Cordero's Forced Bride

‘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 second and then we will explain all. Or rather…’

The cold, curt tone slid into something else as his eyes seared across her skin, seeming to strip away a necessary protective layer and leave her nerves raw and exposed underneath.

‘You will do the explaining,’ he said and for all the sudden softness and smoothness of his tone Alexa could be in no doubt that it was an autocratic command, one that he expected to have obeyed without hesitation or argument. ‘You will tell your father—your family—what has happened.’

‘But I…’ Alexa began, her voice failing her, the words drying in her throat as she tried to protest. ‘It isn’t up to me now—surely you…’

She couldn’t go out there and tell everyone why she was here. Tell them that Natalie had run out on her wedding— the wedding that had been described in the newspapers and the gossip columns as the Wedding of the Year, the joining together of huge wealth and aristocratic beauty. It was to have been the union of one powerful rich, ultra modern bloodline of the billionaire entrepreneur, and the old, patrician lineage of Natalie Montague, twenty-year-old daughter of Lord Stanley Montague. Santos Cordero who had made his fortune with his own hands and brain, dragging himself up from his lowly and impoverished beginnings to the height of his wealth and power, was marrying into the British nobility, a family whose name had been amongst the highest in the land for centuries past. It had been the stuff that fairy tales were made of, especially when the bride was acknowledged to be a stunning beauty and the groom a hunk whose carved, handsome features and lean, powerful frame had featured in many photographs in the gossip columns and in magazines, usually with some supremely decorative female draped on his arm.

‘I don’t think…’ she tried again, feeling even more lost and adrift than in the first moments when she had arrived in the church and had come under the scrutiny of those coldly burning eyes as she walked up the aisle towards him.

Because the truth was that she didn’t know what she was meant to say or how—and what—she was supposed to explain. Nothing had been as she had expected it. But then how did you know what might happen when you had to break up a wedding by announcing to the groom that his fiancée had jilted him? It wasn’t exactly something that you did every day.

But Santos wasn’t listening to her protests. Instead he had levered himself away from the door and taken two swift strides towards her, his hand coming out and clamping over her arm, just above the elbow, hard fingers digging into her skin as he swung her round to face the door at his side.

‘You will do it,’ he declared, cold and brusque. ‘Your family has messed up my life enough already, so now…’

He was interrupted by another rap at the door and her father’s voice again, sharper this time.

‘Alexandra—what’s going on in there…?’

‘Nothing—I mean, it’s fine,’ Alexa managed when Santos turned a forceful glare on her, the burnished eyes directing a silent command that she should respond. ‘We—we’re coming out now and I’ll…I’ll explain.’

She had no option, it seemed, because that hand that gripped her arm was now pulling her forward, leaving her no choice but to follow.

‘Let go of me!’ she spat in furious protest. ‘OK, so I had to bring you bad news—but there’s a saying about not shooting the messenger. And that’s all that I am—the messenger. Natalie’s the one—’

‘But your sister is not here.’