His Suitable Bride(179)

‘Of course …’

The way she had been feeling when she had woken this morning she would have suggested that she join him, that they make the shower a way of continuing the sensual pleasure of the night. But there was no way she dared do that now. The mood was gone, every last trace of sensuality between them evaporated as if it had never been. Santos didn’t even have a smile for her now. In fact, he never so much as glanced at her as he snatched up his clothes and headed for the bathroom. A few moments later she heard the sound of the shower water pounding down and it was impossible not to wonder if he was determined to wash the scent of her from his body, sluice away all traces of the night they had shared and so erase it from his memory as well.

And yet he had opened up to her …

Why the hell had he opened up to her?

Santos stood under the shower, the force turned up to the highest it would go, and let the water pound down onto his skull as he went back over what had just happened. Alexa had seen the scars and, inevitably, had asked about them. It had happened before. Other women had seen the marks on his back and some had asked about them.

But he had never answered anyone truthfully before.

Every other time he had fobbed them off with some vague murmur about an accident. Nothing precise; nothing revealing. And they had been satisfied with that. As he had been satisfied with not revealing too much about himself.

But this time it had not been like that. This time he had had to tell the whole damn story. The one he had never let anyone in on before. Alexa would not have let him fob her off; he knew that. And he had shocked her to hell. He’d seen it in her eyes, in the way that that mossy hazel gaze had widened, darkened in horror. He’d shocked himself too with the realisation of how much he had wanted to tell her, how much he had wanted her to know about him.

And he had never felt more exposed in his life.

Being naked in a woman’s bedroom wasn’t a new experience. He had had his share of lovers over the years, but this was the first time that he had actually felt naked. And it wasn’t a feeling he liked.

In fact if the truth was told, he had been feeling this way from the moment he had met Alexa at the party before the wedding. She hadn’t been at all what he had been expecting, and one look at her had rocked his sense of reality, the way he had felt about life.

If only she had been the daughter he was going to marry. The thought had shot through his head even as he had held out his hand in greeting and felt it taken in hers. If she had been the sister he was to marry then the whole marriage deal would have been a very different prospect. But he was committed, the wedding was planned, and so he had forced himself to hold back, to give nothing away.

And now Alexa was the sister whose hand in marriage was offered as part of the deal. Her bastard of a father had quite happily agreed to his other daughter being a replacement for the one who had run out on him on the wedding day. Anything to save his own cowardly skin. And if Alexa truly was as innocent as he suspected then learning that would have been almost as devastating for her as the way that his own parent had walked out on him.

He pushed his head back under the shower, lifting his face up to the force of the water and slicking back his hair with hard fingers that dug into his skull as he tried to close off his mind to the unsettled, restless thoughts that plagued him day and night. There was only one thing he was sure of and that was that he had no intention of letting this Montague daughter run out on him.

This one he was going to make sure of. This one he wanted willing. And after last night he felt sure that willing was exactly what she would be.

The telephone was ringing somewhere downstairs as he opened the bathroom door and he heard Alexa running down the stairs as she went to answer it. Santos followed her down, buttoning up his shirt as he went but leaving it hanging loose over the waistband of his jeans.

‘Coffee?’ he asked as he passed her in the hall just as she reached the phone. She had pulled on a pale blue cotton robe and was belting it around her waist as she picked up the receiver.

‘Mmm …’

Her reply was distracted, her attention on the phone.

‘Dad!’

Of course. He’d told her to speak to her father. But, maldito sea, he thought she’d done that last night. She’d been on the phone when he’d come back to the house. He’d really believed that everything was out in the open then. Now it seemed that that assumption might have been completely wrong.

Alexa had known that it had to be her father on the phone as soon as she’d heard it ringing. She’d asked him to ring her back as soon as he got her message and this was obviously him doing just that.