LITMIR.BIZ

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      It was her father who stepped forward, obviously determined to intervene, his face alternating between red and pale, his tone and his use of her full name a brusque reproach.

      ‘Alexandra—please…’

      But he stopped dead at a sudden lift of the Spaniard’s hand, an autocratic signal to stop—stay away. Obviously something in what she had said had caught Santos Cordero’s attention. That ‘you impossible man,’ Alexa strongly suspected. She doubted very much that he was regularly subjected to such a contemptuous description—if ever.

      ‘If you’re really afraid, then we can leave the door ajar so that someone will hear your screams when I…’

      But no, she’d gone too far there. If she had meant to provoke him into a decision and action, then she had succeeded. More than succeeded. She had pushed him over some sort of edge that she hadn’t even known was there and he had lost whatever remaining grip he had had on his tolerance, moving from an irritated, barely reined-in impatience in the blink of an eye. She could see it in the flash of cold fire in his eyes and in the way that his beautiful mouth thinned to a brutal, hard line.

      And suddenly her heart was thudding in a very different way from the purely feminine response of just moments before. From being at least on secure ground, if not at all confident of her reception, she now felt as if the earth had shifted beneath her feet, opening up the stone flags to reveal a nasty, sucking, dragging swamp that was closing over her feet, starting to drag her in—drag her down.

      Her throat was painfully dry and her thoughts spun as she slicked a nervous tongue over parched lips.

      ‘Believe me, it really would be better if we spoke in private—in there perhaps…’

      She waved an arm in a wild gesture towards a door that she presumed led to the church vestry.

      Just what she was going to do if he dug in the heels of his highly polished handmade shoes and refused to go anywhere, she had no idea. But it seemed that she didn’t even need to consider the possibility because from his obdurate refusal to co-operate, Santos now launched, suddenly and fast, into action. Swift as a striking snake, his hand came out and clamped hard fingers around her upper arm, their tips digging into the skin.

      ‘You want to talk?’

      His voice was harsh and thick with anger, his accent sounding strongly deep in his throat.

      ‘Then we’ll talk.’

      And he marched her across to the arched wooden door that she had indicated, wrenching on the handle to push it open with scant ceremony. Bundling her inside, he kicked it closed behind him with equal disregard for both the church fitting and, obviously, the idea he had formerly held that being shut in a room with her might prove compromising.

      Clearly that idea was long gone. In fact, to prove the point, he leaned back against the old, dark wood and folded his arms firmly across the width of his chest. If she had thought that his jaw was set, his mouth closed tight before, then it was nothing when compared with the hardness of his face now, the ruthless control of all but the single tight muscle that worked in his jaw.

      ‘Pues,’ he declared after a single flashing glance at the gold watch he wore on his left wrist. ‘You have three minutes in which to explain just what all this is about—and believe me the explanation had better be good—otherwise…’

      He let the threat trail off but all the same it still had enough force and note of danger in his tone to send an apprehensive shiver running down Alexa’s spine.

      ‘So? What do you have to say that is so important?’

      ‘I…’

      Twice she tried to get the words out and both times her voice failed her. Looking into his hard, set face was a mistake. It froze her throat around the words until she could hardly breathe. But looking away was no help either. How could you tell a man that the future he thought was his had been snatched away from him without looking him in the eye?

      But looking him in the eye was quite beyond her.

      ‘You’ve already wasted thirty seconds,’ Santos gibed. ‘Another couple of minutes and I will walk back out there and—’

      ‘Natalie isn’t coming!’

      The words broke from her as any attempt at restraint or control, or even coherence, was impossible. There wasn’t a right way to say this, she told herself, not a good way and definitely not an easy way, so the only thing she could do was to fling the words out into the open and then hope to make a tactical withdrawal, flinching back out of the way of the fallout from the violent explosion that had to result when she made her announcement.

      ‘Natalie isn’t coming. She’s changed her mind.’

      Astonishingly the explosion she had been anticipating didn’t come. But, if it was possible, the sudden dark and dangerous silence that greeted her outburst was actually worse. It was so long-drawn-out and so deep that she felt it take her nerves with it, stretching them out so painfully until she thought she might actually scream out loud with the tension.

      ‘Changed her mind?’ Santos finally echoed the words 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,

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