His Suitable Bride(151)

‘Don’t!’

In a purely instinctive reaction she pulled her head away from his caressing hand, rounding on him sharply and wincing as a few tangled strands caught on his fingers and tugged painfully at her scalp.

‘Stop it!’

Shaking himself free from the clinging tendrils, Santos lifted both his hands, fingers spread wide, but the dark mockery that gleamed in his eyes in the moonlight made a nonsense of the gesture of apparent surrender.

‘And what precisely, querida, am I supposed to stop?’

It was meant to provoke and it succeeded.

‘If you think that I want to be mauled by someone who was my sister’s lover—or that I’m going to let into my bed any man who has only just left hers then you’ve got another think coming. I …’

Her voice died in painful embarrassment as she saw the look that crossed his face, narrowing his eyes and clamping his sensual mouth into a thin, hard line. Too late she realised the recklessly stupid mistake she had made, the way she had given away far more of the path down which her thoughts had been going than was safe for any sort of self-preservation or hope of retaining her composure. Biting down hard on her tongue, she could only be grateful for the way that the gathering shadows of the night and the pale light of the moon drained all the colour from the world and so, she prayed, hid the hot rush of blood into her face as she recognised just how much she had betrayed by her outburst.

‘Might I suggest, señorita, that you wait at least until you are actually invited into my bed before rejecting any offer with the outrage of an appalled virgin?’ he tossed at her with so much ice in his tone that Alexa almost felt the words like stabbing hailstones on her skin. ‘For one thing, I never slept with your sister.’

‘You didn’t?’ Embarrassment thickened her voice, heated her cheeks.

‘I most definitely did not. Perhaps that was my mistake.’

‘Your mistake? What sort of mistake?’

In her uncertain, apprehensive mood, Alexa found that her control of her tongue had loosened and she seemed unable to force herself to think before she spoke. Nervousness just pushed the words from her mouth before she had time to consider if they were wise, or even appropriate. Smarting from that icy put-down, she only wanted to fight back and show him that she was not the gauche, naïve girl she had let herself appear to be.

The gauche, naïve girl who had imagined him making a pass at her when in fact he had just been playing with her.

‘Do you think that just because she’d shared your bed that she wouldn’t be able to walk away from you? That, having had one taste of your lovemaking, she would have become so addicted that she’d have to stay around for more?’

‘We’ll never know, will we? And I think that you are very relieved that that is the case. I know that I am.’

‘Relieved?’

Alexa frowned her horrified confusion, unable to work out just what he meant. He couldn’t have seen right through to her heart and sensed the way that, in spite of herself, in spite of the fight she had against it, she had felt a flutter of something close to reassurance at the thought that her sister and Santos had never been lovers.

‘You’re not making any sort of sense. Why on earth would I be relieved?’

‘Because, as you put it so eloquently just a moment ago, you are not going to let into your bed any man who has only just left your sister’s. And now that you know that Natalie and I were never intimate, you are free to indulge your own needs, which I am sure is what you really want.’





CHAPTER SIX


NO!

The rejection of his arrogant assertion was like a scream in her head, begging to be flung right in his smug, egotistical face. She had almost opened her mouth to let it out when a far too belated streak of common sense caught up with her, making her catch it back, swallow it down. Hastily adjusting her mood and dragging up some degree of control from the depths of her mind, she forced herself to look him right in the face, managing to keep herself calm in spite of the mockery that made his eyes glitter in the moonlight, the touch of a knowing smile that curved his mouth at the corners.

‘I also said that I didn’t want to be mauled …’

That smile grew a little wider, taking her words and her composure with it. But there was no matching lightening of his eyes, and his voice was cold and clipped when he took up the challenge in her words.

‘And you and I both know that I wasn’t mauling you. I have never mauled a woman in my life and I certainly was not doing so just now. For one thing you were enjoying it too much—’

‘I was not!’

Oh, why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut? She was giving herself away, digging herself in deeper with every thing she said. And he didn’t believe a word of it, the sceptical expression on his handsome face, the cynically raised eyebrow said it all for him without a single thing having to be spoken.