He just couldn’t have said ‘I’ve come for you.’
Could he?
But Santos stood there, big and dark and dangerous, with his scarred hand raised to unfasten the buttons of his heavy coat. And with that gleam in his eyes, the taunting one that she had come, through painful experience, to recognise as meaning trouble for someone—and in this case that someone was very definitely her.
Even if he was just teasing then it was a cold-blooded, wicked teasing, one that made her nerves twist in apprehension and lifted the hairs on the back of her neck in a way that made her shiver inwardly.
‘What do you mean, you’ve come for me? There’s nothing for you here. Nothing about me that you could want or can have.’
‘Are you so sure of that?’ Santos shrugged himself out of his coat and tossed it aside so that it landed on one of the twoseater settees that furnished the room, the navy cashmere heavy and dark against the soft pale grey cotton that covered it.
‘Of course …’
That fiendish gleam had brightened disturbingly and the faint lift of one straight dark brow in cynical enquiry was more worrying that any more blatant threat.
‘You’re forgetting something,’ he drawled softly, the fascinating accent deepening on the silky words so that in spite of herself Alexa couldn’t suppress the recognition of how attractive that voice was, how it tugged at her sensuality, sending prickles of awareness down her spine. She didn’t want to find anything about this man attractive but she just couldn’t deny the almost shocking appeal he had for her.
‘Oh, really—and just what is it that I’ve forgotten?’
‘That your family owes me a wife. The wedding that never was,’ Santos elaborated coolly when her head went back in shock, her eyes widening in disbelief and she struggled to accept that he had actually said what she thought she had heard. And, even worse, that he had meant it.
‘My sister’s wedding!’ she protested. ‘She was the one who was supposed to marry you.’
‘Exactly.’
It was crisp and cold as the hail that was whirling outside, blown wildly up against the window and forming a thick curtain so that it was almost impossible to see through to the garden beyond.
‘But—how can my family owe you a wife—owe you anything? I know that Natalie broke her promise to marry you but surely you aren’t going to—’
‘There was more to it than that. So much more.’
‘More in what way?’
‘Oh, come on, Alexa …’
That now familiar arrogant gesture with his hand dismissed the question as not even worth bothering with, never mind answering. And if she had thought that the wild storm outside had looked cold then it was as nothing when compared to the ice in his eyes as they blazed at her across the room, chilling her blood so that she feared that she would never, ever be warm again.
‘Let us not play games here. We both know what I mean.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘It would be better if we were straight with each other.’
‘I don’t know how to be anything but straight because I don’t know what you mean!’
It was impossible to control the tremble in her voice, impossible to stop it rising in fear and uncertainty. She was still struggling so hard to come to terms with what he had said and to work out just how he might actually mean it.
I’ve come for you …
Your family owes me a wife.
The two phrases couldn’t be connected—they just couldn’t. And there really was no way that they could mean what she feared—that he had come for her because he believed that her family owed him a wife and she was the wife he had in mind.
No, it was impossible. She couldn’t believe it. And yet there had been that appalling proposition he had flung in her face on the evening of the wedding.
And did she mean feared—or something else entirely?
She had been unaware of the way that she was shaking her head in frantic denial until she heard Santos’s voice again, cold and incisive, cutting through the blur of confusion in her brain.
‘No? Are you saying no, we should not be straight with each other or no, let us not play games?’
‘I’m saying no, this can’t be happening. No, it doesn’t make sense—none of it.’
‘Why not?’
There was no way she could escape the fierce, intensely focused burn of his watchful eyes. They were fixed on her face as she spoke, observing every tiny flicker of emotion across her features, every change of mood, every sign of uncertainty and confusion. Watching her so coldly and unwaveringly that she felt as if she were some small, defenceless harvest mouse, cowering in a corner of a field, vulnerable and exposed and praying desperately that the cruel, hunting eyes of a hovering bird of prey would somehow pass over her and let her escape.