‘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?’