Page 170 of Modern Romance November 2024 5-8

The answer came immediately:him. She was afraid of the man himself: of his powerful charisma; of the way he just had to look at her to make her feel all mixed up inside, a tangle of fear and yearning, hope and aching disappointment.

His hand was still on the small of her back, and it still burned. Her whole body did.

Feeling as if she were facing her doom, even as she told herself not to be so melodramatic, Mia slowly started to walk towards the yacht. Santos matched her steps, stride for measured stride. A security guard stood at the gangway—Ronaldo, Mia recalled. He’d been kind to her, but the look he gave her now was like granite.

Did everyone hate her now? And yet, why shouldn’t they? She’d been the worst wife ever, running away the way she had. And, even before that, she had not performed as the Aguila heiress and future matriarch should. Not atall...but, really, was that a surprise? She was the illegitimate daughter of a single mother who had never stayed in one place for long. She hadn’t gone to college, had barely completed school and had never held down a job for more than a few months at a time; she’d skipped from place to place, because not planting roots was what she knew, how she’d always lived. None of it had been befitting of anAguila.

She swallowed the smile she’d been about to give Ronaldo and started up the gangway. Santos guided her towards a lounge with leather sofas and glass coffee-tables, everything the epitome of luxury. With a firm click, he closed the double wood-panelled doors, enclosing them in total privacy. It felt a little bit like a tomb.

Mia swallowed hard. She wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t ready to face the man she’d married, the man she’d fallen in love with—or at least had started to; in the six weeks since she’d left him, she’d wondered if any of it had been real. Could she really fall in love with someone that fast, that hard? Had Santos loved her, or had he just been caught up in it all? Mia had never been able to answer that question. The longer she’d lived with Santos, the unhappier they’d both become; she’d decided it couldn’t have been love, no matter how much they might have convinced themselves. They could call it infatuation—obsession, even—but it hadn’t beenreal... It certainly hadn’t lasted.

And yet, now he was here.

‘Drink?’ he asked tersely and headed over to a well-stocked mahogany bar. Mia watched with more than a little trepidation as her husband poured himself a double whisky. He took a packet of pills out of his jacket pocket and broke the foil on three, tossing them back with a gulp of the amber liquid, before he returned the empty glass to the bar.

‘What are those for?’ she asked, and he turned around, leaning against the bar, his arms folded across his chest.

‘Headache.’

For a second, Mia wondered if he was being sarcastic, implying thatshewas the headache. It must have taken some doing to find her, she supposed. She’d made sure only to use cash as she’d made her way across Spain so she couldn’t be traced. Then she saw him flinch, and realised he really did have a headache.

She gazed at him uneasily as he stared her down, seemingly willing to let the silence spin out. His darkly handsome looks still made her stomach contract with both longing and memory: the ebony hair and those golden-brown eyes the colour of the whisky he’d just tossed back; the trimmed beard on his lean cheeks and sculpted jaw glinting in the dim lighting of the room; the broad shoulders and powerful chest; the same well-muscled body encased in hand-tailored linen. In the six weeks since she’d last seen him, nothing about him had changed at all, except he looked wearier, maybe a bit more cynical. That had to be because of her.

Mia swallowed again and made herself lift her chin and look him right in his golden-brown eyes. ‘So,’ she asked with a poor attempt at insouciance, ‘What do you want to talk about?’

He let out a huff of hard laughter. ‘You haven’t changed, I see.’

Actually,she thought, unable to keep a corrosive edge of bitterness from sharpening her insides,I’ve changed a lot. And not for the better.

‘Neither have you,’ she replied, tilting her chin up just that little bit higher. He was as coldly arrogant and assured as ever. ‘Why did you find me, Santos?’

‘Because you’re my wife.’

‘I’m not a possession,’ she reminded him although, to be fair, he’d never truly treated her like one.Thathadn’t been their problem, at least.

‘I didn’t say you were,’ he returned evenly,soevenly... The man never raised his voice, never got angry, a fact which had come to infuriate Mia. She’d wanted afight, had wanted to get all the ugly emotions out, and he’d refused to give her one. He’d always spoken with that even, measured voice, revealing nothing, feeling nothing except judgment...so much judgment. She saw it in his eyes now, in the way his lips tightened, and she remembered all over again why she’d had to leave.

‘Well,’ she asked, unable to keep from sounding sarcastic, ‘Is there another reason, then, why you came looking for me besides the fact that we made a very silly mistake in marrying each other?’

‘Don’tsay that,’ he ordered with quiet lethality, enough to make Mia blink.

‘Say what?’

‘That our marriage was a mistake.’ His golden-brown eyes gleamed into hers. ‘We made vows, Mia. As an Aguila, I take those seriously.’

‘As an Aguila,’ she repeated. She’d known that Santos had a thing about being the patriarch of one of Spain’s oldest aristocratic families. Their titles had been lost a long time ago, but the pedigree remained. Aguilas were men of their word, who took their vows seriously—of course they were.

‘As a man,’ he qualified, and Mia wondered if that meant anything different. She knew what itdidn’tmean, anyway—he didn’t love her, didn’t respect her. Hecouldn’t, she’d decided, when he’d treated her the way he had—with glowering looks and simmering, accusatory silences. If he’d decided he wanted to stay married to her now just to be a man of his word, well, it would end up being hell for them both...just as it had been before.

So, if Santos had found her simply to bring her back to Seville so that he could remain a person of integrity or some such, well, Mia would simply have to convince him that that was not a good idea for either of them.

Because Santos Aguila might be a man of his word, but Mia was a woman of hers. And she’d made a promise too—a promise to herself—never again to let Santos make her feel the way he had before.

CHAPTER TWO

SANTOSSTAREDATMIA, his jaw clenched, his head pounding. He really needed those pills to kick in, if just to take the edge off, but so far his head just felt worse. He hadn’t had a migraine this severe in years; he’d learned to deal with them when he felt the first symptoms—the pain, the blurred sight and the dark spots dancing in his vision. But he could hardly take a breather and go and lie down in a dark room with Mia here. And he needed answers, even if, with the way she was coolly gazing at him, it didn’t seem likely she’d give them.

‘Why were you in Ibiza?’ he asked abruptly.

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