Rafael's Suitable Bride

‘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.

She had distinct concerns about the state of her frock.

‘I don’t know what possessed me to think that I could find a contact lens on the ground,’ she confided glumly.

‘Especially with some dregs of snow still left lying about,’ Rafael felt obliged to point out.

‘Especially,’ Cristina agreed. She looked at her knees. ‘Torn tights, and I haven’t brought a replacement pair. I don’t suppose you have a spare lot lying around somewhere…?’

Rafael glanced across at her and saw that she was grinning at him. Well, she certainly had good powers of recovery, he admitted to himself, not to mention a vibrant ability to overlook the fact that he clearly didn’t feel inclined to spend the rest of the short trip chatting to her about the state of her appearance.

‘Not the sort of thing I usually travel with,’ he said seriously. ‘Maybe my— Maybe there’s a spare pair somewhere in the house…’

‘Oh, Maria’s probably got drawers full of them, but we’re not exactly built along the same lines, are we? She’s tall and elegant and I’m, well, I’ve inherited my father’s figure. My sisters are exactly the opposite. They’re very long and leggy.’

‘And that makes you jealous?’ Rafael heard himself asking.

Cristina laughed. It was an unexpectedly infectious sound, something between a guffaw and a giggle—unlike most women who thought that tittering was the ladylike thing to do.

‘Lord, no! I mean, I love them to pieces, but I wouldn’t swap my life for theirs, not a bit of it. I mean, five kids between them and so much socialising! They’re forever having dinner parties and cocktail parties, and entertaining clients at the theatre or the opera. They live quite close to one another and they’re both married to businessmen, you see, which means that they’re always on show. Can you imagine—never being able to leave the house without a full layer of make-up and matching accessories?’

Since the women Rafael dated never left the bedroom without a full layer of make-up and matching accessories, he could well understand the lifestyle.

Ahead of him, he could see his mother’s house, a sprawling country mansion of faded yellowing stone, its chimneys proudly rising upwards and the front courtyard full of cars, as was the long drive leading up. Even in the darkness it was easy to appreciate the grace and symmetry of the building, and he waited for the predictable gasp of awe, but none was forthcoming.

This was mildly surprising because he had occasionally brought one of his girlfriends to the house in the past and roughly about now, as the house unfolded itself in all its perfect splendour, they had exclaimed in delight as if on cue.

When he looked he saw that Cristina was fidgeting with the hem of her dress and the little frown was back on her face.

‘There are an awful lot of cars,’ she commented nervously. ‘I’m really surprised there’s such a good turnout, considering the weather.’ Surprised, and a bit dismayed. She disliked big social occasions at the best of times, but this had all the hallmarks of being a vast one.

‘People up here are of the hardy variety,’ Rafael pointed out. ‘Londoners are altogether softer.’

‘Is that where you live?’

Rafael nodded and quickly circled the courtyard, and then edged his car down the side-slip towards the back of the house and the tradesman’s entrance.

‘I thought you might have lived around here,’ Cristina said vaguely. ‘I thought perhaps that might be how you know the house and stuff.’ She tried to carry the observation through to its logical conclusion, but her mind was leaping ahead to the small problem of getting herself cleaned up and presentable for the number of people inside—not to mention Maria, who had been kind enough to invite her along. She might lack the polish of her sisters, but embarrassing her host would be anathema.

The back entrance was, to her relief, considerably less busy. Just the staff to get past.

‘I ought to tell you that I’m Maria’s son.’ Rafael killed the engine and turned towards her.

‘Are you?’ Cristina looked at him in silence for a few seconds. She was thinking that Maria was a lovely, kind and genuine woman, and kind and genuine people tended to have kind and genuine offspring. She gave him a beaming smile because she realised that, however curt his outward attitude might appear, he was as kind as she had initially judged him to be. ‘Your mother’s a wonderful person.’

‘I’m glad you think so. On that one thing we at least agree.’ Without giving her time to respond to that ambiguous statement, he let himself out of the car and proceeded to help her out, while a man, who seemed to have materialised out of thin air raced out to get the bags. This could only mean that his mother had requested a lookout for her tardy son, which was a bit of a bother, considering he was now a reluctant knight in shining armour who had to somehow shuffle his unexpected cargo up the stairs and into one of the guest suites—whichever one was unoccupied, because he suspected a fair few people would be staying over.

He had a few quick words with Eric, the man who had been taking care of everything to do with the house for as long as Rafael could remember, and then signalled to Cristina.

In the remorseless light of the back hallway, he was surprised to see that she wasn’t actually the unremittingly plain woman he had first thought.

Of course, no one could call her beautiful. She was way too… He rooted around in his head for a suitable adjective and opted for ‘stout’…not precisely fat, but solidly built. The sort who could probably pack a mean punch if the occasion demanded, although a less aggressive person he could hardly have hoped to find. Her face was open and warm, and although she was still looking nervous he could tell that she would be someone given to easy laughter.

And she had enormous eyes, huge liquid-brown eyes, like a spaniel puppy.