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

What on earth would they all do if he disappeared for a week’s holiday without warning? Self-implode?

‘Okay. Let’s get the sermon out of the way.’

‘I know I don’t have any right to preach to you …’

‘No, you don’t.’ Rafael looked at her over the mug of cappuccino, which she was now attempting to drink even though it was piping hot. A Danish pastry lay on the plate in front of her. In an era of diets and size zeros, it made a refreshing change.

Her outfit today was beyond casual, teetering into the realms of the truly bizarre. Workmanlike overalls and a broadly striped jumper which seemed intent on magnifying the generous proportions of its wearer. Since lack of money didn’t lie behind her choice, he could only conclude that this was yet another quiet rebellion against those supposedly perfect sisters of hers.

‘I don’t usually preach to people.’

‘Then why break the habit of a lifetime?’

‘Why had she outstayed her welcome?’ Cristina asked. She carefully rested the mug on its saucer and bit into the Danish pastry, which crumbled on her lips and was absolutely delicious. ‘What did she do that was so wrong?’

‘Do you live in the real world, Cristina?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘She didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘You just got tired of her?’

‘This is what sometimes happens in relationships. People get tired of each other. Delilah was … unsuitable.’

‘That’s very harsh, Rafael.’

‘You have crumbs on your mouth.’ He picked up her napkin and brushed them away and Cristina jerked back, startled. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not about to make a lunge for you.’ He laughed, amused at her reaction. ‘And I wasn’t being harsh,’ he continued. ‘Delilah and I enjoyed a brief relationship. I never made promises, and it’s unfortunate that she didn’t understand the boundaries of what we had. Believe me, it wasn’t for lack of clarity.’

‘How sad.’

‘What? What’s sad?’ Rafael frowned, not caring for the unwanted sympathy in her voice. ‘Sad,’ he told her, leaning forward, ‘Is when two people get together hoping for the fairytale ending only to find that no such thing exists. Sad is when hope and expectation disintegrate. If there’s no hope and no expectation, then what you get is an uncluttered relationship with no strings attached.’ He didn’t know why he was bothering to give her a protracted explanation of his theories on the malefemale conundrum, especially when her only response was to look at him earnestly as if each word constituted a mound of earth towards the pit which he was digging for himself.

‘Have you never been in love?’

Rafael’s face tightened. Love? Oh yes. He’d been there, or at least he’d thought he had. In his mind he saw his ex-wife, Helen, beautiful, ethereal, wild with love and promising the earth. How quickly time had dissolved that illusion.

‘Have you?’ He threw the question back at her and watched her eyes grow dreamy.

‘Never. I’m saving myself for the right one. I mean,’ she amended hurriedly, ‘I don’t fling myself into relationships just for the sake of it.’

‘What do you mean by saving yourself for the right one?’ He raised his eyebrows with rampant cynicism and then mused, with some amusement, ‘Don’t tell me that you’re a virgin.?’ Not that he’d believed that for a minute, but from the expression on her face, he realised that he had unwittingly hit the bull’s eye, and Rafael was strangely shocked by the thought of that.

‘No!’ She cast an agonised look around her and then concentrated on the cappuccino in front of her. ‘Okay. So what if I am? There’s nothing wrong with that!’

He gathered himself and said casually, ‘It’s just a little unusual …’ For a man who never indulged in discussing feelings—which he personally considered the prerogative of namby-pamby men who would rather talk than act—Rafael was surprised to discover that he was enjoying their conversation. It just went to show that a little novelty was good for the soul.

Cristina was horribly, sickeningly mortified by the admission. She had never uttered that confidence to anyone, not to her sisters nor to her friends. To find now that she had uttered it to a man who thought that sleeping around was par for the course was almost beyond belief. The fact that he hadn’t roared with laughter only made matters worse, because she could smell his incredulity beneath the silence.

‘I realise you must think me a complete loser.’ She stuck her chin up, but holding back the tears of embarrassment was an act of will.

‘Loser … no.’ He leaned forward, both elbows on the narrow table separating them. ‘Were you never tempted?’ he asked curiously.

‘I don’t want to talk to you about this,’ Cristina whispered. ‘Honestly, I don’t know how … I’ve never spoken to anyone about this.’ But there was something about this man. A part of her responded to him, and her responses seemed to be totally beyond her control. How was that possible? It was as if he had reached inside of her and tugged at something strong and hitherto unknown, some secret side of her as yet untapped. ‘It just slipped out,’ she said defensively.

‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

‘I guess you haven’t a clue why … well, why …’

‘It’s a little hard to get my head around.’ He had wondered about her, about the feel of her body. Now those meandering and passing thoughts took on a sharp intensity that surprised him. He reminded himself why he had been tempted to take her for a coffee and it was even more relevant now.

‘So now we’ve bared our respective souls …’

‘I wouldn’t say that you’ve bared yours.’

‘You still haven’t told me who that man was, the one closeted in your office with you while your hapless shop assistant was outside taking the flak.’

‘Anthea happens to very capable,’ Cristina said, temporarily distracted. ‘She always handles the business if I’m not around. I’ve been very lucky to have found her—’

‘I can’t say I’m overly interested in hearing your shop assistant’s CV,’ Rafael interrupted, before she headed off down one of those conversational tangents which she seemed so fond of following. ‘What I am interested in is the man in the shop. He wasn’t there helping with the delivery, was he?’

‘Who, Martin? No, no he wasn’t.’

Martin? Rafael’s ears pricked up. She was already on a first-name basis with the man. She had zero experience of the opposite sex, was a foreigner to the London scene, ignorant of the ways of the average predator—no wonder his mother had been concerned about her and had more or less asked him to keep any eye. No wonder she had seen her as a candidate for the role of wife. Cristina’s gentle innocence would have appealed to his mother’s traditional heart.

The girl was not just wet behind the ears, she was positively archaic. Whether he liked it or not, she needed some sort of protection, if only from her own naivety.

Rafael decided that he would take on the onerous task of making sure she put into position one or two defence mechanisms which would help her deal with unfortunate situations, such as the one in which she found herself.

‘Martin.’ Rafael sighed and sat back so that he could study her flushed face. ‘Forgive me if I sound like a know-it-all, but I have considerably more experience than you.’

‘I realise that.’ She was catapulted back into staring at her misguided and very private admission to him a few minutes earlier.

‘Which is why I am going to ask you how long you have known this man.’

‘Who? Martin?’

‘Who else could I possibly be talking about?’ Rafael said irritably.

‘Well … not very long.’ Cristina blushed. ‘In fact, he only answered my ad in the local paper last night.’

‘You put an ad in a newspaper?’ Rafael was horrified. His opinion of her as archaic in her approach to the opposite sex was disintegrating rapidly. He wondered how her parents could have merrily waved her off to foreign shores when she was so clearly incapable of holding her own. Maybe they had thought that she needed the experience of standing on her own two feet, but frankly she was like a minnow swimming among sharks. ‘Have you any idea how bloody dangerous that can be? Didn’t you learn anything when you were growing up? How protected were you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re implying, Rafael!’ Cristina told him defensively.

‘I’m implying,’ he said in the voice of someone explaining what should have been glaringly self-evident to a halfwit, ‘That you should have realised that putting adverts in newspapers in search of the perfect partner is playing with fire. Only two weeks ago there were headlines in the paper about a girl who had travelled to meet a so-called blind date, some lowlife who had answered an advert in a newspaper, only to discover that Prince Charming was actually Ted Bundy. I don’t know what this Martin character is like but he looks like a thug. He also wears an earring.’

‘I haven’t placed an ad—’

‘You’re inexperienced, Cristina. You’re also of a trusting nature. It’s a lethal combination.’

‘I’m not a complete idiot, Rafael.’

‘No, you’re not an idiot, and I’m not trying to tell you what to do. F’m just giving you a bit of friendly advice.’

‘I don’t need your friendly advice!’

Looking at her, Rafael thought differently. The woman was an accident waiting to happen. Even dressed as she was, in that relentlessly unflattering outfit, she still had curves and a figure that a man could want. And something about her face was softly feminine, with those wide, dark eyes and long lashes and a mouth that promised satisfaction. Of course, she had no idea, wrapped up as she was in comparisons to those sisters of hers, comparisons that were cemented in childhood. He wasn’t getting through to her, and meeting number one had already been missed. He looked at his watch, and before he could say anything Cristina sprang to her feet, suddenly aware of the passing of time and the fact that there was still an awful lot to do with the delivery of flowers before the shop opened at ten. She also had a relatively large order to dispatch to a hotel for a conference room, and it was a commission which she couldn’t possibly ruin because from that could come any number of future orders.

‘I have to go,’ she said breathlessly.

Rafael, who had been about to say precisely the same thing, wasn’t sure that he liked being dismissed. Nor did he care for her heartfelt apology for rushing off because she had some work to do. Wasn’t that his prerogative?

‘We haven’t finished our conversation,’ he grated, following her to the door and then along the pavement as she walked briskly back in the direction of her shop.

She turned and flashed him one of those smiles of hers, this time regretful.

‘I know, but I didn’t like the way the conversation was going anyway.’

‘You didn’t like the way the conversation was going anyway?’ Talking to this woman was like taking a magical mystery tour. Rafael had no idea what she would say next and he was beginning to think that, whatever it was, it would be unexpected and not in a pleasant way. Accustomed as he was to women responding to him as a man, Cristina’s bluntness was a shock to his system.

‘You were practically accusing me of being incompetent in my dealings with other people,’ she explained, glancing across at him and feeling that shiver of awareness. ‘I know you probably mean well,’ she carried on, ‘But it’s actually a little insulting.’

‘Insulting? Insulting? Run that by me, because I don’t see how I’m insulting you by trying to be helpful! You seem to have forgotten that you were the one who insulted me by implying that I don’t treat women well!’ He was beginning to feel a little hot under the collar.

‘I’m not a simpleton, and if you’d listened to me you’d realise that you’d got it all wrong.’

‘Got what all wrong?’ He wondered if she was about to try and convince him that, with her wealth of inexperience, she knew more than he did about the predatory nature of some men. God save him from ever trying to do a good deed!

‘I haven’t been putting ads in a newspaper for a blind date!

No one does that these days anyway! At least, not very many. These days people who want to find someone use the Internet!’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘I put an ad in the newspaper because I wanted to find out whether there were any opportunities for me to coach a women’s football side. Martin replied. He coaches for one of the schools in the area and he thought it might encourage more of the girls to get involved if they had a female coach!’

Rafael grimaced. ‘You should have said that from the start,’ he admonished.

‘You didn’t give me the chance!’

They had reached the shop and she turned to him with a little sigh. ‘I guess you probably feel some kind of duty towards me because of the connection with our parents,’ she said kindly, even though being considered a duty to someone else left a very nasty aftertaste in her mouth. ‘But you see, there’s no need. I would never, ever try and find my soulmate through a newspaper advertisement!’

‘So are you telling me that you’ve now got a second job working at some school somewhere?’ He wondered if she knew how dangerous some schools could be, and immediately reminded himself that she really wasn’t his responsibility.

‘Not a job, no.’ She pushed open the shop door and Rafael followed her in. The delivery of flowers had been sorted out and the shelves were stacked with an extraordinary array of plants, exotic blooms that filled the air with a lush, heavy scent.

Cristina looked at him. ‘I’ve volunteered to coach a couple of classes after school. First one on Tuesday. Martin’s not sure what the turnout is going to be, but he’s keen to make this work.’

‘Where’s the school?’

She smiled at him, a sunny smile that lit up her face. ‘It’s pretty close to here, so I can leave the shop with Anthea and get to the school by five. I’m looking forward to it. I need the exercise, at any rate!’

‘Impossible to tell under those layers of clothing.’

She felt his eyes burning through her and the safe, light-hearted change of topic left her feeling heady. ‘And you probably need to get back to work,’ she reminded him.

‘Right.’

He left the scent of flowers, but his mind refused to be reined in by the clinical sanctuary of his plush office. His meetings all went according to plan, but he was distracted and he could feel his PA dithering around him, aware that something was out of kilter.

None of this was going to do. Categorising was his speciality. Women belonged in one category and his work belonged in another, and they never, but never, overlapped. He certainly never found himself staring through his window while his BlackBerry lay on his desk, reminding him that he was contactable twenty-four hours a day without reprieve.

The woman was a liability.

He buzzed through to summon his secretary and on the spur of the moment asked her what his movements were for the next day.

As expected, wall-to-wall meetings, culminating in a mind-deadening event at one of the art galleries. He was surrounded by phenomenally expensive works of art and yet had never actually made it to any of the galleries in the city.

‘Cancel everything after four o’clock,’ he instructed her. ‘I’II keep the art gallery appointment. Some useful people are going to be there.’ He had to repeat the request before the blank, incomprehending expression on her face was replaced by her usual efficient one.

But it felt better knowing that he was going to tackle the thorny situation of Cristina and her meeting with a perfect stranger at a strange school. She might be clueless, but he had sufficient savvy for two. Once he had put his mind to rest that everything was as it should be, he would be able to focus instead of having her niggling away at the back of his mind.

And his mother would be pleased. In fact, he was feeling quite pleased with himself later that evening as he poured himself a whisky on the rocks and switched on his home computer, which interfaced with the one at his office, enabling him to take up where he had left off without any glitches.

He might be an unreliable catch when it came to women, he thought, remembering her accusations earlier on—but never let it be said that he was the sort of man who would not do what he could to protect a member of the opposite sex, even if was from herself.

Having established a pleasing moral high ground, he was finally able to devote his usual one-hundred-and-ten-percent to the work at hand, switching off the computer just after it had turned midnight.

And he was in fine fettle by the next day. Altruism, he thought, was certainly an elixir and not just the impersonal altruism of donating to charity. He gave large sums of money to a variety of worthy causes, both through his companies and personally, but he had never felt as invigorated in the process as he did now—knowing that he was doing the right thing and taking someone under his wing. Someone helpless whether she would ever admit it or not.

When, at four-thirty and just before he was about to leave, Patricia wryly told him that he was almost as scary in a high-spirited mood as he as in a foul one, he actually found it funny and laughed.

‘You’re laughing,’ she said suspiciously. ‘You’re laughing and leaving work early. Please don’t tell me that you’ve got another Fiona in the background?’

Fiona was one of his exes who had been particularly irritating at the demise of their relationship, and had blown all chances of an amicable parting by bringing her resentment into his work place, much to Patricia’s amusement. Patricia, whose contact with his girlfriends was only via the various presents she bought for them and the flowers she sent, had never let him forget ‘Fionagate’, as she had labelled it. And she had got away with it because she had worked for him for a hundred years and was no longer intimidated by him. She was unique in this.

‘Would I be so stupid?’ Rafael asked, sticking on his trench coat and making sure that his mobile phone was in his pocket.

‘Why not?’ Patricia questioned dryly. ‘Most men are.’

‘Except, of course, for Geoff. Have I ever told you how sorry I feel for that long-suffering husband of yours?’

‘Several times. So who is she? Will I be sending her red roses in a month’s time?’

Rafael paused. In the space of a few days he had been reminded several times of his relationships with women. He had a passing vision of himself as an old man, still chasing beautiful girls for brief affairs. A sad old man. It wasn’t a pleasant vision.

‘She is a project,’ he said slowly.

‘A worthwhile one, I hope.’

‘That …’ Rafael looked at his secretary thoughtfully,’… is something we shall just have to wait and see.’

It was cold and breezy outside and already getting dark. He debated whether to hail a cab, but decided against it. He rarely walked anywhere, mostly because he couldn’t spare the time, and the exercise would do him good. He remembered when he used to play sport. Every sport, excelling in most. Those days seemed to be a lifetime away, before work had become the all-consuming beast it now was.

Before he started indulging in the pointless exercise of reminiscing, Rafael simply refocused on the matter in hand—getting to the school grounds, the name of which Patricia had found out without difficulty, finding Cristina, vetting the Martin character for himself.

Unsurprisingly, the grounds were not located at the school but a bracing fifteen minute walk away. He was pointed in the right direction by a very helpful lady at the school reception desk, and arrived twenty minutes after the football coaching had commenced.

Under the glaring floodlights of the football pitch, he could make her out, surrounded by a meagre assortment of girls who seemed to shuffle about lethargically, while on the sidelines, a large number of boys were making known their thoughts of girls intruding on their territory. The heckling, from a distance, was good-natured, but rowdy, and a couple of the girls drifted away from the pitch to take up ranks with the boys.

Rafael felt a sudden alien surge of protectiveness, but he didn’t hurry. Instead, he scoured the pitch for Earring Man, who was noticeably absent.

Then he walked slowly towards the rapidly diminishing group. At this rate, he thought, she would be left with no one to coach, and where the hell was the man who should have been helping her on her first day?

A warm glow of satisfaction spread through him as he felt vindicated in his opinion of the man. Maybe not a thug but definitely a loser.

He was smiling by the time he was within earshot of her. What should have been a coaching session had apparently turned into a coaxing session, but even as she was in the middle of speaking a further two girls, who had been standing at the back kicking the ground in a desultory manner, drifted off to the safety of the group of boys.

She didn’t see him at all. In fact, she was only aware of his presence because the jeers on the sidelines had fallen quiet and all eyes were directed to a point just left of her shoulder.

Rafael, skilled in reading an audience, and even more skilled in a sort of a silent but brutally effective intimidation, now called upon both talents.

He flashed a smile at Cristina, who was gaping at him in astonishment, then he looked at the now-mute crowd and simply took control.

CHAPTER FOUR

CRISTINA hadn’t known precisely what to expect, but she had been disappointed and taken aback to realise that nothing concrete had been arranged. Martin had made it known during his sports lessons with the kids that they would be initiating a course of football coaching towards getting a girls’ team, and had recruited several possibilities, but beyond that he had done very little.

So she had arrived at the school grounds to find her prospective team, but a Martin virtually on the run because his netball team was playing an away game and he had to race halfway across London to get there. He had been full of apologies and had given a pep talk to the girls, while shouting down the boys, and then had disappeared, leaving her in full and complete control of a group of girls inappropriately dressed who seemed to have attended the coaching session out of curiosity and not much else.

Cristina had eyed the glittery trainers and the pink and white track-suits with a sinking heart.

Having never been confronted with a group of young people hell-bent on not listening to a word she had to say, never mind getting themselves dirty on a cold February evening, she had been floundering when Rafael had appeared. Literally like a knight in shining armour. Again. She had almost sagged to her knees in relief.

And he had just … taken over. Cristina had never seen anything like it in her life before. He fought battles in the boardroom, but it appeared that he could also fight on the playing fields, and never mind his sharp suit. He had appeared, sussed the situation, and had immediately been prepared to get his hands dirty so that he could help her!

In an instant, Cristina had forgotten her previous insistence that she didn’t require looking after, that she could take care of herself. She had just watched, fascinated, as he’d corralled the girls, who’d been seemingly over-keen to prove themselves on a football pitch never mind the sparkly shoes. Cristina had joined in when the team was in full flow and had taken over. She, unlike the remainder of her team, had dressed very appropriately in clothes that were designed for cold, damp, rain and mud.

An hour later and she had more than her fair share of recruits signing up for the term, and as they left the field Cristina turned to Rafael with a grateful smile.

‘You’re always rescuing me from tricky situations,’ she told him, generous as always in her honesty. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t turned up.’ She cast a critical eye at him. ‘You’re muddy.’