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“You can’t...”
“If you love him like you say you do, at least leave him thinking of you with some respect.”
Pain ripped through Belle. She felt her baby kick inside her as if her daughter was angry, too. She put her hands over her belly. “He’s the father of my child.”
“After we are wed, I will give him another baby. He will forget yours.” Nadia smiled. “Santiago is an honorable man. He will always provide for you and your child, as a matter of duty. You will never have to work again. Consider yourself lucky. Leave Spain. Go seek the love that Santiago will never give you.”
Belle swallowed, her heart pounding.
As the door to the lawyer’s office opened and the men came out, Nadia whispered, “End it quickly, and it will be better for everyone. Especially you.”
With a final friendly pat to Belle’s shoulder, Nadia rose to her feet with a beaming smile to greet the duke and Santiago, who was pushing his father’s wheelchair.
“Are you boys finally done? Because we are due at the museum.” She added teasingly, with her violet-blue eyes flashing between the duke and Santiago, “You men always like to talk and talk...”
Numbly, Belle pushed herself up from the chair. No one was paying attention to her. The three others were talking in Spanish as they walked ahead of her out of the lawyer’s office.
In the limo, she sat silently beside Santiago as they traveled through the sun-drenched streets of Madrid. He gave her a curious glance.
But this time, she was the one avoiding his gaze.
“He’s loved me since we were teenagers. He’s ached for me. Hungered for me. We belong together.”
Belle swallowed over the ache in her throat as she watched the passing city through the car window. She’d only met Santiago a year ago. He’d never loved her. And what did they even have in common, when she barely knew the name of her great-grandparents, compared with Santiago, who had an aristocratic bloodline that went back to the Middle Ages?
“After we are wed I will give him another baby. He will forget yours.”
Belle knew Santiago’s determination to uphold his honor and give their unborn daughter a better childhood than he himself had had. He would not abandon his promise to marry Belle.
She shivered as they traveled in luxury, in a limousine through the streets of Madrid.
The real question was, could she actually let him keep his word, and marry her, trapping them both forever in a cold marriage without love?
CHAPTER TEN
SANTIAGO GLANCED AT the duke as they drove through Madrid. His father had actually thanked him for helping deal with some legal business at the lawyer’s office, some contracts that Otilio hadn’t signed properly.
His father. It was strange thinking of the old man that way. For the first time, he had a real, flesh-and-blood father.
The old man wasn’t affectionate, or even kind. He was arrogant and controlling, and seemed to think that he could boss Santiago around, using his inheritance as bait. Just look at his ridiculous demand that Santiago betray his promise to wed Belle...
He glanced at her now, sitting quietly beside him in the backseat, biting her lip as she stared out at the city streets. She’d been strangely quiet since they’d left the lawyer’s office. It wasn’t like her to be so quiet. Usually she couldn’t wait to tell him exactly what she was thinking, particularly when it insulted him.
No, Santiago suddenly realized. That wasn’t true anymore. She didn’t insult him anymore, not like she used to. Now, she treated him with encouragement. With...love?
The limo bounced over a bump in the road, and his shoe hit the stiletto across from him. He looked up at Nadia, who was sitting across from him, beside his father. She lifted her dark lashes and smiled.
His father obviously wasn’t the only one who believed he could get power over Santiago.
It made him incredulous. How could Nadia not realize he had nothing but contempt for her?
Both she and his father were trying to buy him. They offered him a dukedom like a prize, and thought they could use words like honor and fate, and welcome him into the castle, and Santiago would be grateful. They thought he’d never grown up from the childhood dream he’d had as a lonely, fatherless boy. They thought that all they had to do was offer and Santiago, a self-made independent billionaire, would instantly become an obedient son to the father who’d abandoned him, a grateful husband to the woman who’d betrayed him.
But Santiago Velazquez was no man’s pawn—or woman’s. His jaw tightened as he looked from Nadia to Belle, who was still staring out the window as if her life depended on it. He was just grateful that she had no idea what his father had proposed. He didn’t want her hurt. Especially since...
As his gaze traced over her full rosy lips and the plump curves of her body, something twisted in his heart.
Belle was a woman like no other. Her loyalty and courage and honesty didn’t just inspire respect, but reverence. She drew him in. He wanted to let her love him.
