Santos shrugged off her protest with a lazy lift of his shoulders.
‘I know many married couples who openly detest each other and they stay together because of their lifestyle and the fact that one partner is providing what the other one enjoys. At least we would have the passion as well.’
‘And that would be enough for you?’
‘It would be a damn good place to start.’
To start.
No, she was not going to allow herself to read anything into that. Hadn’t he stated openly and bluntly that he didn’t believe in love; that he never had and never would?
‘Why don’t you believe in love?’ she asked suddenly, unable to fight the burning curiosity that overcame her, though she was almost as stunned as he looked to hear her actually voice the question out loud.
But whatever surprise Santos had felt he very soon recovered from, the look of shock fading rapidly from his pale eyes to be replaced by a coldly cynical scorn.
‘I have seen no evidence that it exists.’
‘Oh, come on!’ There was no way she could let him get away with that. No one could get to the age of thirty-three without ever seeing love in some shape or form. ‘You must have!’
‘Must I?’
The enquiry was so calm, so matter-of-fact, almost throwaway, that it sent a shivery sensation over her skin, warning her that she was dealing with something here that she had never encountered in her life before.
‘Well, surely your parents …?’
Santos’s response was a snarl of such bitter, humourless laughter that it made her blood run cold just to hear it.
‘Definitely not my parents. There too was a couple who did not need to love each other in order to create another life.’
‘Your mother must have loved you,’ Alexa hazarded, her heart suddenly seeming to beat high up in a throat that was tight with tension, making it almost impossible to force the question out past the constriction.
The icily burning look that Santos turned on her from those amazing eyes threatened to shrivel her to dust right where she stood and it took all her mental courage to stay where she was and not turn tail and run.
‘Even if my mother had stayed around long enough to get to know me, I doubt if she would ever have felt anything like the way that love is described in fiction or fairy stories. To be strictly honest, I would find it hard to believe that she would have felt anything at all.’
‘But she was your mother!’
‘She gave birth to me, es todo.’
If there was any feeling behind the cold, set mask that was Santos’s face, he was not letting it show. His features might have been carved from marble for all the emotion they revealed, and the glittering eyes had turned as cloudy and opaque as the blank eyeballs of ancient statues.
‘And—your father?’
Alexa didn’t really want to ask the question; she had the nasty feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer one little bit. No one became as cynical as Santos obviously was without good reason, and she was beginning to see that he had more reasons than she had ever suspected.
‘My father?’
The sound of Santos’s laughter made her shrink away inside it was so cold and brutal, and she almost expected to see the words splinter into shards right there on the carpet in front of her.
‘I doubt if mi madre even knew who my father was. He could have been any one of a dozen possible candidates. Whoever he was, he certainly did not want to take care of a young boy, either.’
There was no self-pity in his voice, nothing in it that seemed to ask for any sympathy. Instead he maintained that appalling matter-of-fact tone that made her wince at every word. The stiffness of his long back, the careful blanking off of all expression in his eyes made her want to reach out and touch him, take his hand in hers in an expression of compassion. But even as the thought crossed her mind the immediate recognition of just what his response would be chased it away again.
He would hate it if she showed any concern for him, and would probably repulse her gesture with a brusque one, though he was so armoured against any sympathy that perhaps it wouldn’t touch him at all. But it was the fear of what any touch might do to her that held her back most strongly. After the incendiary effects of Santos’s caresses and kisses once before, she wasn’t prepared to risk that all over again. She felt as if she had barely escaped unscathed as it was and the danger of putting her hand into the fire all over again was more than she could bear.
Which reminded her only too sharply of just why he was here in the first place. The cold-blooded declaration he had made on his arrival.
I’ve come for you …
She could well believe that he was callous enough to do just that. The man who had declared so openly that he didn’t believe in love and who had only wanted a dynastic marriage to a member of the Montague family—any daughter of the Montague family, it seemed.