Cordero's Forced Bride. Kate Walker

Her narrow hands had come up before her face, fluttering weakly against her sculpted cheeks. Above the long, dark red nails her wide blue eyes appeared to glisten with tears that she was fighting not to shed.

      ‘What has she done? What will we do?’

      ‘Hush, my dear.’ Stanley’s response sounded almost like a reproach rather than an attempt at consolation as he stepped forward to take his wife’s hands in his and hold them tightly, looking deep into her glistening eyes.

      ‘Petra—don’t…’

      Alexa took a couple of steps forward, then stopped, knowing that her stepmother would not want her attempts at comfort. In fact, she would probably repulse them as dramatically as she was now clinging to her husband’s hands and gazing up forlornly into his eyes.

      ‘Surely it’s better this way than for her to realise later that she’s made a terrible mistake,’ she repeated.

      Oh, she was good, Santos told himself, watching the way Alexa had moved forward then hesitated, noting the quiet, soothing note of her voice. Listening to her, watching her, he could almost believe that she was genuine. That she believed every last word of the story that had dropped so convincingly from her pretty mouth.

      But of course that couldn’t be true. She had to be in this right up to her elegant neck. She must have known that her sister was going to run out on him; why else would she time her arrival at the church so perfectly that it was impossible for anyone to go after Natalie and bring her back?

      They were all in it together—the whole family. And he had been foolish enough to let them persuade him to let his guard down and, for the first time in his life, make a bad decision.

      As a wedding present for your bride… He could still hear Petra Montague’s beseeching voice inside his head. You wouldn’t want to see your father-in-law thrown out into the street…

      Dios! What had he been thinking? Never before had he paid out anything on a contract before the whole deal was signed and sealed, but this time he’d let his guard slip just a centimetre and the damn Montague family had taken full advantage of it.

      ‘You must want Natalie to be happy.’

      ‘She would have been happy with Santos!’ Petra wailed. ‘We would all have been happy with things that way!’

      ‘But she wasn’t happy,’ Alexa protested. ‘She just didn’t dare say it, once the wedding had been arranged and everything planned.’

      From where he stood slightly to the side, all that Santos could see was this Alexa’s face and body in profile, and, having looked at her once, he suddenly found it impossible to look away.

      ‘Plain’ was the way her stepmother had described her. ‘Dull and old-fashioned’. But even at the pre-wedding party he had not seen her in that way. She didn’t have Natalie’s dramatic colouring, her stunning beauty. In the older girl, everything was toned down, her sister’s blonde hair subdued to a dark brown, and no blue, blue eyes but an unusual hazel of the sort that could be green or brown depending on the light and her mood. And her clothes had been so much simpler than her sister’s, more demure than Natalie’s ultra-fashionable style, perhaps, but not ‘dull’ or old-fashioned.

      Now, even under the appallingly unflattering and over-elaborate hairstyle, her profile had a purity that caught the eye and held it. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent and the length of the lush, curling eyelashes that rested on her cheeks as she looked down seemed almost as if they might waft a breeze across the church with each movement of her eyes.

      Her figure was tall and slender, slight in comparison to her sister’s voluptuous curves, but she held herself with a natural elegance. She might not be as stunning a beauty as her sister but there was something about her that drew his attention to her.

      Something that hooked him and held him watching, caught by her stillness, her composure. Something that intrigued him and wouldn’t let him go.

      On the day they had met she had been so cool, so distant, the ice maiden personified, that he had disliked her on sight. She had turned those hazel eyes on him in the sort of look that he had seen too often as he was growing up. The expression that reminded him he had clawed his way out of the gutter and that he still carried the taint of the slums along with him. It was a look that he had vowed he would never let anyone subject him to ever again and, seeing it, he had told himself that if he had had to choose then he would have preferred Natalie to this cold, stiff, unwelcoming woman.

      Now he was no longer so certain.

      ‘But one thing’s for sure,’ she was saying now, the calm, soft tones of her voice carrying clearly even above her stepmother’s near-hysterics, her father’s attempts at soothing. ‘I’m afraid there isn’t going to be a wedding here today. I just couldn’t let Natalie go through with it.’

      Couldn’t… The word swung round and round in Santos’s head, sending warning echoes out like the ripples in a pond when a pebble was thrown into it. I just couldn’t let Natalie go through with it.

      Couldn’t, be damned. She had been part of this all along. She’d known that Natalie was going to break her promise, had helped her run out on the wedding.

      Helped her humiliate him in this public way.

      ‘I’m sorry that you’ve all had a wasted journey, but I’m sure you’ll understand. And now I suppose the only thing we can do is to go home and get on with our lives.’

      She was moving forward as she spoke, making it plain that she was about to do just that, about to walk down the aisle, out of the church…

      ‘So if you’d all like to leave…’

      ‘No!’

      That was not going to happen. She wasn’t going to just walk away from this, walk out on the mess she and her family had created, and leave it all behind without a backward look. The furious feeling that he had been duped and robbed was like a blaze in his mind, obliterating rational thought, driving him into action. His hand shot out and fastened around her arm again, pulling her to a halt with such force that she actually spun round again, coming face to face with him. Natalie might be beyond his reach, but her sister was not.

      The Montague family owed—and he didn’t care who started paying. Only that someone did. And this other daughter seemed a good place to start.

      But first he had to make sure that she didn’t get away from him now, running out on him fast like her deceitful, lying little sister.

      ‘No,’ he repeated even more forcefully. ‘You are not going anywhere—you are coming with me.’

      ‘Why?’

      Once again Alexa was strongly tempted by the idea of a swift kick on the ankle bone of the haughty, autocratic male who held her captive as he glared down into her face, just inches away from his. Only the thought of the audience still seated in the pews behind them kept her from actually physically attacking him, though she glared up into his arrogantly handsome face, praying that her defiance and determination showed in her own eyes as they locked with his.

      ‘Why on earth would I want to go anywhere with you?’

      ‘Because I am asking you to,’ Santos said with a swift, totally unexpected smile.

      The transformation in his face was so sudden, so astonishing that it made her blink in total disbelief. From being coldly tyrannical and domineering, he had suddenly switched to deliberate and persuasive charm.

      And it was working, she admitted unwillingly to herself as she felt the unexpected change in her pulse rate, the new unevenness of her heartbeat in response to the softening of his expression, that stunning smile. She didn’t want to feel that she was weak enough to respond to the practised charm of an experienced male seducer, but the truth was that she couldn’t stop herself. When that smile curved the sensual lips and the light illuminated his burnished eyes, then she suddenly