When he next stepped out of his now parked car, it was to find that she had disappeared once again.
With mounting irritation, Rafael walked round the back of the Mini and found her kneeling on the ground, looking for something with the help of the light from her mobile phone.
‘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.