His Suitable Bride(173)

‘That’s why you—you couldn’t leave—you crashed.’

Her voice quavered badly on the last word. Somehow actually saying it made it all the more real, all the more disturbing and it brought back the dreadful feeling she had had when she had seen him drive away, the fear that something might happen—something like this.

She found she was trembling all over and not from the cold. Not any more.

Just looking at the car she realised what a narrow escape Santos had had. Another metre or two further forward and his car would have been directly in the line of the tree as it fell. The weight of the huge trunk would have flattened the vehicle—and its driver. The thought of Santos with his strong body crushed and broken sent fearful shudders running through her, her legs seeming to turn to water.

‘Are you all right?’

In the shadowy night she turned to him, trying to recall how he had looked when he had arrived back at the house. Dishevelled, windswept, wet—but uninjured.

He had been unhurt, hadn’t he? She had been too taken aback, too irritated to look closely. She wouldn’t have noticed if there had been anything wrong.

‘Santos—are you hurt? Did the tree …?’

The horror of the possibilities overcame her again and hot tears stung at her eyes so that she had to blink furiously as she tried to focus on his handsome face. Acting purely on instinct, she lifted a hand, fingers shaking, and pressed it to his cheek, needing to feel his warmth, know his strength, and know that nothing terrible had happened to him.

‘Tell me you’re not hurt.’

‘I’m fine … Truly I am—I got out of the car just in time. Alexa …’

His hand, warm and strong and comforting, came up to cover hers where it lay against his cheek, pressing it softly so that she was trapped between the two different types of skin. The hardness of his palm and the softer flesh of his face where the evening’s growth of stubble was already starting to show and it pricked at her own palm with a faint roughness that made her fingers want to curve tight against it.

She needed to touch him, needed to feel the strength and the warmth of him under her hands, skin against skin, life against life. Just the thought that he might have been injured—worse, that she might have lost him before she had fully realised what he could mean to her was so terrible, so terrifying that she couldn’t control her reaction to it.

‘Alexa?’ Santos’s tone was soft, concerned but slightly rough at the edges as if he didn’t quite know how to pitch it. But that wasn’t possible, Santos always knew just what he was doing—he never opened his mouth without thinking. ‘Alexa, I’m fine—nothing happened. Nothing hit me.’

Perhaps if he hadn’t been gentle, if that hand that covered hers hadn’t curved closer, pressed a little harder, she might have held it together. But his tenderness was just too much, breaking through the shattered barriers of her control, destroying them completely. From somewhere deep inside tears welled up again, pressing at the backs of her eyes but refusing to fall. Instead, she had to let her feelings out some way and so she launched herself forward, capturing his mouth with her own and pressing hungry, emotional kisses onto his warm lips.

‘Alexa!’

Her name was a rough, shaken sound in his throat and for just the space of a single heartbeat as she felt him stiffen, strong muscles tautening, she feared that he was going to draw back, push her away. But then his whole mood changed, his mouth softening against her, his arms enfolding her in a new and very different way as he gathered her close and returned kiss for kiss, his hands lacing into her hair to cup the fine bones of her skull and hold her just where he wanted her. Where his hungry mouth could have the most devastating effect.

For several long, heated moments they were oblivious to the storm that raged around them, only aware of the storm of sensation that was building up inside. But then on a long, low moan, another wilder, blisteringly cold flurry of hail whirled round them, lifting their hair on their heads, making their coats fly up around them and slowly, reluctantly, Santos lifted his head, drew back.

‘No …’ Alexa muttered a protest, reaching for him again, still with her eyes half-closed.

‘Alexa,’ Santos reproved softly, ‘we will freeze if we stay out here.’

Freeze? In the privacy of her own thoughts, Alexa questioned the truth of his comment. She had never felt so hot in her life, so bone-deep, her blood pounding, totally warm from the inside out, and even the whirling wind and the lashing rain were having no effect on her.

‘No …’ she murmured again and felt rather than saw the shake of his dark head as she heard the low laughter that escaped him.