Then he’d started asking her to gather small pieces of information for him. Her successes had been met with affection and gifts, and she’d never felt so happy and loved. She hadn’t known then, but he’d been grooming her for his organisation, teaching her the tricks she would need to become one of his network of spies.
She’d obeyed his every command and completed every mission perfectly...until Duarte.
She looked up at the object of her thoughts and wondered which of the men in her life had hurt her more...
‘I get the feeling that we knew one another, Nora. Maybe we were friends?’ Duarte’s whisky-coloured eyes bored into hers, assessing her with a razor-sharpness. ‘If you’re in trouble, I might be able to help.’
‘I’m not in trouble.’ Shaken, she tried to keep control of the conversation, hoping he wouldn’t notice the tremor in her hands. ‘And you are not my friend.’
‘Well, that makes your earlier reaction to my reappearance even more interesting.’
Something within her bristled at the superior tone in his voice and the evident suspicion in his gaze. The Duarte Avelar she had so briefly known had not had this hardness in him. But, then again, that version of him hadn’t been almost murdered as part of a blackmail plot involving the woman he claimed to have loved.
Still, she was a vulnerable woman with a newborn baby in a hospital bed and, as far as he knew they were perfect strangers.
Duarte stood up straight, his eyes sweeping over her and the small infant, something strange in his gaze. ‘You’ve been through a lot today. I still need to speak with you, but my questions will keep until you have recovered.’
‘Did you come back to Rio looking for answers...or for revenge?’ She asked the question, holding her breath as she waited for the answer that would determine their fate.
His brows knitted together, and when he spoke his voice held a mixture of surprise and keen interest, as though he were dissecting a puzzle. ‘You fear revenge from me, Nora?’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
She spoke with steel, despite the frantic thrumming of her heartbeat. She was exhausted, and likely still in shock from the events of the past few hours, but she knew she needed to have this conversation for her son’s sake. For her own sake too.
She forced herself to hold his gaze, trying not to be entranced by the features that seemed like a mirror image of the tiny face on her chest.
He seemed to hesitate for a moment, his eyes shifting to take a sweeping look out over the city. When his eyes at last met hers, there was a haunted darkness to them.
‘I came here to find out what truly happened in that shipping yard. For now, that is enough to satisfy me.’
For now.
Nora felt the threat of those words as clear as day. He might not know it yet, but he was on a direct path to retribution. His memories might be missing but his heart was still the same. He would never let this go. He would never forgive her for the part she’d played, unwittingly or not.
The silence stretched between them like an icy lake and she felt whatever slim hope she’d clung to begin to fade to nothing.
She looked up to see him watching her, his brow furrowed with concentration. Time seemed to stop as he opened his mouth to speak, then closed it, taking a few steps towards the window. He braced his hands on the sill, one deep inhalation emphasising the impressive width of his shoulders.
He was leaner than he had been before, his muscular frame less bulky but somehow more defined. The long, angry scar stood out like a kind of tribal marking along the side of his skull. She breathed in the sight of him, knowing that it might be the last time she could. That it needed to be the last time.
‘I will leave you to rest for a few days.’ He spoke with quiet authority. ‘I am not so cruel as to interrogate you in your condition. But I will have my answers, Nora.’
She opened her mouth to order him to leave, fury rising within her at the barely concealed threat in his words, but she froze as she saw the unmistakable look of curiosity he sent towards the tiny baby she held in her arms.
‘Seeing as you don’t have a phone, would you like me to notify anyone about the birth?’ Duarte asked, taking a step closer and peering into Liam’s small sleeping face. ‘Who is his father?’
CHAPTER THREE
NAUSEA TIGHTENED NORA’S already tender body, emotion clogging her throat as she inhaled and prepared herself for another performance. Another cruel twist, cementing her own web of lies beyond repair.
Just as she’d opened her mouth to respond, like an angel of mercy the nurse returned. Nora smiled politely as her son was lifted from her chest and put gently into his cot before the young woman began efficiently taking vitals, asking about her pain and making notes on a detailed chart.
Nora’s vague realisation that she’d still been pregnant only hours ago was laughable, considering that her current sense of fear had completely overshadowed any of the strange sensations in her body from the Caesarean section.
She was painfully aware of his dark eyes watching her from the corner of the room. Her heartbeat skittered in her throat as the nurse widened her eyes at her blood pressure reading and then left the room, mumbling about getting a second opinion.
Nora fought the urge to call after the nurse and beg her to stay. Please, stay.
She wanted to delay the inevitable answer she had to give. The lies she needed to tell to keep her son safe. To keep them all safe.
In an ideal world she would celebrate finding out that the father of her child was alive and had returned to find her. In an ideal world this would be a reunion... But she had long ago learned that no happy endings lay in her future—only an endless fight for survival. The world she lived in was filled with nothing but danger and dire consequences if she took a single step wrong.
She had a tiny life relying on her now; it wasn’t just her own future at stake. She could not let her heart lead her—not again.
‘Who is the baby’s father?’ Duarte repeated.
She avoided his eyes as she folded and refolded the linen blanket on her lap. She bit her lip, trying to come up with a convincing lie, but found she simply couldn’t. So she just went with omission instead, forcing words from her throat. ‘I’m a single mother. I have no family here in Rio.’
Silence fell between them. She wondered if he was judging her for her situation, then brushed off the thought with disgust. She had far bigger problems in her life than worrying about the opinion of a powerful man who had never known the true cruelty of life at the bottom of the pecking order. He might think her in the habit of random flings, but that seemed preferable to the embarrassing truth.
The only man she’d ever let her guard down with was standing five feet away from her.
And he didn’t remember a single thing.
She reached out and laid one hand on the small cot beside the bed, reminding herself of the tiny life that now relied on her strength. She needed to convince Duarte to leave, to forget all about her and Liam. Once that part was done, she would get back to her original plan.
Her heart seemed to twinge with the pain of knowing she would never see him again, but she forced the pain away, knowing she must survive losing him all over again for the sake of her son.
She had to.
‘You said you wanted details about what happened that night? I’ll write down everything I can remember and send it to you.’ She spoke quickly. ‘I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’
Strong arms folded over an even more powerful chest as he stared down at her. Nora ignored the flare of regret screaming within her. The urge to confess everything and beg him to take her and Liam away from Rio, away from the reach of her father and the memories of all the mistakes she’d made, bubbled up inside her.
But she couldn’t trust him—not after everything that had happened. She couldn’t
put her child’s future in his hands, or gamble on the hope that he might be merciful. She needed to be strong, even if it meant doing something that felt fundamentally wrong to her on every level.
‘Why do you act as though you are afraid of me?’ Duarte asked darkly, his jaw tight enough to cut through steel. ‘I pose no danger to you. You can trust me.’
‘I trust no one—especially not men like you.’ The words slipped from her mouth and she saw them land, anchoring him to the spot. ‘Please...just leave.’
She closed her eyes and lay back against the pillows, willing him away along with the one million worries that had come with his reappearance in her life. She lost track of how long she lay there, eyes closed tight against the sight of him. She fought against the need to reach out and beg him to stay, to breathe in the scent of him one last time.
When she opened her eyes again he was gone.
She didn’t cry, but the walls of the hospital room blurred into one wide canvas of beige and white as she stared upwards into nothingness.
If this was what shock felt like, she welcomed it—welcomed the cold that set into her fingers and the heavy exhaustion deep in her bones.
She had no idea how long she stared up at the ceiling before she drifted off to sleep, one hand still tightly clutching the railing of her son’s cot at her bedside.
Duarte left the hospital in a foul mood, instructing one of his guards to remain for surveillance. Whether that was to protect Nora Beckett or to ensure she didn’t try to disappear he didn’t quite know yet. But one thing was for sure: his mystery woman was deeply afraid of something. And, even though it made no sense, he had the strangest feeling that that something might be him.
The drive out of the city and high up into the hills to his modern villa passed in a blur. He had purchased the house a few years ago, but had very few memories of staying there. It was a visual masterpiece of clean lines and open living spaces, designed by an award-winning architect. Every feature took the natural surroundings into account, so that the building seemed to slot effortlessly into the rocky mountain face that surrounded it.
As a man who had taught himself to conceptualise and build ships just by observing the masters and trusting his feeling for what was right, he had a deep appreciation of design in all its forms. Usually the sight of this home filled him with awe and appreciation for such a feat of skilled, thoughtful engineering. But today he just saw a load of concrete and glass.
Duarte parked in the underground garage and found himself staring at the wall, processing the turn his day had taken in just a few short hours. He felt the sudden urge to grab a full bottle of strong cachaça and switch his mind off. To another man, the lure of getting rip-roaring drunk might have been attractive after a day like he’d had. But he was not another man, he reminded himself.
Perhaps he should have gone into the city, to one of the trendy upscale night spots along the coast. The bars would be teeming with beautiful women only too happy to help a man like him forget his troubles... But he doubted he’d even remember how to chat up a woman it had been so long.
Since he’d woken in the hospital all those months ago his days had been consumed only by recovery and, more recently, revenge. But maybe it was exactly what he needed. To indulge himself, to shake off the edge that had refused to pass since his dreams of the redhead began. Dreams of the woman who had saved him.
Nora.
He shook off the thought of her and made his way into the spacious entrance hall just as his phone began to ring. He looked at the name on the screen and answered the call from his father’s oldest friend with a weary smile.
‘Angelus—tudo bem?’
The old man was eager to hear about his meeting with the mystery redhead and apologised for believing Duarte had simply imagined the woman.
‘She must have been the one to alert me that night,’ Fiero mused, not needing to elaborate any further. They both knew what night he referred to. ‘I got a text from your personal phone number simply stating the address of that shipping yard and the fact that you were in danger. You and Valerio had been missing for seven days at that point.’
Duarte swallowed his frustration at his lack of memories of his captivity. He had no clue as to what had occurred other than the scars that covered his body and the haunted look in Valerio’s eyes. His best friend had refused to go into detail about whatever had befallen them during their long days and nights of captivity, stating that he was better off not knowing.
Nora had saved him—but why had she disappeared?
The thought suddenly occurred to him that perhaps they had been together. Perhaps she had been taken captive too? But surely Valerio would have mentioned a woman.
Angelus interrupted his musings, launching into a detailed briefing on the latest developments in their joint sting operation.
The corrupt politician who had paid for the kidnap had already been brought to justice, shot by Angelus himself in self-defence. But they had evidence to prove the man hadn’t been working alone. That there was a criminal kingpin behind the operation and he was hell-bent on taking control of the large area of land that the Avelar family owned and used for their charitable operations in Rio and Sao Paolo. Tens of thousands of tenants stood to be displaced and abandoned.
Thankfully, Angelus had arranged for the land to become untouchable, locked it into use by the Avelar Foundation, securing the homes and livelihoods of the families they assisted.
Duarte hadn’t yet told Angelus that he remembered having lunch with that same politician just over a year before his kidnapping. Considering that Angelus was currently still recovering from near death because of his efforts to help Duarte, he didn’t think his revelation would be well received.
It plagued him—why would he choose to meet with a man who so vehemently opposed the Avelar family’s work in Rio? Their refusal to sell or redevelop prime land in what was considered an upper class area of the city had been the cause of a decades-long argument, dating back to his father’s inception of the foundation. His parents had taken on the cause of the most vulnerable in society by building quality, sustainable housing projects. They had directly opposed and ignored the handful of corrupt developers that wanted to earmark the area for a luxury tourism development.
Duarte vaguely remembered the months before his kidnapping. He had been tired from spreading himself too thinly between Velamar and his own fledgling nautical design firm, Nettuno. When the Avelar Foundation had needed his immediate presence in Rio due to a large and embarrassing fire safety scandal, he’d been furious and resentful.
He’d had a few drinks with the politician and somehow they’d got into talks about what might happen if he sold the land with their family name kept solely as a front. He’d had plenty of his own charitable projects going on. He simply hadn’t had the time required to pursue such a demanding cause.
Shame burned in his gut at the memory of that conversation.
But he would never have acted on it...he was almost sure. He vaguely remembered flying out of Rio determined to find another way to carry on his parents’ legacy and uphold his duty to the people relying on the foundation.
His memories were non-existent from that point, but his passport showed that he’d returned to Rio three times after that trip. Whatever he’d come back for, he’d kept secret and eventually he was going to be forced to admit his suspicions to Angelus... That the person who had started this hell was possibly himself.
The infinity pool on the boundary of the villa had been serviced and readied for his arrival, as per his instructions. He had never been more grateful as he tore off his clothes and dived under the water in his boxer shorts. The fresh salt water engulfed him, cutting off the frantic hum of his mind and replacing it with a calming nothingness that soothed the anxious roar within him. Even if the relief was only temporary.
Anger and frustration had him doing more lap
s than usual, pushing his body to its physical limits as though reminding himself of his strength.
Teaching his damaged body how to walk and move again had been a nightmare, but he had done it. He had shocked his team of physiotherapists and smashed all their expectations. So much so that soon the staff and other patients would gather to watch him slice through the water at incredible speeds.
He’d thought that was the reason he’d become a minor celebrity in the small community, never realising that many of the staff had already been aware of his identity and had been paid heavily by Angelus for their silence.
Even without his memories he had felt the same connection to water, the same need that he’d had his whole life to swim or be out on the open sea.
It had been on that same beach that a strange man and woman had arrived and introduced themselves as his sister and his best friend. He’d remained silent as they tried to gauge how little he remembered. He soon found out that not only had he been a competitive swimmer and sailor throughout his teenage years and into his twenties, but he had apparently turned that passion into a career and was the co-founder of one of the biggest luxury yacht charter firms in the world.
Going from being an abandoned John Doe with no knowledge of his past to having his dream life presented to him should have been enough, he thought darkly. And yet he had been plagued by the thought that there was something vital he was missing—something he needed to do before his spirit would rest and accept his survival for what it was.
A second chance.
He lifted himself from the water with only minimal pain and stepped under the blistering hot spray of the outdoor waterfall shower. The heat loosened his muscles the rest of the way, ensuring that he would sleep without medication.
Returning To Claim His Heir Page 4
