as if he couldn’t believe what he had heard or if he did then he didn’t understand just what it meant. ‘Explain!’ he rapped out, the cold command having the force of a bullet fired from a gun.
Well, he’d asked for it. She’d tried to be fair. She’d tried to be considerate. But it seemed that fair and considerate were concepts that Santos Cordero just didn’t understand or appreciate.
‘Natalie isn’t coming to the wedding. She doesn’t want to marry you after all.’
‘Where…?’ Another question was barked at her, the single syllable seeming to spark with anger in the air as it was flung from his lips. ‘Where the devil is my bride?’
Alexa would have sworn that it was impossible for his black brows to draw together any more sharply or for the burnished eyes to blaze any more furiously without smoke actually starting to fill the room, but somehow Santos managed to rein in his anger even though she could practically hear it crackling hot in his veins in contrast to the icy control of his beautifully accented voice.
‘And why is she not here, at my side—before that altar, as she should be?’
‘Oh, please!’
Alexa felt she couldn’t take any more. His anger was one thing, when directed at her, but those words ‘my bride’ had almost destroyed her.
My bride. A word that should have meant the promise of love and joy and happily-ever-afters. But he made it sound so possessive.
‘I’m sorry, but she’s never going to be here, at your side, before that—that…’
The word eluded her overstressed brain and she could only manage a wild wave of her hand in the direction of the doorway against which he stood, meaning to indicate the church and the altar beyond it. The church where everyone—her family and his, his friends—were all still waiting for the wedding to begin. The wedding that would never begin now. Never take place.
‘She’s not coming. She’s not going to marry you. She went to the airport but she’ll be through to the departure lounge by now. She was taking a plane to America with the man she really loves. The man she really wants to marry.’
‘She’s gone.’
That icy precision was back in his voice, making her wince in sharp distress when she heard it. She had never felt quite so low and nasty as she did now, and it wasn’t even her own battle she was fighting. But she couldn’t have let Natalie go through with this marriage, the prospect of which was obviously making her so unhappy.
‘Your sister—has run out on her wedding.’
There was a darkly dangerous note in his use of the word ‘sister,’ one that caught on something raw in Alexa’s heart and twisted, cruelly, painfully. But she didn’t dare to absorb the impact of it, take it out and look at it closely to see what it was really implying or what lay behind it. She didn’t have time either. She’d finally almost managed to complete the mission that had brought her here. She’d told Santos the truth and she could now hope to leave, get out of here as fast as she could.
‘She has jilted me—left me for some other man?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘She really should not have done that.’
‘I know, and I am sorry—she should have told you before now, should have admitted to you that she didn’t love you enough to marry you. I know you must be hurt—’
The tumbling words were starting to fall over each other, tangling together in her nervous haste, but they suddenly froze, shutting off completely in shock, as Santos’s response broke into them.
And it was because it was not at all the response she expected that it caught her up short. In fact it was so much the opposite of the response she had been anticipating that she could only stand and stare, hazel eyes widening in stunned disbelief.
Because Santos had laughed.
When she had said that she understood how he must be hurting he had actually flung back his dark head, closed his silvery eyes briefly and laughed out loud. And it was not a pleasant laugh. It had nothing of any real humour in it, no warmth at all. It was a cold laugh, a harsh and bitter laugh, one that made a thousand tiny electrical shivers skitter over her skin and turn her veins to ice.
‘Santos?’ she queried, wondering if after all she had actually got through to him.
In her nervousness had she really made any sort of sense or had she just confused him? Was it possible that she had somehow made him think that this was some sort of joke—a very dark, sick one, but a joke none the less?
‘Santos—did you hear what I said? You have to understand…’
‘Oh, I heard, belleza, and I understand only too well. Your sister has reneged on her promise and run out on me, leaving you to pick up the pieces. That I understand only too well. What I do not get is why in hell you think I should care.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHAT?’
Alexa found that she was blinking in confusion, trying to make sense of Santos’s words, but most of all trying to understand or even believe in his reaction.
If that laugh had been unexpected, then the rest of his words sounded almost surreal. When she had been expecting distress, anger, bitterness at the way that he had been betrayed and left at the altar by the woman he wanted to marry, instead there was dark cynicism, and an almost careless dismissal of what she had just said.
‘You don’t care? But surely…?’
Santos’s response was a shockingly indifferent shrug of his broad shoulders under the fine cloth of his immaculately tailored jacket, and he pushed both hands through the gleaming darkness of his hair as if relaxing after a long day.
But relaxed was the last word she would use to describe the set of his face, the tight compression of his sensual mouth, the way that a taut muscle jumped in his jaw. And the glittering look he turned on her had nothing that was comfortable or easygoing in it. Instead she was reminded of how, on the day she had first met him, she had believed that he had the coldest eyes of anyone in the world.
‘You expect me to act as if your sister has broken my heart? As if I have lost the love of my life and cannot find the strength to go on—to live for the future?’ he questioned cynically, biting the words out as if they were bones he wanted to snap. ‘Well, then you could not be more wrong. I will have no trouble going on with my life after this—though your family might find it harder to pick themselves up as a result. In fact—’
He broke off as a sharp rap came on the door, someone knocking on the heavy panels from the other side, in the church.
‘Alexandra? Alexa?’
It was her father’s voice, coming sharp and concerned through the thickness of the wood.
‘Is everything all right? What’s going on? Cordero—what—’
‘Momento!’ Santos snapped, tossing the word over his shoulder, his burning eyes still fixed on Alexa’s bewildered face. ‘We will be out in a
