Innocent in His Diamonds

by Maya Blake

  Ana’s heart stopped, somersaulted, and then banged with crazy abandon against her chest. She told herself it was the heat in the cabin that made her light-headed, but hope told her it was something else.

  ‘You love me?’

  Bastien nodded. ‘Oui. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you love me again—’

  ‘I never stopped.’

  ‘You never—’

  ‘No, and you never told me how you felt.’

  He grimaced. ‘I did. You’re the love of my life, Ana, amour de mon coeur.’ He repeated the words he’d first said three weeks ago.

  Her eyes widened as recognition dawned.

  ‘I felt safer saying it in French because I was a fool and thought that way I wasn’t risking everything.’ He gathered her closer. ‘But I aim to say it in every language there is—starting with English. I love you, ma belle Ana.’

  Her heart soared. When he gathered her close she didn’t resist. His kiss was hungry, demanding, possessive. And she loved it. He backed her onto the tiny cot she slept on and came down over her.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Have mercy on a poor man, Ana. I’ve been without you for three long weeks. I can’t take another single moment without you.’

  Her sigh of pleasure was all the answer he needed to continue.

  Later, in the equally tiny shower cubicle, he pulled her wet hair to one side and washed her back. Although there was more kissing than washing. Not that Ana was complaining.

  ‘Marry me,’ he muttered against her shoulder.

  Ana froze. ‘No. You can’t want to marry me.’

  His head snapped up, his eyes narrowing. ‘Credit me with knowing my own mind, mon coeur. I love you. I wish to spend the rest of my life with you. Marriage is the next natural step. Ana, I would be proud to have you by my side every day for the rest of my life. You’ve forged your way successfully through life and I’m proud of everything you’ve achieved. I would be even prouder to call you my wife.’ A touch of vulnerable pain clouded his eyes. ‘Why did you leave me, Ana?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t love me. After everything we’d been through, I thought if you loved me you’d have told me. When you didn’t...’

  His eyes turned smoky. ‘I will tell you every day how much I adore you. And if that doesn’t work I have a few aces up my sleeve.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Her smile felt as if it would split her face as she moved into his arms.

  ‘Really.’ He grinned, then sobered. ‘I met your father an hour ago. He grilled me thoroughly before he showed me where your trailer was. I think I passed his potential son-in-law test. But if that doesn’t work... Remember the tower room the night I got back?’

  Intrigued, she nodded. ‘One of the crew members had left a camera on. It recorded our conversation, but more importantly it recorded you melting into my arms, kissing me like I owned your soul.’

  ‘You do. But blackmail, Bastien? Seriously?’

  He grinned. ‘Not as powerful as a sex tape, but I’ll use whatever ammunition I have so you’ll never leave me again.’ He sobered. ‘You’ve believed in yourself, thrived despite all the setbacks you’ve received. Take this last step, mon amour. Marry me.’

  ‘I can’t. Not yet. I’ve signed up with my father’s programme. I need to stay in Colombia for two years.’

  He merely shrugged. ‘Then I’ll stay with you. I can work from anywhere in the world.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Marry me,’ he repeated, his purposeful tone making her heart soar. ‘Let me stay here with you. You can teach me Spanish as we pick through the bones and I’ll teach you whatever you need to learn. Of course that means I will resume tutoring you. Adam will have to go.’

  Tears filled her eyes. ‘I love you, mi corazón. Of course I’ll be your wife.’

  His kiss was long and deep. When he lifted his head the emotion in his eyes moved her soul. ‘I don’t deserve you, Ana.’

  ‘But you’ve got me all the same. You’re mine and I’m yours. Siempre.’

  ‘For ever.’

  * * * * *

  Read on for an extract from THE MAN TO BE RECKONED WITH by Tara Pammi.

  PROLOGUE

  “HE MIGHT DIE any minute of any day or he might live to be a hundred. There’s nothing to be done for it.”

  Nathaniel Ramirez looked up at the snowy, whitecapped mountain peak and gulped in a big breath. The words he had overheard the cardiologist say to his mother all those years ago reverberated inside his skull. The cold air blasted through his throat, his lungs expanding greedily.

  Would this be the day?

  He raised his face to the sky as his vision cleared and his heart resumed its normal beat.

  At some point during the trek, he had realized he couldn’t finish the climb today.

  He didn’t know whether it was because, after almost twelve years of courting death, he was finally bored of playing hide-and-seek with it, or because he was just plain tired today.

  For a decade, he had been on a constant go across the world, without planting roots anywhere, without returning home, making real estate deals in corners of the world, making millions.

  An image of the roses in the garden his mother had loved, back in California, their color vividly red, the petals so soft that she had banned him from touching them, flashed across his mind’s eye.

  A stab of homesickness pierced him as he followed the icy path down. Sweat drenched him as he reached the wooden cabin he had been living in since he closed the Demakis deal in Greece six months ago. Restlessness slithered under his skin.

  And he knew what it meant. It meant he was thrashing against the cage he had made for himself; it meant he was getting lonely; thousands of years of human nature were urging him toward making a home, to seek companionship.

  He needed to chase a new challenge, whether clinching a real estate deal or conquering a new corner of the world he hadn’t stamped with his name yet. Fortunately for him, the world was vast and the challenges it presented numerous.

  Because staying still in one place was the one thing that made him weak, that made him long for more than he could have.

  * * *

  He’d just stepped out of a hot shower when his satellite phone beeped. Only a handful of people could reach him via this number. He pushed a hand through his overlong hair and checked the caller ID.

  The name flashing on the screen brought an instant smile to his face.

  He connected the call, and the sound of their old housekeeper Maria’s voice coming down the line filled him with a warmth he had missed for too long. Maria had been his rock after his mom passed.

  Suddenly he realized he missed a lot of things from home. He clamped down on the useless yearning before it morphed into the one thing he despised.

  Fear.

  “Nathan?”

  “Maria, how are you?”

  He smiled as Maria called him a few names in Spanish and then asked after him as if he were still a little boy.

  “You need to come home, Nathan. Your father... It’s been too long since you’ve seen each other.”

  The last time Nate saw him, his father had been the epitome of a selfish bastard instead of a grieving husband or a comforting father. And despite the decade and the thousands of miles that Nathan had put between them, the bitterness, the anger he felt for him was just as fresh as ever.

  Maybe there was no running away from a few things in life.

  “Is he ill again, Maria?”

  “No. He recovered from the pneumonia. They, at least that woman’s daughter, she took good care of him.”

  Praise from Maria, especially for that woman’s daughter, as she put it, meant Jackie’s daughter had slaved to take care of his dad.

  Nathan frowned, the
memory of the one time he had seen his father’s mistress’s daughter leaving a sour taste in his mouth. She had been kind even then.

  That day in the garage, with the August sun shining gloriously outside with blatant disregard to the fact that Nathan’s entire world had crumbled around him. There had been blooms everywhere, the gardeners keeping it up for his mother even though she had stopped venturing into the garden for months.

  The grief that his mother was gone, the chilling fear, the cold fist in his chest that he could drop dead any minute like her, and the little girl who had stood nervously by the garage door, a silent witness to the choking sobs that had racked him.

  He hated everything about that day.

  “I’m so sorry that your mother died. I can share my mother with you if you want,” she had said in a small voice.

  And in return, he had ripped through her.

  “He’s getting married, Nathan.” Maria’s anxiety cut through his thoughts. “That woman,” she said again, refusing to even speak Jacqueline Spear’s name, the loathing in her voice crystal clear even through the phone line, “she’ll finally have what she wanted, after all these years. Eleven years of living shamelessly with him under his roof...”

  Nathan grimaced as Maria spouted a few choice words for Jacqueline Spear. Bitterness filled his veins at the thought of his father’s mistress, the woman he had taken up with even before Nathan’s mother had passed.

  “It’s his damn life, Maria. He has every right to spend it as he pleases.”

  “He does, Nathan. But your mama’s house, Nathan...she’s preparing to sell it. Just two days ago, she asked me to clean out your mother’s room, told me to take anything I wanted. Your mama’s belongings, Nathan—all her jewelry’s in there. She’s putting the entire estate on sale—the grounds, the furniture, the mansion, everything.”

  Every piece that had been painstakingly put together by his mother with love. And now in the hands of a woman who had been everything his mother hadn’t been.

  “If you don’t come back, it will forever be gone.”

  Nathan scrunched his eyes closed, and the image of a brick mansion rose in front of him. A strange anger gripped him. He didn’t want that house to go to someone else, he realized.

  He had lived the life of a loner for a decade, and the image of the house he had run away from hit him hard in his gut. “She doesn’t have the right to sell it.”

  The silence on Maria’s end stretched his nerves taut. “He gave it to her, Nathan. As a gift.”

  Nausea rolled around in his mouth. His father had killed his mother, as clearly as if he had choked the life out of her, with his disgusting affair, and after he’d lived in her house with his mistress and now... His knuckles turned white around the phone.

  This he wouldn’t, couldn’t, tolerate.

  No matter that he didn’t want to live in the house any more than he wanted to put roots down and settle anywhere in the world.

  “He’s giving away my mom’s house as a wedding gift?”

  “Not to Jackie, Nathan. To her daughter, from her first marriage. I don’t know if you ever saw her. Your father deeded the house to her a few months ago. After he was dreadfully ill that first time.”

  Nathan frowned. So Jackie’s daughter was selling his mother’s house. Getting rid of it for the monetary value it would yield, he supposed.

  The restlessness that had simmered inside him a few hours ago dissipated, washed away by furious determination.

  It was time to go home. He didn’t know how long he would stay or if he could bear to even stay there at all after so many years.

  Neither could he let the house, his mother’s house, fall into some stranger’s grubby hands. He just couldn’t.

  He bid goodbye to Maria and switched on his laptop.

  In a few minutes, he was chatting with his virtual manager, Jacob. He gave orders for a local manager to look after his cabin, for his airline tickets to be booked to San Francisco and last but not the least, for any information the man could dig up on his father’s mistress’s daughter.

  Copyright © 2015 by Tara Pammi

  ISBN: 978-1-472-09838-2

  INNOCENT IN HIS DIAMONDS

  © 2015 Maya Blake

  Published in Great Britain 2015

  by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited

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