‘Come on, Alexa. You know you have to do this!’
Sighing with resignation, she accepted the truth as she forced herself forward again, curling her fingers around the big iron handle and gripping hard.
There was no one else who could sort this out. If she didn’t do something then the whole dreadful, ugly mess would stay just as it was—in fact it would probably get so much worse. The explosion was going to be nuclear as it was. All she could hope to do was to try to contain some of the fallout so that the repercussions were at least manageable.
Nervousness made her palms damp so that her fingers slipped on the metal handle, foiling her first attempt to open the door.
‘Oh, damn it!’
With nothing else available, she had no choice but to wipe her hands down the long skirt of her dress in an attempt to dry them off. The gesture did nothing for the appearance of the expensive pink satin, but then right now that was the least of her concerns. The ceremony that the dress had been planned for wasn’t going to go ahead today after all, so it didn’t matter at all what it looked like.
Besides, the dress wasn’t really her style at all. It was the sort of glamorous look that her stepmother had chosen for the society wedding she had always hoped for for her daughter, and Alexa knew that the colour wasn’t the most flattering for her dark brown hair and hazel eyes. But that had been all right when she had believed that the wedding was what Natalie wanted. It was Natalie’s day and nothing was going to spoil her half-sister’s wedding, even if it was to a man that Alexa felt was not right for her.
A wedding that was now no longer going to take place, Alexa reminded herself ruefully, reaching for the door handle again. She was going to need all her courage to go into the church and tell everyone that.
Her stepmother would probably have hysterics. Her father—and Natalie’s—would become even stiffer, even more withdrawn, his mouth clamping tighter than ever before. And the groom …
And the groom.
The thought made a sensation like the frantic flutter of butterfly wings start to beat high up in Alexa’s throat as the great door swung slowly open, to land with a hollow, sepulchral thud against the worn stone wall, the noise making everyone inside the church turn and stare in expectation.
She had no idea what the groom would say or do. No idea at all just how Santos Cordero would react to the news that his bride-to-be had jilted him at the altar, running away from her marriage and heading for the airport and another man. But just the thought made her shiver as her blood ran cold through her veins.
She had only met the man her half-sister was marrying once, at the family dinner in Santos’s beautiful Moorish-style home just a few miles from Seville on the night of her arrival in Spain, two days before. But she’d heard so much about him. And she’d seen the effects that his influence had had on her father ever since the two men had embarked on a business deal together. It seemed now that every time she saw Stanley Montague he looked older, thinner, greyer. More shrunken somehow and clearly desperately stressed. Her dad was just not used to dealing with the financial sharks, and Santos Cordero was one of the biggest sharks of all.
Not for nothing was he known as el Brigante—the Brigand. A nickname that she had heard he lived up to in more ways than one.
‘Just wait till you see him! He’s such a hunk! And rich as sin,’ Natalie had said, sounding so very enthusiastic.
Too enthusiastic, Alexa now realised, hearing in memory what she hadn’t recognised then as the forced note in her sister’s voice, betraying the careful effort Natalie had been making to sound like an excited young bride desperately in love with her husband-to-be.
But Natalie had been right about one thing at least—Santos was every bit as stunning as everyone had told her he would be. There was no denying that he was one of the most devastatingly handsome men she had ever met in her life. Tall, raven-haired, with a leanly powerful frame and powerfully carved features, he was a man for whom the description ‘darkly dangerous’ had to have been coined.
Hunk he might be, Alexa had told herself later when she had been introduced to Santos. But when she had come up close, close enough to shake his hand, close enough to look into his face, she had known intuitively that the ‘dangerous’ part of that description was not just fantasy or her imagination running riot.
His grip on her hand had been cool and firm, his careful smile polite and practised, but she had found herself looking into the coldest, iciest eyes she had ever seen. A unexpectedly pale grey gaze that seared over her with the cruel force of a focused laser. Her skin had prickled all over and she had felt alternately hot and then shiveringly cold as if she were in the grip of some horrible fever. Murmuring some inane politeness, she had made her escape as soon as possible and from then onwards had tried to avoid Santos for the rest of the evening. But all the time she had felt the burn of his palm against hers, and her body still tingled under the impact of that scorching gaze.