CRISTINA was busy by the main barn when a sound made her look up to watch a helicopter fly overhead. It circled the homestead a couple of times before deciding to drop down into an empty paddock out of her field of sight.
It had to be Luis. She did not do much as even consider the possibility that it could be anyone else. He would be arriving for their last big confrontation, though she had not expected him to get here quite so soon.
A frisson slid through her. She had to give her determination a hard tug not to react to the sting of electric excitement and, tightening the softness of her mouth, she returned to what she had been doing. But she felt his approach like long icy fingers curling themselves around her until she could not take in a single breath.
Anton came to a halt several feet away, watching in silence as she hefted bales of hay from the barn to the truck while Pablo, her helper, eyed them both warily from beneath the brim of his hat. She was wearing work-faded jeans and a check shirt. Heavy work gloves protected her hands. Her hair was lost beneath a red spotted headscarf and her face was bare of everything but its smooth golden skin. She looked too delicate to touch, yet she hefted those bales of hay like a man.
Clenching his body across the rush of anger that hit it, he stepped closer, flicked the helper a look that sent him scuttling away, then turned his attention to Cristina.
‘Look at me,’ he commanded.
Her response was to bend, with the intention of hefting up yet another bale, and in biting frustration Anton stepped forward and placed his foot down on it. He watched her go still, watched her eyelashes flicker when she took in his black leather hand-stitched shoes and the cut of his black silk trousers. The tension between them heightened the higher those eyes drifted, taking in the black silk dinner jacket hanging open to reveal the fine white dress-shirt he still wore beneath.
If looks could paint a picture then the expression on her face was a masterpiece of a woman totally riveted by what she was seeing.
‘Impressed?’ he said, bringing her eyes up that bit further, to the open collar of his shirt, where the rich golden skin at his throat was glossed with the sheen of sweat. His bowtie still hung there, like a trailing piece of black ribbon.
‘It took hours of negotiation to get the helicopter charter company to let me fly myself,’ he supplied, with hard, harsh, husky bite. ‘Before that I had to get to Sao Paulo—and I was right on your stubborn tail until then, meu querida,’ he informed her. ‘Count yourself lucky that I was delayed, or you might have found yourself prostrate by now on this bale with my fingers wrapped around your slender throat. Instead I find I don’t have the energy. I’m hot, I’m tired, and I’m in dire need of a shower and a shave—’
Her eyes flicked to the stubble covering the cleft in his chin. Her lips parted, that vulnerable upper lip just begging—begging for it.
His own lips flexed.
‘I need a drink so badly my throat thinks it’s been cut, and some food inside me would be pleasant, since you effectively ruined dinner last night …’
Then, just to make sure that his next point went home, he bent low enough to bring his eyes into full contact with her darker than black eyes, vulnerable, wishful—sad.
His teeth came together. ‘In other words, sweetheart, what you see here is a man at the end of his rope. So be warned that ignoring me right now is a very—very dangerous thing to do.’
She blinked, she swallowed, and her lips quivered as she took in a small breath. He nodded, held her eyes for a moment longer, and thought about kissing her utterly, totally—punishingly breathless, but then straightened up and took his foot off the bale.
It was then that she saw his overnight bag, dumped on the ground. He watched her look at it, then pull in a breath. ‘Luis—’
‘Anton, he corrected, turning his back on her to take an interest in his surroundings. ‘I don’t feel much like Luis right now.’
He could almost hear her lips snapping shut before they opened again.
‘I will not marry you.’
‘Fine. He shrugged. ‘Now, show me round this heavy investment I’ve bought into.’
‘Will you listen to me?’
He swung back, everything about him hard like iron. ‘Only when you have something to say that I want to hear.’
‘I don’t need your money any more! Did your mother not tell you?’
‘About my father’s bequest to you?’
‘Father—? She stared at him.
Anton returned the look with an inscrutability that said he was not going to play that game. ‘You know that Enrique Ramirez was my father because my mother told you. Now that we have that attempt at yet more deception out of the way, will you show me around—please?’
Please. Cristina looked at this tall, dark, arrogant man, with his beautiful accent and his beautiful manners and the hard crystal eyes that warned her to beware. She felt that oh, so helpless, I do so love you, Luis lump form in her throat, and—
‘I can pay my debts.’ She stuck to her guns, chin up, eyes defiant.
‘You can try,’ he invited with a thin smile. ‘But the moment you so much as attempt to pay me off, I will sell all your debts on to the Alagoas Consortium so fast your head will spin. They will not be so easy to please as I am.’
He would do it too. Cristina could see the cold intent cast like armour on his face.
‘You are not easy to please.’ She sighed wearily, then turned away from him to remove her gloves so she could toss them down onto the bale of hay.
Without looking at him again she walked over to the hand pump beside the barn and set cool water flowing to wash her hands, then pulled the scarf off her head and wet it to use to cool her sweat-sheened face and throat.
If Luis thought he’d had a bad day then he should have lived hers, she thought tiredly. Three ranch hands had walked off the job the moment she’d left for Rio, leaving Pablo alone to do the jobs of four—five, if she counted herself. They had not been paid in months, so how could she complain about them walking away? And when she’d entered the house she’d found Orraca, the housekeeper, on her hands and knees mopping up the kitchen which had flooded due to a burst pipe. Orraca was too old to be on her hands and knees, so Cristina had taken over the mopping while Pablo fixed the leaky pipe. Then she and Pablo had come out here, to start catching up on the jobs that had not been done. Now it was two o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was at its hottest, and all she wanted to do was to take that shower Luis had mentioned, crawl into her bed and sleep … for a hundred years if she could.
A hand came out to take the wet scarf from her. It was stupid for her lips to start quivering, but they did. Luis drenched the scarf again, folded it carefully, then placed it carefully around her neck.
A sob rolled in her throat. ‘Don’t be nice to me,’ she protested, having to blink the tears back.
‘You’d prefer my hands there instead of the scarf?’ he quizzed. ‘Or maybe you would like it better if I just turned round and left again.’
Cristina’s mouth opened but nothing came out. His hands dropped to her shoulders, and it just was not fair that he pulled her close. Before she knew what she was doing two sets of fingers had crept up in between them and were toying with the black ribbon edges of his bowtie, which were dangling either side of the tantalising V of damp skin exposed at his glistening throat.
‘I’m in your blood,’ he murmured huskily. ‘You are in mine. Why keep fighting it?’
Because I have to, she thought, and moved away from him, lifting her chin and taking in a deep breath.
‘Do you want some refreshment?’ she asked then.
‘Or something?’ he drawled by return.
Her eyes gave a warning flash. ‘Do you?’ she persisted.
His turn to utter a sigh as he glanced at his watch, then gave a shake of his head. ‘If you’re going to show me around the place then we don’t have time for food and drink. There’s a weather front coming in,’ he explained. ‘I would rather use the helicopter to see Santa Rosa from the air while we can …’
It was a complete refusal to give in to anything, Cristina noted. Standing here, looking at him, stubbornly willing to continue the fight, she caught the signs of tiredness around his eyes, and for the first time the hint of strain playing with the corners of his mouth.
And she surrendered—for now.
Time later to be stubborn again, she told herself, as without another word she turned to seek out Pablo, who was still standing in the shadow of the barn, and ask him to take Luis’s bag into the house.
With a very hooded look at Luis, and a nod of his head to her, Pablo complied. Cristina knew that by the time they arrived back here the whole of Santa Rosa would know that she had been steamrollered by a man.
Luis took off his jacket and with a polite ‘Thank you’ handed it to Pablo to take inside with his bag. By then Cristina had unearthed a bottle of water from the chiller she kept in the truck. Silently she handed the bottle to Luis, and he drank thirstily on the way to the helicopter. Ten minutes later they were in the air, and Cristina was quietly explaining what they could see while he sat beside her, listening, asking shrewd questions and controlling the helicopter as if he had been born to do it.
Which he probably had, she thought ruefully.
Anton listened to the way her voice began to soften as she described what lay beneath them. And he understood why her voice did that. Santa Rosa was a stunning place of breathtaking contrasts.
They flew over wide open plains scattered with cattle and the occasional gaucho, then on to the first change in scenery as they swept over rich green meadows threaded with gushing streams not quite wide enough to be called rivers but impressive nonetheless. She directed him to fly over a hill and into a valley dotted with small neat whitewashed houses, each surrounded by their own small plot of land.
‘This is part of Santa Rosa?’
Cristina nodded. ‘The valley beneath us is the land the Alagoas Consortium wants to turn into a spur from the highway to the forest,’ she explained, and Anton did not need telling what the people who lived in the whitewashed houses down there would be losing if the developers had their way.
Then she directed him to fly over the other side of the valley. Almost instantly Anton saw exactly why she had instructed him to come this way. Even before they rose above the valley rim he saw the forest rising up like a huge dark wall in front of them. Majestic, invincible … or so you would like to think. But from up here it didn’t take words for him to see what was so valuable to the developers. A natural fault in the earth’s crust had carved a deep groove in the forest that stretched for miles and miles towards what he saw in the misted distance was the sea.
‘This is it?’ he said, as they tracked along the fine vein of water that threaded the base of the groove.
‘Sim.’
‘What happens to the river when the rains come?’
‘It floods.’
‘So what do they intend to do with the flood when they build their road?’
Not if but when, Cristina noted with a shiver. ‘They plan to run their road along either side of it, above the flood line.’
Her eyes scanned the area of forest that would have to be demolished to achieve such an aim. Beside her she could feel Luis doing the same thing.
‘The banker in me says what a goldmine you’re sitting on. The human in me says what a sick, criminal waste,’ was his only comment.
Cristina said nothing. And that was how it remained between them as they made the journey back the way they had come. They landed back in the paddock behind the house, but not before Anton had circled the two-storeyed plaster-walled mansion house. He said nothing about its poor state of repair, but his mouth maintained a flat line as he settled them back down to earth again.
The heat of the afternoon was intense, and the silence between them all the more so—growing as they walked towards the house, passing the collection of ageing barns and paddocks as they did. The house itself was surrounded by a low whitewashed wall which sectioned it off from the rest of Santa Rosa. An open archway took them into gardens that would once have been beautiful but had, like the house itself, fallen into decay.
They hadn’t seen a single living soul since they landed. ‘It’s very quiet,’ he remarked.
‘Siesta time,’ Cristina murmured.
Now, there’s an idea, Anton mused, but kept the thought to himself.
The tension between them grew even stronger when they entered the coolness of the house itself. Without another word passing between them Cristina led the way across a high-ceilinged hallway and up a wide, gracefully curving flight of stairs. Anton looked around him at the once elegant but now scuffed and chipped tiled floor, and the walls hung with heavy-framed oils that looked as if they’d seen much better days.
Mentally crossing her fingers that Orraca had instructed Pablo to place Luis’s bag in the only useable guest bedroom out of twelve, Cristina pushed open the door.
His bag sat, on the heavily carved ottoman, she saw with relief and stepped aside to allow him to precede her inside.
‘There is a bathroom through the connecting door,’ she told him, in a cool level tone that just did not reflect what was trying its best to erupt inside her. ‘I will organise something to eat and drink for when you come back downstairs.’
He did not say a single word, just stood inside the room looking around him. Cristina closed the door with a quiet, dignified click and then swung herself back against the nearest wall. Eyes tight shut, heart dipping and diving, breasts heaving beneath her damp and sticky shirt, she refused, absolutely, to look at why she was feeling like this.
Then, right on the back of that refusal, she was pushing away from the wall and running like a crazy woman down the stairs, across the hall and into the kitchen, situated at the rear of the house. She still did not allow herself to think about what she was doing as she snatched up a tray and laid it on the kitchen table. Two minutes later she had added a small freshly baked loaf of crusty bread, fruit conserve, a pitcher of chilled lemonade from the refrigerator, and the plate of sliced fresh fruit she’d spied in there. Then, as a last impulse she flew down into the wine cellar and plucked at random one of her father’s bottles of wine and added it, a bottle opener and two glasses to the tray.
Sad, weak, pathetic, she castigated herself when she eventually picked up the tray and made her way back to the stairs again. ‘Triste, fraco, patético,’ she repeated beneath her breath, just to make sure she got the point.
In the bedroom Anton was experiencing a similar overload—of the masculine kind which translated into tight-chested, gut-gripping anger beneath his own sweat-soaked shirt.
This place was like some cracked and crumbling forgotten museum. How long had she been living here on her own, rattling around it like the resident ghost with no life worth speaking of? Where did she get off, preferring this to marriage and a full life with him?
He yanked his shirt off over his head and used it to wipe the sweat from his face, then tossed it angrily to the ground. It landed in a float of expensive silk on top of a worn Persian carpet that must have once cost the earth.
Well, not any more, he thought grimly as the rest of his clothes joined the shirt. The carpet, like the faded satin coverlet on the bed and the matching curtains at the windows, needed a hasty burial—along with the rest of this time-locked place.
Unzipping his bag, he hunted down his toilet bag and headed for the connecting door. Half expecting to find a cast iron tub with a pitcher of water standing beside it, it did not mollify his feelings one iota to discover a fully functional if old-fashioned set of sanitary units waiting for him. He turned on the shower suspended over the white bathtub and grimaced his surprise when it gushed clear water into the bath. Then, with a sigh, he turned his attention to removing the growth from his face.
He did not know what was coming next—hell, he did not want to think about what was coming next if it meant yet another battle to get her to see some damn sense. But his insides were already revving up for it, stinging and tensing and—girding, he thought with yet another tight grimace.
Cristina was functioning on a different level by the time she’d carried the tray upstairs and arrived outside the bedroom door. Balancing the tray on one arm, she grabbed her lower lip between her teeth, then gave a knock on the door before twisting the handle and pushing it open.
Luis was not there. Her tummy muscles twisted with what might have been relief, though she wasn’t sure. As she placed the tray down on a table by the window she could hear the shower running, and that was when she saw his clothes lying in a heap on the floor.
Was she going to do it?
Those muscles twisted again. Her heart did the same nervous trick because—yes, she was going to it. Just this once—just this once she was going to do what she really wanted to do and act out a dream that had haunted her for six long years, which involved Luis, this house and that bed.
Her clothes landed on the top of his clothes. With trembling fingers she released her hair from its topknot, then on impulse bent to snatch up Luis’s bowtie and used it to loop her loosened hair back from her face.
The knock sounded as Anton was drying his face with a threadbare but spotlessly clean towel. He turned to stare as the door opened, then went completely still when a perfectly naked Cristina stepped inside, closed the door again, then turned to look at him.
She just looked. He just looked. Both of them held in tight stasis that knew exactly where to centre itself. Her chin was up and her dark eyes were defensive, her soft, lush, beautiful mouth quivering and as vulnerable as hell.
Now she had come this far Cristina did not know what to do or say next to make something happen. If he rejected her she would die where she stood. Water hissed from behind the plastic curtain drawn across the bath, steam swirled and eddied, to say that the ancient boiler had not let her down as it often did.
He recognised his bowtie holding her hair back and his eyelashes flickered across the darkening green of his eyes.
‘I thought we could share the shower,’ she heard herself say in a breathless little voice. ‘Do you mind?’
Did he mind? Anton mocked. For the first time in six years she had come to him, and it did not need words on his part to tell her how he felt about that. She only had to dip her eyes to the cluster of black curls surrounding his sex to know whether he minded her coming to him like this.
The pink tip of her tongue appeared as she looked at him. The physical response his body gave brought her eyes flickering back to his face. Without uttering a single word he reached out with one hand and swept back the plastic curtain, watched the tight little pull of air she took before she could peel herself away from the door.
Suddenly stupidly shy, Cristina slewed her eyes away from him and turned to put out a hand to test the heat of the water spraying out of the shower head. It was too hot; she adjusted it. His hands arrived on her hips as she did so, the jut of his sex making its bold statement against her while he waited for her to be very practical and get the water temperature just right. For some reason the situation caught her with a compulsive giggle, and from behind her she heard his low, deep, husky laugh.
The tension broke, just like that, and he was lifting her up against him to latch his teeth to her shoulder while he stepped into the bath. Water poured down her front, the curtain was swept shut, steam fogged her vision and Luis fogged up everything else.
He touched, he stroked, he moulded her to him, following the streams of water. She responded by lifting up her arms to curve them around his neck and turned her face so she could claim his mouth. When that was no longer enough she twisted to face him, and that was when the really serious kissing and stroking began.
He filled her hands and she stroked him gently. His hand slipped between her thighs. They made love to each other with their mouths and their fingers until both were barely on the planet, but he was not going to let this be over as quickly as that, because once it was over neither knew what was waiting beyond, and they didn’t want to know.
So he soothed things down by locating the soap, and began washing her all over while she stood gazing up at him with heavy, dark, love-drugged eyes. ‘Luis, Luis,’ she kept on saying. He wondered if she was aware at all that she said his name like a whispered call to a lost lover. I’m here, he wanted to say, but was too afraid of breaking into the spell that was holding them both.
Instead he handed her the soap and then stood and just enjoyed while she washed him, caressed him, until he could stand it no longer and he switched off the shower and stepped out of the bath. He wrapped a towel each around them, then lifted her into his arms to carry her into the bedroom.
His eyes blazed when he saw that the covers had been stripped back from the bed. She’d planned this, had known they were going to end up here. This beautiful, stubborn contrary woman, who was her own worst enemy, pushed him away with one hand and hooked him right back to her with the other.
They fell on the bed in a spray of clean water droplets, rough towelling and deep, hungry kisses. They made love while the afternoon sun dropped lower in the sky. And when it was over it wasn’t over, because they still touched, kissed, drew out the after-loving like a trailing silken thread, until hunger and thirst sent her leaping off the bed to pick up the tray.
She’d forgotten nothing. Anton smiled as she placed the tray on the flat of the bed between them, then gave him the wine bottle to open while she knelt beside him, golden, slender, totally carefree in her nakedness, as she broke off chunks of bread and smeared them with conserve, offering him a piece, then smiling at him as he handed her the wine to pour while he bit into the bread. His bowtie had managed to stay in her hair, though he didn’t know how it had, considering what they had been doing. She looked loved and lovely, lips soft and swollen from his kisses, the swing of her nipples dark and tight.
She offered him a glass of wine. He took it and drank, then his face instantly contorted at the harsh, brackish taste.
‘My God, you’re trying to poison me,’ he gasped.
To his shock, huge glistening tears filled her eyes.
‘What did I say?’ he demanded in bewilderment, then saw the way she was staring at his glass of wine. ‘Christina …’ He sighed. ‘Don’t be such a baby. I was joking! Here—try the wine,’ he invited. ‘I can guarantee it will knock your eyes out.’
She shook her head, mouth small now, and trembling, those tear-filled eyes too big in her face. Anger roared up like a monster inside him. Who the hell had knocked the spirit out of her to the extent that she could almost fall apart over a glass of poor wine?
That bastard Ordoniz?
He tossed the rest of the wine to the back of his throat and swallowed, then slammed the glass back down on the tray.
‘All right,’ he said then. ‘Let’s talk about this. Since when did you get this upset over a lousy glass of wine, instead of just tossing your own glassful into my face for being so insensitive?’
‘I wanted it to be perfect.’
‘Wanted what to be perfect?’
‘This …’ She stared at the bed, the tray—him. ‘You, me, here—our last time together,’ she whispered.
Our last time …
The rumbling beginnings of their next major battle began to roll around the room. Anton tried to hold it back by clamping his lips together and clenching just about every muscle he could. But it was not going to happen. Anger six long years in the fermenting, it was filling with a bitterness that by far outstripped the taste of the wine.
‘So this—’ he flicked a hand at the tray ‘—the surprise visit to the bathroom and the rest—was just for the sex, was it?’
‘No—’
‘A last good old frolic with your Englishman before you kicked him out of your life again?’
‘Y-you—’
‘I’ve had it,’ he announced, and launched himself right off the bed.
‘Luis—no!’ she cried. The look he sent her had her scrambling off the bed. ‘You don’t understand!’
‘What’s to understand? I’ve noticed the pattern here. Have you noticed it?’ he rasped. ‘You run; I follow. You take the sex. You run again—or in this case you kick me out.’
‘I don’t mean it to be like that—’
‘No? He released a hard laugh, dragged on a pair of pale chinos and zipped them up. ‘I’ve offered to marry you—again,’ he delivered. ‘I’ve offered to save this bloody awful place. I’ve given you the sex! Who is the fool here, do you think? You or me?’
This time she didn’t answer. Reaching out, he picked up a white T-shirt and dragged it on over his head.
‘And of course I must not forget that you have other options now,’ he continued bitterly. ‘Enrique Ramirez has seen to that.’
‘Y-you said—’
‘What did I say?’ he lanced at her, ignoring—refusing—to see the way she was standing there naked, shivering, face as white as the worn sheet on the bed. ‘That I would sell you out to the Alagoas Consortium if you tried to pay me back? Do I really come over to you as the kind of bastard who would do that to you?’
Without wanting a reply, he ripped out a sigh and went hunting for a clean pair of socks in his bag. He came out with another folded white T-shirt and tossed it at her.
‘Cover yourself,’ he said, as if he hated the very sight of her body now—and turned his back on the next pained look that crossed her face and sat down on the bed to pull on his socks. ‘You married a man old enough to be your father to save all of this once. I would love to know why you could not bring yourself to do the same thing with me.’
‘You are not old.’
‘So you’ve come to prefer older men, is that it? Does their lined and sagging flesh turn you on?’
If only you knew, Cristina thought painfully as she pulled on the T-shirt, emerging from its clean white folds to have her breath catch in her throat at the sight of him. Fully dressed now, and standing at the end of the bed grimly stuffing clothes into his bag, his height and the lean muscle power beneath the casual clothes hit her harder than the sight of him in one of his smart business suits had ever done.
‘You look very much the Latino,’ she remarked helplessly.
‘I am English,’ he declared. ‘To the last drop of my blood.’
‘You never used to deny your Brazilian side,’ she whispered. ‘You—’
‘Well, now I do deny it!’ Rocking her back with a fresh blast of his anger, he swung away from her, then violently back again, hard lines suddenly raking his lean face. ‘Six years ago you rejected me because my Englishness did not appeal to you. You didn’t want to move to England and play the banker’s wife. You did not want to rear English children who would have their natural passions bred out of them.’
Like a machine gun he shot her with all the hateful words she had thrown at him six years ago.
‘Finding out that my real father was a Brazilian does not alter the person I am inside, Cristina. I still am an Englishman who thinks like an Englishman.’ Hard fingers made a tight, stabbing gesture at his head. ‘And I promise you that I will go back to England and marry an Englishwoman, remain this English banker who will rear English banker children, while you—’ he made a gesture of derision ‘—get your dearest wish.’
With that he bent to zip his bag up, cursed when he remembered his soap bag, still languishing in the bathroom, and strode that way, leaving Cristina standing there white-faced and shaken, stripped to the very bones by her own cruel lies.
A shudder raked her slender body, a hand jerking up to cover her mouth in guilt-ridden dismay at the cruelty she had used six years ago to make Luis walk away.
She had mocked his English upbringing, his public school accent and his stuffy banker family. She had scorned his offer of marriage and demanded to know where he had got the idea that what they had was anything but a temporary affair. Cringeing inside, she had listened to her own voice demolish everything they’d spent a whole year cherishing.
Then she had just walked away.
This time Luis was going to do it. And she could see in the hard set of his face as he strode back to his bag that this time he would not come back.
He zipped the bag up again, ignoring her as he straightened and turned for the door.
Oh, Meu Dues, she thought. He was going.
It hit like a thunderbolt. ‘No,’ she wrenched out, and moved like lightning, racing past him to stand with her back against the door. ‘I need you to listen while I tell you something.’
His wide shoulders tensed—his back, his whole body. He did not look into her eyes and she knew—knew—he did not want to look at her ever again.
‘Move out of the way, Cristina,’ he instructed grimly.
‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘You must understand before you go why I cannot marry you!’
Fury leapt in his eyes. He took a step towards her. ‘If you say that to me one more time—’
‘I lied to you Luis!’ she cried out. ‘Everything I said to you six years ago was just one big wicked lie! I never, ever wanted to hurt you. I have always loved you more than anything else in this world! But I am not what you need! Your mother said—’
‘My mother?’ he lanced at her. ‘What the hell has she got to do with this?’
‘Nothing.’ She had not meant to say that. ‘Sh-she loves you.’
‘Great, he snapped. ‘So everyone loves me.’ The bag dropped to the floor as he threw out his arms in an arc of blistering contempt. ‘So what am I supposed to say to that life-changing statement, Cristina? Oh, that’s okay, then. Now I don’t mind if you walk all over me!’
‘Don’t shout at me!’ she shouted, on a loud, anguished sob. ‘I need to tell you something and it is hard for me!’
‘Tell me what?’ He was not going to make it easy for her. ‘That you treat me like a football for my own good?’
‘I was pregnant with your baby when you left me to go to your papa’s funeral!