by Jane Porter
His eyes burned and he squeezed them shut, trying to hold the burning tears back. Forgive me, he thought, sending a silent prayer up to his mother.
And not that he deserved any help, or protection, but Jemma did. Jemma deserved so much, and maybe his mother could pull a few strings up there. Maybe his mother could do something on Jemma’s behalf.
Help her, Mother. Help my Jemma. Help her heal, if you can.
And then gently, carefully he lifted Jemma’s hands to his lips, pressed a kiss to her skin.
He didn’t know how long he sat there, holding her hands, his lips pressed to her skin, but he wouldn’t let her go. He refused to let her go. He needed her.
He loved her.
He couldn’t be the man he wanted to be without her.
She had to survive and forgive him. She had to survive to be his friend, his lover, his companion. She had to survive so he could make things right with her.
“Forgive me, laeela,” he whispered, exhausted by the vigil by her side, but not wanting to be anywhere else, either. He wouldn’t leave her. Not now. Not ever.
Her eyes fluttered. Mikael sat forward. He stroked her brow, where her delicate, dark eyebrows arched. “Forgive me,” he repeated. “I need you to come back. I need you with me.”
“Forgive...” Jemma whispered, her eyes fluttering again, and slowly opening. Her brows tugged. Her gaze was unfocused. “Mikael?”
“You’re awake.”
“Where am I?”
“Ketama. The royal hospital.”
“Why?”
“There was an accident.” He stood, and gazed down intently into her eyes. “You were hurt.”
It seemed hard for her to focus, but otherwise her eyes looked the same, clear and cool and green.
She blinked, and licked her lips, her mouth dry. “Do you have any water?”
“I’ll ring the nurse.” He pushed the button on the side of the bed. “Do you hurt?”
“A little. Not bad.” She frowned. “I don’t remember an accident.”
“That’s all right. You don’t need to. It was bad. It’s a miracle you’re here.”
She was silent a long moment. “What day is it?”
“Monday.”
“No, what day? Of the eight days?”
He leaned over, kissed her gently on the cheek. “Day eleven, or twelve. I forget. It’s been a blur.”
“Oh.” And then her expression changed, her brows knitting, tightening. “You’re sending me home. You don’t want me.”
“Let’s not talk about that right now.”
“You don’t love me.”
“Jemma. Laeela,” he said roughly, sounding agonized.
She turned her face away from him, closed her eyes. “It’s fine. I want to go home. I want to go now.”
A knot filled his throat. His chest ached with bottled emotion. “You can’t go anywhere until you’re better.”
She tried to sit up. She winced at the effort.
“Lie down, be still—”
“I won’t have you making decisions for me,” she interrupted hoarsely. “I won’t have you commanding me or dictating to me, because you’re just like the others. You’re just the same, making promises you never intended to keep—”
“That’s not true,” he interrupted fiercely, before lowering his voice. “I love you. I do. I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. I didn’t want a love match, but love found me anyway in you, and the only reason I was sending you home was to give you your freedom and future back.”
“But my future is with you! My home is with you. And you, you—” She broke off and squeezed her eyes closed even as tears seeped beneath her lashes. “You don’t even care.”
“I care,” he said, leaning over her, and kissing her carefully on the forehead, between bandages. “I care so much that I only want what’s best for you, and I am not sure Saidia is best for you. It wasn’t good for my mother. She was lonely here.”
“But I’m not your mother,” Jemma answered, opening her eyes. “And you’re not your father. We can have our own marriage, and we can do it all differently. We can do it right. But you have to believe that, too. You have to fight for us, too.”
“I’m fighting,” he murmured, stroking her cheek gently, tenderly. She was all bruises, scrapes and stitches and more beautiful than any woman in the world. “I’m fighting for us, fighting for you. I haven’t been able to leave your side, afraid that if I left, you’d disappear.”
She struggled to smile even as tears fell, slipping from the corners of her eyes. “I’m here.”
He smiled down at her, and caught a tear before it slid into her hair. “Yes, you are, my wife, my heart, my queen.”
Jemma’s lower lip trembled. “You can’t ever threaten to send me away again.”
“I won’t. Not ever. We are going to make this work, and we will have hard days and arguments and hurt feelings, but I promise you, I am here for you and with you. You and I are meant to be together.”
“Not because it’s your duty,” she whispered.
He smiled. “No, it’s not because of duty. We are together because you are my love, and the queen of my heart.”
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from IN THE BRAZILIAN’S DEBT by Susan Stephens.
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CHAPTER ONE
REVENGE IS A DISH best served cold.
Lizzie thought about her father’s words as the transport plane lost height, bringing them closer to their destination. Determination was an admirable quality, her father had insisted with his usual bluff confidence, founded on nothing more than one of his hunches and the dregs from a bottle of Scotch. His Lizzie wasn’t short of determination. She would rebuild the family pride where he had failed.
How many other apparently confident people put on an act in order to reassure others? Lizzie wondered as she peered out of the small, grainy window. She had been planning to embark on this advanced training programme with horses in Brazil for years, and just hoped she wasn’t shooting too high. She was determined to set the family business back on its feet, but flying for hours over miles of uninhabited nothingness in Brazil had thrown her. She felt so far away from home, and seeing Chico Fernandez again after all these years was going to dent her confidence even more.
‘How come you’re not nervous?’ Lizzie’s friend and fellow groom Danny Cameron demanded, clutching on tightly to Lizzie’s hand as the plane dropped like a stone.
She put on one hell of an act? She wasn’t a great traveller, and probably felt the same fear as Danny. As the ground came up to meet them like a slap in the face, her stomach roiled. The distinctly unglamorous transporter, known as the Carrier Pigeon to the staff of Fazenda Fernandez, appeared to dive-bomb its target, which was a rambling ranch in the middle of the pampas in Brazil.
‘We’ll be fine,’ she soothed Danny, hoping for the best.
Would they make it?
Would she make it, more to the point? Never mind that the runway was short, and the plane was loaded down with horses, groo
ms, and equipment, all heading to the world-class training ranch of the infamous hard man of polo, Chico Fernandez. She might make it to the ground safely, but would she make it safely out of here with both her heart and her reputation intact? It seemed incredible now that Chico had once meant so much to her, but she’d been fifteen the last time she’d seen him in person, when, for one glorious summer, Chico had been her closest friend and confidant, until her parents started referring to him in the same tone people reserved for the devil.
Chico Fernandez was supposedly the Fane family’s nemesis, yet here she was, to suck him dry of all his equine knowledge, according to her father, before returning home to restore the horse-training business that, again, according to her father, Chico Fernandez had destroyed. She knew now her father’s bluster covered for his faults, and had learned to make up her own mind where his many, dramatic pronouncements were concerned. The college that had awarded her this scholarship to train with Chico Fernandez was spending good money on the course, as were all the other students. She guessed they, like her, also hoped to ‘suck the famous polo player dry’ of everything Chico could teach them.
Any thoughts her father might have had about this being a wonderful opportunity for Lizzie to get back at a man he considered his enemy were so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. But she’d listened patiently, as she always did when her father was on one of his rambles, as he assured her that this trip was simple justice, because Chico had stolen everything from him: his good name, his business, his wealth and success, and his horses. ‘Chico took everything from me—everything, Lizzie—even your mother! Never forget that.’
How could she forget her father’s impassioned speech, when he constantly reminded her that thanks to Chico he had been reduced to a drunken husk, while her mother had left him to go and live in the South of France with the latest in a long line of much younger men?
But not before her mother had been seduced by Chico? The rumours put about by her parents were even worse. They said Chico had forced her mother to have sex with him. Lizzie couldn’t equate that with the man she’d known, though her mother, whom Lizzie had been made to call Serena, had done everything she could to destroy Lizzie’s friendship with Chico, saying he was just a poor boy from the slums of Brazil, while her daughter was Lady Elizabeth Fane.
Lizzie had thought herself in love with Chico, and had cared nothing for her so-called status. She still cared nothing for it, but she was no longer a gullible adolescent and could see her parents’ faults. Whatever her father said, Lizzie doubted Chico was to blame for her family’s descent into ruin. In fact, her grandmother, who had taken over Lizzie’s care when her parents lost interest, had confirmed this, saying Lizzie’s parents hadn’t needed any help where ruining the family was concerned.
What had hurt Lizzie the most was that Chico had promised to take her away from a home life that had frightened her, before her grandmother had moved back in, mainly because her parents had held parties where everyone got drunk and did things behind locked doors that Lizzie could only guess. She hadn’t shared these suspicions with Chico, just her unease, though she had told him how much she hated living at home. As a youth looking for a cause, Chico hadn’t demanded too much of an explanation, but had promised to rescue her, only to return to Brazil without even saying goodbye.
It was hard to reconcile the friendship they’d shared with the way she felt about him now. She had trusted Chico completely and had never got over what she’d seen as his betrayal. They had shared so many adventures on horseback, and had got to the point of exchanging silly gifts, though Chico’s mentor, the Brazilian polo player, Eduardo Delgardo, had made sure their friendship never went any further than that.
The only way to deal with her mixed feelings for Chico, Lizzie decided, was to concentrate on the one thing that mattered, which was his magical way with horses. This gift had made him her hero when she was fifteen years old, and if she could pick up everything Chico could teach her here on his world-famous training course it could be the key to rebuilding the family business. She was looking forward to showing him how much she’d changed, from an impressionable teenager into an individual who was every bit as driven and as determined as he was, and, though it would be tough seeing him every day, failure wasn’t an option when the people of Rottingdean were depending on her to get this right.
Her thoughts were interrupted when Danny yelped as the plane landed.
There was no going back now.
As she looked outside her confidence took another knock. Everything was so much bigger and wilder than she had imagined, and potentially more dangerous.
Like Chico?
The ground was parched. The sun was blazing down. According to the weather forecast, the humidity outside the aircraft would be high. The horses would be restless after such a long confinement. They would need firm and sensitive handling by their grooms, which was where Lizzie excelled. Horses were her life, and seemed to sense how deeply she cared for them. Her presence alone was usually enough to reassure them. Unbuckling her seat belt, she was out of her seat before the pilot had turned off the engines.
Lizzie remained with the most fractious horse until the back of the plane had been opened and sunlight streamed in as the ramp was lowered into place—and the sound of a husky male voice, so familiar, so long in the past, issuing terse commands in Portuguese, froze her to the spot.
‘Quem é que na parte de trás congeladas em pedra? Tremos trabalho a fazer!’
It stunned her to hear that voice again, though it had gained an edge of command. Chico was used to instant compliance, she gathered. He must expect it. He was so successful. For Lizzie it was a nostalgic reminder of the past, and for a moment she thought herself back at Rottingdean in the shade and the quietness of the stables, a fifteen-year-old girl, hanging on every word he said—
‘Lizzie!’
Danny was shaking her arm, Lizzie realised, because, thanks to thinking about Chico, she had become the one fixed point in what was now a hive of activity. ‘What did he say?’
Danny had a better command of Portuguese than she did, and lost no time translating for her. ‘“Who’s that at the back of the plane, frozen into stone? We have work to do!”’ ‘Lizzie!’ Danny muttered urgently. ‘That’s you!’
‘Oh—’ Red-cheeked, Lizzie stared around, but there was no sign of Chico.
He never had been the type to hang around, she remembered as she caught a glimpse of a big male figure, dressed in dark, form-fitting clothes, ducking into a high-powered Jeep. He was so much bigger than she remembered, and his body language had changed. Instead of the easy stride she remembered, everything about him was commanding and certain...
Well, he would be changed. Twelve long years had passed since the last time she’d seen Chico, though even as he drove away at speed now that brief glimpse of him was enough to make her heart race. Which was not the best of starts, if she was going to complete this course successfully. And she was not going home without a result. She would not be taken in a second time by Chico’s seductive charm. She would focus on the horses, and make a strong business plan before returning to Scotland to make a name for herself.
Staring up into the solemn brown eyes of the horse she was caring for, she was relieved to see his ears pricked with interest, rather than laid back with fright. If only she could soothe herself the same way.
‘Come on, handsome,’ she coaxed. ‘It’s time for you and me to test the air of Brazil.’
* * *
He was content. He was back on his vast fazenda in Brazil, which was the most cherished part of his worldwide equine empire. Control and order ruled throughout. His control. His rule. Horses loved order and certainty, and he loved horses, so the smooth running of this ranch was non-negotiable.
‘New recruits, Maria,’ he snapped out crisply.
Crossing the wooden floor of his pristine
office, his elderly secretary handed him a sheet of paper listing the new students.
He exchanged warm glances with Maria, who was the only woman in the world he trusted. Maria had been with him from the start. They adored each other. It was more a mother and son relationship than that of employer, employee. Maria had occupied a neighbouring shed in the barrio, the violent slum where they had both started out, where someone was murdered on average every twenty minutes. Maria’s son, Felipe, and Chico’s brother, Augusto, had been in the same gang, and had been shot dead in front of Chico in the same brutal incident. Chico had been ten years old at the time with a father in prison and a mother on the game. He had vowed to look after Maria, as he had vowed to bring justice and education to the barrio. He’d done both.
‘So,’ he mused, scouring the list. ‘These brave few have come to study at Fazenda Fernandez so they can leave with a diploma stating they have survived and thrived beneath the riding boot of the acknowledged master of the equine world?’ He exchanged an amused glance with Maria. ‘And still they come, Maria.’
‘Thanks to you, Chico,’ Maria insisted. ‘Because you are the best.’ Maria’s characterful mouth pressed down as she shrugged expansively. ‘The best want to study with the best.’
He laughed. ‘So, who have we got here?’ His gaze stalled on one name. Thank God Maria hadn’t noticed his reaction. Explanations would have spoiled her day. Seeing the name Fane and that distinctive address had spoiled his day. He had thought he was done with that family.
‘There were more applicants than ever this year, Chico.’
He didn’t want to upset Maria when she was in full flow. Maria was proud of him. She treated him like the son she had lost, and in return he loved Maria and protected her in every way he could. He would not upset her now, so a short hum was his only response to her rapid-fire résumé of each of the new students.
