His Suitable Bride(178)

‘How could she do it?’

‘I’m sure she saw it as the perfect solution.’

Bleak and unemotional, the blank statement slashed at Alexa in a way that any more savage declaration could never do. Santos’s total lack of feeling somehow, his apparent detachment, made everything so much worse than if he had shouted or sworn.

‘It was too bad that the poor bastard she left me with did not feel the same.’

Flinging back the bedclothes, Santos swung his long legs out of the bed, getting to his feet. As he paced across the room, Alexa couldn’t help but stare at the beautiful, lean, strong shape of his body, the powerful legs, tight buttocks, the long, sleek line of his back. Last night she had caressed that body, her hands had clung to his shoulders, fingers digging into his back in the throes of ecstasy.

Last night she hadn’t known those scars were there.

Today she could not look away from them.

‘What happened?’

Her voice croaked embarrassingly. She didn’t really want to know, but she knew that she had to find out. Having come this far, there was no turning back.

‘What happened?’

He actually sounded as if he was considering the question. As if he was trying to remember what had happened because it was buried in the mists of time. Alexa had no doubt at all that the truth was the exact opposite. That he remembered far, far too well. And because of that, his pretence at hesitation made the sensation of something vile and slimy sliding over her skin.

‘Santos—don’t,’ she tried but he wasn’t listening.

‘He kept me—for a while. He thought I might be useful around the house.’

‘What could you do? You were what—three?’

‘Just. But he did not know much about kids. He thought I would be better at the jobs he wanted done than I was. He hated it when I was slow or clumsy. He hated it especially when he’d been drinking. When he had been drinking then he was impatient—and mean.’

‘Santos, what did he do?’

Santos swung round to face her so that she could no longer see the scars on his back. But she still knew they were there. And even if she had tried to forget them then the hard, tight set of his face would have been a painful reminder whenever she looked at him.

‘When he drank, he also smoked heavily. If I got in the way—or was slow …’

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to. Alexa knew that her face must have revealed how much she understood. How she knew exactly what he was trying to say. And how she wished that she didn’t.

Oh, no, no, no, no!

In her mind’s eye she was seeing again those scars, the round shape of them, and at the same time her horrified imagination was showing a smoking, glowing cigarette tip.

‘Oh, dear God!’

‘And the other scar—the one on your hand …?’ She couldn’t finish the question.

‘Yes,’ was all Santos said. It was all he needed to say. There was no way she wanted him to expand on the simple syllable.

It was no wonder he didn’t believe in love. No wonder he trusted no one, believed in no one. How could he believe in something that he had never learned? Something that no one had ever shown him existed? After a betrayal—betrayals—like that, he must believe that he was unlovable himself, that no one would ever love him.

Her mind went back to Santos’s declaration that she should marry him—there was no way that she could call it a proposal. Of course he couldn’t couch that in terms of love, she saw that now.

‘What did you do?’

‘I ran away as soon as I could. I ended up in a children’s home.’

‘And didn’t you tell anyone?’

‘What would have been the point? It was in the past—I’d got away.’

Santos was moving around the room, collecting up his clothes, restoring order. She couldn’t help wondering if he was doing the same in his mind as well.

‘And later I’d heard that he’d died—an overdose. There was nothing to be gained from going back over it. I moved on.’

He’d moved on, but he’d taken the scars with him. Scars on his mind as well as on his body. And although he said he’d put it behind him, it was still there. Still darkening his life, still making it impossible for him to build a loving relationship. But he had opened up to her. He had told her the terrible story of his childhood. Was she a fool to read something into that?

‘I’d like to take a shower.’ Santos’s voice, all practicality and matter-of-fact tone, intruded into her thoughts.

While she had been absorbed in thinking over what he had been saying, interpreting it, finding possible repercussions that might result from it, he had been getting his life back under control. His clothes—and hers—were off the floor and on the bed, and now he wanted a shower. His day was going to begin, it seemed, with everything as normal and the uncomfortable revelations he had made now tidily put away.