His Suitable Bride(130)

‘Señorita, I am about to be married.’

‘Not like that! I didn’t mean it like that!’ she hissed at him. ‘And you’re—’

With a sense of horror she choked off the appalling declaration—you’re not getting married. She couldn’t just come out and say it. Not like that. Just as she couldn’t give him the devastating news right here and now, in front of this audience.

Because he had to be devastated, didn’t he? Even if he was big and strong, and ruthless as they came, he had after all asked Natalie to marry him, to be his wife, for better, for worse.

‘You really need to hear what I have to say,’ she managed, praying that the emphasis she was putting on the words hid the sudden huskiness that seemed to have affected her voice.

‘ You think I do.’

He was looking down his long, straight nose at her now, that broad forehead creased in a disapproving frown, silvery eyes darkened with frank disdain and total scepticism.

‘You think I should hear what you have to say—but you give me no reason why you should march in here like this, without a word of explanation and demand that I—’

‘I’m trying to explain!’ Alexa snapped in total exasperation.

Couldn’t he see that this was important? That she wouldn’t have ‘marched in here’ like this if it weren’t? Couldn’t he see …?

No, she acknowledged to herself privately. He couldn’t see at all. It was the last thing that would possibly cross his mind.

Of course el brigante would never consider that his bride might not turn up. That she might abandon her wedding, jilting her bridegroom and leaving him waiting at the altar. It would just never enter his handsome, arrogant head. Instead he had supreme confidence that she would be here, just as he had arranged, just as he wanted, and go ahead with the marriage—because he wanted it.

The immovable arrogance of the man was beginning to grate so much that she found she was actually clenching her teeth hard so as not to let rip with a furious and totally unvarnished declaration of the truth.

‘But I think that you’d prefer it if we were alone to talk.’

‘What I would prefer is not to be alone with an unknown woman just moments before my wedding ceremony. Can you imagine what the gutter Press would make of that?’

‘Oh, if you’re interested in preserving your reputation then you needn’t worry! I can assure you that I have no designs on.’

Alexa’s voice faded away as she caught the piercing, cynically sceptical look he slanted at her from those burning, silvery eyes. He really thought she was here as some sort of reputation-ruining exercise? What sort of life did this man lead that he had become so totally cynical, so appallingly suspicious? Did he truly believe that she would use the time they were alone together to blackmail him later—demanding a small fortune not to ‘kiss and tell’?

Well, she had no intention of kissing at all.

That thought sent her unwary gaze flying to Santos’s mouth, lingering just a moment too long on its sensual shape, the cynical half-smile curling the corners, and her heart skipped a beat. Kissing those lips would be an experience, one that set off flares of warning in her mind at just imagining it.

But ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ as her mother was fond of quoting. And everything she had heard about Santos Cordero put that ‘handsome does’ part of the saying very much in doubt.

‘I prefer not to know what designs you might have …’

The icy tones of the Spaniard’s attractively accented voice dragged her thoughts back from the foolish path they were travelling, giving her a hint of perhaps one of the reasons why her half-sister had decided that she couldn’t go through with this wedding.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you impossible man,’ she exploded. ‘I’m trying to save you from embarrassment here.’

‘Alexandra …’

It was her father who stepped forward, obviously determined to intervene, his face alternating between red and pale, his tone and his use of her full name a brusque reproach.

‘Alexandra—please.’

But he stopped dead at a sudden lift of the Spaniard’s hand, an autocratic signal to stop—stay away. Obviously something in what she had said had caught Santos Cordero’s attention. That ‘you impossible man,’ Alexa strongly suspected. She doubted very much that he was regularly subjected to such a contemptuous description—if ever.

‘If you’re really afraid, then we can leave the door ajar so that someone will hear your screams when I …’

But no, she’d gone too far there. If she had meant to provoke him into a decision and action, then she had succeeded. More than succeeded. She had pushed him over some sort of edge that she hadn’t even known was there and he had lost whatever remaining grip he had had on his tolerance, moving from an irritated, barely reined-in impatience in the blink of an eye. She could see it in the flash of cold fire in his eyes and in the way that his beautiful mouth thinned to a brutal, hard line.