Kate Walker - His Suitable Bride - Rafael's Suitable Bride / The Spaniard's Marriage Bargain / Cordero's Forced Bride

Cristina couldn’t stop herself from smiling helplessly, unfazed by his unsympathetic expression.

Rafael ignored the outstretched hand. ‘I’ll get your car into a less hazardous position and then you’d better get in my car. I assume you’re heading in the same direction as me. There’s only one house at the end of his lane.’

‘Oh, you don’t have to do that,’ Cristina said breathlessly.

‘No, I don’t, but I will because I don’t want the hassle of dealing with a guilty conscience if you get behind the wheel of your car when you can’t see anything and crash.’ He spun round on his heels while Cristina continued to watch, with fascinated interest, as he expertly did what she had spent half an hour trying and failing to do.

‘That was brilliant,’ she told him honestly when he was back in front of her, and Rafael felt some of his anger begin to subside.

‘Hardly brilliant,’ he muttered. ‘But at least the damn thing’s in a safer position now.’

‘I could drive myself now,’ Cristina was forced to admit. ‘I mean, I have a pair of specs in my bag. I always carry them because I never know when my contact lenses are going to start irritating my eyes. Do you wear contact lenses?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’ She frowned slightly, belatedly considering her appearance and what lay ahead of her.

‘Well?’ Rafael was back by his car, passenger door open, waiting for her to stop dithering at the side of the road while the wind whipped around them, reminding them that yet more snow was just a frosted breath away.

Cristina took a couple of steps towards him, her expression still anxious and hesitant. ‘It’s just that … well …’ She spread her hands tellingly along the length of her body. ‘Look at me. I can’t possibly make an entrance looking like this.’ She barely knew her hostess, Maria. She had met her a few times in Italy, when she had been living with her parents before moving to London, and she had seemed a nice lady, but she really wasn’t close enough to her to enlist her help in getting cleaned up because she had somehow managed to lose a contact lens. Now her hands were dirty from rummaging on the ground, her tights were torn and she dared not even think of the state of her hair, which was unruly at the best of times.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Rafael told her dismissively. He pulled open the passenger door and sighed impatiently. ‘It is freezing out here, and I’m not standing having a prolonged conversation with you about the state of your appearance.’ He kindly decided not to point out that there was very little she could have done with her appearance which would have made her look sexy anyway. She was built like a little round ball, and the wind was doing some very unflattering things to her hair. Grubby hands weren’t exactly going to go a long way to remedy what looked like a pretty plain gene pool.

However, as she seemed rooted to the spot in some kind of agony of embarrassment and indecision, and as he was getting colder and colder and more and more impatient by the second, Rafael decided on the only possible solution.

‘Get your things from your car and I’ll make sure we go through the back entrance. Then I’ll take you up to one of the guest suites and you can do whatever it is you think you have to do.’

‘Really?’ The way he had handled her little car! And now the way he was taking charge, hitting upon a solution to the thorny problem of her appearance! Cristina couldn’t help but admire his ingenuity and consideration in helping her out. True, he wasn’t exactly giving off sympathetic vibes, but as she hurried to get her overnight bag and coat from her car she decided that that was perfectly understandable. He had, after all, just had the fright of his life when he had taken the corner and nearly crashed into her car.

‘Hurry up.’ Rafael glanced at his watch and realised that the party would already be in full swing. He had promised his mother that he would make it well in advance, but naturally the demands of work had progressively eaten away into his good intentions.

‘You’re very kind,’ Cristina told him as he took her bag and coat from her and tossed them into the trunk—the virtually invisible-to-the-naked-eye trunk.

Rafael couldn’t remember the last time he had been described as kind, and he really wasn’t sure that he cared for it, but he shrugged and didn’t say anything, just turning the ignition so that his powerful beast of a car roared into immediate life.

‘How are you going to find your way to the back entrance?’

At this point in time, Rafael didn’t feel inclined to go into his relationship with the hostess. The woman obviously didn’t have a clue as to his identity and he preferred to keep it that way. At least for the moment. He had met enough women in his lifetime who’d found his wealth an aphrodisiac. Sometimes it was amusing. Mostly it was just plain dull.

‘I never got your name,’ he said, changing the conversation, and as his eyes slid over to her he saw the colour flood her cheeks and she looked at him with mortified consternation.

‘Cristina. Golly, I’m so rude! You’ve just rescued me and I haven’t even had the wit to introduce myself!’ Was she gaping? She thought she might be, and she made an effort to pull herself together and start acting like the twenty-four-year-old woman that she was.

However all attempts at sophistication were ambushed by her intrinsically cheerful personality and impressionable nature. She had met hordes of men throughout her life. That had all been part and parcel of her privileged upbringing in Italy, and then later staying with her aunt in Somerset when she had gone to boarding school. But her experiences with them on any kind of intimate level were limited. Indeed, non-existent, and so the cynicism that came from broken hearts and ruined relationships, which most women would have considered just another part of growing up, had failed to materialise. She had an unbounding faith in the goodness of human nature and was therefore undaunted by Rafael’s unwelcoming response to her chatter.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked curiously, abandoning the struggle not to feast her eyes on him.

‘Rafael.’

‘And how do you know Maria?’

‘Why are you so concerned about what kind of impression you make? Do you know the crowd who are going to be there?’

‘Well, no … But … I just can’t bear the thought of walking into a roomful of people with torn tights and hair all over the place.’ She looked at her hands and sighed. ‘My nails are a mess as well, and I especially had a manicure yesterday.’ She could feel tears begin to well at her ruined appearance and she stoutly swallowed them back. Instinct told her that here was a man who probably wouldn’t welcome the sight of a strange woman howling in his car.

But she had tried so hard. New in London and still without any solid friendships, Maria’s invitation had been something lovely to look forward to, and she had really tried to dress for the occasion. Hard as her mother had laboured over the years, in her own sweetly loving way Cristina had always been guiltily aware that she had never managed to live up to the position into which she had been born. Her two sisters, both now married and in their thirties, had been blessed with the sort of good looks that needed very little work. They had been super clothes horses and then, in due course, super wives and super mothers.

She, on the other hand, had blithely failed to live up to expectation. She had grown up a tomboy, more interested in football and playing in the vast gardens of her parents’ house than in frocks, make-up and all things girlish. Later, she had developed a love of all things to do with nature and had spent many a teenage summer following around their gardener, asking questions about plants, keenly interested in what could grow where and why. Somewhere along the line she suspected that her mother had given up on her mission to turn her youngest into a lady.