The terrible, tearing agony of realising that it had all been just some perverted sort of test, a way of proving that she couldn’t resist him—and, damn it, she hadn’t been able to, had she?—made her voice shrill with self-disgust.
‘Am I supposed to be grateful?’
‘Not grateful, no. But you might consider it a relief because it shows that in this way at least, our marriage is not going to be the ordeal you seemed to think. In fact, you might actually enjoy it.’
‘Why, you—’
She would have lost her grip on her control, would have launched herself at him in a fury, but at that moment a loud buzzing sound had Santos pulling his mobile phone from the pocket of his trousers.
‘Si … Momento …’
Shockingly matter-of-fact, he turned back to Alexa.
‘Perdone … I have to take this call. Wait here—I will be back in a moment and we will talk about this further.’
They wouldn’t talk about it at all, Alexa told herself. And if he thought that she was going to stay here quietly and wait for him after that horrific humiliation, then hell would freeze over before she would do any such thing. But, deciding that discretion was very definitely the better part of valour and she would do best not to arouse his suspicions, she forced herself to nod briefly, avoiding the searching gaze of his eyes as she did so.
She even managed to lie still, exactly where she was, as he walked away, her heart thudding, breath catching as she prayed that he would just keep moving and that he wouldn’t look around, that nothing in her edgy position, the way she was poised in readiness for flight, would communicate itself to him.
As soon as Santos disappeared through a door at the far end of the room she jumped off the bed, pulling down her dress and adjusting it, tugging her clothing back into place as she went. Looking in the mirror was the last thing that she wanted to do but practicality forced her to do just that. She could hardly walk out of here looking as if …
Oh, hell—looking as if she had just been indulging in the most wanton, erotic sex of her life.
She might have been doing just that, but her tangled hair, swollen lips and panda eyes were too much of a giveaway for appearing in public. She was forced to waste a few precious moments on essential repairs, all the time scarcely daring to breathe for fear that the door would reopen and Santos would come back into the room.
But at last she was on her way, running silently down the stairs, trying to work out just how she was going to get a car to take her back to her hotel.
In the end it was stunningly easy. She braved it out, speaking to the first member of staff she saw.
‘Señor Cordero wants the car brought round to the front door.’
Obviously the power of Santos’s name was absolute because the woman simply nodded and disappeared in a rush. There was a brief, anxious wait, a panic that perhaps he might finish that phone call and catch her. But then suddenly the sleek black limousine was there by the steps, the uniformed chauffeur getting out to open the passenger door for her, and she scrambled hastily and rather inelegantly inside, huddling down on the seat in case Santos should reappear and look around for her.
It was only as the car pulled away and headed down the drive that she allowed herself to draw in a long, shaken breath in the hope of slowing the whirling spin of her mind and look around. She couldn’t quite relax until they had reached the main road and turned in the direction of Seville, and that was when she realised that she still had nothing on her feet.
The elegant and ruinously expensive shoes that had crippled her feet so painfully were still lying under the wooden bench near to the swimming pool where she had kicked them off when she had first gone outside. She had left them there when Santos had carried her inside and she had no intention at all of going back for them, no matter how much they had cost. Apart from the fact that they would tear her feet to ribbons, they now had memories attached to them that she didn’t want to have to recall.
So she was sitting in the car like some sort of Cinderella on her way home from the ball, having left her shoes back there. But they weren’t glass slippers, and it wasn’t Prince Charming she had left behind. Instead of her coach turning back into a pumpkin it was Santos himself who had changed from seeming to be something close to the prince into the Big Bad Wolf.
All the magic she had felt earlier in the evening had evaporated, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth as the tiny dreams she had allowed herself to feel just for a moment shrivelled into ashes. And she could only pray that the wolf prince wouldn’t come after her as he had hunted down Cinderella in the original fairy tale.