His Suitable Bride(166)

But Santos was clearly in no mood to ease up on her. He had no intention of letting her get away.

‘To me it makes perfect sense. What is wrong with what I am saying? Why can it not make sense?’ Santos enquired with a softness that stunned her as it was so much in contrast to the burn of his gaze.

‘Because there is no way you can claim that you want me as your wife.’

It must all be a pretence. Some sort of dark, twisted game. One that he was playing deliberately to make her squirm, to make her burn up in embarrassment.

‘No way that you can say that you came here for that.’

‘And why not, hmm?’ Santos shot back.

‘Because—because I’m not Natalie!’

‘Do you think I don’t know that? And do you not realise that that is exactly what makes this arrangement so much better in my eyes?’

Had he just paid her a huge compliment, or flung another insult in her face? Alexa couldn’t decide and her brain felt too bruised and muddled to work it out.

‘How can I want you as my wife? Why not? I told you this before and you reacted as if I had thrown a live snake into your face. As if I had given you the worst possible insult.’

‘You had.’

Anger at the memory of that appalling moment brought a new strength to Alexa’s voice, bringing her chin up defiantly, hazel eyes blazing into his cold silvery ones.

‘My proposal of marriage was an insult to you?’ He actually sounded shocked, as if she was the one who had insulted him.

‘It wasn’t so much a proposal as a demand that I could take Natalie’s place. One Montague sister was as good as another, you said.’

And was that really why he was here now? To suggest once again that she could replace her sister as his bride? Her brain threatened to blow a fuse simply at the thought.

But would he have come all this way if she was simply a replacement? Or was she being totally weak and stupid to allow herself to dream that perhaps, after all, she had made some impact on him? That he hadn’t been able to forget her as she had found it totally impossible to get the image of his dark, stunning face, those pale eyes and the beautifully accented voice out of her mind.

‘I was angry when I said that. In that I was wrong.’

Santos’s response brought her head up sharply, shocked hazel eyes looking into cool grey ones.

‘Is that meant to be an apology?’

‘It is the truth. I never wanted your sister as I want you. And if she had run to some strange little cottage in the wilds of Yorkshire, then I would have thought twice about following her.’

‘It’s not a strange …’ Alexa began but then the realisation of just what he had said sank into her numbed brain. ‘Is that the truth too?’

‘Why should I lie to you, belleza? That is exactly the point.’

His gaze still held hers as he spoke, his eyes so deep and clear that she felt they were like a still, smooth pool in which she risked drowning, going in over her head completely.

‘And precisely just what point is that?’

The look Santos turned on her questioned the justification for her fury, seeming to wonder just why she was overreacting in this way, which of course only added fuel to the fire, making her breath hiss in between clenched teeth, her eyes sparking fury as they glared into his.

‘I would have thought that was obvious.’

‘Not to me it isn’t! So tell me exactly what point you were trying to make.’

Santos moved to fling himself down onto one of the small settees, pushed both hands through the dark sleekness of his hair as he lounged back against the multicoloured cushions on the settee, infuriatingly at his ease.

‘In Spain you said there was no way you could marry me because we had never even kissed,’ Santos pointed out with exasperating calm. ‘I simply put that right. But I suspected—knew—that there would be more to it than that. And I was proved right.’

Alexa feared that her head might actually burst open under the pressure of the outrage and fury that was pounding through her. She could have very little doubt as to just what sort of ‘more’ to it there was in what Santos was implying.

‘I told you that I never slept with Natalie and you asked—’

‘If you believed that if she’d once experienced your love-making she’d never want to get away from you. That she would have become so addicted that she’d have to stay around for more,’ Alexa put in angrily when he hesitated, seeming not to be able to remember just what she had said.

Too late she realised that she had fallen head first right into the trap that she hadn’t even noticed he was digging for her.

‘I never thought that would be the case with Natalie,’ Santos drawled, actually having the nerve to smile up at her as he spoke. ‘But I knew how it would be with you. That if I touched you, you would go up in flames.’