‘I thought we could dance.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Raúl…’
‘Araminta.’ Now he turned and looked at her. ‘If I wanted to dance with you then I would have asked.’
Estelle blinked, because despite the velvet of his voice his words were brutal.
‘That was a bit harsh,’ Estelle said as Araminta stumbled off.
‘Far better to be harsh than to give mixed messages.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘So…’ Raúl chose his words carefully. ‘If taking care of Gordon is a full-time job, what do you do in your time off?’
‘My time off?’
‘When you’re not working.’
She didn’t frown this time. There was no mistake as to what he meant. Her green eyes flashed as she turned to him. ‘I don’t appreciate the implication.’
He was surprised by her challenge, liked that she met him head-on—it was rare that anyone did.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes my English is not so good…’
When it suited him.
Estelle took a deep breath, her hand still toying with the stem of her glass as she wondered how to play this, deciding she would do her best to be polite.
‘What work do you do?’ She looked at him. She had absolutely no idea about this man. ‘Are you in politics too?’
‘Please!’
He watched the slight reluctant smile on her lips.
‘I am a director for De La Fuente Holdings, which means I buy, improve or build, and then maybe I sell.’ Still he watched her. ‘Take this castle; if I owned it I would not have it exclusively as a wedding venue but also as a hotel. It is under-utilised. Mind you, it would need a lot of refurbishment. I have not shared a bathroom since my university days.’
She was far from impressed and tried not to show it. Raúl, of course, could not know that she was studying ancient architecture and that buildings were a passion of hers. The castle renovations she had seen were modest, the rooms cold and the bathrooms sparse—as it should be. The thought of this place being modernised and filled to capacity, no matter how tastefully, left her cold.
Unfortunately he didn’t.
Not once in her twenty-five years had Estelle even come close to the reaction she was having to Raúl.
If they were anywhere else she would get up and leave.
Or, she conceded, if they were anywhere else she would lean forward and accept his mouth.
‘So it’s your father’s business?’ Estelle asked, trying to find a fault in him—trying to tell herself that it was his father’s money that had eased his luxurious path to perfection.
‘No, it was my mother’s family business. My father bought into it when he married.’ He saw her tiny frown.
‘Sorry, you said De La Fuente, and I thought Fuente was your surname…’
For an occasional model who picked up men at Dario’s she was rather perceptive, Raúl thought. ‘In Spain it is different. You take your father’s surname first and then your mother’s…’
‘I didn’t know that.’ She tried to fathom it. ‘How does it work?’
‘My father is Antonio Sanchez. My mother was Gabriella De La Fuente.’
‘Was?’
‘She passed away in a car accident…’
Normally he could just say it. Every other time he revealed it he just glossed over it, moved swiftly on—tonight, with all he had learnt this morning, suddenly he could not.
Every man except Raúl had struggled in the summer heat with full Scottish regalia. Supremely fit, and used to the sun, Raúl had not even broken a sweat. But now, when the castle was cool, when a draught swirled around the floor, he broke into one—except his face drained of colour.
He tried to right himself, reached for water; he had trained his mind not to linger. Of course he had not quite mastered his mind at night, but even then he had trained himself to wake up before he shouted out.
‘Was it recent?’ Estelle saw him struggle briefly, knew surely better than anyone how he must feel—for she had lost her parents the same way. She watched as he drained a glass of water and then blinked when he turned and the suave Raúl returned.
‘Years ago,’ he dismissed. ‘When I was a child.’ He got back to their discussion, refusing to linger on a deeply buried past. ‘My actual name is Raúl Sanchez De La Fuente, but it gets a bit long during introductions.’
He smiled, and so too did Estelle.
‘I can imagine.’
‘But I don’t want to lose my mother’s name, and of course my father expects me to keep his.’
‘It’s nice that the woman’s name passes on.’
‘It doesn’t, though,’ Raúl said. ‘Well, it does for one generation—it is still weighted to the man.’ He saw her frown.
‘So, if you had a baby…?’
‘That’s never going to happen.’
‘But if you did?’
‘God forbid.’ He let out a small sigh. ‘I will try to explain.’
He was very patient.
He took the salt and pepper she had so nervously passed to him and, heads together, they sat at the table while he made her a small family tree.
‘What is your surname?’
‘Connolly.’
‘Okay, we have a baby and call her Jane…’
How he made her burn. Not at the baby part, but at the thought of the part to get to that.
‘Her name would be Jane Sanchez Connolly.’
‘I see.’
‘And when Jane marries…’ he lifted a hand and grabbed a fork as he plucked a name from the ether ‘…Harry Potter, her daughter…’ he added a spoon ‘…who shall also be called Jane, would be Jane Sanchez Potter. Connolly would be gone!’ He looked at her as she worked it out. ‘It is simple. At least the name part is simple. It is the fifty years of marriage that might prove hard.’ He glanced over to today’s happy couple. ‘I can’t imagine being tied down to another, and I certainly don’t believe in love.’
He always made that clear up-front.
‘How can you sit at a wedding and say that?’ Estelle challenged. ‘Did you not see the smile on Donald’s face when he saw his bride?’
‘Of course I did,’ Raúl said. ‘I recognised it well—it was the same smile he gave at the last wedding of his I attended.’
She laughed. There was no choice but to. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Completely,’ Raúl said.
Yet he was smiling, and when he did that she felt as if she should scrabble in her bag for sunglasses, because the force of his smile blinded her to all faults—and she was quite positive a man like Raúl had many.
‘You’re wrong, Raúl.’ She refused to play his cynical game. ‘My brother got married last year and he and his wife are deeply in love.’
‘A year.’ He gave a light shrug. ‘It is