sleek gray suit. He alone among all the guests was not even pretending to dress for a pool party. Gabriel’s hands tightened on the railing. The aristocratic French bastard excelled at breaking companies up for parts. The two had tangled before, and Gabriel knew St. Raphaël would like nothing more than to steal Açoazul from under his nose. All the assets of his father’s company would be scattered around the world, coldly dissected for St. Raphaël’s profit.
Gabriel narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t let that happen.
But where was Laura?
Scowling, he glanced at his watch. Carlos had texted that they were on the way. But Gabriel would have to start on his own. Grimly going down the stairs to the lower terrace, he started walking toward Oliveira and his French rival.
“Gabriel,” he heard a woman’s voice coo behind him. Setting his jaw, he turned with a scowl.
Adriana da Costa smiled up at him from a poolside cabana, where she was holding court in her tiny bikini. Five half-naked young men surrounded her, offering her food she would never eat in a million years. Gabriel saw one particularly hapless youngster trying to tempt her with a platter of bread and cheese. Bread and cheese? Adriana’s idea of a fattening meal was menthol cigarettes and a handful of raisins.
Lounging in her chair, she lazily stretched her skinny arm up over her wide-brimmed straw hat as she looked up at him. In her other hand, she was holding a glass of something that looked like water but was likely vodka on the rocks.
“What a lovely surprise,” Adriana drawled. Her eyes raked over Gabriel’s shorts and short-sleeved shirt, now open over his bare chest without the tank top. “I didn’t know Felipe invited you.” She smiled slyly. “I heard the two of you ran into some sort of…trouble.”
Gabriel set his jaw. She knew perfectly well why he hadn’t been able to close the deal. Since Gabriel had ended their short tumultuous affair, Adriana had been determined to get his attention, and now she had it. She clearly wanted to either have him back in her bed, or wreak her revenge.
How he despised her.
Curving his lips into a smile, he walked past the young men clustered around her and stood at the bottom of her lounge chair, near her perfectly pedicured feet. “Does Oliveira know you are keeping such company?”
“Oh, these?” She shrugged, indicating her admirers with a wave of her hand. “They are just my friends.”
“You are an engaged woman. You should not have such friends.”
“Go away, all of you,” she told them in English. Pouting slightly, she sat back in her chair. “It is easy for you to say. You pushed me into an engagement that I never wanted.”
“I would never push anyone into marriage.”
“Dropping me like you did, what did you expect me to do?” She sat up straight in her lounge chair, leaning forward to expose her cleavage to better advantage. “No man has ever left me before. You wouldn’t return my calls. I fell into the arms of the first rich man who proposed to me!”
Gabriel set his jaw again. “And that is why you are trying to destroy my business deal with Oliveira?”
She shrugged gleefully. “I just told Felipe the truth—that we were once lovers.”
“You implied more than that,” he said. “You made him believe if I moved permanently to Rio, I would make it my mission to lure you into my bed.”
Adriana looked up at him like a smug Persian cat, fluttering her long dark eyelashes. “Wouldn’t you?”
He stared down at her, unable to believe her vanity. She’d been a pain in the ass as a mistress, possessive and jealous. But clearly, she still believed that he, like any man, must be lusting after her as a matter of course.
He was tempted to correct that impression, but if he did, she might do some real damage and lie to her fiancé, tell him that Gabriel had made a pass at her. Clenching his hands with the effort it took to hide his dislike, Gabriel forced himself to say pleasantly, “I will always treasure our time together, but that time is over. I am with another woman now. In a committed relationship.”
“Committed? You?” Adriana stared at him, her eyes wide and shocked. It was very satisfying. For several seconds all he could hear was samba music from the live band. Seagulls flew overhead, their cries mingling with those of the guests and laughter of the Cariocas lying out in the sun. She licked her lips. “That’s impossible,” she said faintly. “You will never settle down.”
“And yet I have.”
“Who is the woman?” she demanded. “Do I know her?”
“My former secretary,” he said. “Laura Parker.”
Adriana sucked in her breath. “I knew it,” she declared. Her eyes glittered. “I always knew there was something between you. Every time you ran to her in the middle of the night, every time you explained why she was the only woman who could possibly live in your flat, every time you swore your relationship was innocent, I knew you were lying!”
“I wasn’t lying,” he said. “At the time, she was just my employee.”
“She was always more than that!”
“All right. We were friends,” he said tersely. “But never more. Not until last year, when—”
“Spare me the details!” Adriana hissed.
A wide shadow suddenly fell between them from the front of the cabana, blocking the sun’s reflection off the pool. “Is there a problem?”
Gabriel turned to see Felipe Oliveira standing behind him. His shapeless shirt covered his large belly, and his eyes were hard as bullets in his jowly face. He must have seen Gabriel come down the terrace steps and apparently make a beeline for Adriana. Perfeito, Gabriel thought, irritated.
“No problem.” He glanced at Adriana, who’d folded her arms to look away in sulky silence. “I was just telling your future bride that her love for you has inspired me to make a similar commitment. My secretary and I have had an on-off affair for the last year, and I’ve asked her to move in with me.”
Silence fell, until Adriana cried, “Move in with you?”
Oliveira stroked his double chin with shrewd watchfulness in his heavy-lidded gaze. “So you’ve decided to make a commitment to another woman. How romantic. How very…convenient.”
The older man was no fool. Deliberately, Gabriel shrugged. “Laura is everything I’ve ever wanted.”
Adriana muttered a blasphemous curse. “I always knew the little mouse was in love with you.”
In love? Gabriel frowned. Adriana was mistaken. Laura couldn’t love him. She was too smart for that. She knew his deep flaws far too well. Laura wouldn’t give her heart to an undeserving man who would break it.
Or would she? He paused, remembering how she’d let herself conceive a child by a man who wouldn’t marry her, a man she didn’t even love.
Adriana said scornfully, “With her adoring, sickening gaze on you all the time, I knew it was just
