by Lynne Graham
An heir for the Da Rocha legacy...
Secured with a ring!
Tycoon Zac’s wedding to innocent waitress Freddie is pure convenience. Dark-hearted Zac will help keep Freddie’s family together, if she provides him with a Da Rocha baby! He’s confident their insatiable passion will soon burn out. But when Freddie falls pregnant, Zac realizes he craves more than just an heir. He wants to keep Freddie in their marriage bed—forever!
LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen romance reader since her teens. She is very happily married to an understanding husband, who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
Also by Lynne Graham
Claimed for the Leonelli Legacy
His Queen by Desert Decree
Brides for the Taking miniseries
The Desert King’s Blackmailed Bride
The Italian’s One-Night Baby
Sold for the Greek’s Heir
Vows for Billionaires miniseries
The Secret Valtinos Baby
Castiglione’s Pregnant Princess
Da Rocha’s Convenient Heir
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
Da Rocha’s Convenient Heir
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-474-07213-7
DA ROCHA’S CONVENIENT HEIR
© 2018 Lynne Graham
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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www.millsandboon.co.uk
Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPILOGUE
Extract
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
ZAC DA ROCHA, the Brazilian billionaire, powered towards his father’s office on long muscular legs. He was in a rare state of surprise because his stuffy, rigidly formal half-brother, Vitale, the Crown Prince of Lerovia, had just matched the facetious bet Zac had made him earlier that morning. Zac enjoyed yanking Vitale’s chain but he had not expected a retaliation. He raked his hand impatiently through the long, luxuriant dark hair falling onto his broad shoulders and grinned with sudden appreciation, flashing perfect white teeth in the process. Maybe Vitale wasn’t such a narrow-minded bore after all. Maybe he had more in common with his half-sibling than he had assumed.
As quickly as that idea occurred to him, Zac suppressed it again because he wasn’t looking for a family connection. He had never had a family. He had looked up his long-lost father, Charles Russell, out of pure curiosity and had lingered on the edge of the family circle out of pure badness, thoroughly entertained by the immediate animosity of his two half-brothers, Vitale and Angel. The emergence of a third son had shocked and unsettled them and Zac had made little effort to foster a sibling relationship. But then what the hell did he know about blood ties? He had never had a brother or a sister and, what was more, he had had a mother he had seen only once a year if he was lucky, a stepfather who hated him and a birth father whose identity he had only discovered the year before when his mother had finally told him the truth she had long withheld because she was dying.
Yet when it came to his birth father, for once in his life he had landed lucky, Zac conceded grudgingly, because he actually liked Charles Russell. Zac was more accustomed to people who tried to use him and he trusted very few people. His light grey-blue eyes hardened. Fabulously rich from birth and raised like a little prince, surrounded by fawning servants, Zac was very cynical about human nature. But from their first meeting, Charles had taken a genuine interest in his third and youngest adult son, despite the fact that, at twenty-eight and six feet four inches tall, that son was already a man grown.
After only a few hours in the older man’s radius, Zac had realised how much better he would have done had his mother, Antonella, chosen to stay with Charles rather than choosing to marry the playboy fortune hunter, Afonso Oliveira, the love of his mother’s life. Unhappily, while being engaged to Antonella, Afonso had got cold feet and dumped her for several weeks. Heartbroken, Antonella had succumbed to a rebound affair with Charles, then in the process of divorcing a wife who had been cheating on him throughout their marriage with another woman. But then, Afonso had returned to Antonella to ask for her forgiveness and Antonella had followed her heart. When soon after the wedding she had realised she was pregnant, she had fervently hoped that she carried Afonso’s child and had refused to acknowledge that Zac might not be her husband’s son. Sadly, for all of them, Zac’s very rare blood group had become a ticking time bomb in his mother’s marriage.
As Zac strode into his father’s office he was rewarded by an immediate smile of warm welcome and acceptance. He might be a tattooed guy clad in jeans and biker boots with diamond studs in his ear but Charles, the grey-haired older man who greeted him in an immaculate business suit, treated him the exact same as his other sons.
‘I did think of putting on a suit to surprise the brothers,’ Zac murmured deadpan, his strikingly light eyes glittering with self-mockery against his bronzed skin. ‘But I didn’t want them to think I was conforming to expectations or competing.’
‘No fear of that, I think.’ Charles laughed, wrapping his arms round his very tall and vociferously different son in a whole-hearted embrace before stepping back. ‘Any news yet from your lawyers about your chances of breaking the trust?’
The internationally renowned Quintal da Rocha diamond mines had been locked into a trust by Zac’s great-great-grandfather to protect the family heritage. Since his mother’s death, Zac had been in possession of the income f
rom the mines but he would not have the right to control the extensive Da Rocha business empire until he produced an heir of his own. It was an iniquitous arrangement, which had sentenced previous generations to a deeply dysfunctional family life, and Zac had long been determined to break the cycle. Sadly, the answer his legal team had given him was not the one he had sought.
He could not be truly independent or free until he had met the terms of the trust one way or another. Hedged by restrictions throughout childhood and adolescence, he had railed against the trust when he had finally understood how it would limit him. He was the last da Rocha and he enjoyed enormous wealth but until he fulfilled the conditions imposed by that trust he had no more rights than a child to control the diamond mines and the vast business empire built on the back of their profits. He felt sidelined, powerless and dispossessed by his current weak position and there was little he would not have given to be free of it.
‘My lawyers tell me that if I marry and fail over time to produce a child they think there would be little problem breaking the trust,’ Zac revealed grimly, his chiselled cheekbones taut. ‘But that would take years and I’m not prepared to wait for years to run what is mine by right of blood.’
Charles expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘So, you’re going to get married,’ he assumed.
Zac frowned. ‘I don’t need to get married,’ he countered. ‘Any heir will meet the terms of the trust, boy or girl, legitimate or otherwise.’
‘Legitimate would be better,’ Charles protested quietly.
‘But the ensuing divorce settlement would cost me a fortune,’ Zac responded with resounding practicality. ‘Why marry when I don’t have to?’
‘For the child’s sake,’ Charles supplied with a grimace. ‘To protect the child from growing up as both you and your mother did, isolated from normal life.’
Zac parted his lips as though he was about to say something and then thought better of it, swinging restively away. His grandfather had found himself married to a barren wife. He had then impregnated a maid in the household, who had given birth to Zac’s mixed-race mother. Antonella had been whisked away to be raised at a remote ranch, separated from her mother and never acknowledged by her aristocratic father once her arrival had refuelled his wealthy lifestyle. She had been an heiress but one from the kind of humble background the rich and sophisticated delighted in despising.
Initially, Zac’s stepfather, Afonso, had assumed that Zac was his child and he had married Antonella, willing to turn a blind eye to her embarrassing background if he could share her riches. When Zac was three years old, however, his need for a blood transfusion after an accident had roused Afonso’s suspicions about his parentage and the truth had emerged. Zac still remembered Afonso screaming at him that he was not his child and that he was ‘a dirty, filthy half-breed’. After that fallout, Zac had been transported to the ranch to be raised by staff, out of sight and out of mind while Antonella worked on repairing the marriage that meant so much to her.
‘He’s my husband and he comes first. He has to come first,’ Antonella had told Zac when he’d asked to go home with her after one of her fleeting visits to see him.
‘I love him. You can’t come to Rio. It will only put Afonso in a bad mood,’ she had argued vehemently years later with tears in her beautiful eyes.
Yet Afonso had enjoyed countless affairs during his marriage while Antonella struggled to give him a child of his own, suffering innumerable miscarriages and finally the premature birth that had claimed her life when she was already well beyond the age when child bearing was considered safe. Afonso had not even come to the funeral and Zac had buried his weak-willed but lovely mother with a stone where his heart should’ve been and the inner conviction that he would never ever marry or fall in love, because love had only taught his mother to reject and neglect her only child.
‘I married two very beautiful women, neither of whom was the least maternal,’ his father, Charles, told him heavily, pulling Zac suddenly back into the present. ‘Angel and Vitale paid the price with unhappy home lives. Right now you’re at a crossroads and you have a choice, Zac. Give marriage a chance. Choose a woman who at least wants a child and give her the opportunity, with your support, to be a normal mother to that child. Children need two parents because bringing up a child is tough. I did the best I could after the divorces but I wasn’t around enough to make a big difference in my sons’ lives.’
It was quite a speech and it came from the heart; Zac almost groaned out loud because he could see where his father was coming from. Although marrying would cost him millions when it inevitably broke down, that legal framework would provide a certain stability for the child. It would be a stability that he had never enjoyed but then, unlike his grandfather, he had always planned to be involved in his child’s life, hadn’t he? Even so, if he wasn’t married to the mother of his child, his freedom to be involved would be dictated by her. He already knew those facts, had worked through all possible options with his legal team and preferred not to think about those facts because they only depressed him. After all, the odds of him having a good relationship with his child’s mother were slim, he reflected impatiently.
Women always wanted more from Zac than he was prepared to give...more time, more money, more attention. But all he had ever wanted from a woman was sex and once that was over, he was done. He was an unashamed player, who had never been in a real relationship, who had never pledged fidelity and who could not bear the sensation of being caged by anyone or anything. In many ways, he had been caged most of his life, raised on a remote ranch before being placed in a stiflingly strict boarding school run by the clergy and forced to follow endless rules. He hadn’t known a moment of true freedom until he reached university and it was hardly surprising that he had then gone off the rails for a while. In fact, it had been a few years before he got back on track and completed his business degree.
And what had brought him back? The discovery that at heart he was a da Rocha and that he couldn’t run away from his birthright. A workers’ dispute in which he was powerless to intervene on their behalf had persuaded him to start attending business meetings and, although he still couldn’t legally call the shots, he had discovered that the directors were very wary of making an outright enemy of him. Like Zac, they looked to the future.
‘How long will you be away?’ Charles prompted, aware that Zac was leaving London to check out the diamond mines in South Africa and Russia.
Zac shrugged. ‘Five...maybe six weeks. I’ve a lot to catch up on but I’ll stay in touch.’
Leaving his father’s office, Zac headed back to The Palm Tree, the small, exclusive and very opulent hotel he had bought in preference to an apartment of his own. His thoughts immediately turned in a more frivolous direction, escaping with relief from the serious ramifications of his father’s sage advice. He had bet his brother that he couldn’t find an ordinary woman and pass her off as his socialite partner at the royal ball to which he had also been invited. Unsurprisingly, Vitale, who didn’t have a humorous bone in his entire body, had been unamused by the challenge but, on emerging from his meeting with their father earlier, Vitale had startled Zac by not only accepting the bet but also by making his own. And what had followed had had very much an ‘own goal’ feel for Zac...
Remember that little blonde waitress who wanted nothing to do with you last week and accused you of harassment? Bring her to the ball acting all lovelorn and clingy and suitably polished up and you have a deal on the bet.
Freddie? Lovelorn and clingy? That was the challenge to end all challenges when he couldn’t even get her to join him for a drink! His even white teeth clenched hard in frustration. Zac had never before met with an outright rejection from a woman and it had infuriated him, his innate need to compete making him persist. But Freddie had interpreted persistence as harassment and had burst into tears in Vitale’s presence, a fiercely embarrassing moment that had frozen Zac where he’d sat in all male horror at what he had unlea
shed on himself in a public place. Even more gallingly, Vitale had stepped straight in to defuse the scene with all the right soothing words until another waitress had arrived to rescue them. But then that was Vitale, all smooth, slippery and refined in a way Zac was distinctly aware that he himself was not. The most formative years of Zac’s life had been the dropout years when he had belonged to a biker club, not rubbing shoulders with the rich and sophisticated in polite society.
In polite society, Zac was mobbed by women seduced by his great wealth and he avoided such women like the plague, well aware that they would’ve been equally enthusiastic even if he were old, bald and unpleasant. That he was none of those things simply made him more of a target. He had loved the male brotherhood in the club, the easy acceptance, the loyalty and the complete lack of rules that had enabled him to be himself. He had enjoyed women equally happy to enjoy him in bed, women without an agenda, only looking for pleasure. But after a while, even that had got old and as soon as the Brazilian media had discovered his hideout and exposed the story of the billionaire biker boy, he had moved regretfully on, knowing that phase of his life was over.
He revelled now in the anonymity of his life in London and had avoided his siblings’ social gatherings out of a strong desire to preserve it. Spoiled, privileged young women with cut-glass accents didn’t do it for him because they saw him as a prize trophy to be won. He had met with more sincerity and honesty in people his brothers would probably snobbishly deem to be vulgar and uneducated. And even conservative Vitale had conceded that Freddie was a real looker.
Zac only knew that he had never wanted a woman with such instantaneous lust. Lust at first glance, he conceded grimly, thinking it ironic that out of all the many women who wanted him back his libido had had to focus on one who not only did not want him, but also actively appeared to dislike him. He couldn’t accept that he had done or said anything to incite that reaction from her and the injustice had outraged him, encouraging his damaging determination to change her attitude. Meu Deus, after her outburst, he would scarcely be looking in that direction again, which meant that Vitale had won the bet outright and as the loser he would have to hand over his cherished sports car. Exasperation and growing annoyance gripped him. He would now be gone for weeks in any case.