There was a café next door. He went inside, ordered coffee, sat at a small table and drank the coffee while he waited, eyes glued to his watch. Was the damned thing working? The minute hand seemed not to move. And then his phone rang and he flipped it open.
“Dante,” Sam said.
“Well?”
“The easy stuff first. Don’t make any legal commitments to the woman. Be pleasant, stay calm, but—I hate to use the word—keep your options open until we do some tests. Okay?”
It was solid legal advice. “Okay. What about the property issue?”
“The property.” Sam exhaled noisily. “You want it in legalese or words of one syllable?”
A muscle flexed in Dante’s jaw. It didn’t take a genius to know that Sam had not asked him a question meant to raise his hopes.
“Just tell me the bottom line.”
“The bottom line, dude, is that you’re screwed.”
“Screwed how? You mean, the bidding process has to begin all over again?”
“I mean,” Sam said carefully, “you bought an option to purchase the property and the option expired twenty-four hours from the moment you signed it. In other words, you have no further legal rights to it.”
Dante sprang to his feet. The other customers in the café shot him wary looks. He ignored them, tossed his coffee cup in the trash and stormed outside.
“I made the winning bid,” he said sharply. “The bank accepted it.”
“The auctioneer accepted it.”
“As the bank’s rightful agent. Listen here, Sam—”
“The guy who bought the property after the twenty-four hours were up is a national.”
“The twenty-four-hour thing is bull!”
“Maybe. But you’re not on a level playing field, Dante. You’re not in the U.S. of A., you’re in another country. Is what they’ve done legal?” Sam Cohen’s lift of the shoulders all but came through the phone. “Probably, but who knows? The only certainty is that you’d need a Brazilian attorney to walk you through this. I can get a name, fly down, meet with you and whatever guy is recommended, but—”
“There’s no time for all that,” Dante said grimly.
“Yeah. I figured as much. And, to be blunt, I can’t guarantee how it would work out. My best advice? Find yourself another ranch, man. Hey, you’re in Brazil. How tough could that be?”
Dante laughed. Even to his own ears, it was not a happy sound. He thanked his lawyer, disconnected and headed for his car.
Somehow the fazenda looked worse today than yesterday.
The potholes in the road seemed more numerous, the weeds higher, the house and outbuildings more forlorn. Dante parked, walked up the steps to the door and rang the bell. He could hear it echoing through the rooms.
He rang it again. And again. Finally the door swung open. A white-haired woman in a shapeless flowered dress scowled at him. She barked a question he figured was either what do you want or who are you? So he told her his name and said he wanted to see Senhorita Reyes.
The woman stood immobile. He started to repeat what he’d said when he heard Gabriella’s voice. He brushed past the woman, who hurried after him, and followed the sound to what seemed to be a library although, like everything else here, it had seen better times.
Gabriella’s back was to him as she squatted beside a cardboard box half-filled with books. She wore jeans and a T-shirt; the shirt had ridden up and he could see the ridge of her spine. Her hair was pulled back and secured with one of those things that looked like a rubber band but wasn’t. Her feet were bare and dusty.
She was, in other words, a mess.
And she was beautiful. So beautiful, she made his heart ache.
“Yara,” she said, without looking around, “quem está aí? Is it the man with the truck? If it is—”
“Hello, Gabriella.”
Gabriella sprang to her feet so quickly that she kicked over a stack of books piled on the floor. That voice. She had never expected to hear it again. Never wanted to hear it again—and yet, the sound of it made her heartbeat quicken. And when she turned and saw Dante, the joy that swept through her was indescribable.
The intensity of it shocked her. Joy? For what? This man meant nothing to her. She meant nothing to him. She put her hand to her temple, where last night’s headache had taken up what felt like permanent residence.
She was coming down with something, and was that not perfect timing?
This was even worse timing. That Dante should turn up again…
And why was he looking at her that way? As if she were a…a specimen in a zoo. She was a mess; she knew it. She’d dressed for the work of the day. A torn shirt. Ragged jeans. In New York, she had dressed for him, she had done everything for him because she had been fool enough to think she mattered to him.
But she never had.
She’d just been another of the endless string of shadow women who moved through his life, and if she’d lasted a little longer than most, so what? It had all come to nothing in the end.
Dante had never known the real her.
But she knew the real Dante Orsini. The man who had it all, who never looked back, who believed commitment to a relationship didn’t involve anything deeper than temporary exclusivity and pricey gifts, although there had been times like that one weekend, that lovely, glorious weekend…
“What are you doing?”
He was looking from her to the box of dusty books, scowling as if he’d discovered something unpleasant on his shoe. It made her angry. Everything about him made her angry, especially after last night. To think she’d been fool enough to believe he’d really wanted to help her…
She blew an errant curl off her forehead.
“I have a better question,” she said coldly. “What are you doing here?”
He flashed a quick smile. “Such a warm greeting.”
Gabriella narrowed her eyes. “My lawyer told me you went back to New York.”
“Your lawyer,” he said, his mouth twisting. “Is that what you think that double-dealing bastard is?”
“Answer my question. Why didn’t you return to the States?”
“I started to.” He moved slowly toward her. “But I thought things over and I realized…I decided to come back and try to sort things out.”
“There’s nothing to sort out. Not anymore.” Her chin rose. “Senhor de Souza explained everything to me. You chose not to buy the fazenda after all, and Ferrantes—”
“De Souza’s a liar!”
“Is he?” Her chin rose. “Then why is Ferrantes the new owner of Viera y Filho?”
“He’s the new owner because your wonderful attorney sold you out! He and Ferrantes and the bank sneaked a joker into the deck. I didn’t know a damned thing about it until I saw de Souza an hour ago.”
She gave a weary shrug. “It does not matter. You had already decided not to give the ranch to me. You made that clear. And that was for the best. It was a mistake for me to have asked such a thing of you.”
“It wasn’t a mistake, dammit! You had every right to ask. You and I were—we were close, once.”
“No,” she said stiffly, “we were not close. We were a man and a woman who came together in bed. Nothing more.”
She was right. That was how it had been, how he had wanted it. Then why did hearing those words make him so angry? Like it or not, there’d been more between them than sex. Like the weekend they’d gone away to his house in Connecticut, the one Nick had dragged him north to look at and he’d ended up buying instead of Nick. He’d planned two long days and nights of making love, but the house hadn’t cooperated. It had been built in the 1600s, and that weekend every piece of it decided to admit its age. You turned a faucet, the indoor plumbing—installed in the 1800s—coughed once and that was it. You turned on the furnace, vintage early 1900s, and nothing happened. The refrigerator—a handsome 1950s antique—groaned and died. And then there was the final insult: a storm sprang up and rain found a hole in the roof, rig
ht over their bed.
So, no. There had not been two days and nights of endless sex…but they’d had a wonderful time, anyway.
He’d turned up an old Scrabble set and she’d beaten him, three games running. She’d beaten him at gin, too, and at checkers, and he’d sighed and hung his head and talked her into one more game of everything, Scrabble and gin and checkers, winner take all, and when he won each and every time, she accused him of letting her win the first time around and he grinned, pulled her into his arms and said the “all” he wanted was her, naked in front of the fireplace….
Dammit, what did old memories have to do with anything? He’d come here to do exactly what he’d said. To sort things out, nothing more.
“There’s no sense debating our relationship,” he said gruffly.
“I agree. So if that is what you came here to do—”
“It isn’t. I was on my way home and then I began to think about things.”
“What things?”
Dante looked at the woman who’d let him into the house. She stood, arms folded over her ample bosom, glaring at him as if he were here to steal the family silver.
“Do me a favor, okay? Ask your guard dog to step out of the room.”
Gabriella laughed. Yara, a native of the Pantanal, did look as if she was standing guard. She’d stood that same way early this morning, when Ferrantes had come by, unannounced, with his ugly news.
Dante, for all his faults, was not Andre. He had hurt her heart once, he had even managed to hurt it again yesterday, but he would never hurt her physically.
She told that to Yara. “You can leave us alone,” she said, in a rapid burst of Portuguese. “This man will not hurt me.”
Yara’s bushy eyebrows drew together. “What you mean is that he will not strike you.”
Gabriella smiled at the old woman’s wisdom.
“No. He will not.”
“But he will hurt you in other ways.”
Gabriella shook her head. “He no longer has that kind of power over me.”
Yara made a sound that made it clear she did not believe that. Still, she threw Dante one last meaningful look and left the room. Gabriella wiped her dusty hands on her jeans and looked at Dante.
“Now,” she said, “tell me why you have come here.”
Dante took a deep breath. Where to start? He thought of all the tough business meetings he’d survived, of how there was always the right thing to say and the right way to say it, knew that this was going to be more difficult than any of those, and that the only way to handle it was head-on.
“I came back because of the boy. Daniel.”
Gabriella raised an eyebrow. “This time he has a name?”
“To tell you that…that I accept responsibility for him.”
“He has a name—and you’ve had a change in attitude. How interesting.”
“Dammit, you’re not making this easy…”
“Did you expect that I would? Get to the point, please. I have much to do.”
Dante took another deep breath. “I had time to think. And I realized that I want to do the right thing for him. For you both. If he’s my son—”
“If?” she said coldly. “If he is your son?”
“Gabriella, you know what I mean.”
“No. I do not. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“Try looking at this from my vantage point. You walked out. I didn’t hear a word from you, and all of a sudden here’s this child—”
She moved quickly, covering the distance between them before he could think, and lifted her furious face to his.
“You keep saying that I walked out. I did not. You did the walking, senhor. And no, you did not hear a word from me. Why would you? What could we have said that had not already been said by you that night you sent me away?”
“All right.” His mouth thinned. “Have it your way. This has to do with the baby. With Daniel. If he’s mine—”
“Stop saying that! Do you think I would lie about such a thing? That I would have slept with another man after—”
“Would you?” Dante’s voice was rough. “Would you have slept with another man after you’d been with me?” He moved forward quickly, framed her face with his hands, forced her to look up at him. “Because I don’t want to think of you that way, Gabriella, I don’t want to think of you in someone else’s bed with your hands on him the way they used to be on me, your mouth on his, your skin hot against his.”
“Damn you, Dante,” she said in a shaky whisper, “damn you, damn you, damn—”
He kissed her.
Kissed her hard, with anger, forcing her lips to part to the thrust of his tongue, and when she cried out against his mouth he groaned, his kiss gentled and he gathered her against him, ignoring the way her hands rose to flatten against his chest and push him away. He kept kissing her, slanting his mouth over hers again and again as if he would consume her sweet taste, and at last she gave that little moan of surrender he had always loved, rose to him, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
But her acquiescence didn’t last. A heartbeat later she tore her mouth from his.
“Please. If you ever cared for me, let me go.”
He didn’t want to. He wanted to hold her forever, which was crazy. He was here for the child, not for any other reason. So he took a steadying breath, dropped his hands to his sides and stepped back.
“Tell me about Ferrantes.”
Her eyes flashed.
“No,” he said quickly, “I don’t mean—Tell me what’s happening. De Souza says he’s bought this place. Has he contacted you?”
Gabriella shivered and wrapped her arms around herself.
“Sim. He was here this morning.” She touched the tip of her tongue to her lips. “He gave me—he gave me an…an—I do not know what you call it. A decision I must make.”
“An ultimatum?”
“Yes. Either he gets what he wants,” she said, so softly Dante had to bend his head to hear her, “or he will sell Viera y Filho to the rancher who owns the adjoining 50,000 hectares.”
Dante nodded. “And what he wants,” he said tonelessly, “is you.”
She looked up, eyes bright with determination. “I told him what he could do with his ultimatum. And he told me—”
“He told you…?”
She shrugged, turned away, began taking books from the shelves. “He said it was my choice, that I could do as he demanded or I had until this evening to leave this place.”
A string of Sicilian profanities, learned on the streets of his childhood, fell from Dante’s lips. “He can’t do that.”
Gabriella swung toward him. “Of course he can!”
She was right. Ferrantes could do any damned thing he wanted, or so it seemed.
“But where will you go?”
Another shrug, her face once more averted. “Yara can take us in for a few weeks.”
“Yara. The guard dog?”
“She is a good woman. She all but raised me.”
“She has a house you can share?”
Gabriella thought of Yara’s house. Small. Very small. Smaller still, these last months since Yara’s daughter, son-in-law and their three small children had come to live with her and her husband.
“Yes.”
It was the least certain “yes” Dante had ever heard. He stepped in front of Gabriella, took a book from her hands, set it aside and clasped her shoulders.
“To hell with that.”
Her eyes, filled with defiance, met his.
“I will do what I must.”
“There’s no room at Yara’s for you and the baby,” he said flatly, “is there?”
“I will do what I must,” she said again.
He nodded. She would. She had done what she had to do all these months, returning to Brazil to have her child, living out here in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the barren land for company.
“Is your clothing packed?”
Her eyebrows
rose. “Why?”
“Dammit, just answer the question. I can hire someone to pack this stuff, whatever you don’t want to leave behind.”
“I am perfectly capable of doing it myself.”
He took a deep breath. “I’m taking you with me. To New York.”
She stared at him as if he’d lost his sanity. “Why would you do that? Why would I permit you to do that?”
“Because I say so.”
She looked up into his eyes. He meant every word; she knew it. The blood of his ancestors flowed within him. He was a man who would not tolerate any obstacles once he had decided he wanted something.
There had been times he’d been like that in bed.
The tender Dante, the sweet lover she’d adored, would vanish. His lovemaking would turn hot and hungry. He’d clasp her wrists, hold her arms above her head, say things, tell her things while he was deep inside her, while his body moved within hers, and at those moments she would come and come and come…
“I do not take orders from you,” she said, forcing the unwelcome memories away.
A muscle knotted in his jaw. “Listen to me, I can’t leave you here alone, and I can’t stay with you. You must come with me. You and the baby.”
“The baby.” Her voice broke. “The baby you still think does not belong to you.”
He knew what she wanted him to say, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “There’s no other solution.”
She shook her head. “It is all happening too fast,” she whispered. “Much, much too fast. I need time to think. To plan.”
She was right about everything happening fast. He’d come back to Brazil to make careful arrangements. Give her the fazenda, arrange for paternity tests, set up funds for her and the child, do all the right things but do them logically and slowly.
Taking her with him flew in the face of all that.
His plan had turned into no plan at all, certainly not one Sam or any other good attorney would advise, much less approve.
And yet, what else could he do? Leave her to the not so tender mercies of Ferrantes?
“It is quick,” he said, because what good would it be to lie? He framed her face with his hands and slowly raised it to his. “We’ll work out the details later. And it will all work out. You’ll see.”
Dante: Claiming His Secret Love-Child Page 8