Laura was even more beautiful than he remembered. In the moonlight, her hair looked like dark honey. The frosty winter air gave her cheeks a soft pink glow, and as she bit her lower lip, her heart-shaped mouth looked red and inviting. For a single instant, when he’d first seen her at the farmhouse, he’d had the insane desire to kiss her.
He took a deep breath. He was tired, flying straight from Rio on his private jet. Even more than that, he was exhausted from the months of negotiations to buy back his father’s old company in Rio, to gain back the business that had been his birthright before he’d stupidly thrown it away as a grief-stricken nineteen-year-old.
He wouldn’t fail. Not this time. Gabriel glanced down grimly at his expensive platinum watch. They were still on schedule. Just.
As they climbed the steps to the jet, Laura paused, looking behind her. Shifting the baby carrier on her arm, she pulled her diaper bag up higher on her other shoulder and bit her lip. “I think we should go back to the house for a few more things—”
“You have enough for the flight?” he said shortly.
“Yes, but I didn’t pack clothes. Pajamas—”
“Everything you need will be waiting for you in Rio. It will be arranged.”
“All right.” With one last, troubled glance, she followed him up the steps.
Inside the cabin, Gabriel sat down in the white leather seat. A flight attendant offered him a glass of champagne, which he accepted. It had been harder than he’d expected to convince Laura to come. She sat across from him, suddenly glaring at him beneath her dark lashes.
Was she angry at him for some reason? God knew why. He was the one who should be angry. She’d left him in the lurch a year ago. In an act of pure charity, he’d allowed her to quit her job. It had been the act of a saint. He’d barely managed to patch up the hole she’d left in his office.
“You’d better have a very trustworthy babysitter in Rio,” she growled, refusing the offer of champagne.
He finished off the crystal flute. “Maria Silva.”
She blinked. “Your housekeeper?”
“She was my nanny when I was young.”
“You were young?” Laura said sardonically.
Gabriel’s throat closed. Against his will, memories of his happy childhood washed over him, of playing with his older brother, of the wrestling and fighting, of his nanny’s voice soothing them. Only a year apart in age, Gabriel had competed with Guilherme constantly, always seeking to best him in their parents’ eyes. He’d started some stupid battles. Leading up to the night of the accident…
Turning away, he finished harshly, “I’d trust Maria with my life.”
Laura no longer looked angry. Now she looked bemused, staring at him with her large, limpid turquoise eyes. She started to ask a question, then was distracted when the flight attendant suggested she buckle in the baby’s carrier before takeoff.
Gabriel watched her smiling down at her son, murmuring soft words of love as she tucked a baby blanket into his pudgy hand. The little one yawned again.
A strange feeling went through Gabriel.
He’d won. He’d convinced her. They would make it back to Rio in time. His plan would work. He should be feeling triumphant.
Instead, he felt…on edge.
Why? It couldn’t be the money he’d promised her. A million dollars was nothing. He would have paid ten times that to win back his father’s company. He would have given every penny he possessed, every share of stock in Santos Enterprises, the contracts, the office building in Manhattan, the ships in Rotterdam. Everything down to the last stick of furniture.
So it wasn’t the money. But as the jet took off, leaving New Hampshire behind, he looked out the window. Something bothered him, and he didn’t know what it was. Was it that he’d let Laura see his desperation?
No, he thought, setting his jaw. She knew how much his father’s company meant to him. And anyway, allowing his vulnerability to show had helped achieve his goal.
It was something else. His gaze settled on the drowsing baby’s dark hair, his plump cheeks.
It was the baby. The baby unsettled him.
Gabriel’s jaw set as he realized what the edgy feeling was. What it had to be.
Anger.
He couldn’t believe that Laura had fallen into another man’s bed so swiftly. When she’d quit her job and walked out of his life last year, he’d let her go for one reason only—for her own good. He’d come to care for her. And he knew he couldn’t give her what she wanted. A husband. Children. A job that didn’t consume her every waking hour. When, the morning after he’d seduced her, she’d suddenly said she was quitting and going back to her family, he’d given Laura her chance at happiness. He’d let her go.
But instead of following her dreams, she’d apparently jumped into a brief, meaningless affair with some man she didn’t even care about. She’d settled for poverty and the life of a single mother. She’d allowed her child to be born without a father. Without a name.
Cold rage slowly built inside him.
He’d let her go for nothing.
Gabriel looked at her, now leaning back in her white leather seat with her eyes closed, one hand still on her baby in the seat beside her. She was even more beautiful than he remembered. Even in that unflattering, pale pink satin dress, with that horrible hot pink lipstick, her natural beauty shone through. With all its deceptive innocence.
Against his will, his eyes traced the generous curves beneath her gown. Her breasts were bigger since she’d become a mother, her hips wider. And suddenly he couldn’t stop wondering what her body would look like beneath that dress. What it would feel like against him in bed.
Erotic memories flashed through him of the first time he’d kissed her, when he’d swept his laptop to the floor in his ruthless need to have her. Taking her against his desk, he’d lost data that had cost thousands of dollars.
He hadn’t cared. It had been worth it.
He’d wanted Laura Parker from the moment she’d walked into his office, looking uncertain in her country clothes and wearing big, ugly glasses. He’d seen at once that she had a kind, innocent heart, coupled with the fearless bluntness he needed in an executive assistant. He’d wanted her, but for five years, he’d held himself in check. He needed her too badly in his office, needed her expertise to keep Santos Enterprises—and his life—running like a well-oiled machine. And he knew an old-fashioned woman like Laura Parker would never settle for what a man like Gabriel could offer—money, glamour, an emotionless affair. So he hadn’t allowed himself to touch her. Not even to flirt with her.
Until…
Last year, during a helicopter flight from Açoazul’s steel factory to the north of the city, Gabriel had looked up from a report to discover his pilot had flown them right over the sharp stretch of road where his family had died nearly twenty years before.
Gabriel had said nothing to the pilot. He’d told himself he felt nothing. Then he’d gone back to the office. It was late, and all his other employees were gone. He’d seen Laura Parker alone at his desk, filing papers in her prim collared shirt and tweed skirt, and something inside him had snapped. Five years of frustrated need had exploded and he’d seized her. Her blue eyes had widened behind her sleek, black-framed glasses as, without a word, he’d ruthlessly kissed her.
That night, he’d discovered two things that shocked him.
First: Miss Parker was a virgin. Second: beneath her demure exterior,