The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride
The Ramirez Brides 02
By Michelle Reid
CHAPTER ONE
THERE was an old-world elegance about the walnut-panelled room that somehow scorned the idea that anyone would be tasteless enough to raise their voice in anger in here. Under normal circumstances Anton Luis Ferreira Scott-Lee certainly would not have dreamt of doing it.
But there was nothing normal about this situation, and the anger was certainly here, pulsing away in the background, even if it was safely encased in ice right now.
‘I will have to resign,’ he announced, effectively throwing the two people in the room with him into a frozen state of horror and dismay.
His mother was too young, at fifty, and much too beautiful to be a widow—but apparently not too young, after marrying at the youthful age of nineteen, to have clocked up a murky past which had now come back to haunt her.
‘But—meu querido…’ She recovered first to speak shakily. ‘You cannot possibly resign!’
‘I don’t think that I have a damn choice.’
Maria Ferreira Scott-Lee flinched, her liquid brown eyes wrenching down and away from her son’s hard expression.
‘Don’t be crazy, boy,’ Maximilian Scott-Lee thrust out impatiently. ‘This has nothing to do with the bank! Let’s try to keep some perspective here.’
Max wanted perspective? Switching his gaze from his mother to the man he had lovingly called Uncle for all of his life, Anton felt a sudden rushing urge to smash a fist into his beloved face!
No perspective there, he thought as he swung away to aim his bitter black mood at the view beyond one of the long casement windows that lined the beautifully appointed study of this, the Scott-Lees’ Belgravia home.
It was a lousy day out there. The rain, lashing down from an iron-grey sky, was battering what leaves were left clinging to the trees down onto the square below. Anton knew how those leaves felt. Two hours ago a bright, calm winter day had been shining on London and he had been attending a board meeting, supremely confident in his place as chairman of the old and prestigious Scott-Lee Bank.
Now look at him, cast adrift like those storm-battered leaves out there.
A muscle flicked at his clenched jaw, emphasising the stubborn cleft in the centre of his chin…a cleft he had not thought to question until today, just as he had not thought of questioning many things about himself that were now staring him hard in the face.
And why should he have? Born the adored only child of Brazilian beauty Maria Ferreira and wealthy English banker Sebastian Scott-Lee…or so he’d believed until today…he’d naturally taken it for granted that he’d inherited his lean dark Latin looks from his Brazilian mother and his shrewd business mind from his late and still deeply missed English father.
At first, when he had read the letter from a Brazilian called Enrique Ramirez who was claiming to be his real father, he’d thought it was some kind of sick joke. It had taken this confrontation with his mother and his uncle to have his joke theory crushed right out of him. Now he was having to come to terms with the ugly fact that not only was this Ramirez guy telling the truth, but the man he’d always believed to be his real father had known about his mother’s affair with Enrique and that Anton was not his real son! A very hush-hush adoption had secured his legal place in Sebastian Scott-Lee’s life, along with the abiding wish that Anton should never find out the truth.
‘You know as well as I do that without you the bank will collapse,’ Max pushed into the thickened silence. ‘You are the bank, Anton. If you resign people will want to know why you’ve gone. The truth will inevitably come out, because juicy stuff like this always does, and the family name will be—’
‘This truth didn’t come out,’ Anton said harshly.
‘Because my brother was careful to make sure that it didn’t,’ the older man said. ‘Who the hell expected Ramirez to come along with his kiss-and-tell last will and testament?’
Kiss and tell, Anton echoed silently, hot, spitting bitterness rolling around inside him and spinning him about.
‘Did it never occur to you that I had a right to know?’ he fired directly at his mother.
Maria tensed, slender fingers mangling the handkerchief she held on her lap. ‘Your father did not want—’
‘Enrique bloody Ramirez is my father!’ Anton thundered with explosive force.
The words bounced around the room like the aftershock from an earthquake.
‘No.’ Maria quivered as she shook her head. ‘Enrique w-was a terrible mistake in my life, Anton! You did not need—’
‘—to know that I’ve been living a lie for all of my thirty-one years?’
Maria subsided, lifting the handkerchief up to cover her trembling mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
‘Hearing you say that does not particularly help.’
‘You do not understand…’
‘You can say that again,’ he uttered. ‘I thought I was the son of a man I loved and revered above all men. Now I find out I’m the result of an extra-marital affair you enjoyed with some globe-trotting Brazilian polo-playing stud!’
‘It wasn’t like that.’ Maria was going paler by the second. ‘I was…with Enrique before I married your f-father.’
‘So let me get this right,’ Anton said, seeing the red mist of his growing fury swim up across his eyes. ‘You had an affair with this guy. He left you pregnant, so you looked around for a gullible substitute to take his place, found Sebastian, and simply foisted me on to him? Is that it?’
‘No!’ For the first time since this had begun his fine-boned slender mother showed some of her Brazilian fire by shooting to her feet. ‘You will not speak to me in this insulting tone, Anton! Your father knew. He always knew! I was honest with him from the start! He forgave me—and he loved you as his own son! His name is on your birth certificate. He raised you! He was proud of your every achievement and not once did he treat you as anything but the shining light in his life! So don’t you dare hurt his memory now by turning it into a thing to speak of with contempt!’
Anton flung himself back to the window, seething inside with an eruption of feeling that was crucifying him with anger and bitterness and now tinged with a remorse that placed a sting in his eyes. He’d loved his father, looked up to him in every way a loving son could. When Sebastian had been killed in a freak road accident, Anton had lived for months in a black hole filled with inconsolable grief.
‘I always knew I looked nothing like him.’ The words arrived hoarse and uneven, pulsing with a deeply felt emotion that forced poor Maria to muffle a sob.
‘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—’
‘I don’t want his damn money; I want to meet my half-brothers!’ Anton lashed out, and watched his mother flinch, despised himself for it, despised Ramirez for doing this to them all. His mother was right, he didn’t need to do anything. But, knowing that did not alter the fact that he felt bloody cheated—denied of the right to know so many things about himself.
He would not be denied this chance to know his own flesh and blood—no matter what the cost!
The cost.
His gaze flicked back to the papers spread out in front of him, green eyes glassing over as he re-read the paragraph in which Ramirez accused him of running out on a woman six years ago, leaving her in dire straits. He was insisting that Anton make reparation and was giving him six months in which to do it. He was then expected to turn up at some lawyer’s office in Rio with this woman as his wife, ripe with his child, or he would never know his brothers and Anton’s share in his birthright would go to her instead.
‘So w-what are you going to do?’ his mother questioned.
Anton didn’t hear her. He was too busy staring at the name typed in bold print that was leaping at him off the page—along with a vision of waist-length black hair with a sexy loose spiral twist framing a small heart-shaped face with a pointed little chin, a lush red provocative mouth, and a pair of she-devil fiery dark eyes that had a habit of turning into burning rubies when she was—
‘Anton…?’
His eyes lifted automatically at that appealing note in his mother’s voice, but he wasn’t seeing her because he was seeing that other woman who had been so instrumental in the making of him. His body was burning, filling with the deep grinding pulse of uncontrolled sexual power that had always been his response whenever he let—
‘Anton, please tell us what you intend to do about this!’ his mother begged.
‘Carry out his wishes,’ he heard himself utter, as cold and hard as death.
‘What—get married at some dead man’s behest?’ his uncle Max gasped in horror. ‘Are you crazy, boy?’
Stark staring mad—but up for it, Anton thought as the heat in him grew and grew. He was going to hunt down, trap and then marry the lying little tramp called Cristina Marques and make her life a sexual hell…
The old and sadly neglected book-lined room that had used to be her father’s sanctuary rang to the sound of raised voices and the fierce-eyed fury of one of its two occupants.
‘For goodness’ sake, Cristina, will you listen to me? If you—’
‘No, you listen.’ A small clenched fist ma
de angry contact with the desk. ‘I said no!’
Sheer frustration threw Rodrigo Valentim back into his seat. ‘If you will not take my instruction,’ he sighed out impatiently, ‘then what am I doing here?’
‘You are here as my attorney to find a way to get me out of this!’
‘And I keep telling you,’ he enunciated tightly—but then this had been going on for ages now, and the longer it did the more angry both of them became—‘I cannot do that!’
Cristina straightened, her fine-boned slender figure giving no hint to the strength of the woman within. With a proud toss of her head she sent her long black tresses flying back from narrow shoulders. Eyes like flashing devils pierced Rodrigo Valentim with a defiant glare.
‘Then I will have to find myself a lawyer who can, will I not?’
Another loaded sigh and Rodrigo’s forty-years-in-the-business jaded expression suddenly gave way to a rueful smile. ‘If I believed it could make the difference then I would take you to one myself. Do you not understand, minha amiga?’ he pleaded. ‘Santa Rosa is all but bankrupt. If you do not agree to this offer it will die!’
It was like taking a whip to a wounded animal. Cristina’s pained little whimper crucified the tough lawyer’s ears. She turned away, tense fingers jumping up to burrow into the sleeves of a well-used sweater as she paced away from the desk. The window beckoned, drawing her hopeless gaze to the open pampas, where the gauchos roamed free and machismo still ruled.
Out there, where most of the other large estates had turned their land over to soya or wine, Santa Rosa was one of the few traditional working cattle ranches left functioning in this part of Brazil. A Marques had ruled here since her Portuguese ancestors had claimed the land and built this house she was standing in.
And here she stood, Cristina thought bleakly, the last Marques in a long invincible line—and a female, of all things.
A female who was being forced to face the demise of the Marques land, name and pride.
‘Your father should have let you run things years ago, then you would not be in this mess,’ Rodrigo gruffly pronounced. ‘He was a stubborn old fool.’
The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride - The Ramirez Brides 02 Page 1
