‘My brother knew he could not have children, Anton,’ Max filtered in huskily. ‘He was already aware of that when he met and fell in love with Maria. When she told him about you he saw your coming birth as a gift.’
‘A gift he insisted must be kept secret.’
‘Don’t deny him the right to some pride,’ his uncle sighed.
But Anton couldn’t think of anyone else’s pride right now. ‘I’m the son of a Brazilian,’ he muttered. ‘That makes me about as un-English as I can get. I live like an Englishman, I speak, think, behave like an Englishman and—hell!’ A second explosion of emotion sent his clenched fist pounding into the window’s wood casement, because he’d just remembered something. Something he’d spent the last six years trying to forget!
Now a face swam up in front of him—an excruciatingly lovely face, with dark eyes and a lush red mouth. ‘But I cannot marry you, Luis, My father will not allow it. Our Portuguese blood must remain pure…’
‘Is Ramirez a Portuguese name?’ he demanded roughly.
Still quaking from her son’s sudden burst of violence, his mother breathed out a quavering, ‘Yes.’
Anton tried for some air but didn’t make it. That burst of blistering rage was now pooling inside his head as he replayed once again that unforgettable moment when five feet four inches of Latin scorn had told him that he wasn’t good enough for her.
His teeth came together, accentuating that cleft in his chin. Not good enough—not good enough! No one before or since had ever dared say such a thing to him.
And he was damned if he was going to give her the chance to say it to him again.
It was then that the ice took over—an ice that those who knew him recognised with dread. Turning to face the room, he saw his mother was trying to fight back the tears still. His uncle just looked old. Maximilian’s health wasn’t good. He’d suffered his first heart attack which had forced him to retire from the bank, only weeks after his brother’s death. His words to his then grief stricken and shock-battered nephew had been, ‘Take the reins, boy. I have every confidence in you to make this family proud.’
That word again—proud.
The muscles around his heart contracted. To be really proud of someone you had to accept them as they were, warts and skeletons alike. These people who claimed to love him only loved a lie they’d constructed to protect their own pride.
Anton stepped back to the desk that had been Sebastian’s before he had died leaving everything he possessed—including this house in Belgravia, the family estate near Ascot and the major share in the Scott-Lee Bank—to the person he had been proud to call his son.
Well, Anton didn’t feel proud of them right now. He felt angry and cheated in too many ways to count.
On the desk lay the documents that had been delivered to him from the lawyer attending to the Ramirez estate. Splintering emotions threatening to take him over again, he sent long blunt ended fingers flicking through the papers until he found the one he was searching for.
‘There is more to this,’ he clipped out, and saw from beneath his lowered eyelashes his mother and his uncle tense up. ‘I am not the only poor swine Ramirez is laying claim to. There are two more like me out there somewhere. Two more sons…’
Two half-brothers with their own lying mothers? His top lip curled in contempt.
‘Considering the globe-trotting lifestyle Ramirez enjoyed, they could be anywhere…’
‘You mean he does not say?’
‘No, not exactly,’ Anton drawled cynically. ‘How much amusing mileage would he get from making it as simple as that?’
He was already getting to know Ramirez, he noted, and didn’t like it—hated it, in fact.
‘But he’s dead—’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘But still thoroughly enjoying himself at my and my half-brothers’ expense.’ He heaved in a taut breath. ‘You see, he’s been keeping tabs on all three of us for years.’
It was like being invaded—spied upon by some faceless stalker. Ramirez knew things about Anton that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. What schools he’d attended, his academic success. He knew about every damn trophy he’d won on the sports field, every major deal in business he’d pulled off. He even knew about all those other trophies he’d notched up in that other sporting arena—his bed.
‘He sees us as three sex-obsessed chips off the old block,’ he summed up with a white-toothed razor slice. ‘So, in his wisdom, he means to teach my brothers and me a lesson in life that apparently he did not grasp until he was too old and it was too late to change what he was.’
He saw his mother wince at the intimacy already honing his tone when he referred to his brothers. Odd. A nerve flicked in his jaw. But he felt that intimacy in some deep place inside him, like a newly formed artery feeding the blood link, and it was hungry for more.
‘Ramirez was loaded,’ he continued. ‘And we are not talking about a few paltry million here. He owned diamond mines, emerald mines, some of the richest oil fields in Brazil…’ The fact that he could see from their lowered expressions he was telling them things they already knew did not make him feel any better about this. ‘We—his three sons—get to share the booty,’ he explained with sarcastic bite. ‘So long as we fulfil several conditions our dear departed sleazy coward of a father has set out in his will.’
‘Enrique was not sleazy,’ his mother protested.
‘What was he, then?’ Anton asked.
‘N-nice, h-handsome—like you—charming…’
His mother was still fond of the bastard! Another explosion began to gather.
Maximilian shifted in his seat. ‘What kind of conditions?’ he questioned.
Anton fought the explosion back down again.
‘I can only speak for myself, because that’s all that’s referred to here,’ he said. Then a strange kind of smile hit his mouth. ‘I am to mend my philandering ways,’ he enlightened. ‘Get responsible, find a wife, settle down, produce legitimate progeny—’
‘Good God!’ Max expelled. ‘The man’s brain must have been addled by the time he popped it!’
Coming from a confirmed bachelor, his uncle’s attitude made sense.
‘It makes me wonder what my brothers need to do before they win the right to meet me.’
‘You don’t need to do anything, querido,’ his mother inserted. ‘You don’t need his money. You don’t need any of—’