His Suitable Bride(133)

‘You expect me to act as if your sister has broken my heart? As if I have lost the love of my life and cannot find the strength to go on—to live for the future?’ he questioned cynically, biting the words out as if they were bones he wanted to snap. ‘Well, then you could not be more wrong. I will have no trouble going on with my life after this—though your family might find it harder to pick themselves up as a result. In fact—’

He broke off as a sharp rap came on the door, someone knocking on the heavy panels from the other side, in the church.

‘Alexandra? Alexa?’

It was her father’s voice, coming sharp and concerned through the thickness of the wood.

‘Is everything all right? What’s going on? Cordero—what—’

‘Momento!’ Santos snapped, tossing the word over his shoulder, his burning eyes still fixed on Alexa’s bewildered face. ‘We will be out in a second and then we will explain all. Or rather …’

The cold, curt tone slid into something else as his eyes seared across her skin, seeming to strip away a necessary protective layer and leave her nerves raw and exposed underneath.

‘You will do the explaining,’ he said and for all the sudden softness and smoothness of his tone Alexa could be in no doubt that it was an autocratic command, one that he expected to have obeyed without hesitation or argument. ‘You will tell your father—your family—what has happened.’

‘But I …’ Alexa began, her voice failing her, the words drying in her throat as she tried to protest. ‘It isn’t up to me now—surely you …’

She couldn’t go out there and tell everyone why she was here. Tell them that Natalie had run out on her wedding—the wedding that had been described in the newspapers and the gossip columns as the Wedding of the Year, the joining together of huge wealth and aristocratic beauty. It was to have been the union     of one powerful rich, ultra modern bloodline of the billionaire entrepreneur, and the old, patrician lineage of Natalie Montague, twenty-year-old daughter of Lord Stanley Montague. Santos Cordero who had made his fortune with his own hands and brain, dragging himself up from his lowly and impoverished beginnings to the height of his wealth and power, was marrying into the British nobility, a family whose name had been amongst the highest in the land for centuries past. It had been the stuff that fairy tales were made of, especially when the bride was acknowledged to be a stunning beauty and the groom a hunk whose carved, handsome features and lean, powerful frame had featured in many photographs in the gossip columns and in magazines, usually with some supremely decorative female draped on his arm.

‘I don’t think …’ she tried again, feeling even more lost and adrift than in the first moments when she had arrived in the church and had come under the scrutiny of those coldly burning eyes as she walked up the aisle towards him.

Because the truth was that she didn’t know what she was meant to say or how—and what—she was supposed to explain. Nothing had been as she had expected it. But then how did you know what might happen when you had to break up a wedding by announcing to the groom that his fiancée had jilted him? It wasn’t exactly something that you did every day.

But Santos wasn’t listening to her protests. Instead he had levered himself away from the door and taken two swift strides towards her, his hand coming out and clamping over her arm, just above the elbow, hard fingers digging into her skin as he swung her round to face the door at his side.

‘You will do it,’ he declared, cold and brusque. ‘Your family has messed up my life enough already, so now …’

He was interrupted by another rap at the door and her father’s voice again, sharper this time.

‘Alexandra—what’s going on in there.?’

‘Nothing—I mean, it’s fine,’ Alexa managed when Santos turned a forceful glare on her, the burnished eyes directing a silent command that she should respond. ‘We—we’re coming out now and I’ll … I’ll explain.’

She had no option, it seemed, because that hand that gripped her arm was now pulling her forward, leaving her no choice but to follow.

‘Let go of me!’ she spat in furious protest. ‘OK, so I had to bring you bad news—but there’s a saying about not shooting the messenger. And that’s all that I am—the messenger. Natalie’s the one—’

‘But your sister is not here.’

It was a low growl and he didn’t look at her, didn’t slow his steps towards the door, yanking it open as soon as he reached it.