If all of those people managed to get Cristina to stand in front of the registrar, then it only left him with the prospect of a full blown face-to-face rejection in front of everyone in the Blue Room at his hotel in Rio.
Could he handle that?
Yes, he could handle it. He could handle anything—because this time he was not going to let Cristina down. And on that final thought, he turned his attention to the next grim task in hand.
Going to sit down behind the desk of the late Lorenco Marques, Luis put his mind into a different gear, then picked up the phone.
Two minutes later a cool, smooth, quietly refined voice greeted him pleasantly. ‘Good afternoon, Senhor Scott-Lee. It is a pleasure to hear from you.’
‘It’s quite possible that you won’t be saying that in a few seconds, Senhor Estes,’ Anton replied. ‘I am calling you to formally withdraw any claim I have on Enrique Ramirez’s estate.’
There was a small silence. ‘May I enquire as to why you’ve made this decision?’
‘That’s personal.’
‘Your half-brothers—’
‘Will survive without knowing me.’
‘But will you survive without knowing them, senhor?’
The quick answer? Anton mused. ‘Yes.’ If he had to.
‘You do understand that by doing this your share of your father’s estate—’
‘Ramirez was not my father.’
‘A moot point we will leave to one side for now, if you will. As I was saying…You understand that your share in the estate will go to Cristina Marques?’
‘Since you’ve already handed over a chunk of it to her I think I’ve managed to get that, Senhor Estes,’ Anton drawled. ‘Was that ethical, by the way?’
‘Was it ethical that you brought your mistress with you to Rio?’ the lawyer returned.
Anton sat up straight. ‘Explain that,’ he commanded.
‘I think you prefer to call her your secretary,’ Senhor Estes said.
‘So the money went to Cristina as a slap on the wrist for me? Is that what you mean?’
‘Your—Enrique Ramirez expected you to mend your lusty ways not continue them.’
‘I don’t bed two women at the same time, Senhor Estes,’ Anton said coldly. ‘Unlike my—father, who seems to have bedded anything he happened to see in a skirt.’
‘He was not the most discerning of men where his personal life was concerned,’ the lawyer agreed. ‘May I ask why you will not be marrying Cristina Marques?
‘But I am marrying Cristina,’ Anton confirmed smoothly. ‘On Saint Sebastian’s day at two p.m. in the Blue Room at my hotel. You are welcome to attend, if you wish.’
‘I will certainly consider it,’ the other man said politely. ‘Though I don’t see the point if you are definitely pulling out of this.’
‘I am.’ Anton was adamant.
‘Then you will understand that from that day forth all correspondence to do with Enrique Ramirez’s estate will be forwarded to your wife?’
‘Of course,’ Anton agreed. ‘Prefixed by my name, if you please, Senhor Estes, since I will be taking complete control of Cristina’s business interests from that day forth.’
There was a pause, a long pause, then the merest hint of smile sounded in Senhor Estes’s tone. ‘Machismo still rules on the pampas, heh, Scott-Lee?’
‘Most certainly,’ Anton confirmed.
‘Then all correspondence from this office to your wife will be prefixed by your name,’ the lawyer established.
‘And, as I will be attending all meetings with or on behalf of my wife, may I ask if she will need to attend any meetings at your offices with regard to Enrique’s estate?’
‘That will of course, be up to your wife.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Please don’t mention it,’ the other man said, and there was a definite smile in his voice now. ‘Before you go, Scott-Lee, I am curious—do you know why your father took so personal an interest in Marques?’
Anton tensed. ‘I believe he saved her life once.’
‘And a life once saved becomes the saviour’s responsibility,’ the lawyer confirmed. ‘Enrique lived by that maxim where Cristina was concerned. He even found her a job working in a café-bar on the Copacabana when she ran away from home seven years ago—though I don’t think that she knows this. It was purely coincidental, of course, that the café-bar was the place you used to frequent each evening on your way home from the bank. Fate lending a hand, do you think, Scott-Lee?’
It did not take Anton two seconds to understand what Estes was really saying. Anger erupted, pushing him to his feet. ‘Then where the hell was Ramirez when Cristina needed protecting from her father and that bastard Ordoniz?’ he rasped.
‘Enduring his first heart attack,’ the lawyer came back. ‘Where were you, Senhor Scott-Lee…?’
Anton was pacing. He had never thought he would be a pacer at his own wedding. He’d always teased his friends when they’d done this at their weddings. Now here he was—pacing.
She was late.
He glanced at his watch. Not very late, just a few minutes late—the bride’s prerogative.
‘Anton…’ Gabriel touched him on the shoulder.
He swung round. One glance at the other man’s face and he knew his worst prediction was about to come true.
‘Where is she?’ he demanded.
‘Not far,’ Gabriel quickly assured him. ‘She’s at the restaurant downstairs, by the pool. She wants to talk to you before she—’
The rest was spoken into fresh air.
Anton stepped outside and saw her instantly. She was sitting at a table staring at the ornamental pool—and he had to pause for a moment because she quite simply took his breath away. Her hair was down, rippling in glossy, loose spiral twists down her back, and she was wearing a simple short silk sheath dress in a shade of warm ocean-green that could have been hand-dyed to match the colour of his eyes.
Relief swept through him. A woman who bought a dress to match the colour of her lover’s eyes had not been thinking of jilting him when she chose it. As he approached he even smiled when he caught sight of what she was wearing to tie her hair back from her face.
‘Hi,’ he said as he arrived beside her, touching her warm sun-kissed shoulder with his fingertips and bending to brush a kiss to her cheek.
‘Hi,’ she greeted him huskily.
Swinging out the chair next to hers, he turned it around, then straddled it.
Cristina glanced up and felt not just her heart but everything else take a warm, swooping dive inside her. He looked so very good to her hungry eyes, with his neat dark hair and warm golden skin, and a smile on his lips that made her vulnerable heart ache. He was wearing a pale cream silk-linen suit that did disturbing things for his broad-shouldered figure, and the silk shirt he wore beneath the jacket was an almost exact match to the colour of her dress.
‘Now I know why my mother bought this shirt and insisted I wear it,’ he said. Reaching out then, he flicked a finger at the cream ribbon she was wearing in her hair. ‘And you’ve been filching my bow ties again.’
Cristina flushed and looked away. ‘Don’t tease,’ she shook out.
A waiter appeared beside their table. Without hesitation Luis ordered two glasses of champagne. The waiter moved away—curious, Cristina could tell, because it had to be obvious that they were the bride and groom supposed to be getting married in the Blue Room right now, instead of sitting here. Luis was even wearing a creamy rosebud in his jacket lapel.
‘Luis…’ she whispered anxiously.
‘Mmm?’ he responded, in an intimately seductive way that brought some colour into her pale cheeks.
Leaning forward, he rested his arms across the back of the chair, then placed his chin on his arms. ‘You look amazingly, beddably gorgeous, meu querida,’ he told her softly. ‘Will you come upstairs and marry me?’
Cristina sucked in a breath. ‘Can you be serious for a moment?’
&nbs
p; ‘Not today, no,’ he refused.
‘But I need to talk to you—’
‘You could try looking at me when you say that, my darling. At the moment you are talking to your poor mangled fingers.’
Her chin shot up; her eyes flashed. ‘Will you please listen to me for one moment without—’
‘Listen to you try to kick me out of your life again? No way.’ Anton shook his head.
‘I don’t want—’
‘Then what do you want?’ he asked, and the humour was starting to leave him, no matter what he’d said about refusing to be serious.
‘I want to talk about what you really want,’ she told him.
‘I want you as my wife.’
The champagne arrived, delivered to the table with a flourish in two fluted glasses. ‘With the compliments of the hotel, senhor—senhora.’ The waiter smiled, then melted away.
‘He thinks we are already married.’ Cristina sighed.
‘Optimistic of him—but then he doesn’t know my bride’s penchant for pulling my strings.’
‘You’re cross.’
‘Getting there,’ Anton agreed as he handed her a glass. ‘Now, drink,’ he commanded. ‘You are going to need Dutch courage to sustain you when I become weary of this and decide to pick you up and throw you over my shoulder—and don’t kid yourself I won’t do it,’ he added warningly. ‘Because you know very well that I will.’
‘This just isn’t fair! If you had agreed to speak to me on the telephone we would not be sitting here at all!’
A sleek black eyebrow made a sardonic arch. ‘You wanted to dump me by telephone this time?’
‘I’m going to hit you in a minute.’ She glared at him.
‘Well, that would be a whole lot healthier than sitting here giving the impression that you are about to attend a wake,’ Anton snapped, then uttered a sigh. ‘You know that I love you, Cristina,’ he declared wearily. ‘I’ve tried to show you I do in every which way I can. But if you cannot find it in you to love me enough to want to spend the rest of your life with me, then I will accept that and let you go.’
‘I don’t feel like that.’ Cristina even shivered at the thought of him letting her go. But her eyes were bleak as they stared into her champagne glass. ‘You are being asked to sacrifice too much for me, Luis.’
‘We aren’t talking about me, now. We are talking about you and what you want.’
‘I want more than anything for you to be happy.’
‘And you believe that you are the best one to judge what will make me happy?’ His tone alone mocked her ability to judge anything with any accuracy.
‘Your half-brothers,’ she said huskily. ‘I cannot let you sacrifice the chance of meeting them because I cannot—’
‘They are not an issue,’ he interrupted. ‘Seriously,’ he added, at her impatient look, ‘they are not an issue. You are the issue, Cristina. You know it and I know it, so get to the point.’
‘I don’t think that I can be truly happy again,’ she admitted on a helpless rush. ‘And that could make you unhappy—understand?’
‘You could be right.’ Anton was not going to pull his punches here, this was just too important, but he did reach out to gently move a stray twist of hair from her unhappy cheek. ‘I know I can never fill that empty place you carry around inside you, and that does make me unhappy, but I would rather live with it than live without you.’
‘And what about the empty place that you will carry around inside you because you can never conceive your own child with me?’
Anton heaved in a sigh and straightened his body. He spied his mother standing anxiously by, not far away, and knew she wanted to approach them, but he stopped her with a small frowning glance.
‘I wish you had met Sebastian.’ He turned back to Cristina. ‘If you had met him you would know what a true father really is, and then you would not have needed to ask me that question. Sebastian was—special.’
‘I know.’ Cristina nodded. ‘You used to talk a lot about him six years ago, w-when…’
‘What you do not know is that Sebastian always knew that I was not his real son,’ Anton told her, and watched her gaze flick to his in surprise. He held it there. ‘Yet he loved me, Cristina, totally and unstintingly, from the moment I arrived in his world. My being someone else’s son just did not matter to him. And if there is one thing I wish I could have changed in my relationship with him I wish I had known that he was not my blood father before he died, so I could have shown him how gut-wrenchingly grateful I feel for his loving me the way that he did.’
His voice had roughened with feeling—the same feeling that was showing on his face. Cristina wanted to reach out and soothe it away, but he had not finished.
‘Well, I can do that,’ he avowed. ‘I can love someone else’s child like that, because I had the best to show me how to do it. The point is, though, Cristina—can you do it? Can you take someone else’s child into your life and allow it to fill that empty space inside you, as Sebastian allowed me to fill that empty place inside him?’
He was talking about adoption here. Filling their lives with other people’s children and filling her with that dangerous thing called hope. Could she do it? Would it really be enough for him?
‘But you can have your own child if you want to,’ she persisted. ‘It has to make a difference to how you feel! Maybe not now,’ she conceded. ‘But in years to come you might feel differently, and—’
‘We don’t live in the Dark Ages any more, when a man’s only quest in life was to pass on his genes to the next generation,’ he cut in. ‘We’ve managed to evolve, look for other quests in life to chase—mine being getting a wedding ring on your finger, if you would only stop being so damn stubborn about this!’
‘You really don’t mind that we will have to adopt our children?’
‘One, two, five—ten! Hell, Cristina, I don’t care how many it takes to make you feel better about yourself! We could fill Santa Rosa with them if that’s what you would like to do.’
‘Or bring up a dozen little banker’s children in England,’ she added, with one of her impulsive little laughs.
The little laugh did it. Anton had had enough. That laugh told him he had her hooked, whether she wanted to be hooked or not. He stood up and swung the chair out of his way, then tugged his bride into his arms and kissed her—hard.
She fell into that kiss as she always did, without an ounce of control. By the time he pulled back she was wrapped to him, clinging and wanting more.
‘Can we go and get married now?’ he requested hopefully.
Cristina looked up at him, all dark, glowing eyes. ‘I love you so much it frightens me,’ she confided. ‘But if you are absolutely sure this is what you want, Luis, then, yes.’ She smiled. ‘Let’s go and get married.’
At last! Anton almost shouted it. Instead he contained the urge and drew her beneath his arm. As he turned them towards the restaurant exit his mother began to approach with one of her anxiously hopeful smiles. She received a kiss from her son, then one from her future daughter, and all three of them walked arm in arm back inside the hotel.
A very short half-hour later Anton turned to kiss his new wife. Then their small group of well-wishers crowded in and they were separated by everything but their clasped hands.
Cristina was flushed and happy. He was happy—and relieved that it was finally done.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to find an immaculately dressed young man standing beside him—a young man Anton had seen before, right here in this hotel.
‘My apologies for intruding, senhor,’ the young man said. ‘I have been instructed to pass this letter to you.’
The letter changed hands, then the young man bowed politely, turned, and walked out of the room.
Everyone else had gone silent. Anton smiled as he split the seal.
‘What is it?’ Cristina was suddenly at his elbow—clinging to it.
Without saying a word he handed her the
envelope while he opened the single sheet of paper that had been inside. He could sense her puzzlement, her growing confusion.
‘Looks good, hmm?’ he prompted. ‘Cristina Vitória de Marques Scott-Lee.’
‘But it says care of you.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
Anton did. He handed her the letter. ‘Wedding present,’ he explained.
She read, then had to re-read what was written before it finally began to sink in. Then one of those pained little whimpers broke from her throat as she spun around.
‘Rodrigo—’ She held the letter out to her lawyer with trembling fingers. ‘Please explain this to me!’
Rodrigo glanced at Anton, took the letter, glanced at it, then handed it back again. ‘It’s quite clear, minha amiga,’ he said. ‘On marrying Senhor Scott-Lee you became one of the three beneficiaries of the estate of the late Enrique Ramirez. That makes you a very wealthy woman,’ he added gravely.
‘But how—why?’ she demanded in complete bewilderment.
‘By default,’ the lawyer provided.
‘I didn’t want it,’ Anton put in.
Cristina turned wide, horror-filled eyes on him. ‘But, Luis, this belongs to you. I don’t want it!’
‘Don’t say that,’ he groaned. ‘I’ve banked everything on you accepting it.’
Then he banded his arms around her so he could lift her off the ground and carry her away from the wedding group to a quiet corner of the room. Their faces were level—just how he liked it. He pressed small smiling kisses to her worried mouth as he walked.
‘You are beautiful. I adore you. And you are going to be such a wealthy wife too.’
‘Did you know this was going to happen?’ she demanded, between the kisses.
‘Of course.’ He lowered her feet to the floor.
‘Then why are you happy?’
‘Because, minha esposa bonita, I get to have my cake and eat it.’ He kissed her again.
‘Talk sense to me!’ Cristina snapped, prising their mouths apart.
The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride - The Ramirez Brides 02 Page 16
