‘Oh, yes.’ His mother had been totally honest with him—at last.
‘Vaasco never forgave her,’ Cristina said, then released a sudden cold laugh. ‘He forgave Enrique Ramirez for his part in your mamma’s affair because he was a man, and “a man is allowed to sip the nectar if it is there to sip”—Vaasco’s words exactly,’ she explained. ‘He also knew about you and me—my father had told him. He expected you to come back for me. He wanted to watch me hurt you when you did. He wanted you to be hurt in your mamma’s place, by seeing me married to him. He made me stay in Rio with him for a full year, w-waiting for you to come back.’
But he hadn’t come back.
‘You let him do this to you without putting up a fight?’
Her eyes were cold now. ‘He bought me from my father in the same way that you have been trying to buy me. When you sell yourself you lose the right to think for yourself.’
Anton turned away from that coldly honest statement, a hand with decidedly shaky fingers going up to scrape through his hair, then ending up grabbing the back of his neck.
What now? he asked himself as he stood there trying to numb the shockwaves crashing into him. Cristina was right about him. He did always look for the bad in her. He had done it six years ago, when he had taken what she’d said to him without bothering to question why she was saying it. What kind of man did that make him?
He had even come back here to Brazil bent on seeking his revenge on her for what she’d done. He need not have bothered. Cristina had been punishing herself.
He found he was staring at the bed, with its humble picnic, and suddenly he felt the sting of tears attack the back of his throat as he began to see every single thing she had done since he came back into her life for what it really was.
An act of love for him that was so damn hopeless in her eyes she had to be tough afterwards—or how did she let him go?
He turned to look at Cristina next, standing there in his T-shirt and his bowtie and nothing else. His scent on her body, his kisses on her lips. His love was wrapped all around her if she would dare to let herself to feel it.
‘Let’s go back to bed,’ he said.
She stared at him. ‘Have you listened to anything I have said to you?’
‘All of it.’ He nodded. ‘It doesn’t change a single thing.’
‘Oh, meu Dues,’ she sighed, as it all flared up again. ‘Luis, I know about Enrique’s last will and testament!’ she cried. ‘I know why you need to marry quickly and produce a child! You have half-brothers you need to—’
‘Don’t talk about them,’ he uttered. They did not belong here—not in this room with this situation and this woman who had sacrificed so much! Well, he was about to learn what it felt like to sacrifice something he wanted badly. Because from this moment on he had no half-brothers. How could he have when—?
God, he did not want to go there right now. He could not allow himself to if he was going to get through the rest of this.
‘We have to talk about them,’ Cristina insisted. ‘The only way you can meet them is by marrying s-some woman who can give you a baby…’
Anton stiffened. She didn’t know—not all of it anyway.
‘Well, you cannot do that with me,’ she went on. ‘S-so you can go now and—and marry that h-horrible Kinsella Lane person,’ she suggested with tremulous bite.
He laughed. It was bad of him to laugh with so much anguish creasing the atmosphere, but that was what he did. Because here stood this beautiful, proud, tragic woman telling him to go—yet she was protecting that damn door as if her life depended on it!
He heeled his shoes off. For a moment he thought she was going to leap on him in a rage. ‘Luis—!’
‘That’s me,’ he acknowledged, and pulled his shirt off over his head.
She stamped a foot. Now, that’s more like it, he thought as he began to undo his trousers.
‘If you don’t stop this I will—!’
He reached her so fast that it was all she could do to gasp out a protest as he clamped his hand over her mouth. ‘Now, listen to me…’ he said, bringing his head down so he could look right into those dark pools of tragedy. ‘I am not going to stop loving you because you think that I should, and I am not going to walk away from this. I am going to marry you, whether you like it or not, and I am going to keep on loving you until I draw my last breath—so get used to it.’
After that he straightened up, took his hand from her mouth and lowered it to grasp both her arms, where they still linked defensively across her front. He used them to pull her over to the bed. It took him five seconds to get rid of the tray, another two to grab her again, then stretch out on the bed, pulling her down on top of him so she had no option but to unwrap her arms to support herself.
Her eyes were dark and her mouth small, and as he looked up at her he knew she had not given in to him yet.
‘Sad little thing,’ he murmured, and stroked a gentle finger across an unhappy cheek. ‘Am I such a bad bet?’
She gave a sombre shake of her head, ‘Arido,’ she whispered.
It came then. Six years of grief and misery pouring out of her as she lowered her face to his chest and wept.
Anton said no more. He did not attempt to stem the flow. He just held her. Held her and wished there was something he could do to make it all go away for her—but there wasn’t.
Arido, he thought bleakly, and rolled with her, pulled the covers up over them, then curled his body around her as much as he could.
Of course he ended up kissing her out of it. How long was a man supposed to lie passive while the woman in his arms broke her heart all over him?
And he used words—husky, soft, honest words—like, ‘Eu te amo.’ I love you. ‘Nada matérias outras.’ Nothing else matters. ‘Eu te amo. Eu te amo.’ Until words became warm, thick, tear-washed kisses, and kisses became—something else. It even shocked him how an overdose of heartache and anguish could generate the driving depths of passion they ended up sharing.
Anton still wasn’t over it when he carefully slid from beneath her and stood up from the bed. She was asleep, coiled around the pillow he’d slipped into the place where his body had been. Turning away, he hunted down his discarded clothes and put them on again with a dry promise that this time they’d stay on. Then he let himself out of the room as quietly as he could do.
He needed some time alone to think.