‘And I’ll be round at six on Saturday to fix you up!’ Anthea told her. ‘You’re going to be the belle of the ball!’
Cristina was far from sure about that. The dress was a vibrant deep red with a neckline that went beyond plunge into full-blown dive, but her breasts, her friend had declared, were her assets and should be displayed with pride. And no, she wouldn’t fall face-first in front of the assembled crowd in her high heels. She would walk in a sexy but dignified manner and all eyes would be on her. Cristina accepted those words of wisdom with a little sigh of resignation.
Rafael’s secretary, when she had called earlier in the week with details of the evening, had offered to send his driver round to collect her, but Cristina had refused, preferring to make her own way there by taxi. And it was just as well, because Anthea was late in arriving and, by the time she had been ‘fixed up’, she was already running behind time.
But she did, she had to admit, look glamorous. The dress, which had looked idiotic in the changing room when tried on with her trainers, did all the right things. It accentuated her bust, nipped in her waist, and her legs looked much longer than they really were in the shiny, patent-black high heels.
They had bought loads of costume jewellery, which jangled around her neck down to her waist, and Anthea had done clever things with her hair, pinning it up but very casually so that it tumbled around her face and made her eyes look sultry and enormous. She had managed to argue her way out of vast amounts of make-up, but her lips were still red, and the faint blush on her cheeks highlighted cheekbones which she had never known really existed.
All told, Cristina was confident that she at least looked her best, even if inside she felt far from it.
The flutter of nerves which had begun the minute she had accepted the invitation were in full force by the time the taxi dropped her outside his place.
Patricia had said that it would be a small, quiet gathering, really in honour of their Japanese clients with whom they had recently closed a major deal.
Standing outside his door, it sounded neither small nor quiet. She was discreetly pressing her ear against the door, anxiously chewing her lower lip and wondering whether she could sneak back out and escape under cover of gathering darkness, when the door was pulled open and there he was. Tall, darkly, fatally handsome and waiting to catch her as she stumbled against him.
Cristina hurriedly gathered herself, flustered.
‘What are you doing?’ Rafael asked, as taken aback to see her standing there as she was to find the door opened when she had been pressed against it.
He wasn’t quite sure what had brought him to the door. At the back of his mind, with the party in full swing and Cindy playing the perfect hostess, much to his annoyance he had been waiting for Cristina to arrive. She was one of the most punctual women he had ever met and he knew that after an hour he had been glancing at his watch every three minutes, his mind only half on what was happening around him.
He hadn’t expected to open his door to find her toppling against him.
Nor had he expected her to be wearing what she was wearing.
He held her at arm’s length and looked at her appraisingly.
‘You said it was a party,’ Cristina said defensively before he could say anything. ‘So I dressed for a party.’
‘So I see.’ His hands appeared to be temporarily glued to her arms and he quickly removed them. ‘I’m not sure I would call this strip of red cloth a dress.’ He had wondered how she was, had thought about her far too much for his liking, had assumed that she was missing him. In fact he had been worried enough about her well-being, and caring enough to invite her to his party, magnanimous as he was.
From the looks of things, he had been way off target. He had never seen her in a get-up like this before. She looked … sexy as hell and ready for anything.
An imagination which he’d never known he possessed suddenly slammed into action, and he had vivid images of her dealing with her loss in the classic way. He pictured her going out on the town, meeting strange men in strange bars. God. When he had called her the week before and imagined that he had caught her sleeping in on a Saturday night, she had probably been in bed all right. But not alone.
‘You’re barely decent!’ He found himself positioning himself directly in front of her, blocking her from the crowd of people milling around inside.
Having left all arrangements in the capable hands of his secretary, the party of twenty people had somehow turned into a lavish affair with more than forty people, who had been steadily getting tipsy on the champagne and Chablis from the moment of their arrival well over an hour ago. The waiters were assiduous in their duties, never allowing a glass to remain empty for longer than five seconds, it seemed, and the array of delicious and abundant canapés were doing the rounds, but were hardly robust enough to mop up the quantity of alcohol on offer. Rafael had no doubt that he would have to send out for something more substantial on the food front at some point, but at the moment …