Her mouth trembled. Her eyes filled. It was hard not to feel sorry for her. Hard—but not impossible.
“I hate you, Dante Orsini!”
“I guess the question is, who do you hate more? Me or Ferrantes? Of course, you can always turn us both down. Pack up, move out—”
A thin cry drifted into the room. Gabriella stiffened, jerked back in his arms.
“What’s that?”
“A…a fox,” she said quickly.
She was lying. He could see it in her face. The cry came again. Dante narrowed his eyes.
“A fox in the house?”
“A monkey, then,” Gabriella said, rushing the words together. “Sometimes they get into the attic.”
The hell it was. You didn’t have to grow up in the country to know whatever was making that sound was not a monkey or a fox. Dante thrust her aside and started for the stairs. She ran in front of him and held out her hands.
“Get out of my way,” he growled.
“Dante. Please. Just leave. I’ll pack tonight. I’ll be out by morning. I promise—”
He lifted her as if she were a feather, set her aside, took the stairs two at a time, following what were now steady sobs down a long hall, through an open door, into a softly lit room…
And saw a crib, a blue blanket, a blue teddy bear…
And a baby, kicking its arms and legs and sobbing its heart out.
Dante stopped on a dime. Gabriella rushed past him and lifted the child into her arms. Say something, Dante thought furiously…but no words would come. He didn’t seem capable of anything besides looking at her and at the baby.
“Meu querido,” she crooned, “dearest one, don’t cry!”
The baby’s cries changed to sad little hiccups; Gabriella held the small body against her so that the baby’s face was against her shoulder. A pair of eyes—pale-blue eyes fringed by long, dark lashes—peered at Dante.
The room filled with silence. After a very long time, Dante cleared his throat.
“Yours?” It was not a brilliant comment but it was all he could think of saying.
Gabriella looked at him. He could read nothing in her face.
“I said, is the child—”
“I heard your question.” Her eyes were bright with what he could only assume was defiance. “Yes. The child is mine.”
He felt as if someone had dropped a weight onto his heart.
“Yours,” he said thickly. “And Ferrantes’s.”
Gabriella made a choked sound, neither a laugh or a sob, then lowered her face to the baby’s. Dante stared at her. At the child. He knew he should say something…or maybe he should just smash his fist through the wall.
He did neither. If life lesson number one was that what was over was over, number two was the importance of maintaining self-control.
Dante turned and walked out.
HE DROVE like a man possessed by demons, a hot fist of rage twisting in his belly.
That Gabriella should have slept with a pig like Ferrantes, that she’d carried his child in her womb…
Dante slammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel.
“Come on,” he muttered, “come on, dammit!” Couldn’t this freaking car go any faster? He couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel, toss his stuff in his suitcase and get the hell out of Brazil.
He had to phone his old man eventually, but what would he tell him? That he’d gotten it all wrong, there was no dissolute Viera son inheriting the ranch…
Only a dissolute daughter.
A woman who’d warmed his bed every night for, what, a few weeks? Okay. For three months. He’d taken her the first night they’d gone out, in an explosion of mutual passion like nothing he’d ever known before, taken her night after night, and the intensity of that passion had never diminished, not even when it had begun a subtle change to something he hadn’t been able to define except to know that it made him uncomfortable.
Was that the reason he’d ended their affair?
Not that it mattered. There were more important things to consider.
Like what in hell he was going to do with a ranch.
He’d bought it for a woman who’d never existed, a woman who’d walked away from him and never looked back, who’d gone from his arms to another’s without missing a beat, and who gave a damn? God knew, he hadn’t been celibate these past months. There’d been a parade of women in and out of his life. So what if there’d been a parade of men in and out of hers?
What mattered now was that he was stuck with five million bucks’ worth of absolutely nothing.
He’d been scammed, and scammed good—and now he was the unfortunate owner of a place he didn’t want, all his until he could unload it.
Note to self, Dante thought grimly. Phone de Souza. Instruct him to sell the fazenda and never mind the price. Forget how much money he’d lose on the deal. Just find a buyer, he’d say. Any buyer and, yeah, that included Ferrantes. In fact, selling the ranch to Ferrantes was a great idea.
Until he’d shown up, Gabriella had been more than willing to pay the price Ferrantes demanded. She could damned well go on paying it now.
He wasn’t the Sir Galahad type. Sir Stupid, was more like it, a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Well, that was over. Yeah, definitely, let Ferrantes buy the damned ranch. It was what Gabriella deserved, the perfect payback. Let her spend the next hundred years in the pig’s bed. It didn’t matter to him. She was just someone he’d been with for a while.
Nothing special. Just like seeing her with another man’s kid was nothing special…
A kid with a solemn expression and pale-blue eyes.
Dante cursed and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, put the engine in neutral and sat gripping the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
You could put what he knew about kids in a teacup and have room left. Why would he know anything about them? His brothers, his sisters, were all unmarried. If the guys he played touch football with Sundays in Central Park had kids, he never saw them. Children were aliens from a planet he’d never had any interest in inhabiting.
The only children he ever saw were being pushed through the park in strollers. And, yeah, there were people with kids living in his condo building, now that he thought about it. Like a woman he’d met in the lobby a couple of weeks ago. He’d been heading out, so had she, both of them waiting for taxis in a driving rainstorm, except she’d had a pink-swathed bundle in her arms.
“Nasty weather,” he’d said, because she’d kept looking at him as if she expected him to make conversation.
“Uh-huh,” she’d replied, but she’d seemed to be waiting for something more. Finally he’d caught on.
“Cute,” he’d said, nodding at the bundle. It wasn’t. Not particularly. It was just a baby, but evidently he’d said the right thing because the mom beamed.
“Isn’t she?” she’d said, and then she’d added, proudly, as if the information rated applause, “She’s four months old today.”
Four