As a wedding present for your bride … He could still hear Petra Montague’s beseeching voice inside his head. You wouldn’t want to see your father-in-law thrown out into the street …
Dios! What had he been thinking? Never before had he paid out anything on a contract before the whole deal was signed and sealed, but this time he’d let his guard slip just a centimetre and the damn Montague family had taken full advantage of it.
‘You must want Natalie to be happy.’
‘She would have been happy with Santos!’ Petra wailed. ‘We would all have been happy with things that way!’
‘But she wasn’t happy,’ Alexa protested. ‘She just didn’t dare say it, once the wedding had been arranged and everything planned.’
From where he stood slightly to the side, all that Santos could see was this Alexa’s face and body in profile, and, having looked at her once, he suddenly found it impossible to look away.
‘Plain’ was the way her stepmother had described her. ‘Dull and old-fashioned’. But even at the pre-wedding party he had not seen her in that way. She didn’t have Natalie’s dramatic colouring, her stunning beauty. In the older girl, everything was toned down, her sister’s blonde hair subdued to a dark brown, and no blue, blue eyes but an unusual hazel of the sort that could be green or brown depending on the light and her mood. And her clothes had been so much simpler than her sister’s, more demure than Natalie’s ultra-fashionable style, perhaps, but not ‘dull’ or old-fashioned.
Now, even under the appallingly unflattering and over-elaborate hairstyle, her profile had a purity that caught the eye and held it. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent and the length of the lush, curling eyelashes that rested on her cheeks as she looked down seemed almost as if they might waft a breeze across the church with each movement of her eyes.
Her figure was tall and slender, slight in comparison to her sister’s voluptuous curves, but she held herself with a natural elegance. She might not be as stunning a beauty as her sister but there was something about her that drew his attention to her.
Something that hooked him and held him watching, caught by her stillness, her composure. Something that intrigued him and wouldn’t let him go.
On the day they had met she had been so cool, so distant, the ice maiden personified, that he had disliked her on sight. She had turned those hazel eyes on him in the sort of look that he had seen too often as he was growing up. The expression that reminded him he had clawed his way out of the gutter and that he still carried the taint of the slums along with him. It was a look that he had vowed he would never let anyone subject him to ever again and, seeing it, he had told himself that if he had had to choose then he would have preferred Natalie to this cold, stiff, unwelcoming woman.
Now he was no longer so certain.
‘But one thing’s for sure,’ she was saying now, the calm, soft tones of her voice carrying clearly even above her stepmother’s near-hysterics, her father’s attempts at soothing. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t going to be a wedding here today. I just couldn’t let Natalie go through with it.’
Couldn’t … The word swung round and round in Santos’s head, sending warning echoes out like the ripples in a pond when a pebble was thrown into it. I just couldn’t let Natalie go through with it.
Couldn’t, be damned. She had been part of this all along. She’d known that Natalie was going to break her promise, had helped her run out on the wedding.
Helped her humiliate him in this public way.
‘I’m sorry that you’ve all had a wasted journey, but I’m sure you’ll understand. And now I suppose the only thing we can do is to go home and get on with our lives.’
She was moving forward as she spoke, making it plain that she was about to do just that, about to walk down the aisle, out of the church.
‘So if you’d all like to leave.’
‘No!’
That was not going to happen. She wasn’t going to just walk away from this, walk out on the mess she and her family had created, and leave it all behind without a backward look. The furious feeling that he had been duped and robbed was like a blaze in his mind, obliterating rational thought, driving him into action. His hand shot out and fastened around her arm again, pulling her to a halt with such force that she actually spun round again, coming face to face with him. Natalie might be beyond his reach, but her sister was not.
The Montague family owed—and he didn’t care who started paying. Only that someone did. And this other daughter seemed a good place to start.