Breath hissed out from between Nick’s clenched teeth. He was steaming over this manipulation from the grave, yet Tess reasoned it had done him no harm. Even if it was rebellion against his father’s appraisal of his life that had spurred him into proposing marriage to her, it had led to what they shared now. And Nick certainly valued it enough to come charging in to protect it.
‘You actually sowed the seeds of caring by confronting Enrique when you were eighteen,’ the lawyer went on. ‘He could not acknowledge your existence without destroying the powerful connections that had become the fabric of his life, but his wife had not borne him sons—only two sickly daughters—and she could not give him any more children. It hurt him to turn you away.’
‘Tough!’ Nick mocked. ‘Forgive me but I’m not impressed with my value rising because my father couldn’t have legitimate sons.’
‘It was coming face to face with you that made him care,’ the lawyer shot back, his long elegant hands making a comprehensive gesture at Nick as he explained further. ‘The boy—the young man—you were at eighteen. You made him want to know you. As the years went on and his wife died of leukaemia and both daughters passed away from other ailments, Enrique became more and more obsessed with your life.’
‘I’m not impressed with having my life spied upon, either,’ Nick said in savage rejection of his father’s obsession. ‘If that’s still happening, call off the watchdogs, Estes, because…’
‘He also watched over the lives of your two half-brothers whom he searched out after he’d sent you away.’
Half-brothers?
Tess’s mind boggled over the shockingly broadened picture the lawyer had just drawn.
Words exploded from Nick, seemingly shot from an eruption of jealous fury. ‘He met them? Acknowledged them as his sons?’
The deep poison of rejection was spilling out.
‘No.’ Javier Estes shook his head with a rueful air. ‘The structure of their lives was such that Enrique judged it wiser for him to remain unknown.’
‘Oh, come on!’ Nick tersely challenged, his disbelief in any sensitivity from his father pouring into scorn. ‘They would have interfered with his life, just as I would have. Much safer to leave any contact until after he was dead.’
‘Perhaps that is true. But he cared enough about all three of you to give you to each other…if that was what you wanted.’
‘Give? A gift comes free, Estes. A gift is not attached to conditions.’
‘Each mission was designed for the good of each son.’
‘Each mission?’ Nick’s voice climbed with outrage. ‘Each…mission?’
Zack decided he should match his father’s outburst with a full-blooded scream. Even a four-month-old baby was not immune to the tensions running riot in this room, Tess thought, taking him in her arms as Nick thrust him at her in distracted agitation, beyond the task of soothing their son when all his own testosterone was fired up to blast the executor of Enrique Ramirez’s will right back to the world he came from—a world Nick clearly rejected with every atom of his being.
‘Best take Zack out of here, Tess,’ he muttered, his eyes flickering with barely controllable fury.
‘No.’ She quickly tucked Zack’s head into the curve of her neck and shoulder—his favourite comforter place—bringing down the volume of his distress to a snuffling whimper as she rubbed her cheek over the soft springy curls on his head. ‘Whatever’s going on here we stand together,’ she insisted, her own eyes flashing unshakable determination.
No way was she going to miss out on information which would answer so much about how Nick thought and felt!
He sucked in a deep breath, his chest expanding to muscle-bristling tension as he faced the lawyer again. In a dangerously low voice throbbing with all manner of threats, he posed the question, ‘Are you telling me that any meeting with my half-brothers is conditional upon their performing missions set by our father before he died?’
‘That is correct, yes.’
‘There never was any guarantee of a meeting with them even if I did my part in fulfilling my father’s fantasy?’
‘You each had to earn the right to…’
‘The right!’ Nick completely lost it. ‘Don’t you see how obscene this is? How absolutely, grotesquely obscene? We’re not his sons. We’re his performing monkeys!’
He threw out his hands in furious disgust as he advanced on Javier Estes. ‘And you…you’re the director of his circus. Having fun, are you? Seeing how well the outcast bastards are coming into Enrique’s fold and toeing his line, handing out rewards to them for being good little monkeys…’
Javier Estes stiffened in the face of oncoming attack. ‘I assure you, sir, it was not meant to be like that. There were lifestyle issues…’
‘They’re my brothers!’ Nick shouted him down. ‘They belong to me by blood! Let them reject me as they might, but Enrique did not have the right to give out knowledge of our existence, then keep us apart. We’re men with the right to choose for ourselves.’
‘Do you not think your brotherhood would naturally become more meaningful if you each had a mission to complete in order to meet at all?’ Estes argued earnestly.
‘Twist it any way you like…’ Nick hurled at him from a bare metre away, then forced himself to come to a halt, his hands clenched, his chin jutting aggressively as he emphatically declared, ‘…it is still an obscene misuse of power and I will not be party to it. Not to any of it. I do not need what Enrique could have given me. I now have my own family.’
He backed off, raising a warning hand to the lawyer who was opening his mouth to speak again. ‘Enough! Call off the watchdogs. Go back to Brazil. We have no business together. It’s over. Finished.’ His hands scissored the air with violent decisiveness. ‘Gone!’
Nick turned his back on Javier Estes and strode straight over to Tess, plucked Zack out of her hold and nestled their son against his shoulder. ‘I’m taking him back to the swimming pool, Tess. If you want to see this guy out, do so. Or get Betty to do it. I’m all out of being polite to circus directors.’
Tess nodded, acutely aware of major turbulence driving him. She was vividly reminded of when she’d told him her father had sat with her during Zack’s birth. Nick’s sense of rightness had been hugely, deeply violated. It was again now.