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

Cristina felt an unaccustomed surge of rage rush through her, and she gritted her teeth together to suppress the awful desire to shout at him.

‘You should know about women and their mysterious moods,’ she muttered violently instead, and she felt Rafael still behind her.

‘Meaning …?’ He rested his hands on her shoulders and swivelled her around so that she was forced to at least face his direction, although she cravenly kept her eyes pinned to the flag-tiled kitchen floor.

Cristina took a deep breath and dived straight in. What choice did she have? She could continue making mysterious and bitter asides, but the truth was that sooner or later she would have to confront the issue and, who knew? Maybe she had misinterpreted Maria, or misheard. She had a fleeting moment’s peace of mind at the thought of that, of a perfectly harmless, innocent remark having been taken out of context and cruelly magnified into something suspicious.

‘Your mother and I were having a little chat while you were in the kitchen.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘It’s just that she said … Well, she mentioned something in passing that I need to talk to you about.’

‘I can think of better things to do than talk.’

‘I know I’m probably being over-imaginative …’

Rafael resigned himself to one of those conversations in which, he knew, only ten percent of his mind would actively participate. It would probably involve wedding preparations or something equally tedious and, whilst he would dearly have liked to distract her, he could tell from the stubborn angle of her head that this was important to her and he shrugged, dropping the tea cloth on the counter.

‘Okay. Do you want some of that dessert in the fridge?’

Cristina thought of Maria’s description of her, fondly intentioned but unwittingly cutting. A real woman. Cristina didn’t particularly want to be a real woman. Right now, she would happily have settled for Barbie-doll status, because, despite what Maria had said, men weren’t attracted to real women. How could she have been so blind as to imagine that Rafael was seriously attracted to her? She was a novelty at the moment, and he was probably making the best of a bad job in sleeping with the woman he had more or less been set up to marry. Just thinking about it now made her head swim and her legs feel weak.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Now I really am concerned.’

‘This is serious, Rafael,’ Cristina said more sharply than she was accustomed to, and he frowned at her. She could see him trying to work out what was going on and she realised, belatedly, how transparently predictable she had been—always thrilled to see him, always ready to make love, always sunny natured because that was her temperament. He had beckoned, and like someone in a trance she had walked towards him, never asking all those questions which she now realised she should have been asking.

Frankly, she had been clueless.

‘Could we go into the sitting room?’ she asked.

‘As you wish.’

Cristina nodded and led the way. It was a grand house, but many of the rooms downstairs were shut up because Maria, on her own, really only occupied the kitchen, the cosy den which she used as her office, the sitting room and her bedroom. In summer, she said that she liked nothing better than her garden room at the back, from which she could contemplate the beauty of nature. Consequently, those rooms which were used all year round were cluttered and cosy and quite different from the remainder of the house.

With the foundations of her fairy-tale future disappearing like a puff of smoke in a high wind, Cristina was piecing together all those missing jigsaw pieces which she had cheerfully ignored. For instance, she thought bitterly, how odd had it been that after only three months he had proposed marriage—a man accustomed to single life in the fast lane, surrounded by the most beautiful women in the world, sought after, courted, desired? How was it that he had suddenly decided to wave goodbye to all of that in a matter of a few seconds, so to speak, because she, plump, gauche and nothing stunning in the looks department, had come along?

‘You were saying?’

Cristina, lost in her thoughts, had almost forgotten what she had been saying. She focused her eyes on the man sitting next to her on the sofa and blinked.

‘I was saying that your mother … Maria said something and I need you to clarify.’

‘Get to the point, Cristina.’

Was he being understandably impatient because she was waffling, or were these just the signs of arrogance which she had conveniently chosen to overlook but which had been there all along?

‘She said that she was really happy … that you had decided to finally settle down.’

‘And so she is. Are we going somewhere with this or is it just the circles thing?’

‘She said that she had spoken to you … told you that it was time that you found a suitable wife.’ Bitterness had crept into her voice, and Rafael’s face darkened. ‘I need to find out what this is all about, Rafael,’ she pursued doggedly. ‘Finding a suitable wife. Is that what this is all about?’ The words were wrenched out of her and spoken straight from the heart.

‘You’re beginning to sound hysterical, Cristina, and I don’t do hysterics.’

‘I’m not being hysterical. I’m just asking you to tell me the truth, whether you were put up to this.’

‘I don’t think I like that expression,’ Rafael said, his lean, handsome face taut.

‘Well, I can’t think of another one to use. Your mother said that she told you that it was time to find a suitable wife and, lo and behold, here I am!’

‘You seem to have a problem with that term and I don’t understand why.’ The relaxing weekend Rafael had anticipated seemed to be going rapidly pear-shaped and he was at a loss to explain why. Cristina, so obliging for the past few months, was now asking questions which he personally found unnecessary, and standing her ground. Why? She should have been pleased that he considered her a suitable wife! He had already been through a wife who had been totally unsuitable. What higher compliment than to be chosen for her suitability?

Cristina’s hope that she had somehow misinterpreted Maria’s remark crumbled into ashes.

‘Yes, my mother suggested that it was time I settled down and I agreed with her.’ He gave a casual, elegant shrug. ‘Where is the problem in that? There comes a moment in every man’s life when he must weigh the advantages of playing hard against the peace of tying the knot.’

Cristina had a mental image of a pair of scales with ‘Fun and Frolics’ on one side and herself, ‘Giant Knot’, on the other. No love to be seen and, without love, how long before ‘Giant Knot’ lost its appeal? Would he then expect to resume his fun and frolics, with the added bonus of having Giant Knot at home raising children, cooking meals and waiting for him to return?

‘So this would be a bit like a business transaction, in other words?’

‘Why do you insist on using such emotive language?’ Rafael enquired impatiently.

Cristina turned away, the sting of tears making her blink rapidly, willing herself not to cry because she was pretty sure that he probably didn’t do crying along with hysterics.

‘It’s not going to work.’ She wriggled the engagement ring from her finger, turned back to him and silently held out her hand with the ring in her palm. ‘The diamond was too big anyway. How could I do football coaching or my flowers wearing it?’ She forced herself to smile in the face of his stony expression. ‘I should have seen that as a sign. We couldn’t even agree on the ring.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE evening and following day were a nightmare of misery and tension. Cristina had handed Rafael back his ring, but he had refused to accept it. Instead, he had looked at her with a long, cool expression and told her to consider the implications of not wearing it. The explanations to his mother, which would be uncomfortable at the very best. What would she say—that they had had a massive row and she had decided to call the whole thing off? His mother, he had assured her, would smile indulgently and probably tell her something wise about pre-wedding nerves. Or else she could go for the truth, tell his mother … that what? She considered herself at the wrong end of a deal which she had now decided she didn’t care for—a deal to marry one of the most eligible men in the world?

‘Wear the ring,’ he had told her. ‘We can discuss this later.’

Coward that she was, Cristina, faced with the scenario which Rafael had succinctly depicted in sparse but extremely graphic detail, had silently slipped the ring back onto her finger, but it had felt like barbed wire against her skin.

She had smiled, and the following day had limped by, each minute feeling like a lifetime, until finally, at four in the evening, they’d been standing by the door with their cases by their feet, ready to face the long journey back to London.

She had managed to successfully avoid ‘the cosy chat’ situation by disappearing outside at all available opportunities, and then reappearing with the excuse that she was seeking inspiration for her landscape project, that she couldn’t get enough of the countryside. Towards the end Maria had been eyeing her with a puzzled expression, and Cristina had realised that she’d been walking the thin line between appearing engagingly committed to her ambitions and a complete lunatic.

She gave Maria a hug of genuine warmth, and suddenly a small but promising idea presented itself to her. Here she was, idiotically in love with a man who felt nothing for her but a temporary attraction, a man who saw her as a suitable partner. On paper, she made sense—right background, right connections, even the added bonus of a history among parents. He would marry her because, like any sensible investment, she would stand the test of time. He hadn’t banked on her response on discovering that she was a useful commodity. In fact, he hadn’t banked on her finding out that little gem, although it wouldn’t have worried him unduly if she had, because it would never have occurred to him that she wouldn’t go along for the ride. Well connected she might be, but she was no model, nor did she have the finesse of someone whose life had been relatively pampered. He had probably imagined that her gratitude would take her right up to the altar and beyond, whatever his reasons for marrying her.

This was an engagement from which she had to wriggle out with as much subtlety as she could muster, because to admit to anyone that she was marrying a man who saw her as a sensible investment … Well, she would sooner have grabbed the nearest spade, dug a hole for herself and jumped in. The humiliation would have been unendurable. Her sisters would have smiled sympathetically and encouraged her to go along with it because, after all, she wasn’t getting any younger. But behind her back they would have shaken their heads in sympathy and thanked their lucky stars that they’d been blessed with husbands who had genuinely been attracted to them.

And her parents would have supported her, of course, but they too would have retired to their bedroom and, with no one around to hear them, lamented the fact that their poor baby would never know the meaning of true love.

Frankly, it was too horrible to think about, and her only solution was to extricate herself with as much dignity as she could.