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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 deci
ded. Did his mamma know she had raised this kind of man?
‘May I look at your ring, 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.
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.’
Cristina blushed. ‘Obrigado,’ she murmured, thinking bleakly, You would not find much beauty there now.
‘Have you seen Santa Rosa, Anton?’ Luis’s mother asked her son. ‘The ranch sits on the edge of the pampas, with fertile pastures and valleys dramatically backed by the rise of the mountains and the most awe-inspiring sub-tropical forest acting like a barrier to hold back the ocean beyond…’
She went silent for a moment, eyes lost to some distant memory. Then she blinked. ‘I may be mistaken, because it was more than thirty years ago when I was there, but I seem to recall that the house itself resembles a Portuguese mansion house?’
Cristina nodded, wetted her dry lips with a sip of wine. ‘My ancestors built the house over three hundred years ago. It was not unusual for Portuguese settlers to reproduce the style of house they were used to living in Portugal. The area has many similar-styled houses.’
‘But few were built and furnished to the grand style of Santa Rosa, I suspect.’
Cristina lowered her eyes, thinking about the home she had left only a few short days ago, where grandeur had lost out to peeling paint and damp walls.
‘Do you think I might know your mother?’
Cristina shook her head. ‘My father met and married my mother when he was visiting Portugal. She died a year later, giving birth to me, so I doubt you would have met.’
‘It is a shame, then, that your father could not join us this evening.’
Her tone had taken on a subtle alteration. Everyone noticed it. Luis tensed. Kinsella reached for her wine glass. Cristina waited a moment before she lifted her eyes.
‘Both my parents are dead, Senhora Scott-Lee,’ she provided, as calmly as she could.
‘Ah, my sympathies.’ Scott-Lee tilted her head. ‘But surely your father must have married again? Provided you with a brother, perhaps, to inherit Santa Rosa?’
‘I am an only child. I inherited Santa Rosa.’
‘Then my son has indeed made a fortunate choice in bride,’ his mother said. ‘Your children will be truly blessed on both sides of the family—unless you have children from your first marriage, who will naturally inherit from you?’
It was like taking a double punch in the stomach. Cristina didn’t answer, could not answer. More tension leapt around the table. Kinsella sent her a cold, sly, malicious little smile that chilled Cristina’s blood.
‘Is there a point to this line of questioning?’ Anton intervened at last.
