‘Sorry,’ came an anxious apology from the squatting figure. ‘I’m really sorry. Are you all right?’ A quick glance in his direction, then the search for whatever was missing began again.
‘Have you any idea how dangerous it is for you to leave your car there?’ He nodded curtly at the Mini.
‘I tried moving it, honestly, but the tyres kept squealing.’ She stood up, reluctantly abandoning her search, and chewed her lips nervously.
Rafael could now see that the woman in question was little over five-three. Short and dumpy from the looks of it. Which did nothing for his diminishing patience levels. Had she been willowy and beautiful, his charm-gene might have automatically been kick-started. As it was, he looked down at her with a frown of displeasure.
‘So you then decided to leave it where it lay, never mind the risk you were causing to anyone coming round the bend, and start scrabbling on the road instead?’ His voice was laced with sarcasm. Never noted for high levels of patience, Rafael was now on the verge of snapping completely.
‘Actually, I wasn’t scrabbling on the road. I was… I rubbed my eyes to wake myself up, and one of my contact lenses came out. I’ve been driving all the way from London. I should have taken the train, but I want to leave first thing in the morning and I didn’t want to be rude and have to wake anyone up to drop me to the station.’ She looked up at him earnestly. ‘Hello, by the way.’ She held out one small hand and stared at the stranger.
He was the most beautiful stranger she had ever seen in her entire life. Actually, he could have stepped off the cover of a magazine. He was very tall, over six feet, and his dark hair was combed back so that there was nothing to distract from the perfect chiselled beauty of his face. His scowling face.
Cristina couldn’t stop herself from smiling helplessly, unfazed by his unsympathetic expression.
Rafael ignored the outstretched hand. ‘I’ll get your car into a less hazardous position and then you’d better get in my car. I assume you’re heading in the same direction as me. There’s only one house at the end of his lane.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to do that,’ Cristina said breathlessly.
‘No, I don’t, but I will because I don’t want the hassle of dealing with a guilty conscience if you get behind the wheel of your car when you can’t see anything and crash.’ He spun round on his heels while Cristina continued to watch, with fascinated interest, as he expertly did what she had spent half an hour trying and failing to do.
‘That was brilliant,’ she told him honestly when he was back in front of her, and Rafael felt some of his anger begin to subside.
‘Hardly brilliant,’ he muttered. ‘But at least the damn thing’s in a safer position now.’
‘I could drive myself now,’ Cristina was forced to admit. ‘I mean, I have a pair of specs in my bag. I always carry them because I never know when my contact lenses are going to start irritating my eyes. Do you wear contact lenses?’
‘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