CHAPTER ONE

      SHE didn’t want to open her eyes. Not yet. For when she did, he would be there.

      The man they said was her husband, seated in a chair to one side of the bed where she’d been told he had maintained an almost constant vigil for days after her admission.

      For the past week he had confined his visits to three each day—early morning, mid-afternoon, and evening.

      The nurses had commented on it when they thought she was asleep…and relayed it in informative, faintly envious tones when she was awake. Together with the added news, her initial admission had caused a furore. It appeared that within an hour of being transported unconscious by ambulance from the accident scene to a nearby public hospital all hell had broken loose, and she had been transferred post-haste to this exclusive and very expensive private establishment with its coterie of consultant specialists.

      ‘Elise.’

      The voice was a deep, faintly inflected drawl, and its timbre succeeded in tripping her pulse into an accelerated beat.

      Damn. Now she would have no recourse but to acknowledge his presence. Her lashes trembled fractionally, then fluttered slowly upwards.

      His physical impact was such that it took considerable effort not to close her eyes again in an attempt to shut out the sight of him.

      A tall man, whose impressive breadth of shoulder and impressive frame, even in relaxed repose, was intimidating. Broad, sculptured facial features were harshly chiselled, all angles and planes as if etched from stone, and his eyes were so dark that they appeared black—almost as black as his wellgroomed hair.

      Beneath the cool mantle of his sophisticated façade he bore the look of a hunter, as untamed as a savage jungle beast and just as dangerous.

      Alejandro Santanas. Even his name was unusual, and the relayed information she had been given was merely statistical, rather than enlightening.

      He was in his late thirties and he headed a financial empire whose very name was regarded with due reverence in the business sector.

      A very wealthy man, one of the nurses had revealed, whose entrepreneurial skill ranked him high among the upper echelon of the country’s rich and famous.

      Elise didn’t find it surprising, for there was an inherent degree of power, a ruthlessness lurking beneath the surface, which she found vaguely frightening.

      The knowledge that she was his wife had initially shocked and