker of emotion that crossed her features, every tiny change of expression.
‘You unsettled me,’ he said, the words breaking on a short, self-deprecatory laugh. ‘You did more than that. I couldn’t take my eyes off you.’
‘Then?’ Alexa breathed in shock.
‘Then,’ Santos confirmed, ‘I’d been told that Natalie was the beauty but you were the dowdy, bookish one, the spinster librarian. I didn’t see any dowdy spinster. I saw someone who intrigued me, someone who caught my eye and held it. Someone …’
He sighed again, shaking his head once more as he recalled those thoughts.
‘Someone I needed to put out of my mind if I was to go ahead with my plans. Those carefully thought-out, businesslike plans. If I gave in to the attraction I felt to you, if I lost control, then everything would be ruined. But then on my wedding day, things didn’t turn out in any way as they were planned. And at the end of the day that should have seen me married, my planning fulfilled, the contracts signed, instead I was in a position where not one but two Montague girls had walked out on me.’
‘I’m sorry …’ Alexa put in but the words faded into nothing as she saw the way he was looking at her. The unexpected light in his eyes.
‘Two of you walked away but there was only one of you I gave a damn about. Only one of you that I couldn’t get out of my mind. When you told me that Natalie wasn’t coming to the wedding, that she’d jilted me, I was furious, my pride was hurt, but I was determined not to show it.’
‘The reception.’
‘The reception.’ Santos nodded. ‘Everything was going to go ahead as planned. No one was going to see me show any reaction—least of all the family of the woman I was supposed to have married. And I had another plan up my sleeve.’
‘Me?’
‘You,’ he confirmed. ‘I thought you were in on everything right from the start. That you had known about your father.’
‘I didn’t! I swear …’ Alexa began but Santos held up a hand to silence her.
‘I know that now, but I wasn’t thinking straight right then. I was angry—I wanted someone to pay for what had happened. And I thought that person would be you. But then you walked out on me too and suddenly everything changed. Where Natalie’s defection left me with hurt pride, an outraged sense of being used … when you left, I missed you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you; I wanted you back. I would have done anything to get you back. Including turning up here to demand that you took your sister’s place.’
‘Bringing with you the most uncomfortable pair of shoes I’ve ever worn …’ Alexa’s laughter was weak but it was there, and he heard it and his face changed suddenly.
‘Those shoes were tearing your poor feet to ribbons. I cannot understand how you could even stand up in them.’
And he cared. It was written all over his face. It was there in the burn of his eyes, the shake in his voice. She was beginning to be able to read him, this man who didn’t believe in love.
‘I missed you, Alexa. I wanted you. I couldn’t go on without you. But I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t understand how I felt. I didn’t know what it was.’
Of course not, Alexa thought, her heart aching for his confusion. He didn’t know what love was so how could he recognise it?
‘When I said I didn’t believe in love, I meant that I didn’t know how to do it—how to love, I mean. I didn’t think it existed, so I didn’t even know what it was I was feeling. No one had ever made me feel that way before. I thought it was just wanting—wanting you more than any other woman I’d ever met. And that was bad enough. But then …’
‘Then?’ Alexa prompted again when he broke off and rubbed both his hands across his face in a gesture of tiredness and confusion that caught on her heart and tugged hard. ‘Then what?’
‘Then you asked about the scars on my back—and I talked about my mother. For the first time in my life I talked to someone about my mother.’
Alexa’s breath caught in her throat. Her head was spinning with the importance of that last sentence. Did he know what he was saying? Did he know the huge compliment he was paying her?
It seemed he did because apparently without being aware of it he had taken a single step—then another—towards her.
Away from the door.
‘And when I tried to leave just now—when you said you wouldn’t marry me—I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk away from you because I realised that what I had felt when you walked away from me that day of the wedding wasn’t new. It was something I’d felt just once before—when my mother walked away from me. And I knew then why you wouldn’t marry me.’
Alexa drew in her breath on a long, ragged sigh and started to speak even as she let it out again.
‘Let me tell you why—’ she began but broke off as she realised that Santos had moved even closer, that he was reaching out for her hand, taking it in his.
‘No—let me tell you,’ he said sombrely. ‘Because now I think I understand. You wouldn’t marry me because I said marriage or nothing. And I was offering nothing—nothing that you wanted. I wanted marriage because I wanted to have you—hold you—I wanted to keep you with me, make sure that you never walked away from me again. In that I was as bad as my mother—your father. I thought I could control you, make you do what I wanted. But what I should have been offering you was the one thing that would have kept you with me for ever if you’d wanted it.’
He paused, looking deep into her eyes, and Alexa felt as if her legs had turned to water at the sight of the powerful emotion she saw burning there. But still she needed him to say it.
He didn’t disappoint her.
‘You wanted my love.’
‘Oh Santos …’
‘But I didn’t recognise what I was feeling, so how could I say the word? Until I realised that if I didn’t say it, then I had to leave. And I couldn’t leave … Alexa—what I’ve said—’
‘Sounds a lot like love to me,’ Alexa managed, her voice catching, breaking on the words. ‘And I should know because that’s what I’ve been feeling too.’
‘It is?’
The change in his face was stunning. The light that glowed in his eyes warmed her right through to her soul and his grip on her hands tightened, drawing her close to him until she was hard up against the warm strength of his body and it was the only place in the world that she wanted to be.
‘You love me?’
‘I love you,’ Alexa assured him. ‘I love you with all my heart—with everything that’s in me. Without your love I couldn’t face a future with you, but with it you are all the future I will ever need.’
‘And you’ll marry me? You’ll marry me and be my lover? And now that I know what I’m feeling is love—will you let me love you for the rest of your life?’
‘I can’t think of anything I’d want more. Yes, Santos, I’ll marry you—and together we’ll learn about how wonderful love can be when it’s shared. When two become one.’
She sighed her happiness as Santos’s arms came round her and she lifted her face for his kiss. A long, deep, giving, loving kiss such as she’d never known in her life before.
Behind him the door slammed closed, shutting out the rest of the world and leaving them in their own private, special place where the only thing that they needed was each other and the love they had built between them.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
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