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.
In fact, Rafael thought, she was the human equivalent of a spaniel puppy. The direct antithesis to the languid greyhound sort he favoured. But, hell, a deal was a deal and he had promised to help her out with her predicament.
‘Follow me,’ he said abruptly, and he began leading her out of the kitchen, and through a myriad back rooms which lay between them and the sound of voices and laughter that signalled the party happening at the front of the house.
Of course, the house was far too big for his mother after his father had died, but she wouldn’t hear of having it sold.
‘I’m not yet decrepit, Raffy,’ she had told him. ‘When I need to use stair lifts, then I’ll consider selling it.’ Knowing his mother, that day would never come. She was as energetic in her early sixties as she had been in her early forties, and although there were wings of the house which were rarely used many of the rooms were taken up at various points of the year by friends and relatives staying over.
Rafael now led Cristina to one of the less-used wings and quickly ushered her into a bedroom suite, where she proceeded to look at him with a mournful expression.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman.’ He shook his head and favoured her with a direct and assessing look.
‘I know I’m being a nuisance,’ Cristina said on a sigh, ‘But…’ Then she saw the expression on his face and flushed. ‘I know I haven’t got a perfect figure…’ she stuttered in embarrassment. It occurred to her that a man who looked like him, a man whose amazing looks could stop a woman dead in her tracks, would only ever associate himself with his female equivalent—which would probably not be a vertically and horizontally challenged twenty-four-year-old inexperienced woman.
‘I’ve been on countless diets,’ she blurted out into the ever-growing silence, ‘You wouldn’t believe. But like I said, I have my father’s shape.’ She laughed a pitch higher than was necessary and then subsided into embarrassed silence.
‘Your dress has a tear.’
‘What? No! Oh, goodness…where?’
Before she could bend to scrutinise her treacherous garment, Rafael was in front of her, then kneeling like a supplicant, holding up the flimsy fabric of her loose, tunic-styled silk dress which, with its cluttered pattern of red and white tiny flowers against a black background, should have been more than up to the job of camouflaging a tear. Unfortunately, as he held it up, the rip seemed to expand in girth until it was all she could see with horrified eyes.
Through her horror, though, she was very much aware of the delicate brush of his fingers against her leg. It sent a thrilling, wicked shiver straight through her body.
‘See?’
‘What am I going to do?’ she whispered.
They looked at each other and Rafael sighed. ‘What else did you bring?’ Since when had he been in the habit of rescuing damsels in distress?
‘Jeans, jumpers, wellies just in case I wanted to have a walk and look around the garden. I absolutely love looking around gardens. I’m addicted to it. The most boring people can sometimes have wonderfully creative streaks that come out in the way they landscape their lawns. I’m babbling, sorry, getting away from the point…which is that I have absolutely nothing appropriate to wear…’
Rafael had never met a woman who only packed the bare necessities. For a few seconds he was reduced to stunned silence, then he reluctantly told her that he would fish something out of his mother’s wardrobe. She had enough outfits to clothe most of Cumbria.
‘But she’s so much taller than me!’ Cristina wailed. ‘And skinnier!’
But he was already striding out of the room, leaving her to wallow in a very unaccustomed sense of self-pity.
He returned some ten minutes later holding various assorted clothes, all of which seemed hideously bright, not at all suited to someone of a more robust persuasion.
‘Right. I can’t waste much time here, so strip.’
‘What?’ Cristina’s eyes widened and she wondered, fleetingly, whether she had heard correctly.
‘Strip. I brought some…some forgiving items…but you’ll have to try them on and you’ll have to be quick about it. I’m late enough as it is.’
‘I can’t…not with you there…watching…’
‘Nothing I haven’t seen before,’ he drawled, amused by her sudden attack of prudishness.
Cristina, however, refused to budge and he waited, looking at his watch while she tried on the armful of clothes in the privacy of the adjoining bathroom.
He could, he knew, always leave her to get on with it. After all, she wasn’t his problem. But he found himself staying anyway, and when she finally emerged he swung round, ready to tell her whatever she wanted to hear. Anything to get going with the evening, because he had work to do and would have to disappear virtually as soon as he appeared.
He looked at her and stared before muttering the statutory, ‘Looks very nice…’
He hadn’t quite expected this. Yes, she was far from willowy, but neither was she as overweight as the dress had suggested. In fact, there was a definite sign of curves, and her breasts were bountiful, barely restrained by the stretchy lilac fabric. She had the golden colouring of someone brought up in kinder climes, and her shoulders, left bare by the sleeveless style of the dress, were rounded but firm. For the first time in memory he was awkwardly conscious of fumbling for something further to say, and avoided the dilemma by opening the door and standing back to let her through.
‘Thanks.’ Cristina gave him a sincerely felt look of gratitude, then on impulse she tiptoed and kissed him chastely on the cheek.
It was as if she had suddenly been touched with an electric spark. She could actually feel her skin go hot, and it was like nothing she had ever experienced in her life before. She pulled back at roughly the same time as he did and preceded him out of the room, babbling yet again about nothing in particular because she didn’t want him to see how hot and bothered she felt.
It
