owner because your wonderful attorney sold you out! He and Ferrantes and the bank sneaked a joker into the deck. I didn’t know a damned thing about it until I saw de Souza an hour ago.”
She gave a weary shrug. “It does not matter. You had already decided not to give the ranch to me. You made that clear. And that was for the best. It was a mistake for me to have asked such a thing of you.”
“It wasn’t a mistake, dammit! You had every right to ask. You and I were—we were close, once.”
“No,” she said stiffly, “we were not close. We were a man and a woman who came together in bed. Nothing more.”
She was right. That was how it had been, how he had wanted it. Then why did hearing those words make him so angry? Like it or not, there’d been more between them than sex. Like the weekend they’d gone away to his house in Connecticut, the one Nick had dragged him north to look at and he’d ended up buying instead of Nick. He’d planned two long days and nights of making love, but the house hadn’t cooperated. It had been built in the 1600s, and that weekend every piece of it decided to admit its age. You turned a faucet, the indoor plumbing—installed in the 1800s—coughed once and that was it. You turned on the furnace, vintage early 1900s, and nothing happened. The refrigerator—a handsome 1950s antique—groaned and died. And then there was the final insult: a storm sprang up and rain found a hole in the roof, right over their bed.
So, no. There had not been two days and nights of endless sex…but they’d had a wonderful time, anyway.
He’d turned up an old Scrabble set and she’d beaten him, three games running. She’d beaten him at gin, too, and at checkers, and he’d sighed and hung his head and talked her into one more game of everything, Scrabble and gin and checkers, winner take all, and when he won each and every time, she accused him of letting her win the first time around and he grinned, pulled her into his arms and said the “all” he wanted was her, naked in front of the fireplace….
Dammit, what did old memories have to do with anything? He’d come here to do exactly what he’d said. To sort things out, nothing more.
“There’s no sense debating our relationship,” he said gruffly.
“I agree. So if that is what you came here to do—”
“It isn’t. I was on my way home and then I began to think about things.”
“What things?”
Dante looked at the woman who’d let him into the house. She stood, arms folded over her ample bosom, glaring at him as if he were here to steal the family silver.
“Do me a favor, okay? Ask your guard dog to step out of the room.”
Gabriella laughed. Yara, a native of the Pantanal, did look as if she was standing guard. She’d stood that same way early this morning, when Ferrantes had come by, unannounced, with his ugly news.
Dante, for all his faults, was not Andre. He had hurt her heart once, he had even managed to hurt it again yesterday, but he would never hurt her physically.
She told that to Yara. “You can leave us alone,” she said, in a rapid burst of Portuguese. “This man will not hurt me.”
Yara’s bushy eyebrows drew together. “What you mean is that he will not strike you.”
Gabriella smiled at the old woman’s wisdom.
“No. He will not.”
“But he will hurt you in other ways.”
Gabriella shook her head. “He no longer has that kind of power over me.”
Yara made a sound that made it clear she did not believe that. Still, she threw Dante one last meaningful look and left the room. Gabriella wiped her dusty hands on her jeans and looked at Dante.
“Now,” she said, “tell me why you have come here.”
Dante took a deep breath. Where to start? He thought of all the tough business meetings he’d survived, of how there was always the right thing to say and the right way to say it, knew that this was going to be more difficult than any of those, and that the only way to handle it was head-on.
“I came back because of the boy. Daniel.”
Gabriella raised an eyebrow. “This time he has a name?”
“To tell you that…that I accept responsibility for him.”
“He has a name—and you’ve had a change in attitude. How interesting.”
“Dammit, you’re not making this easy…”
“Did you expect that I would? Get to the point, please. I have much to do.”
Dante took another deep breath. “I had time to think. And I realized that I want to do the right thing for him. For you both. If he’s my son—”
“If?” she said coldly. “If he is your son?”
“Gabriella, you know what I mean.”
“No. I do not. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
“Try looking at this from my vantage point. You walked out. I didn’t hear a word from you, and all of a sudden here’s this child—”
She moved quickly, covering the distance between them before he could think, and lifted her furious face to his.
“You keep saying that I walked out. I did not. You did the walking, senhor. And no, you did not hear a word from me. Why would you? What could we have said that had not already been said by you that night you sent me away?”
“All right.” His mouth thinned. “Have it your way. This has to do with the baby. With Daniel. If he’s mine—”
“Stop saying that! Do you think I would lie about such a thing? That I would have slept with another man after—”
“Would you?” Dante’s voice was rough. “Would you have slept with another man after you’d been with me?” He moved forward quickly, framed her face with his hands, forced her to look up at him. “Because I don’t want to think of you that way, Gabriella, I don’t want to think of you in someone else’s bed with your hands on him the way they used to be on me, your mouth on his, your skin hot against his.”
“Damn you, Dante,” she said in a shaky whisper, “damn you, damn you, damn—”
He kissed her.
Kissed her hard, with anger, forcing her lips to part to the thrust of his tongue, and when she cried out against his mouth he groaned, his kiss gentled and he gathered her against him, ignoring the way her hands rose to flatten against his chest and push him away. He kept kissing her, slanting his mouth over hers again and again as if he would consume her sweet taste, and at last she gave that little moan of surrender he had always loved, rose to him, wound her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
But her acquiescence didn’t last. A heartbeat later she tore her mouth from his.
“Please.
