AMANDA CINELLI was born into a large Irish Italian family and raised in the leafy green suburbs of County Dublin, Ireland. After dabbling in a few different careers, she finally found her calling as an author after winning an online writing competition with her first finished novel. With three small daughters at home, she usually spends her days doing school runs, changing nappies and writing romance. She still considers herself unbelievably lucky to be able to call it her day job.
Also by Amanda Cinelli
Resisting the Sicilian Playboy
The Secret to Marrying Marchesi
Monteverre Marriages miniseries
One Night with the Forbidden Princess
Claiming His Replacement Queen
The Avelar Family Scandals miniseries
The Vows He Must Keep
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
Returning to Claim His Heir
Amanda Cinelli
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-008-91365-6
RETURNING TO CLAIM HIS HEIR
© 2021 Amanda Cinelli
Published in Great Britain 2021
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.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
www.millsandboon.co.uk
Note to Readers
This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:
Change of font size and line height
Change of background and font colours
Change of font
Change justification
Text to speech
For those who have grieved.
May the sun always shine after the storm.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EPILOGUE
Extract
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
IT WASN’T OFTEN that a man could say he’d looked upon his own grave. Duarte Avelar stood frozen in the sleepy English village graveyard, staring at the elegant family crypt where he and his twin sister had laid their beloved parents to rest seven years before.
But now a third name had been added to the marble plaque.
His own.
Dried wreaths and bouquets lined the resting place, with small notecards and offerings of condolences from friends and business colleagues alike. He’d been told his memorial service had been a grand affair, filled with Europe’s wealthy elite, come to pay their respects to one of their favourite billionaire playboys.
His mind conjured up an image of his twin sister, Dani, accepting their sympathies, standing in this very spot to watch as they lowered an empty coffin into the ground...
His stomach lurched, nausea burning as he turned away and moved swiftly through the empty cemetery grounds. A sleek black car awaited him outside the gates, the young male chauffeur studiously staring at the wet ground as he held the door open. A pair of hulking bodyguards in plain clothes stood nearby, quietly focused on monitoring the surrounding countryside.
He had once enjoyed a certain level of familiarity with his staff. Had prided himself on being considered a likeable employer, easy-going and approachable. And yet for the past two weeks, since his shock return, he had been a pariah. It seemed everyone had been forewarned of his unpredictable temperament and had decided that ignoring him was the safest option.
Still, he caught them trying not to stare at the thick crosshatched scarring that spanned his face from the centre of his left eyebrow to the tip of his ear. He saw their stricken gazes upon seeing the scars along the rest of his torso when he went for his twice-daily swim.
He had gone from being the kind of man who could command a boardroom and charm any woman in his path to being one who avoided his own staff so as not to make them nervous.
His sister had managed the media, laying down an embargo for a couple of weeks until Duarte was ready for the attention. He had walked out of their first press conference less than an hour ago, knowing he hadn’t been ready, but there was nothing to be done now.
The press had called him a walking ghost, a man returned from the dead. They had jumped at the chance to paint him as some kind of hero to fit their own sensational narratives.
No one seemed to understand that his survival was not something he wished to be celebrated for. Not when he was sure that his disappearance and the suffering he had endured had been entirely his own fault.
By rights, he should be dead.
He sat heavily against the back seat of the car, running his hand along the length of the long scar that traced the side of his head above his ear. It turned out that the nightmarish recovery process he’d endured after a gunshot wound to the head had been child’s play compared with trying to fit back into a world where Duarte Avelar had ceased to exist.
As they drove away he watched the sun shine over the picturesque countryside hamlet that his family had adopted as their home after moving from Brazil. As a young boy he had been angry and homesick, barely even ten years old, but this quiet place had soon become home. Even when he had made his fortune, owning homes in every corner of the world, nothing had compared to the feeling of this small slice of peace and paradise.
Now...nowhere felt like home.
Everything was wrong. He was wrong.
He saw it in the glances his sister shared with Valerio, his business partner and best friend. They had witnessed his shifting moods, his restless lack of focus and his irritation with the debilitating
headaches that could hit at any moment.
Two weeks previously, when they had been informed that he had miraculously survived, they’d both rushed to where he’d been kept, at an elite private medical facility on a tiny island off the coast of Brazil. Up until that point he’d had no memory of who he was, and had been singularly focused on rebuilding the physical strength he had lost during the months he’d spent confined to a hospital bed.
Talking to them had been painful, but he had started to recover some memories with their help. Coming back to England had been Dani’s idea, and he had seen her eyes fill with hope that he would somehow come back to their childhood home and magically be restored to his former self.
It had worked to a certain extent. With their help, the gaps in his memory had begun to fill, but he still felt a strange disconnection from it all. Dani was determined to think positively, but Duarte felt nothing but apathy for the strange world he had re-entered. At times he even longed for the peaceful solitude of his anonymous life on the island, then felt guilt for his own selfishness.
In his absence, so much had changed. With every passing day he continued to be reminded of how people had moved on and adapted, growing over the hole he had left behind. Growing together mostly. He scowled, thinking of the look on his best friend’s face when he’d revealed that in Duarte’s absence he and Dani had fallen in love and were now engaged to be married.
His best friend and his twin sister were going to be man and wife. The fact that their relationship had begun as a measure to protect Dani from the corrupt forces who had been behind his kidnapping had only angered him further.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want them to be happy. But they’d buried him. Mourned him. And then they had moved on—all while he had been trapped alone in a living hell.
His anger was a constant presence and it shamed him. They had done nothing wrong. No one could have known he was still alive. In fact, his father’s oldest friend in Brazil had ensured that no one knew until the time was right.
But Duarte hadn’t told them that part of the story yet... He hadn’t told anybody. Telling the truth behind the events that had led to him and Valerio being captured and tortured at the hands of Brazilian gangsters would mean admitting his own part in what had happened. Revealing the secrets he’d kept from them both. Secrets that now had gaping holes in them, thanks to his memory loss.
Dani had been subtle, but pointed in her questions about when he might feel ready to get back to work. Velamar, their luxury yacht charter company, was just about to open new headquarters in the US and in the Caribbean. It was something that he and Valerio had been building towards for more than a decade. His answers to her repeated questioning had been hostile and he had refused to commit to attending.
After the press conference that morning he’d told them both that he was going back to Rio for a while, to assist with securing one of the Avelar Foundation’s charity developments—a sizeable portfolio of prime urban development sites in Rio De Janeiro, which had been the catalyst for all the trouble he had brought into their lives.
Of course the charity was only one of the reasons he was returning to Rio, but he hadn’t told them that.
Dani had been stone-faced and had walked away from him without a single word. Valerio had been torn between them both, his mouth a grim line as he’d urged Duarte to take a large security detail and be careful.
He knew his sister was hurt by his distant moods, but he felt stifled by her company, by her obvious happiness with Valerio and by her questions about his time in recovery. But he didn’t want to talk—didn’t want to remember the pain of learning to walk again and pushing his broken body to its limits. Not when he was so consumed with bringing down the wealthy criminals behind his ordeal and making sure they paid for their crimes.
The insistent chime of his phone grabbed his attention. The screen showed a text message from an undisclosed number.
We found her.
Duarte felt his body freeze for a moment before he tapped a few buttons on the phone to open an encrypted server. His team of private investigators and ex-law-enforcement operatives had been hard at work in the past week, since he’d set the course for his revenge. They’d already recovered and collated every photograph and video of him from the past year, trying to create a map of his movements. Judging by the most recent files added, they’d uncovered a wealth of photographs taken at a political event he had attended directly before his kidnapping.
He scanned through the countless images, one after the other, seeing that a trio of pictures at the end had been flagged for his attention. The photographs showed him standing away from the main podium area, towards the back of the large event hall. Something thrummed to life in his gut as he clicked through the files until finally a glimpse of long red hair made him freeze.
It was her. Cristo, he’d finally found her.
Of all his tortured dreams as he’d recovered on the island, those of the beautiful redhead had plagued him the most. When he’d first come out of a medically induced coma, the only clear memory he’d had was of her holding him as he bled out. He hadn’t been sure if it was his imagination that had conjured such a vivid picture or if it was truly a memory he’d managed to retain.
She’d kept him warm with her body around his, her hand holding his own as she’d spoken his name so softly. Her bright silver eyes had been filled with tears, and the scent of lavender had cocooned him as she’d tried to stem the blood-flow.
‘Duarte...please don’t die,’ she’d sobbed, before cursing in colourful Portuguese.
Her words had been like a mantra in his mind.
‘You need to stay alive for both of us.’
That voice in his mind had kept him going throughout his intense recovery process. And now he couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was...important, somehow. That she was real. But, despite all the people that Angelus Fiero had tracked down and arrested in the last two months, there had been no mention of a woman anywhere near that shipping yard.
But now, looking at the photo on his phone screen...
One look at her face and he knew it was her. He knew she was real, not a dream. She had been his very own angel that night. She had saved his life with her bare hands, but she had left before anyone saw her.
Why?
He ignored the countless theories his mind produced, knowing none of them painted her as having nothing to hide. He would think about that later. For now, this woman was possibly the only link to what had happened that night and he needed to find her.
He looked up, noticing that they had arrived at a small private airfield outside London. His pilot, Martha, stood on the Tarmac to greet him, along with the small crew of one of the Velamar fleet of private jets.
Duarte smoothed a hand over his jaw as he tried not to think of his sister’s words, begging him to forget his ordeal, to let the police continue to handle it while he focused on getting back to his normal life. Now, after seeing the woman’s face, knowing she was real, he felt as if he was finally doing something that mattered. The cogs in his brain were turning, giving him purpose.
But was he just tracking her down to find out what she knew, or was it something more?
He brushed off the thought and dialled a number on his phone, hearing the rasping voice of his chief investigator as he answered the call and began griping about the various data protection laws standing in the way of facial recognition and searching for the mystery woman. Duarte growled back that he didn’t care what he had to pay or what had to be done. He added that if his team had eyes on her by the time he landed in Rio their fees would be doubled.
The other man swiftly changed his tune.
‘You will wait for my arrival before you make a move. Nobody is to approach her or bring her in—understand?’ Duarte felt anticipation build within him as he growled the warning. ‘She’s mine.’
Nora Becket
t took one last look at the empty space of her tiny apartment and felt the weight of uncertainty descend, choking the air from her throat.
She wouldn’t cry. She’d done enough of that in the last six and a half months to last her a lifetime. Crying was for people who could afford that weakness, she thought miserably as she opened her phone one last time and looked at the list of missed calls and unopened voicemails. The name on the screen read ‘Papai’. Such an innocent word to cause such a violent reaction in her gut.
She placed the phone in one of the boxes, knowing she couldn’t take it with her. As far as she was concerned she had no father. Not any more.
She’d thought she was almost free of his reach...
She’d thought she still had time...
Her powerful father had been in hiding somewhere outside of Brazil for months, and Nora had taken the time to finish her studies at university, cramming in as many repeat classes as she could to try to undo some of the damage of the last year.
She’d barely managed to scrape through her final exams when the first messages had begun to arrive. She had no idea if she would even be allowed to graduate with her patchy attendance record, but sadly, that was the least of her worries right now. She had to get out of Rio.
The open boxes on the floor overflowed with books on engineering and environmental studies. They were the only possessions she owned other than her small case of clothing, but they were too heavy to take with her. She’d already done far too much today, bending down and scrubbing the place all morning so she could get her meagre deposit back.
As though agreeing with the thought, her lower back throbbed painfully.
As she descended the five flights of stairs to the street below she cradled the enormous swell of her stomach, taking care not to go too fast for fear she might jostle the precious cargo nestled within.
She had agonised over booking the four-hour flight to Manaus at this late stage of her pregnancy, but the nurse at the clinic had assured her that spending three days crammed in a bus to travel across the country would pose far more of a risk.
Returning To Claim His Heir Page 1