She could see the bigger picture and it wasn’t pretty.
Turning away, she walked to the window to put some distance between herself and her sharp-eyed brother.
‘Dante is the lynchpin of our team,’ he stressed. ‘He’s hosting the polo cup. We need someone to organise it. What more do you need to know?’
‘Nothing,’ she agreed, staring blindly out of the window.
Karina would be the first to admit she’d been a wild child. Dante had been a big part of that past, but while he’d been worldly and experienced, she’d taken longer to grow up. She’d been naïve and a bit of a dreamer, and had paid a high price for her lack of sophistication. Growing up fast had been forced on her. Putting her sensible head on had come too late. She had clipped her party wings, but it still tore her up to know that by then the damage had been done. It had been a steep learning curve ever since, and that had been something in which Dante had played no part...
‘I understand this is the biggest contract you’ve ever handled,’ Luc remarked, misreading her preoccupation. ‘You’re bound to have concerns, Karina, but I know you can nail this.’
‘I’ll do a good job for you,’ she promised, turning to face him.’
‘I know you will. That’s why I want you and no one else to handle this contract. And, believe me,’ Luc added with a smile to reassure her, ‘no one finds Dante easy.’
‘With the possible exception of the women in his life,’ she countered dryly.
‘What’s that to you?’ Luc said suspiciously.
‘Absolutely nothing.’ She held his stare steadily until he looked away.
Leaning back against the cold, smooth glass, she remembered begging Luc to let her continue her studies abroad. She’d given him the excuse that she’d had enough of Rio and being under his wing, and that it was time for her to make her own way in life. Luc hadn’t guessed for a minute that all she’d really wanted was to get away from Dante. Luc had paid for her to go to catering college, which had turned out better than she had expected. She’d ended up winning a full scholarship to a prestigious Swiss training facility for event planners, where she had excelled. Equipped with an honours diploma, she had returned to Rio ready to change the world—or, at least, her brother’s hotel chain—only to find a highly sceptical Luc waiting for her.
She had won her spurs by working on small assignments for him, until he’d finally allowed her to work on his bigger projects. This Gaucho Polo Cup was the biggest project to date by far. And, yes, she wanted to be part of it. And, yes, she knew she could make it a success. She had the expertise and the inside knowledge when it came to the world of polo. But she’d be working with Dante, and that was a problem. She wasn’t the person she’d been in the past, but would Dante see that? According to the press he hadn’t changed and the word ‘wild’ still defined him. She only had to open a magazine to see him dating another woman. Dante Baracca attracted glamorous females in dizzying succession, but then he discarded them twice as fast. So nothing had changed.
‘Dante Baracca, the hard man of polo.’ Her brother said this with amusement, quoting a phrase most often associated with his teammate. ‘You’ll be the envy of half the women in the world.’
‘Half the women in the world don’t need a wake-up call from me,’ she argued. ‘And, if they did, I’d tell them that their idol has feet of clay.’
Luc drew back his head to give her a look. ‘That’s a little harsh when you’ve barely spoken to the man for years.’
‘For a very good reason,’ she dismissed. ‘Who needs trouble like Dante Baracca in their life?’
Dante could be charming when it suited him, but he could also be hard and cold. If Dante would behave professionally, she might be able to make this work. If not... Her thoughts took her back to a man with black hair, black eyes and a black heart, a man who looked like a Gypsy king with gold earrings glinting in his ears. She could still remember the night Dante had punched those gold hoops into his own earlobes because she’d challenged him to do so. They’d both been wild when he’d been fourteen and she’d been ten, back in the day when they could take risks and get away with them.
‘Stop frowning, Karina. Anyone would think I’d hooked you up with a monster. Here...’ Luc held out a magazine, which he obviously intended to reassure her. ‘Take a look at this—Dante’s riding the crest of the wave at the moment.’
Dante Baracca was on the front cover. Of course he was. Where else would the god of the game be?
‘There couldn’t be a better time for you two to be getting together.’
‘We won’t be getting together,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll be working alongside him.’
‘Of course you will,’ Luc agreed—to placate her, she suspected.
She made herself stare at the photograph while Luc looked on with approval.
Thank goodness Luc couldn’t hear her heart thundering at the sight of a man who had always affected her profoundly, both for good and for bad. The photo showed Dante seated bareback on a horse at sunset on the fringes of the surf. He was stripped to the waist with his face in profile. His powerful torso was warmed to a seductive bronze by the mellow rays of the setting sun. He was a daunting sight. The shadows pointed up the harsh angles of his face and delineated his formidable muscles. She had no doubt the photographer’s intention had been to big up the legend that was Dante Baracca, and in that he had succeeded.
Dante had more tattoos than she remembered. All the members of Luc’s team had a Thunderbolt inked on their torsos, but it wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that these new additions to Dante’s hard frame had been handcrafted by the devil.
Her mouth dried as she thought back. She would never shake the past. In many ways she didn’t want to. The memories were bittersweet. The loss had been too great, the sadness too searing, and Dante would always be part of that. He was still wearing the earrings that matched her own. Dante had given them to her on her eighteenth birthday—teasing her, saying they could be twins, but the look in his eyes had not been that of a sibling, and the earrings had been pushed to the back of a drawer after the party, because they’d become too cruel a reminder of Dante and everything he stood for...too close a reminder of kindred spirits who had almost destroyed each other.
‘Stop fretting, Karina,’ Luc coaxed when she frowned. ‘You can handle one barbarian. Why not two?’
‘If Dante is prepared to do things my way, it might work,’ she mused distractedly.
‘That should be fun to watch,’ Luc commented dryly.
‘This is no joke, Lucas.’
‘Clearly, as you’re calling me by my Sunday name.’
‘I mean it,’ she said, rounding on her brother. ‘My work is a serious business. You and Dante may have grown up wild on the pampas—’
‘As did you,’ Luc cut in, his tone turning hard. ‘What’s wrong with you, Karina? You never used to be like this. Just because you’re about to do business with a man women lust after doesn’t mean you have to wear a hair shirt. You can loosen up and make this project a success, or you can carry this ridiculous grudge you seem to have against Dante to its ultimate conclusion and wreck the match.’
‘Okay,’ she said, holding up her hands. ‘Just so long as we get one thing clear. You can’t just hire me out to your friends whenever you feel like it without my permission. No more Dante Baraccas—okay?’
Luc turned to face the door where his secretary was miming an apology for the interruption. ‘Why don’t you tell Dante that yourself? Come in, my friend...’
Striding forward to greet his fellow polo player, Luc added, ‘Karina can’t