Rafael's Suitable Bride

by Cathy Williams

  Maria shrugged and stood up. ‘I should go and change,’ she said neutrally. ‘People will start heading down in a minute. I wouldn’t like to shock them by having to see me in my dressing gown. I am sorry if you think that I’m being an interfering old woman, Rafael, but I worry about you.’

  Rafael smiled fondly. ‘I don’t think you interfering, Mother…’

  ‘The child is a little naive. I know her parents. Is it any wonder that I feel a certain moral obligation that she is okay?’

  ‘She seems fine to me,’ Rafael said heartily. ‘No complaints about London life. Probably having a whale of a time.’

  ‘Probably.’ Maria busied herself with her back to her son, making sure that all the breakfast requirements were ready. Of course Eric and Angela, who had been with her for ever, would have made sure that everything was prepared for her guests—twelve of whom had remained for the night—but she still liked to make sure for herself that all was as it should be. She could hear the guilt in Rafael’s voice, but her maternal sense of duty ignored it. She wanted her son to be sorted out, which meant not standing on the sidelines while an array of highly unsuitable women flitted in and out of his life until he eventually keeled over from work-related stress or heart failure.

  ‘Maybe, however, you could make sure that her car is all right for her drive back down to London?’ She turned to him for confirmation. ‘I told her that you would last night, and she has left her car keys on the table by the front door.’

  ‘Sure.’ That small favour seemed more than acceptable when the upside was his mother dropping a conversation that was really beginning to frustrate him.

  He would have to do his emails a little later, which was annoying, but unavoidable.

  He left the house before further distractions occurred and headed out to where the Mini had been abandoned overnight. Already the sky was beginning to turn the peculiar yellow-grey colour that precedes a snowfall. He realised that if he didn’t leave soon he might find himself marooned in his mother’s house, subjected to significant conversations about the quality of his life choices.

  He was unprepared for the unthinkable, which was a Mini whose engine had decided to hibernate.

  An hour after he had left for the seemingly routine task of starting it up, letting it run for a few minutes and then assuring his mother that the car was fine and dandy, he was returning with a ferocious scowl and a premonition of hassle.

  He pushed open the front door in a tide of bitterly cold air to find Cristina standing there, warmly clad in jeans and a jumper. The source of all his trouble.

  ‘The thing’s dead,’ he informed her, slamming the door behind him and stamping his feet on the mat. He divested himself of the beaten leather jacket and glared at her.

  Cristina bit her lip, guiltily aware that she should have been the one seeing to her car, even though Maria had assured her that Rafael wouldn’t mind in the least checking on it first thing in the morning. She’d given the impression that it would be no bother at all. From the dark expression on his face, it certainly had been a bother.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ she apologised profusely.’ I should have gone and tried myself. In fact, I was about to…’

  ‘Do you think you might have been able to get it going where I failed?’

  ‘No, but…’ She fidgeted and then gave him a watery smile. ‘Thank you so much for trying anyway. Is it very cold out there? I can make you a cup of hot chocolate, if you like. I’m good at making hot chocolate.’

  ‘No hot chocolate. Black coffee.’ He headed towards the kitchen which, thankfully, had not yet been invaded by the leftover guests. As an afterthought, and without turning around to look at her, he offered her a cup.

  ‘I’ve already had a cup of tea. Thank you.’ Cristina paused. Even windswept and scowling he was still rawly, powerfully sexy, just as sexy as he had appeared the night before when he had come to her rescue. She brightened up at the memory of that, the way he had helped her out when there had been no need. ‘Do you think I might be able to get in touch with a garage to come and have a look at it?’ she asked his averted back.

  ‘It’s Sunday and it’s going to snow.’ Rafael turned around to look at her. ‘I think the answer to that is no.’

  Cristina paled. ‘What am I going to do, in that case? I can’t just stay here indefinitely. I’ve got my job. I can’t believe my car’s decided to just pack up on me!’

  ‘I doubt it was a deliberate act of sabotage,’ Rafael commented dryly, feeling slightly better after the coffee, but still aware that there was a shed-load of work waiting to be done and that he would have to leave sooner rather than later. The motorway would be fine, even if it began to snow, but getting down the lanes that led from his mother’s house could be challenging in bad weather, especially in a sportscar which was not fashioned for anything but optimum road conditions.

  Cristina smiled and he was dimly aware that she really did have a smile that lit up her face, giving her a fleeting aspect of beauty. However, he was far more aware that time was pressing on, and he looked at his watch and then gulped back the remainder of his coffee.

  ‘I really have to go.’ He wondered whether she had any idea of his mother’s far-fetched ideas and decided that she didn’t.

  ‘I know it’s a huge imposition, but could you possibly give me a lift back to London—to whatever Underground station is closest to where you live? It’s just that I really need to get back, and…I could always get the garage to come out in the morning and fix the car…and then have someone drive it down to London.’

  ‘Or you could just stay and see to it in the morning yourself. I mean, surely your boss would let you have the day off for an emergency.’

  ‘I don’t have a boss,’ Cristina said with a touch of pride. ‘I work for myself.’

  ‘All the better. You can give yourself a day off.’ That sorted, Rafael dumped his cup in the sink and began heading for the door. But the image of her disappointed face behind him made him curse softly under his breath and turn back to her. ‘I’m leaving in an hour,’ he said abruptly, watching the disappointment fade away like a dark cloud on a sunny day. ‘If you’re not ready, I’ll go without you, because snow’s forecast and I can’t afford to be trapped here.’

  ‘You could always ask your boss for the day off.’ Cristina grinned. ‘Unless you are the boss, in which case you can always give yourself the day off.’

  But she felt considerably cheered. It was peculiar, but there was something invigorating about him. She packed her bags quickly and efficiently. She hadn’t eaten breakfast, but her figure could do with skipping a meal, she decided. And Maria, despite her protests, assured her that she would telephone the garage herself and make sure that the car was delivered to London. She knew Roger, the chap who owned the garage, and he owed her a favour after she had given him a very lucrative tip indeed on the horses.

  Rafael was less overjoyed with the arrangements. ‘Saddled with’ were the two words that sprang into his head. He could hardly blame his mother for the state of the Mini and its lack of co-operation in getting started, but as they manoeuvred down the country lanes one hour later he couldn’t help but feel that he had somehow been trapped into sharing his space with a perfect stranger.

  And an extremely talkative one who seemed intent on ignoring the fact that he had a handless headset in the car for a reason. She patiently waited for business conversations to end, staring through the window at ominous skies which had gone from yellow-grey to charcoal, and then felt perfectly free to ask him about his work.

  ‘But don’t you ever relax?’ she asked, appalled after he had reluctantly given her a rundown of his typical day. They were leaving behind the first dismal flurries of snow and Rafael reluctantly abandoned his plans to call his PA, Patricia, for an update on the Roberts deal.

  ‘You sound like my mother,’ he told her curtly, then, because he could sense rather than see her baffled silence at the harshness of his response, he relented. Afte
r all, he only had a couple more hours in her company. Why be offhand when she was so determinedly upbeat? ‘I presume, if you’re your own boss, then you know that running a company is a twenty-four-seven commitment. What exactly do you do, anyway?’

  Cristina, who had been a little hurt at his lack of curiosity about her life and what she did, smiled, more than prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was obviously very, very important. She had known, of course, that he came from a moneyed background, but she had had no idea that he was entirely and solely responsible for running the show. Little wonder he was so focused on work with little time to spare making polite chit-chat with her.

  ‘Oh, nothing very important,’ Cristina said, suddenly a little abashed at her pedestrian occupation.

  ‘Now I’m curious.’ He half smiled, and that half smile made her draw in her breath sharply, made a frisson of awareness ripple down her spine and send shivers racing all through her body. It was scary and exhilarating at the same time.

  ‘Well…do you remember I told you how much I love gardens? And nature?’

  Rafael had a dim recollection but he nodded anyway.

  ‘I own a flower shop in London. I mean, it’s nothing much. We each of us children came into some money on our twenty-first birthdays and I chose to spend mine on that.’

  ‘In England? Why?’ A flower shop? He had had extensive dealings with flower shops, almost exclusively in connection with his girlfriends, to whom flowers were usually sent at the beginning and at the end of relationships. But his PA dealt with all that and he had always assumed that she simply rang one of those huge concerns that delivered worldwide. But there must be one-man-band shows. Cute. She had the appearance of someone who might run a flower shop.

  Cristina shrugged and pinkened. ‘I fancied being out of Italy. I mean, I have perfect sisters who lead perfect lives. It was nice getting away from the comparisons. But please don’t mention that to your mother, just in case it gets back to my parents!’

  ‘I won’t,’ Rafael promised solemnly. Did she imagine that he gossiped with his mother about such things? Nevertheless, her admission was touching, as was her enthusiasm about what she did. The woman was a walking encyclopaedia on trees and plants, and he was perfectly content to listen as she chatted about her shop, her plans to branch out into the landscaping business at some point, starting with small London gardens, but then moving on to bigger things. She was dying for the Chelsea Flower show, which she had been to a couple of times, and which had never failed to amaze and astound her. Her dream was to show her own flowers there someday.

  ‘I thought your dream was to do some landscaping,’ Rafael said, his cynical palate tickled by her optimistic ambitions.

  ‘I have lots of dreams.’ Cristina, aware that she had been babbling, fell silent for a few seconds. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘I find it doesn’t pay to think too far into the future, which, if I’m not mistaken, is the realm of dreams, so I guess the answer has to be no.’ To his surprise, they had reached London quicker than he had expected. She lived in Kensington, not a million miles away from his Chelsea penthouse—and in a rather nice part of Kensington which, he assumed, would have been paid for by those discreetly wealthy parents of hers.

  For the first time he considered the advantages of a woman to whom his money would be a matter of indifference. His girlfriends were almost always impressed by the size of his bank balance. The ones who did have inherited money were almost worse, in a way, because they were motivated by social standing—playing a game of ‘keeping up’ or ‘going one better’ which had invariably involved him being displayed to their other friends as the catch of the day.

  This girl seemed to be motivated by neither. Nor, he thought, did she seem interested in playing games with him. There had been none of the usual blatant flirting.

  ‘Seems a bit drastic, moving over here just to escape comparisons with your sisters.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been to England hundreds of times. I went to a boarding school in Somerset, you see. Actually, I’m living in my parents’ flat, as it happens. And I didn’t come just to escape comparisons. Well…actually, I pretty much did. I mean, have you any idea what it feels like to have two gorgeous sisters? No, I guess you don’t. Roberta and Frankie are perfect. Perfect in a good way, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Some people are perfect in a nauseating way, the sort who look glorious and never manage to put a foot wrong—but then they know it and want the world to know it too. But Frankie and Roberta are just lovely and talented and funny and kind.’

  ‘Sound like model citizens,’ Rafael said with heavy sarcasm. In his experience such creatures didn’t actually exist. He was pretty sure that, like a number of things, they were an urban myth.

  ‘They are, really.’ Cristina sighed. ‘Model daughters, at any rate. They’re both much older than me. I was a bit of a mistake, I think, although my parents would never admit it, and I have to say that I did have a rather wonderful life as the baby of the family. Dad took me to loads of football matches. I think that’s why I’ve always loved football so much. In fact, that’s another one of my dreams. I want to do some football coaching. I used to play a lot when I was younger. I was pretty good, in fact, but then I gave it up, and I would really love to get back into it now. Not on the playing level, but on the coaching level. I might put an ad in the papers. What do you think?’

  What Rafael thought was that he had never met such a garrulous woman in his life before. He was beginning to feel a little dazed.

  ‘Football,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Yes. You know the sport? It’s the one that involves lots of hunky men running around a field kicking a ball…?’

  ‘I know what football is!’

  ‘I was just kidding.’ She was beginning to think that here was a man for whom the world was a very serious business.

  ‘You’re not exactly a people person, are you?’ she mused aloud, and Rafael was stunned enough at that observation to look at her, speechless for the first time in his life.

  ‘Meaning?’ he snapped.

  ‘Oh, gosh, I’m sorry,’ Cristina apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘Why would I be offended by anything you have to say?’

  ‘That’s not very nice.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ Rafael answered with brutal honesty. He turned down Gloucester Road, slowing to accommodate the pedestrians who seemed to think that crossing roads without watching for oncoming cars was perfectly acceptable Sunday behaviour. Her remark niggled at him and, as he turned right into her road, he slotted his car neatly into a space, switched off the engine and turned to her.

  ‘But I’m curious to find out what you mean by that.’

  Cristina reddened and looked at him. ‘Oh, just that you don’t seem to have much time for fun. I mean…’ She frowned slightly. ‘Last night, at your mother’s party, you didn’t seem to be having a good time.’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘Now you’re mad at me, aren’t you?’

  ‘Why should I be mad at you?’

  ‘Because even though you say you want me to be honest with you, you don’t. Maybe because you’re not accustomed to other people telling you exactly what they think.’

  ‘I work in the most cut-throat business in the world. Of course I’m accustomed to people telling me what they think!’ Rafael snapped, not really sure how he had ended up having this discussion with her.

  ‘Well, maybe not women, in that case.’

  ‘Maybe I prefer my women to be a little more compliant.’

  ‘Does that mean they’ve got to agree with everything you say?’

  ‘It helps.’

  Cristina thought that it sounded very boring, and since he obviously wasn’t a very boring man she wondered how he could tolerate a boring love life—but, before she could expand, he was opening his car door.

  ‘No. Spare me the workings of your mind. I d
on’t think I can take any more refreshingly honest home truths.’

  Mortified, Cristina clumsily followed him out of the car and launched into a series of uninvited and unwelcome apologies while Rafael swung her suitcase out of the pocket-sized boot and walked along the pavement to her apartment block.

  ‘Enough!’ He held up one autocratic hand and looked at her with frowning impatience. ‘There’s no need for you to trip over yourself apologising. What’s your apartment number? And before you tell me that you can walk yourself and your bag up, I’m escorting you to your door. I may not be a people person, but I do have some rudimentary good manners.’

  ‘Oh, I know you have!’ Cristina assured him hurriedly. ‘I’m at the top.’ She fumbled in her bag for the key, and as she pulled it out he took it from her and pushed open the front door into a flagstone hallway shared by the residents.

  It was the sort of place not many young people could ever have dreamed of affording, with the high ceilings and majestic elegance of a converted Georgian building. In fact, it was the sort of place well out of the price range of most people—except, he considered, Cristina was not most people. Underneath the slightly dippy, ready-to-smile, chatty girl lay the soft cushion of family money.

  She was walking ahead to the lift, which was small, so small that their bodies were virtually touching when they stepped inside with the overnight bag separating them.

  ‘How long have you been here?’ Rafael asked eventually. Somehow prolonged silence in her presence seemed slightly unnatural. He wondered if his brain had somehow gone into overdrive during the long trip back down to London. Could relentless chatter do that to a person?

  ‘You don’t have to make polite small talk with me,’ Cristina told him, staring straight ahead at the uninspiring view of an elevator button rather than into the mirrored sides of the shaft—which were a little too harsh for her liking when it came to showing up her unprepossessing figure next to his superbly built one.

  Even after hours behind the wheel of a car he still managed to look carelessly, breathtakingly, dangerously sexy. She quickly tore her treacherous eyes away from the quick sidelong glance she had given him.