His Suitable Bride: Rafael's Suitable Bride / The Spaniard's Marriage Bargain / Cordero's Forced Bride

‘I must be fussy,’ she responded airily, pleasantly heady after the wine.

‘Oh, yes?’ Rafael leaned forward. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright. She wasn’t flirting with him, but there was something undeniably sexy about her—they way her lips were parted, the way her heavy breasts bounced when she gesticulated, which she did a lot. He reached out, forked one of the prawns on her plate and placed it to her mouth.

Cristina went a brighter shade of pink and nibbled the proffered delicacy. Such a small gesture, but it sent her pulses racing and made the hairs on the back of her neck tingle.

‘You’re blushing,’ he said, flirting outrageously but keeping his expression perfectly serious. ‘Why? Do I make you nervous?’

‘A little, I suppose,’ she confessed. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Anything you like.’ Rafael sat back, sipped his wine and watched her carefully over the rim of his glass.

‘Are you flirting with me?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Are you flirting with me?’

Rafael, taken aback by the directness of the question, was stumped for words. ‘What if I were?’ He finally answered her question with one of his own.

‘I would ask you why.’

This was not a conversation Rafael had ever conducted with a woman before, but then he had to concede that this woman was not exactly like any woman he had ever dated before. Next she would be asking him if this, in fact, was a date, and if so could he please give her his definition of a date!

‘Well?’ It took some courage, but Cristina was determined to find out where exactly she stood. There would be nothing more mortifying than to conduct herself in a manner that suggested she wanted more from him than he was prepared to give. He was a man of the world. The last thing he needed was to lend a helping hand only to find the subject of his noble attentions was becoming a nuisance.

‘If it’s flirting when I tell you that you look sexy, then I’m flirting.’ The roundabout approach was, he was finding, strangely enjoyable. Something of a turn-on, in fact.

‘Sexy? Me?’

Rafael leant towards her, his face still serious. ‘I’m a connoisseur of women and you have a very delectable body, Cristina.’

‘I’m … I’m not sure that I approve of … of having my body looked at … in that way …’ she stuttered, swallowing a deep breath. ‘I’ve never appreciated men who—who treat women like objects.’

‘And I apologise if that was the impression I gave you.’ Their food was placed in front of them, lots of little taster dishes, with the delicious aroma of coconut and peanut.

Cristina stared down at the fragrant selection, dismayed to find that, although she had been sticking up for her principles, she wished that she hadn’t wrecked the atmosphere in the process. And why kid herself? She had liked his remark. It had been out of order, but she liked that he had been looking at her body. Her mind had gone into overdrive and she had pictured him touching her. Just thinking about it now made her feel hot and bothered.

‘Okay.’ She smiled shyly at him. That was her way of flirting. She thought it might have been more coy if she hadn’t gone bright red, but she was new to this game.

Rafael, smiling lazily back at her, knew that he was winning, and a very pleasant game it was turning out to be too. Not for a moment did he think that he was being unfair, that he was using his tremendous and powerful appeal to sneak under her skin and break down her defences. Indeed, he thought that he was doing her a favour in not sitting her down and discussing with her, rationally and thoughtfully, the pros and cons of marriage as a business transaction. If that wasn’t respect for her values, then what was?

He raised his glass to her in an indolent toast and kept his fabulous eyes pinned to her face as they sipped their wine.

‘Do you know?’ Cristina confided as she finally closed her knife and fork on what had been a superb meal. ‘I feel as though I’ve known you for ages. Isn’t it weird?’

‘Weird,’ Rafael agreed. She was as transparent, he mused, as a pane of glass. There was no teasing ‘getting to know you, getting to know me’ game, no suggestive remarks designed to get his appetite whetted, no come-hither looks to pique his curiosity.

‘Except,’ she frowned, ‘I don’t really, do I?’ She linked her fingers together and stared at him, thrilling at the sheer beauty of his face, his sensational sexual allure. He was flirting with her, teasing her, and although she didn’t know why, because he could have snapped his fingers and had any woman he wanted on the face of the planet, she was happy to just accept the situation as it presented itself to her. She wasn’t someone who spent a lot of time analysing things. What good did that ever do? Growing up, she had had friends who’d analysed relationships into an early grave, and she had learnt that trying to read too much into things was usually a cause of unnecessary stress. Aside from that, her sunny personality was not given to brooding on possibilities.

Something about this man—and she knew it went way beyond the fact that he was stunningly, shockingly beautiful—went straight through her sexual reserve and struck at the very core of her.

‘How well do we ever know someone else?’ Rafael was amused by the ease she felt in his company. He wasn’t a fool. Even when women had been chasing him, even when they had been lying in bed with him, he had known that they had tiptoed around him, as though apprehensive that the man who made love to them could suddenly turn into a monster.

‘That’s a silly answer,’ Cristina said bluntly, and Rafael burst into laughter, highly amused at her response.

‘A silly answer … Nooo …’

‘No what?’

‘Nope. I’ve searched through my memory bank and I can’t recall anybody ever telling me that something I’ve said is silly.’

‘You’re making fun of me.’

‘Perish the thought!’ He ordered them both coffee and then sat back, relaxed, to hear where she would go from here. Surprisingly, they had managed to consume between them the better part of two bottles of very fine white wine indeed. Italian, naturally.

‘It’s just that you pretty much know everything about me. I’ve told you about my family, my sisters, my schooling, my flower shop. But you haven’t told me anything about yourself. I know you work hard and do something clever in business, but what else?’

Rafael thought of the never-ending hours of work he put in running companies that stretched across the world, and was amused to have it all reduced to doing ‘something clever in business’.

‘Went to school, did economics, physics and psychology at university, left with a first-class degree …’

‘You did psychology? Frankie wanted to do psychology at university, but dad told her that it was a soft option so she did history instead. As it turned out, she never actually used her degree cos she got married and had children. I guess you find it useful in business, though—you can interview people and know exactly what they’re really thinking.’

‘Psychology, Cristina,’ Rafael said dryly, ‘As opposed to mind-reading.’ He fell silent for a few seconds and then made a decision. ‘And, yes, I guess it is useful in business. Knowing how people tend to think gives you a headstart on figuring out their moves, which can come in handy when you’re sitting round a table trying to hammer something out. Aside from that, it’s been less effective than you might think.’

‘What do you mean?’ She was hardly aware that she had finished her coffee and was watching him intently, sensing that he was on the brink of a revelation of some kind. Was she holding her breath? She forced herself to breathe evenly because this was really no big deal. He was probably on the brink of disclosing something really trivial, like he hated cooking or didn’t know how to use his washing machine, or had cried when his pet rabbit had died when he was a kid.

‘I was married once …’ Rafael gave her a crooked smile. He had decided to embark on this topic because his marriage was no secret, and sooner or later she would find out about Helen from his mother. He wanted to set the record straight from the start. However, now that the words had left his mouth, he discovered that confiding was a talent he lacked, never having put it to any use.

‘You don’t have to go into any details,’ Cristina said hurriedly, partly because she could sense his difficulty in talking about it and partly because, in this little fantasy world she was busily spinning for herself, hearing about a woman who could turn out to have been the love of his life was not what she wanted. ‘I mean,’ she continued quickly, ‘I know men aren’t very good at expressing their feelings …’ She had read that somewhere and in her limited experience it was certainly true. ‘Well, obviously some men are,’ she ploughed on for the sake of accuracy.

Rafael experienced one of those moments of slight disorientation that conversing with her seemed to generate.

‘Some men can be very sensitive.’ She frowned earnestly. ‘Of course.’

‘Of course,’ he agreed blandly, once more back in control. ‘Men who cry in front of sad movies and think that knitting shouldn’t be a sexist thing.’

This time it was Cristina’s turn to laugh, which drew a smile from Rafael.

‘I got married to a woman called Helen when I was … Well, put it this way, young enough to be fooled into thinking that it was love.’

‘And it wasn’t?’ Cristina asked hopefully.

‘It was a catastrophe.’ This was the real version of events and one he had told no one, not even his mother. This was the version of events which he had had no intention of telling her, but somehow his brain had failed to transmit that message to his mouth—and here he was, recounting a story that was older than time, but that still filled him with sour bile whenever he thought about it. Which was seldom.

He would keep it brief, he decided. ‘We met at university,’ he said in a clipped, impersonal voice. ‘At one of those clubs where too much beer gets drunk and everyone rolls back to halls of residence way too late, stopping for a curry on the way back.’

Cristina tried to imagine a wild and reckless Rafael, drunk and eating a curry, and found that she couldn’t.