His Suitable Bride(171)

CHAPTER TEN


DID ALEXA MONTAGUE really not know what was going on, or was she playing some more complicated, carefully planned game along with the rest of her family?

The question nagged at Santos’s thoughts as he drove away from the cottage, distracting him dangerously from the control of his car. He really needed all his concentration in the appalling weather conditions.

But in spite of the fact that he knew he should think of driving and nothing else it was impossible to stop his thoughts drifting back over the time he had spent in the cottage, and the images of Alexa as she had been then.

He wanted to recall the things she had said, how she had spoken them, and most importantly how she had looked as she’d reacted to him or answered his questions. He needed to be able to interpret her facial expressions, her body language, to try to understand just what was going on here, but the problem was that the memories he needed were not the ones he could recall most easily.

Instead, the images that flooded his mind were ones from that night in Seville, sensuous, erotic, doubly distracting. In his mind’s eye he could see again the way that Alexa had looked when he kissed her. He could have sworn that he could still taste the essence of her on his lips, and if he licked them to ease their sudden dryness it was as if he had only just lifted his mouth from hers, a memory that set his heart pounding and made the hunger of sensual need clutch at his loins.

Once again he lived through the moment of looking down at her as she lay under him on the bed, seeing the long strands of her soft brown hair spread out on the pillows around her head. Her eyes had been the deep dark green of a mossy pool, her lips blushing pink in response to the pressure of his kisses. The soft scent of her skin had been all around him, blending with some delicately floral perfume that still lingered in his nostrils even though he was already so far away from her. And under the weight of his own body, her soft curves had been a warm, sensual delight, her breasts just perfectly filling his hands

‘Maldito sea, no!’

Savagely he cursed aloud, dragging his thoughts back to the present and the hellish road he was trying to negotiate in the pitch-darkness. Even the beam of his headlights was blurred and distorted by the lashing rain and the savage hailstorm.

And the focus of his thoughts was no clearer. He wanted to be able to think without letting sensual hunger distract him from what mattered. But the truth was that where Alexa was concerned there was no hope of thinking of anything other than the aching sexual hunger she woke in him simply by existing. Even now he was hot and hard just thinking of her, remembering the way she had responded to him, her soft moans when he had touched her, the way she had given herself up to his caresses.

But had he let that primitive need, that most basic of male appetites, blind him to anything else? Was she truly as innocent as she sometimes seemed, or just pretending to be unaware of the set-up that the supposed wedding had been? And if so, was she—?

‘Hell and damnation!’

The raw, ragged creaking sound alerted him just in time. At the very last possible minute he saw the way that a large tree on the edge of the road was waving more wildly in the wind than all the others. The ominous noise came again, louder this time, audible even above the wail of the wind, and with a terrible wrenching, splintering sound the great trunk split apart and started to fall.

‘Madre de Dios!’

Fingers clenched hard over the steering wheel until his knuckles showed white, he swung it sharply to the left, slamming his foot down on the brakes hard at the same time. He could only pray that he had reacted fast enough as a sound like roaring, deafening thunder crashed through the air.

Alexa pressed the off switch on the phone and set it back down in its holder with a sigh. This was the second time she’d got the answering machine’s automated voice asking her to ‘leave a message after the tone’ and there was no way that she could say what she needed to say to her father in an impersonal recording. The best thing she could do was to leave a request for him to ring her back as soon as he got in from wherever he’d gone.

And she’d hope and pray that that would be soon. She had very little belief that Santos would stay away for long. Or that he would wait for her to phone him to say he should come back. Santos Cordero was not a man who waited around for anyone’s permission to do anything he wanted to do.

The thought had barely faded from her mind when the front door was pushed open suddenly, making her jump like a startled cat, and, as if conjured up by her reflections, Santos himself strode into the hallway in a flurry of wind and hail.

‘What are you doing here?’

Irritation at his blatant disregard of her demand that he should not return until she asked him to warred with the unwanted but uncontrollable leap of her heart at the sight of him to create a volatile mood in which she didn’t know what she should be feeling and why.