drove down through a city humming with workaday energies to a luxury hotel overlooking a superb crescent of white beach that was already heavily populated. Sugar Loaf reared now to the left, outlined against a sky beginning to cloud over a little.
‘Is it going to rain, do you think?’ Karen asked, turning from the balconied window—more for something to say than through any real interest in the weather. ‘Summer is the rainy season out here, isn’t it?’
Watching her from across the superbly furnished and decorated room, Luiz inclined his head. ‘It is, yes.’ His regard was penetrating. ‘You recall that much then?’
‘Not the way you mean,’ she said. ‘I must have read it somewhere.’
‘Then the view out there means nothing to you?’
Karen’s brows drew together. ‘I’ve seen it in pictures.’
‘But no more than that?’
‘No.’ Heart thudding against her ribcage, she added, ‘What else might it mean?’
‘It’s the view you had from your room in this same hotel three months ago,’ he said. ‘Not the same room, I admit, but a replica of it. I hoped it might strike some spark of recollection.’
‘It hasn’t.’ Her tone was flat. ‘I must have won quite a lot to afford to stay in a place like this.’
‘Several thousand pounds, I believe. A one-time opportunity to see how the other half lived, was how you excused the extravagance. There would have been little left to take home with you, for certain.’
‘Except that I found myself a husband who could afford to stay in places like this.’ She made a gesture of self-disgust. ‘Forget I said that, will you?’
The dark head inclined again. ‘It’s forgotten.’
Considering his expression a moment ago, Karen doubted it. If she wanted to alienate him any more than he already must be alienated, considering the reason he’d followed her to Rio, she was going the right way about it.
He was leaning against a chest of drawers on the far side of the queen-size twin beds. Karen could only be thankful that there were two of them—although the thought of sharing even a room with him was daunting.
‘I have the room next door,’ he said, reading her mind with an ease she found daunting in itself. ‘I’ve no intention of pressuring you into anything you find distasteful.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Karen scarcely knew what else to say. ‘It isn’t that I find you…unattractive.’
‘A start, at least.’ His tone was dry. ‘Patience is no particular virtue of mine, but it seems I must learn to employ it. Perhaps sight of our home will help.’
‘Perhaps.’ Karen hesitated, reluctant to put the idea in his mind if it wasn’t there already, yet needing reassurance. ‘You don’t think I’m pretending to have lost my memory, do you?’
His expression underwent an indefinable alteration. ‘What might cause you to do such a thing?’
She lifted her shoulders. ‘Fear of retribution, perhaps.’
‘You see me as a wife-beater?’
‘I don’t know what you’re capable of.’ She was beginning to wish she’d kept her mouth shut. ‘It isn’t true, anyway. If I were capable of putting on that kind of act, I’d belong on the stage!’
‘I believe you would.’ His shoulders lifted. ‘There have been moments in our relationship when you’ve sorely tried me, I admit.’
Karen eyed him in silence for a moment. ‘We had rows?’
‘We had some differences of opinion. You’re a strong-willed young woman.’
‘Where I come from, all women have minds of their own,’ she claimed.
‘As do Brazilian women—except that they are rather more subtle in their employment of it.’ The pause was brief, the sudden change of tone emphatic. ‘We have to put this behind us, and begin again.’ He held up a staying hand as Karen started to speak. ‘I’ll arrange a hire car and show you the sights—the way I did when we first met. Perhaps then things will start to come back to you.’
He straightened away from the chest, turning towards the door. ‘Come to the lobby in half an hour.’
Karen stood where she was for several moments after he’d left the room, mulling over everything that had been said. There were still so many questions to be answered, and only Luiz to supply those answers.
But was what he told her the whole truth? Why had she felt the need to turn to another man at all?
CHAPTER TWO
THE limousine Luiz had hired was already waiting for them outside when she went down. He put her into the front passenger seat before going round to slide behind the wheel.
He had shown her the sights this way when they’d first met, he’d said upstairs. If the hotel itself, plus the view from the window, had failed to stir her memory, it was unlikely that this was going to work either, but it was worth a try, Karen supposed. Anything was worth trying!
They headed for the mountains backing the city, leaving the congested streets to enter a world of tropical rainforest where thick lianas hung like pythons from tree branches furry with moss. The tangled canopy far above filtered out the sunlight, casting an eerie green glow over writhing creepers and huge tree ferns. There were flowers in abundance, their colours jewel-like among the foliage.
Karen was mesmerised, hardly able to believe that they were still within the city limits.
‘It’s like another planet!’ she exclaimed, viewing a begonia bush bursting with bright yellow blossom and smothered in bees. ‘What’s making all the noise?’
‘Monkeys,’ Luiz advised. ‘We invade their territory. This is the Terra da Tijuca, Rio’s national park. It spreads over a hundred or more square miles.’
‘It’s wonderful!’
He cast a swift sideways glance at her rapt face. ‘But in no way familiar?’
‘No.’ The enthusiasm faded as reality reared its head again. ‘To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen any of this before.’
She sank back into her seat, head against the rest, eyes closed. ‘I feel I’m living someone else’s life!’
‘I can assure you you’re not,’ Luiz responded. ‘Your memory will return when you’re ready to remember.’
Karen stole a glance at the hard-edged profile, feeling the fast-becoming-familiar tension in her lower body. ‘Supposing that’s never?’
His jaw compressed momentarily. ‘Then we accept matters the way they are and live our lives accordingly.’
‘I’m not sure I can accept it,’ she said, and saw the compression come again.
‘There’s
