‘Someone I needed to put out of my mind if I was to go ahead with my plans. Those carefully thought-out, businesslike plans. If I gave in to the attraction I felt to you, if I lost control, then everything would be ruined. But then on my wedding day, things didn’t turn out in any way as they were planned. And at the end of the day that should have seen me married, my planning fulfilled, the contracts signed, instead I was in a position where not one but two Montague girls had walked out on me.’
‘I’m sorry …’ Alexa put in but the words faded into nothing as she saw the way he was looking at her. The unexpected light in his eyes.
‘Two of you walked away but there was only one of you I gave a damn about. Only one of you that I couldn’t get out of my mind. When you told me that Natalie wasn’t coming to the wedding, that she’d jilted me, I was furious, my pride was hurt, but I was determined not to show it.’
‘The reception.’
‘The reception.’ Santos nodded. ‘Everything was going to go ahead as planned. No one was going to see me show any reaction—least of all the family of the woman I was supposed to have married. And I had another plan up my sleeve.’
‘Me?’
‘You,’ he confirmed. ‘I thought you were in on everything right from the start. That you had known about your father.’
‘I didn’t! I swear …’ Alexa began but Santos held up a hand to silence her.
‘I know that now, but I wasn’t thinking straight right then. I was angry—I wanted someone to pay for what had happened. And I thought that person would be you. But then you walked out on me too and suddenly everything changed. Where Natalie’s defection left me with hurt pride, an outraged sense of being used … when you left, I missed you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you; I wanted you back. I would have done anything to get you back. Including turning up here to demand that you took your sister’s place.’
‘Bringing with you the most uncomfortable pair of shoes I’ve ever worn …’ Alexa’s laughter was weak but it was there, and he heard it and his face changed suddenly.
‘Those shoes were tearing your poor feet to ribbons. I cannot understand how you could even stand up in them.’
And he cared. It was written all over his face. It was there in the burn of his eyes, the shake in his voice. She was beginning to be able to read him, this man who didn’t believe in love.
‘I missed you, Alexa. I wanted you. I couldn’t go on without you. But I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t understand how I felt. I didn’t know what it was.’
Of course not, Alexa thought, her heart aching for his confusion. He didn’t know what love was so how could he recognise it?
‘When I said I didn’t believe in love, I meant that I didn’t know how to do it—how to love, I mean. I didn’t think it existed, so I didn’t even know what it was I was feeling. No one had ever made me feel that way before. I thought it was just wanting—wanting you more than any other woman I’d ever met. And that was bad enough. But then …’
‘Then?’ Alexa prompted again when he broke off and rubbed both his hands across his face in a gesture of tiredness and confusion that caught on her heart and tugged hard. ‘Then what?’
‘Then you asked about the scars on my back—and I talked about my mother. For the first time in my life I talked to someone about my mother.’
Alexa’s breath caught in her throat. Her head was spinning with the importance of that last sentence. Did he know what he was saying? Did he know the huge compliment he was paying her?
It seemed he did because apparently without being aware of it he had taken a single step—then another—towards her.
Away from the door.
‘And when I tried to leave just now—when you said you wouldn’t marry me—I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk away from you because I realised that what I had felt when you walked away from me that day of the wedding wasn’t new. It was something I’d felt just once before—when my mother walked away from me. And I knew then why you wouldn’t marry me.’
Alexa drew in her breath on a long, ragged sigh and started to speak even as she let it out again.
‘Let me tell you why—’ she began but broke off as she realised that Santos had moved even closer, that he was reaching out for her hand, taking it in his.
‘No—let me tell you,’ he said sombrely. ‘Because now I think I understand. You wouldn’t marry me because I said marriage or nothing. And I was offering nothing—nothing that you wanted. I wanted marriage because I wanted to have you—hold you—I wanted to keep you with me, make sure that you never walked away from me again. In that I was as bad as my mother—your father. I thought I could control you, make you do what I wanted. But what I should have been offering you was the one thing that would have kept you with me for ever if you’d wanted it.’