Look back at me—just once, Alexa begged him in the privacy of her own thoughts, then immediately contradicted herself, pleading with him not to turn round, knowing it was more than she could bear if she saw his beloved face one more time and saw stamped on it the determination to leave her, never to have loved her.
‘Adios.’ Santos flung the single word over his shoulder as he turned the key in the lock, wrenched open the door. And then, just in case she hadn’t understood, ‘Goodbye, Alexa.’
Goodbye. She let the word form silently on her lips but couldn’t bring herself to say it. Goodbye, my love.
Tears were blurring her eyes and she blinked them fiercely away, needing to be able to see him clearly this one last time. She watched his tall, straight back stiffen, saw him square his shoulders as he prepared to step out into the morning air, cold and still after the wild storms of the night before.
And stared in disbelief as he hesitated, stopped.
‘No lo puedo,‘ he said. ‘I cannot …’
‘You …’
For several long, fraught moments Alexa struggled to find the strength to say anything. She couldn’t see Santos’s face and so she had no idea what thoughts were going through his mind.
‘You can’t—what?’
Slowly he turned to her once again and she could barely recognise his face, the skin was drawn so tightly across his cheekbones, and his eyes were dark with shadows that he didn’t try to hide from her.
‘Don’t ask me to leave. I cannot do it.’
Twice Alexa tried to form the question. Twice her voice broke, failed her, and she had to swallow hard to relieve the tension in her throat. But Santos waited, seeming to understand intuitively just how important this was.
‘Why can’t you do it?’ she managed at last.
‘I can’t leave you.’ It was as simple and as straightforward as that.
‘Santos …’ Alexa began but he lifted up a hand to silence her, his burning eyes intent on her face.
‘No—let me. I’ll give you answers. I don’t know if they are the answers you want but they’re the only ones that I have. Please listen and then …’
He broke off as if unable to say—or to face—what would happen ‘and then …’
And it was the simple fact of the way that Santos, normally the one so totally in control, so totally sure of what he wanted to say, so sure of what should be said, was unable to finish the sentence, was hesitating over what to say next, that kept her frozen, silent, waiting until he could find the words that were needed.
She didn’t know where this was heading. She only knew that Santos had been about to leave and then he had turned back. But he still stood between her and the door, with it hanging wide open behind him. All he had to do was to turn in that direction again, and walk, and she knew she would have lost him. For good.
But for now he was here. And she needed to listen to him.
‘Tell me.’ She spoke softly, knowing there was nothing else she could say.
Santos nodded slowly, drew in a deep, uneven breath.
‘Just over a week ago, I had my life all planned out. I was supposed to be getting married to a woman who would bring me everything I wanted—everything I thought I needed. It was all carefully rationalised, totally under my control …’
And control was what he had needed. The adult male was determined to enforce the control that the little boy who had been abandoned, who had been abused, had never had over his fate.
‘And I knew that it would work. Natalie and I were a well-planned business deal. But I would have treated her well. She would have wanted for nothing. But then …’
He hesitated, raked both hands through his hair, his eyes looking clouded and distant as if he was focusing on something a long way away, something he could barely see.
‘Then at the party before the wedding I met someone else. My bride-to-be’s sister …’
At Alexa’s sudden gasp of surprise those silvery eyes came up to hers in a swift, flashing look, one that focused intently on her face—and stayed there, watching every flicker of emotion that crossed her features, every tiny change of expression.
‘You unsettled me,’ he said, the words breaking on a short, self-deprecatory laugh. ‘You did more than that. I couldn’t take my eyes off you.’
‘Then?’ Alexa breathed in shock.
‘Then,’ Santos confirmed, ‘I’d been told that Natalie was the beauty but you were the dowdy, bookish one, the spinster librarian. I didn’t see any dowdy spinster. I saw someone who intrigued me, someone who caught my eye and held it. Someone …’
He sighed again, shaking his head once more as he recalled those thoughts.