‘On the contrary senhorita,’ Dante argued with a perfectly straight face. ‘I think I’ve raised a very important point that should be considered right now.’
A point she was forced to award to Dante. ‘Your notes are certainly comprehensive,’ she agreed with a rise of her brow.
‘Exactly as I intended. And your answer?’
‘I’ll give it some thought.’ She smiled to reassure her brother, who was watching this exchange closely. She hoped Luc was oblivious to the undercurrents, though she doubted it when he asked to take a look at the page she was clutching to her chest.
‘Maybe I can help clear up Dante’s meaning so you can decide what to do?’ he offered.
‘That won’t be necessary. It’s perfectly clear to me.’ Moving the papers out of her brother’s reach, she stowed them away safely in her briefcase.
‘Then can you please stop frowning so we can get on with the meeting?’ Luc suggested. ‘I can’t tell if this is going well or not.’
And long may that last!
‘Karina and I are going to work together just fine,’ Dante assured Luc.
‘If you say so.’
Luc looked less than convinced. And he’d better not be smiling, she thought as her brother covered his mouth with his hand. If bringing her together with Dante was his idea of a joke—
‘How soon will you be going out to the fazenda?’ Luc asked, directing his question to Dante.
It would have to be soon, Karina thought, frowning as she weighed up the hectic schedule ahead of her. There were several big projects pending—not as prestigious as this one but, then, what was? And whatever the job, she prided herself on giving it her best. But the clock was ticking.
‘Tomorrow morning?’ Dante suggested, turning to her to seek her approval. ‘I’ll have my driver pick you up.’
So soon? Her heart lurched at the thought. But that was exactly what she needed to happen, she reminded herself—not that that made the thought of going with Dante tomorrow sit any easier in her mind.
‘Unless that’s too soon for you, Karina?’ Luc probed, seeing her frown.
‘No. The sooner I can get started, the better it is for me. I have other commitments not too far down the line.’
‘None that are going to interfere with this project, I trust?’ Dante asked with a raised brow.
‘Of course not.’ Her heartbeat spiked as he continued to stare at her.
‘You can’t put a deputy in your place for an event like this, Karina,’ he made clear.
‘I know that. And it won’t happen,’ she assured him.
They stared at each other for a few moments longer until Luc shifted in his seat.
‘I’m sorry to break this up, but I’ve got somewhere else to be,’ her brother informed them. ‘Copy me in on your reports, Karina, but wait until you’ve assessed the facilities at Dante’s ranch before you finalise anything.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll leave you two to it, then.’ Luc came around the desk to shake Dante by the hand. ‘I know you’ll take good care of my sister.’
Karina clenched her jaw. She was as close to her brother as it was possible for siblings to be, but where Dante Baracca was concerned Luc didn’t have a clue.
For the sake of maintaining a good client relationship, she called Dante to formally refuse his invitation to supper. She decided it would be better to slip it casually into the conversation with the excuse that she had to pack for the trip tomorrow. The main thrust of the call would be to ask what time she should be ready for his driver to pick her up.
‘Senhor Baracca isn’t taking calls, Senhorita Marcelos,’ the receptionist told her, when she rang Dante at the office.
Whose bed was he in now?
Stop being ridiculous! she told herself firmly, adjusting her grip on the phone, noting that her fingers had turned white with the pressure she was applying.
‘If he’s not in the office, may I leave a message, please?’
‘Of course. Oh—wait a minute. My apologies for not seeing this right away, senhorita. Senhor Baracca has left a handwritten note on my desk. He is having supper at Cellini’s tonight, and expects to see you there. If you can’t make it, I can try and get a message to him?’
‘That won’t be necessary, but thank you. I was just calling to confirm our arrangements.’ She cut the line. Why shouldn’t she meet up with him? Did she want Dante to think she was too affected by him to meet him out of the office? Theirs had to be a relationship of equals if she was going to work alongside him to make the polo cup the best it could be.
* * *
Dante had invited Karina to supper because he had to be sure she shared his vision for the event. He’d read her notes and was still worried she was playing it safe.
In life and in business, he mused as he drove to the restaurant, wondering why that should be so. Tonight was an opportunity for her to taste the energy and passion that brought people together and gave them the will to create carnival. He was certain the Karina he’d once known was still in there somewhere, and it was up to him to strip her barriers away. He smiled at the thought. Then he frowned. Up to now she had done everything he’d asked, when at one time she would have challenged every word he said. But without conflict there was no story, and he didn’t want the event he was hosting to be a bland affair. He wanted it to be remembered for all the right reasons, for Karina’s magic, the magic he was sure she could still bring.
* * *
The doorman took her coat and then the maître d’ escorted her into the main body of the upscale restaurant—where she stopped dead. Dante was certainly hosting a supper, but it wasn’t the intimate get-together she’d anticipated. Far from it. It seemed that every member of the samba group who’d appeared at the hotel was seated at his table, along with their mothers...and grandmothers—and probably their aunts and cousins too, by the look of things. And they were all dressed in their finest clothes. She fingered the collar of her tailored office suit self-consciously. Champagne was flowing, while the chef’s finest dishes were being carried aloft.
He’d seen her.
Dante threw a sharp glance her way. Then his face mellowed into a look of confident amusement. She’d been set up. He’d known what she’d think when she saw that note. He’d put out the bait and had let her imagination to do the rest. The look on her face must have pleased him. It would have told him more about how she felt about him than anything else could.
She’d make the best of it, she determined as she wove her way through the tables. She wanted her life back, and hiding in the shadows behind her business was no way to do that.
‘Karina.’ Dante stood when she reached the table. ‘What a pleasure,’ he added. ‘I’m so glad you could join us. I wasn’t sure you would come.’
‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world,’ she said, smiling at everyone.
Turning his back briefly on his guests, Dante raised an amused brow. ‘I’m really pleased you’re here.’
‘You’ve already said that.’
‘But I want you to know I mean it.’
As Dante stared into her eyes, her heart thundered a warning. Instead of being here and feeling the old magic washing over her, she would have been safer staying at home and banging her head against the wall in the hope of knocking some sense into it.
She had recognised some of the people around the table, and they were quick to bring her into their midst. An older lady pulled out a chair for her between herself and Dante. ‘It wouldn’t be complete without you here, Karina,’ she said, a comment that caused Dante to swing around and stare at her with a frown.
‘Thank you.’ She dipped her head to hide her burning cheeks as Dante continued to scan her face with interest. What she did in her private time was none of his business.
‘What did she mean?’ he asked her with a frown the moment he got a chance.
‘I’m an asset to any gathering?’ she suggested dryly.
‘That won’t cut it,’ he assured her, sitting back so he didn’t exclude their guests.
Tough. She’d told him all she was going to.
Dante had arranged cabs to take everyone home. Before the girls and their relatives left, Karina offered the use of the hotel spa free. The older women protested that this was too much, but she insisted, and all the girls begged their relatives to relent.
‘It’s the least I can do,’ she said. ‘You all work so hard to bring pleasure to visitors from around the world.’
‘And increase the business at your hotel,’ Dante murmured dryly, so that only she could hear.
Ignoring him, she added, ‘Just give my name at the desk and I’ll make sure that you’re expected.’ As Dante helped her on with her jacket, she told him, ‘I can see you now for half an hour to discuss flight details and any other business you might have.’
‘How very good of you.’ His mouth slanted in a mocking smile as he shook his head in disagreement. ‘We’ll talk at the ranch. I’ll have my man collect you at seven prompt tomorrow morning. Don’t be late.’
If looks could kill, she had just murdered the most popular man in Brazil.
CHAPTER SIX
A SECOND NIGHT without sleep was not the best of starts for a research trip. Lack of sleep made her cranky, made her vulnerable, made her brain tick slowly, and she needed her wits about her more than ever this morning. On top of sleep deprivation, being with Dante again last night had rattled her. Instead of checking that she’d got everything she needed for the trip, she was pacing up and down, waiting for dawn, fretting whether it was actually going to be possible to work alongside Dante without telling him everything.
Could she get away without telling him all of the truth? He was already suspicious about what had happened while they’d been apart, but he had no proof and no way of getting any. She wasn’t such a coward that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him, but was there any point in opening Pandora’s box when the past couldn’t be changed?
Pausing by the window, she stared down at the hotel gardens, so calm and beautiful in the moonlight. The gardens had been designed to soothe—an impossibility where she was concerned, because she was flying out of her world and into Dante’s world soon, and that was a raw, unforgiving world where the secrets she was harbouring could eat her up inside.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she put her head in her hands, thinking back to a time when they had both been wilful and unpredictable and had got away with it. They had enjoyed adventures on the pampas that made her toes curl now she thought back. The bigger the risk, the more likely they had been to take it. Then they’d grown up and life had become complicated, with innocence gone for good.
Seeing Dante again now had upended her feelings for him like a tube of sweets, shaking them out and forcing her to confront all the things she couldn’t change. All the sadness she’d kept safely bottled up. She had never told anyone about losing her baby. Who could she tell? Luc? Dante? The medical team had said she was ‘lucky’ because she had lost her child in the relatively early stages of pregnancy. She hadn’t felt lucky. She’d felt devastated. When she’d left the hospital and even the kind attention of the medical professionals had been taken away, she had felt alone, grief-stricken, with no consolation to be found anywhere. It had been a very long and slow road back to recovery, and she wasn’t even sure she’d reached her destination yet.
Maybe she never would. Closing her arms over her head as if that could block out the nightmare, she tensed as the scene played out in her head. She had asked the lady operating the scanner if her baby was dead, as if by some miracle the little light she had cherished for so short a time could still find a way to shine. There was no reason for it, the doctor had told her. Nature could be cruel. And once was enough to get pregnant, he had added disapprovingly when she had least needed to hear that.
Once with Dante.
She’d been too young, too inexperienced to handle something like that on her own, the same medical team had advised. But she’d had to handle it. Her mother was dead. She couldn’t say a word to her brother and risk breaking his heart. It would have destroyed the team, set him against Dante. Worse, it would have destroyed her brother’s trust in her, and how could she do that after everything Luc had done for her when their parents had died? She loved her brother too much to put him through that. He would never know.
Why hadn’t she told Dante?
Lifting her head, she gave a sad smile. Practising the art of making babies was Dante’s specialty. Dealing with the aftermath? Not so much.
But this wasn’t all on Dante. According to what she’d overheard when they’d been younger, he’d had a life as a child that no one could envy. It was no wonder that he’d cast about, trying to find love. She was no better. At age eighteen she was supposed to know it all. She had certainly thought she did, and that was the impression she’d given Dante at the party. And he’d used protection. What more was he supposed to do when she had been an all-too-willing partner?
It had been bravado in front of her friends that night. She had wanted to take the bond, the friendship she’d had with Dante and move it on to the next level—preferably before one of her girlfriends landed him. She’d taken the initiative, and she had led him to her room where hot, hungry nature had taken its course.
She should have told him she was a virgin, but she could hardly do that after putting on such an air of experience. She was lucky he had prepared her so well that all she remembered was pleasure. And it had been more than once. They had made love throughout the night. Well, she had. Dante had had sex with her. Maybe he wasn’t capable of anything more...maybe his ruined childhood had numbed him to feelings.
It certainly hadn’t affected his stamina. That had been inexhaustible. He had been inventive and had known how to use every surface in the room. She had never expected anything like it, and knew for a fact she would never experience anything like it again.
What a klutz. What an eighteen-year-old klutz. She should have known that every action had a consequence. She might have anticipated Dante would throw her out of his bed. What else was he going to do? Marry her? Marry a girl on the threshold of life, who’d been his friend and who had taken that friendship and mangled it?
And now she was going to leave the security of her job in the city, with a brother who cherished and cared for her, for the wilds of the pampas with a man she hardly knew these days.
What were her options? Back down and throw away the chance of a lifetime because she was too scared to face the past? Appoint someone else in her place to handle the job? Dante had ruled that out from the start. And she could never live with herself if she did that. Should she live out her life in the shadows from now on, never admitting what she wanted, which was to be judged on her own merits—merits that felt thin and few right now?
It all came back to Dante. When she had discovered she was pregnant, she’d hung on, trying to find the right time to approach him and tell him, but he’d become elusive, moving in such sophisticated company she’d rarely seen him, except from a distance at a match. When she’d lost the baby, nothing else had mattered, and she’d been too bruised to face the rigmarole of trying to convince Dante that he was the father of her child—the child she’d lost. What was the point when there was no child? And so she’d kept her secret all these years.
And then she’d embarked on her fightback, going to college abroad, where she had got her head down and learned what had been expected of her in the hotel trade, which had been to be impeccably groomed at all times, and to have the type of quiet manners that reassured people.
How would Dante react if she told him all that now?
He’d be furious and r
ightly so, and she couldn’t risk alienating him so close to the polo cup, though with his suspicions already roused she might be forced to tell him. He could always read her. She couldn’t use the argument that many youthful friendships didn’t survive the changes in people, and that they’d moved away and apart, and there’d never been chance to tell him about the baby—she couldn’t do it, because that tiny light still shone too brightly in her mind, and the bond between her and Dante was still so strong.
Once they were isolated on his fazenda could she lie to him? Or would she tell him the truth and face the consequences?
* * *
As Dante’s sleek executive jet descended to a smooth landing on the narrow airstrip, Karina was both apprehensive and excited, as well as interested in what she’d find at his home. How would the world-famous barbarian live? She knew so little about him these days. Her brother didn’t dabble in gossip of any kind. Bottom line. She really didn’t know anything about him. He might as well be a stranger she was visiting. And she shouldn’t be remotely interested. Staring out at the endless swathes of emerald green and gold pampas, she reassured herself that it wasn’t necessary to understand the ins and outs of a client’s private life in order to do business with them.
‘We are here, senhorita...’
She glanced up into the smiling eyes of the cabin attendant. Gathering her belongings, she unfastened her seat belt and got ready to disembark.
She must stop thinking about Dante, she warned herself as the jet engine died to a petulant whine. Her glance had flashed instantly to the cockpit door. She would see him soon enough. They’d be working together, remember?
‘Senhorita?’
She followed the flight attendant to the exit door. And blinked as she inhaled her first lungful of warm, herby air. Even laced with aviation fuel, it was familiar and intoxicating. She’d been away too long. But now she was home. Closing her eyes, she lifted her face to the sun. If it was possible to be changed in a moment, she was changed. But not so changed that she had forgotten why she was here. She ran through a quick mental checklist of everything she’d brought with her. She was still a professional, even if the lure of the pampas was strong in her blood. And she was still determined to handle Dante a lot better than she had at eighteen.
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