Cordero's Forced Bride

‘How can you claim anything so ridiculous—so preposterous—as to say that you—you’ve…?’

‘That I’ll take you as my wife? Why not? I never wanted your sister as I want you.’

‘But you—’ Alexa began, but then the realisation of just what he had said sank in to her numbed brain. ‘Is that the truth?’

‘Why should I lie to you, belleza?’

Santos’s tone was suddenly soft. His gaze still held hers as he spoke, his eyes so deep and clear that she felt they were like a still, smooth pool in which she risked drowning, going in over her head completely.

Alexa wished that she could look away, but she found it impossible to drag her gaze away from that mesmerising stare of his, the look that seemed to search right to the depth of her soul and know exactly what was hidden there.

‘But—’ Her head was spinning, the room seeming to blur around her. ‘But how can you know that? You haven’t even kissed me…’

‘That is something that is soon remedied.’

Kate Walker was born in Nottinghamshire, but as she grew up in Yorkshire she has always felt that her roots are there. She met her husband at university, and originally worked as a children’s librarian, but after the birth of her son she returned to her old childhood love of writing. When she’s not working, she divides her time between her family, their three cats, and her interests of embroidery, antiques, film and theatre, and, of course, reading.

You can visit Kate at www.kate-walker.com

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CORDERO’S FORCED BRIDE

BY

KATE WALKER

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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CORDERO’S FORCED BRIDE

For Helen

CHAPTER ONE

IF SHE WAS going to do this, then she had better get on with it, Alexa told herself firmly. In fact, she had better get on with it right now, she added fiercely, knowing there was no other way forward.

Because the truth was that she did have to do this. Somebody had to, that was for sure. No one else was going to do it. And definitely not Natalie.

Natalie would never have coped with this. She’d have given in, gone down under pressure, and she’d have ended up saying the exact opposite of what she’d come to say—what she needed to say.

If Natalie had had to face Santos Cordero then she would have agreed to go through with this wedding she didn’t want, just as she’d been agreeing to do right from the start. She’d go through with it and as a result she’d miss out on her chance of a real relationship, real love. No, Natalie was better being on her way to the airport and a new life.

Leaving her older half-sister to tidy up after her. It was now Alexa’s job to clean up, apologise, explain.

That thought was enough to have Alexa’s feet slowing as she moved away from where the car had just delivered her to the main door of the huge, elegant cathedral of Santa María de la Sede in the centre of Seville. Glancing upwards briefly, towards where the bell tower known as La Giralda was etched against the clear blue sky, she drew a deep, calming breath and squared her shoulders. At her back the crowd of paparazzi gathered to record the event called for her attention, and the flashing of cameras sounded like a fusillade of bullets, one she struggled to ignore as she climbed the couple of worn stone steps into the porch, her fingers reaching out for the heavy wrought-iron handle of the big, carved wooden door.

‘You’re not getting trapped that way, Nat. Not any more.’

She spoke the words out loud, shaking her head as she did so in an attempt to give them more emphasis, to make them mean more and have more effect. But even as she heard them she knew that they lacked the conviction she’d been aiming for. They weren’t going to be able to give her the strength she needed to walk into the cathedral, announce what had happened and deal with the chaos that followed. And that was what she had to do. Because there was no one else.

‘Come on, Alexa. You know you have to do this!’

Sighing with resignation, she accepted the truth as she forced herself forward again, curling her fingers around the big iron handle and gripping hard.

There was no one else who could sort this out. If she didn’t do something then the whole dreadful, ugly mess would stay just as it was—in fact it would probably get so much worse. The explosion was going to be nuclear as it was. All she could hope to do was to try to contain some of the fallout so that the repercussions were at least manageable.

Nervousness made her palms damp so that her fingers slipped on the metal handle, foiling her first attempt to open the door.

‘Oh, damn it!’

With nothing else available, she had no choice but to wipe her hands down the long skirt of her dress in an attempt to dry them off. The gesture did nothing for the appearance of the expensive pink satin, but then right now that was the least of her concerns. The ceremony that the dress had been planned for wasn’t going to go ahead today after all, so it didn’t matter at all what it looked like.

Besides, the dress wasn’t really her style at all. It was the sort of glamorous look that her stepmother had chosen for the society wedding she had always hoped for for her daughter, and Alexa knew that the colour wasn’t the most flattering for her dark brown hair and hazel eyes. But that had been all right when she had believed that the wedding was what Natalie wanted. It was Natalie’s day and nothing was going to spoil her half-sister’s wedding, even if it was to a man that Alexa felt was not right for her.

A wedding that was now no longer going to take place, Alexa reminded herself ruefully, reaching for the door handle again. She was going to need all her courage to go into the church and tell everyone that.

Her stepmother would probably have hysterics. Her father— and Natalie’s—would become even stiffer, even more withdrawn, his mouth clamping tighter than ever before. And the groom…

And the groom…

The thought made a sensation like the frantic flutter of butterfly wings start to beat high up in Alexa’s throat as the great door swung slowly open, to land with a hollow, sepulchral thud against the worn stone wall, the noise making everyone inside the church turn and stare in expectation.

She had no idea what the groom would say or do. No idea at all just how Santos Cordero would react to the news that his bride-to-be had jilted him at the altar, running away from her marriage and heading for the airport and another man. But just the thought made her shiver as her blood ran cold through her veins.

She had only met the man her half-sister was marrying once, at the family dinner in Santos’s beautiful Moorish-style home just a few miles from Seville on the night of her arrival in Spain, two days before. But she’d heard so much about him. And she’d seen the effects that his influence had had on her father ever since the two men had embarked on a business deal together. It seemed now that every time she saw Stanley Montague he looked older, thinner, greyer. More shrunken somehow and clearly desperately stressed. Her dad was just not used to dealing with the financial sharks, and Santos Cordero was one of the biggest sharks of all.

Not for nothing was he known as el Brigante—the Brigand. A nickname that she had heard he lived up to in more ways than one.

‘Just wait till you see him! He’s such a hunk! And rich as sin,’ Natalie had said, sounding so very enthusiastic.

Too enthusiastic, Alexa now realised, hearing in memory what she hadn’t recognised then as the forced note in her sister’s voice, betraying the careful effort Natalie had been making to sound like an excited young bride desperately in love with her husband-to-be.

But Natalie had been right about one thing at least—Santos was every bit as stunning as everyone had told her he would be. There was no denying that he was one of the most devastatingly handsome men she had ever met in her life. Tall, raven- haired, with a leanly powerful frame and powerfully carved features, he was a man for whom the description ‘darkly dangerous’ had to have been coined.

Hunk he might be, Alexa had told herself later when she had been introduced to Santos. But when she had come up close, close enough to shake his hand, close enough to look into his face, she had known intuitively that the ‘dangerous’ part of that description was not just fantasy or her imagination running riot.

His grip on her hand had been cool and firm, his careful smile polite and practised, but she had found herself looking into the coldest, iciest eyes she had ever seen. A unexpectedly pale grey gaze that seared over her with the cruel force of a focused laser. Her skin had prickled all over and she had felt alternately hot and then shiveringly cold as if she were in the grip of some horrible fever. Murmuring some inane politeness, she had made her escape as soon as possible and from then onwards had tried to avoid Santos for the rest of the evening. But all the time she had felt the burn of his palm against hers, and her body still tingled under the impact of that scorching gaze.

‘Alexandra?’

It was her father’s voice, blurred and almost covered by the murmurs of surprise from the congregation, coming to her from where he had been waiting just inside the church—waiting not for her but for his younger daughter to arrive. Natalie had made the excuse that she didn’t want to overtire him, had insisted that her father went on ahead, rather than following tradition and travelling to the church in the same car as the bride.

‘Alexandra…’

‘What has happened?’

Another voice sliced into the buzz of interest that had filled the church with the realisation that the new arrival through the door had been not the bride they were expecting but the chief bridesmaid. A pale-faced, uncomfortable-looking bridesmaid at that, Alexa reflected miserably as the cold, incisive tones of the groom’s question carried clearly down what seemed like miles and miles of aisle and made every other conversation and comment die away, like the tide ebbing back from the sand.

‘What has happened?’ he demanded again and unwillingly Alexa’s eyes went to where he stood at the altar, tall and darkly, dangerously imposing.

If he had looked stunning in the sombre black and white of the evening dress of the night of the party, so now, in the formal morning coat, waistcoat and elegant cravat, he had an impact that made her head spin. And from the moment that her eyes clashed with his, green-brown locking with glittering grey, it was as if there were only the two of them in the world. The rest of the congregation, her surroundings, the flickering candles and the gorgeous flowers all merged into just one great blur, at the centre of which was a dark, strongly carved face, a tight, set mouth and burning, molten eyes.

‘Tell me!’ Santos Cordero said, and it was an autocratic command, flung at her with all the force of a perfectly aimed arrow, right from the far end of the church.

The impact of it flung her head back, bringing her chin up as her eyes flashed a defiance of his dictatorial tone and she watched his eyes narrow in swift assessment, his beautiful mouth tightening sharply.

‘Per favor,’ he added with such a bite and an obviously carefully controlled effort that it was like a slap in her face. Stinging hard.

It wasn’t a ‘please’ at all, she thought furiously. It was just another way of phrasing a command, and in a tone that made her want to toss something rude at him and turn on her heel and march out. Either that or fling the shocking truth in his face and watch that arrogant glare fade from his face, the ‘lord of all I survey’ stance falter just a little so that his straight shoulders weren’t held so high, the elegantly booted feet not planted quite so firmly on the stone-flagged floor of the church.

But even as the angry thoughts crossed her mind, a sense of decorum and a touch of unwilling compassion pushed them out again fast.

Arrogant brute though he might be, Santos Cordero was still a bridegroom on his wedding day. He had come here today believing he was going to be married to her half-sister, Natalie.

The same Natalie who had fled from her hotel and was probably at the airport now with the man she had admitted she really loved.

Leaving it to her sister to explain just what was happening.

The thought dried her mouth, tightening her throat, and just for a moment she actually allowed herself the luxury of considering turning and running too, getting away from here as fast and as far as she could. This wasn’t her problem; her responsibility. Let someone else explain to this arrogant Spaniard that his bride-to-be had had second thoughts. Let someone else…

There was no one else.

At the far end of the church, Alexa could see that her stepmother, resplendent in emerald-green and a hat with swirling peacock feathers, was twitching uncomfortably in her seat, her narrow face pale and taut as if she already suspected that something had gone very badly wrong. And her father…

No, she didn’t dare to look into her father’s face, knowing that he would guess she had brought the worst of news. And being her father he would probably erupt in a rage. Which could be the worst possible response right now.

‘Señorita…’

Santos Cordero’s pointed hint that she continue sounded gentle, but looking into his dark, set face, Alexa suddenly knew that gentle was the exact opposite of just what he was feeling. He had barely controlled his impatience, reining it in only with the most ferocious power. And even now it was very close to breaking free if the harshly drawn white lines about his nose and eyes, etched around that sexy mouth were anything to go by. Say the wrong thing and he would explode, the top blowing off his mental volcano and the red-hot lava of fury flowing out to engulf them with spectacularly nasty results if she wasn’t very much mistaken.

This was the Santos Cordero she had been led to expect. This was el brigante, whose reputation for arrogance and ruthlessness had reached her even in Yorkshire, where her home was, miles away from the family house in London.

When her father had first announced that he was negotiating a business deal with Santos he had sounded so excited, totally confident that this partnership would make him a fortune and so ease all his financial problems. But it hadn’t been long before everything had seemed to change. It was obvious that the deal was not the success Stanley had dreamed of but instead a source of great stress. Though just lately those worries seemed to have been buried in the unexpected rush to organise Natalie’s wedding.

‘Señorita…’

Once more those softly deadly tones drew her eyes to the face of the man her half-sister was supposed to have been marrying today. And once she had looked into those burning, deep-set eyes, even from this distance, she found it impossible to look away. She couldn’t drag her own gaze from the mesmeric force of his and once more she had that shocking sense of tunnel vision. Of being at the far end of a long, long channel from where the only thing she could see was the tall, powerful form of Santos Cordero, every ounce of his attention totally focused on her.

‘What is it that you have come here to say? Because you have come to say something, I assume?’

Drawing in her breath sharply, Alexa struggled to ignore the sting of that sarcastic tone, which had a bite like the flick of a whip.

‘I have to speak to you,’ she managed, the words coming out as breathlessly as if she had just run the couple of miles from her half-sister’s hotel room to the cathedral. ‘Please…’ she added with renewed urgency when she saw the way that his black brows snapped together in a dangerous frown.

‘Then speak.’

An autocratic flick of one long, bronzed hand emphasised the command with all the arrogance of a long-ago emperor.

‘I for one am impatient to hear what you have to say.’

He was impatient all right. He couldn’t make that any plainer. And she would tell him. But not right here, right now. Not like this with close on six hundred guests now openly gawping in her direction, fascinated by what was going on and anxious to view the next ‘episode’ in this soap-opera drama that had suddenly been staged before them.

With her heart beating so high up in her throat that breathing normally was a complete impossibility, she made herself take the necessary steps forward down the aisle that brought her near to him. And as she went she tested possible openings over and over inside her thoughts, trying each one for size and discarding them as too stupid, too contentious, too clumsy or just plain wrong. And even if she had any hope of an idea it fled from her mind in the moment that she looked up into his dark, shuttered face and saw the way those cold, hunter’s eyes were burning down into her.

She knew that it wasn’t possible but she suddenly felt that he was even bigger, leaner, stronger than he had appeared on the night she had been introduced to him. The formal tailoring of his wedding suit emphasised the straight width of his shoulders, the broad chest, narrow waist and long, long legs. And against the immaculate white of his shirt, the golden tones of his skin stood out in dramatic, powerful contrast.

‘Can we go somewhere more private, please?’

Her voice was thin and uneven on the words but she knew that he had heard her even though he inclined his dark head to one side, frowned faintly, as if he had not quite caught what she had said.

‘Perdon?’

He took a step forward as he spoke and she was close enough now to see the way the powerful chest rose and fell with his breathing, even see the faint shadow on his jaw where already the darkness of stubble was just visible below the surface. She almost believed she could actually feel the heat of his strong body reach out to enclose her, carrying with it the subtle tang of some citrusy cologne, enhanced and deepened by the clean, personal scent of his skin. Her heart was thudding even harder now, but this time she realised on a sense of shock that it was not just the sense of apprehension that gripped her but a sudden rush of a purely female response to the presence of a powerful, sexually alluring male. And that was the last thing she wanted to feel towards this man whose presence in their lives seemed to have created nothing but problems for her family.

‘Can we go somewhere more private, please?’

She forced herself to say it again, more firmly and a touch louder this time, though she really wanted to hiss it at him in the most controlled of whispers, for his ears only.

‘Somewhere we can be alone.’

‘Alone?’

This time those black brows drew together with such sharp force that she almost heard the snap and it was impossible to misunderstand just what was in his mind. Alexa could feel the hot tide of blood race through her skin, heating it with embarrassment.

‘Señorita, I am about to be married.’

‘Not like that! I didn’t mean it like that!’ she hissed at him. ‘And you’re—’

With a sense of horror she choked off the appalling declaration— you’re not getting married. She couldn’t just come out and say it. Not like that. Just as she couldn’t give him the devastating news right here and now, in front of this audience.

Because he had to be devastated, didn’t he? Even if he was big and strong, and ruthless as they came, he had after all asked Natalie to marry him, to be his wife, for better, for worse…

‘You really need to hear what I have to say,’ she managed, praying that the emphasis she was putting on the words hid the sudden huskiness that seemed to have affected her voice.

‘You think I do.’

He was looking down his long, straight nose at her now, that broad forehead creased in a disapproving frown, silvery eyes darkened with frank disdain and total scepticism.

‘You think I should hear what you have to say—but you give me no reason why you should march in here like this, without a word of explanation and demand that I—’

‘I’m trying to explain!’ Alexa snapped in total exasperation.

Couldn’t he see that this was important? That she wouldn’t have ‘marched in here’ like this if it weren’t? Couldn’t he see…?

No, she acknowledged to herself privately. He couldn’t see at all. It was the last thing that would possibly cross his mind.

Of course el brigante would never consider that his bride might not turn up. That she might abandon her wedding, jilting her bridegroom and leaving him waiting at the altar. It would just never enter his handsome, arrogant head. Instead he had supreme confidence that she would be here, just as he had arranged, just as he wanted, and go ahead with the marriage— because he wanted it.

The immovable arrogance of the man was beginning to grate so much that she found she was actually clenching her teeth hard so as not to let rip with a furious and totally unvarnished declaration of the truth.

‘But I think that you’d prefer it if we were alone to talk.’

‘What I would prefer is not to be alone with an unknown woman just moments before my wedding ceremony. Can you imagine what the gutter Press would make of that?’

‘Oh, if you’re interested in preserving your reputation then you needn’t worry! I can assure you that I have no designs on…’

Alexa’s voice faded away as she caught the piercing, cynically sceptical look he slanted at her from those burning, silvery eyes. He really thought she was here as some sort of reputation- ruining exercise? What sort of life did this man lead that he had become so totally cynical, so appallingly suspicious? Did he truly believe that she would use the time they were alone together to blackmail him later—demanding a small fortune not to ‘kiss and tell’?

Well, she had no intention of kissing at all…

That thought sent her unwary gaze flying to Santos’s mouth, lingering just a moment too long on its sensual shape, the cynical half-smile curling the corners, and her heart skipped a beat. Kissing those lips would be an experience, one that set off flares of warning in her mind at just imagining it.

But ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ as her mother was fond of quoting. And everything she had heard about Santos Cordero put that ‘handsome does’ part of the saying very much in doubt.

‘I prefer not to know what designs you might have…’

The icy tones of the Spaniard’s attractively accented voice dragged her thoughts back from the foolish path they were travelling, giving her a hint of perhaps one of the reasons why her half-sister had decided that she couldn’t go through with this wedding.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, you impossible man,’ she exploded. ‘I’m trying to save you from embarrassment here.’

‘Alexandra…’

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.