‘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.