Understand? Pulling her gaze away from the angry Kinsella, Cristina looked at the woman who had once been betrothed to Vaasco, and understood so much more than Luis could ever appreciate that the consequences of that understanding were already threatening to squeeze the life out of her sinking, sickly dipping heart.
Maria Ferreira was a beautiful woman of indefinable years, dressed in a beautiful smoky blue silk evening suit that made her look as delicately structured as a fragile rose yet contrarily regal, though she was unable to hide her shocked dismay.
Cristina had not expected this. In the last mad forty-eight hours her mind and her body had been so engrossed in Luis that she just had not once considered the possibility of coming face to face with the one person Vaasco had hated above anyone.
And Vaasco had hated.
Swallowing tensely, she tried to turn within Luis’s embrace, needing to stop this before it exploded in their faces. But he was not in the mood to listen.
‘Behave,’ he repeated, kissed her pale cheek, then straightened, releasing only one of her hands as he moved to her side so they could exit the lift.
And it was not by accident that he retained her left hand, bringing two pairs of eyes dipping down to stare at the diamond clustered ruby adorning her finger. It was making a huge statement, Cristina realized, with a growing awareness of the disaster about to descend on their heads.
Recovering her poise first, his mother took a couple of steps forward.
Did she know? Cristina wondered anxiously.
‘Querida,’ Anton greeted her warmly, lowering his dark head to brush his mother’s smooth cheek with his lips.
‘Querido—’ his mother responded, returning his embrace.
‘You look tired,’ he observed as he straightened again. ‘Perhaps we should have left this until tomorrow, to give you time to sleep off your jet-lag.’
‘I am fine; do not fuss,’ his mother said with quiet impatience. ‘Although I did assume you and I would be sharing a private dinner, Anton,’ she scolded. ‘I needed urgently to talk to you, but—’
‘You will contain your impatience for another time?’ her son suggested with a gentle amusement that made his mamma’s eyes flutter—because, like Cristina, she had heard the censure threading through his tone.
‘Meu querida…’ His hand tightened its grip on Cristina’s hand to draw her closer. ‘Let me introduce you to my mother, Maria Ferreira Scott-Lee—Mother…this beautiful creature is Cristina Vitória de Santa Rosa…Marques…’
The pause, staged for effect, certainly had its reward, Anton noted as he watched his mother’s spine rack up in shock.
‘You are the daughter of Lorenco Marques?’ Maria asked Cristina sharply.
‘Y-you knew my father?’ Cristina returned, her voice small and very wary.
‘We met once—many years ago,’ Maria replied in a slightly dazed way. Then her lovely liquid brown eyes narrowed. ‘But I was led to believe—’
‘You knew Cristina’s father?’ Anton smoothly took back control. ‘Well, this unexpected surprise makes what I have to say next all the more special.’ He smiled. ‘Mother, you can be the first to congratulate us because the astonishingly beautiful daughter of Lorenco Marques is about to become my wife…’
It was like living in a kind of nightmare after that, one in which people talked and behaved in one way when their body language said entirely something else.
‘Well, this is a—surprise.’ Luis’s mother used dignity to hide behind as she tried not to go pale. ‘Congratulations, my dear.’ And she even managed to kiss Cristina on both cheeks, when surely she would rather be demanding answers to all the questions that must be whirling around in her head.
Was it Kinsella who had mentioned the Ordoniz name to Luis’s mother? Cristina only had to meet the venom in the blue eyes as she politely offered them her congratulations to know that she had.
Only Luis appeared not to notice the undercurrents weaving around them. He smiled, he charmed, he pretended to be the happiest betrothed on this earth. They toasted their coming nuptials with champagne drunk from tall fluted glasses. They moved from the lounge into the restaurant. They discussed food and ordered their individual courses. Luis chose the wine.
And through it all either his hand or his eyes or his mouth were in contact with Cristina somewhere. He toyed with her fingers. If she snatched them beneath the table his followed, captured and tangled with hers, then lifted them up to receive the brush of his mouth before he placed them back on top of the table again. It was like being paraded naked for everyone to stare at, because he was making absolutely no secret of what they would be doing right now if they were not sitting here.
The first course arrived with a flourish from four waiters eager to impress. Cristina looked down at her salad starter and wondered how she was ever going to manage to place a single forkful into her mouth. Her stomach had knotted, the tension in her stretched across every muscle she had. Letting her gaze slip around the table, she saw across the flickering candlelight how difficult his mother was finding it to keep the conversation pleasant and polite.
Kinsella ate sparingly and kept her eyes carefully lowered, but it was what was going on behind the lowered eyelashes that worried Cristina. How could Luis do it to her? How could he make his lover sit here and endure this when only recently she had still been sharing his bed?
He was ruthless. He gave way on nothing, she decided. Did his mamma know she had raised this kind of man?
‘May I look at your ring, Miss Marques?’ Maria Scott-Lee requested.
‘Cristina,’ her son corrected softly.
Biting her lip in annoyance with him, because his mother was at least trying to be nice, Cristina stretched out her hand to display the ring.
Mrs Scott-Lee gazed down at it for a long time before she glanced up at Cristina. ‘I have one just like it,’ she said with a tense little smile. ‘Instead of your beautiful ruby mine has an emerald in the centre—to match the colour of my son’s eyes…’
Those eyes belonging to her son narrowed for some reason. His mother refused to look at him. Tension whipped around them all like barbed wire stretched to its optimum. The waiters arrived to remove plates.
While they waited for their main course to arrive, it was Luis’s mother who surprised Cristina once again, by mentioning Santa Rosa.
‘I visited your home once—a long time ago,’ she said. ‘It is such a beautiful place.’