The Alvares Bride. Sandra Marton

invited him to stay for the weekend.” She grinned. “Matchmaker, matchmaker,” she began singing, and Carin covered her ears.

      “Stop!” She sighed with resignation. Well, it wasn’t a surprise. She should have known her mother wouldn’t give up the idea of marrying off her remaining two daughters. Samantha was safely out of range, flitting around Europe somewhere, which left Marta free to concentrate all her efforts on Carin, even though she’d vowed never to get involved with a man again. Marta had no way of knowing that but even if she had, it wouldn’t have stopped her.

      “He’s gorgeous,” Amanda gushed, “and rich, and incredibly yummy. Well, not quite as yummy as my Nicholas, of course, but he’s really something special.”

      “How nice for him,” Carin said politely.

      “His name is Raphael Alvares. Isn’t that sexy?”

      “Actually,” Carin said, even more politely, “I think it’s Spanish.”

      Amanda had giggled. “Brazilian,” she’d replied, in an exaggerated accent, “wheech, my ’usband says, means zat he is zee Senhor Alvares, and not zee señor.”

      She’d laughed, and Carin had grinned, and that had been that.

      Carin had half expected her sister to drag her off to meet the man right there and then, but Amanda had apparently decided on a more subtle approach.

      Instead of pointing Carin at Raphael Alvares, she’d pointed him at Carin.

      At least, she must have, because the man who had to be the senhor from Brazil kept staring at her. Once in a while he smiled, as he was doing now. She smiled back, because it was the polite thing to do, but he wasn’t her type. No man was her type, anymore. To put it more accurately, she wasn’t the type for any man. Not now, maybe not for the rest of her life.

      She lifted her wine goblet to her lips and took a drink so that she wouldn’t have to go on smiling when smiling was the last thing she felt like doing, and turned her back on the senhor.

      The wine went down smoothly, maybe because it was her second, or was it her third, glass. She didn’t drink red wine, as a rule, not even one like this which had, undoubtedly, come from the Espada wine cellar and probably cost almost as much as she’d paid in rent on her first apartment in New York six years ago, but the first waiter she’d seen had been carrying a tray filled with glasses of red wine.

      “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she’d quipped, and snatched one from him.

      It was for false courage, she knew, but then, this was a weekend that called for it. Screamed for it, she thought, and drank more of the wine.

      Her mother thought she was here because of the anniversary party for Tyler and Caitlin. At least, she was pretending she thought that was the reason, which was sweet of her.

      “I can’t come, Mother,” Carin had said, when Marta phoned.

      She’d been genuinely regretful, too. The gathering of the clan, all the Barons and Kincaids and al Rashids, was always a noisy, impossible, exciting event, and then there were all those adorable babies her stepbrothers’ wives and her very own sister were popping out, as if “fecundity” were their middle names.

      “I wish I could,” she’d added, “but I’ll be at a wedding that weekend.”

      That, of course, had all changed.

      Latin Lover was staring again. She could almost feel his eyes on the exposed nape of her neck.

      “Wear your hair up,” Amanda had urged, and she’d done it, except now her neck felt naked, which was dumb, but there was something about the way Raphael Alvares kept looking at her that made her feel uncomfortable. She thought about turning around and staring back but that might give him the wrong idea, which would be stupid. And she’d had quite enough of being stupid for a while.

      Instead, she took another sip of the wine. It didn’t taste as bad as it had, at first. Well, who knew? Maybe red wine had to grow on a person, the way extended families did.

      The idea was so silly it made her giggle. A woman standing nearby looked around.

      “Nothing,” Carin said, when the woman smiled and raised her eyebrows questioningly. “I just thought of something, and…”

      The woman nodded and turned away. Carin buried her face in her glass again and drank more deeply.

      Yes, even if she wasn’t mingling, as Amanda had urged her to do, maybe it was a good idea that she’d come tonight, even if the reason sounded too ridiculous for words.

      The man she’d been seeing for almost six months had been seeing one of her best friends at the same time he’d been dating her. It was such a clichéd, sad little tale that it would have been quite unremarkable—except for a minor deviation.

      He wasn’t just dating Iris, he’d become engaged to her. The wedding date was set, the arrangements all made…and Carin was to be one of the bridesmaids.

      “I can’t believe I’ve never met that fiancé of yours,” she’d said to Iris once, with a little laugh, and Iris, as ignorant of the truth as Carin, had explained that he traveled a lot.

      Carin finished her wine just as she spotted another waiter with a tray of drinks.

      “Waiter,” she said briskly.

      There were no glasses of wine on the tray, only cocktail glasses filled with a colorless liquid and onions or olives impaled on tiny plastic swords.

      “Cute,” she said, and smiled as she swapped her empty glass for a full one that held an onion and then, because the drink looked small, she shifted her evening bag under her arm and took a second glass that contained an olive.

      The waiter lifted an eyebrow.

      “Thank you,” Carin said, as if she drank two-fisted every day of her life. She took a sip of the glass that held the onion. “Wow,” she whispered, and took a second sip.

      It was true. Frank had, in fact, traveled a lot. What neither she nor Iris knew was that the traveling he did was mostly between their two apartments. Thinking back, remembering how naive—no, how stupid—she’d been she almost laughed.

      A month ago, it had all come apart. Frank must have realized he couldn’t keep up the act much longer, not with things like the rehearsal dinner and his marriage vows staring him in the face. So he’d phoned one evening, sounding nervous, and said he had to see her right away; he had to tell her something important.

      Carin had hurried down to the corner wine shop, bought a bottle of champagne and popped it into the fridge. He was going to propose, she’d thought giddily…

      Instead, he’d told her that he’d trapped himself in a nightmare. He had, he said, become engaged to another woman. And while she was staring at him in horror, trying to digest that news, he’d told her who the woman was.

      “You’re joking,” Carin had said, when she could finally choke out a coherent sentence.

      Frank had shrugged, grinned sheepishly—grinned, of all things—and that was when she’d lost it, when she’d gone from gasping to shrieking and screaming. She’d thrown things at him—a vase, the waiting wine bucket—and he’d run for the door.

      Carin took a deep breath, raised her glass to her lips and drank down half of the martini.

      She’d survived, even managed to put it all in perspective. Frank was no great loss; a man like that, one who couldn’t remain faithful, was not a man she’d want for a husband. All she had to do was get through the wedding that loomed ahead—the wedding between the woman who’d been her friend and the man who’d been her lover—and she’d be fine. She wouldn’t attend the wedding, of course, but that didn’t mean she’d mope.

      No, she’d told herself firmly, no moping. No sitting around feeling sorry for herself. She’d order in pizza, drink the bottle of champagne she’d