His lips curled in a derisive smile. “Napping.”
“Oh.”
Cristiano was in no mood to be waylaid by this woman. And yet, she could be of use to him. “What is your name?”
“Marie,” she said, taking a step closer and holding her hands out for Milly. To her chagrin, the child stayed right where she was.
“And this is..?”
Marie looked from one to the other in confusion. “I’m sorry, sir, you’re going to need to explain to me just what’s going on here. As far as I can see, guests have no business walking in and out of the homestead. And as for handling Milly …”
“Yes, that might be true for guests,” he seethed. “But you see, Marie, I have a history with Ava. Evidently a future too,” he added for good measure.
And though his comment was cryptic, it was enough. Comprehension dawned in Marie’s mind. “Oh!” She remarked, her cheeks colouring even more darkly. “You’re … are you saying …”
“I’m saying I need to have a private conversation with Ava,” he intoned flatly.
“Of course,” she nodded, shock mingling with excitement. How had Ava kept this under wraps? She’d always presumed the baby wasn’t Angus’s, but to discover that it was Cristiano Cesar Barata’s? It was like a fairy story.
He gently disentangled Milly from around his neck and handed her to Marie, only Milly was none too happy about the swap. “Dah, Dah,” she exclaimed crossly, pointing to his chest.
And his chest was certainly feeling something. He reached over and flopped her curls then smiled curtly at Marie. “We will be gone a while.”
‘That’s fine,” Marie nodded. “I can keep an eye on things here. Take as long as you need.”
He didn’t look completely convinced.
“Honestly, I always stand in for Ava when she has to go away. You don’t need to worry. Milly and I will watch some playschool together.”
“Fine. Thank you,” he tacked on as an afterthought. He watched the young woman and child disappear into a lounge area, and then walked swiftly back to the guest bedroom. She was asleep, but she stirred when he shut the door.
His expression was grim. “Put your clothes on, Ava. We are going out.”
She blinked, confused and uncertain. “Cris?”
She’d been dreaming. She’d been dreaming they’d made love in the middle of the day, like two teenagers with nothing better to do but indulge their hormones.
She shook her head, and then sat bolt upright. It had been no dream. They’d actually done it. She had done it, with their daughter asleep upstairs and the front doors to the house unlocked. She clasped a hand to her forehead, and let out a noise of regret. Why couldn’t she think straight around him? Why did he turn her into a pile of sensuality and little else?
He reached down and tossed her dress onto the bed beside her. “Now, Ava.”
Her eyes were enormous in her pale face. “I …” She swallowed, but reached for the dress. Apart from anything, she felt at a disadvantage now that she was naked. He watched her pull the flimsy cotton over her head with satisfaction and then reached for his own shirt. He ripped it on, his mood dark and worsening by the minute.
“I’ve been thinking about something,” he said, while she pulled her underwear over her legs. Her hair was messy. He ached to run his fingers through it. But he couldn’t indulge his libido any longer. There were more important matters at stake.
“Yes?” She prompted, when he didn’t continue instantly.
“When you came to Rio, you came to my penthouse.”
She swallowed. “Yes?”
“And my housekeeper told you I didn’t want to see you.”
She felt dizzy. The memories were agonising to re-live.
“Yes,” she agreed coldly.
He took a step towards her, determined that he would see her face when he told her the truth. “Do you think that she might have convinced me, Ava, if you’d told her that the baby in your belly was mine?”
A million expressions burst on her face. All the colour drained from her flesh, and she fell to the side of the bed without taking her eyes from him. Her eyes were heavy with doubt and grief. Good. He hoped she was hurting. For whatever reason she’d decided not to tell him about Milly, it had been the wrong choice.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “Well?” He prompted, when she didn’t speak for a full minute.
“What … what do you mean?” She asked carefully, finally, her eyes no longer meeting his.
It was the wrong thing to say; she understood that instantly. “Even now you wish to lie to me? You hope perhaps you are wrong, and I that I do not know for a fact you have our child here, in this house? Even now, you wish to keep from me the fact that I am a father?”
Her mouth dropped. She shook her head. “It’s not like that.”
“My God, Ava, I am not a violent man, but I want to punch something.” A muscle clenched in his jaw and she understood how hard he was fighting to keep a hold on his temper. “How can you have done this?” His accent was thick; his words loaded with feeling.
“Cris …”
“Don’t.” He held an imperious hand up. It shook slightly. His passionate nature had transfixed her from the first. Now it terrified her. Not out of fear that he might hurt her, but because it forced her to confront the truth of how her decisions had affected him. “Don’t you dare make excuses.”
Ava squeezed her eyes shut and drew in a shaking breath. “You met Milly.”
“Yes, I met Milly.” He exhaled angrily and his nostrils flared wide. “When was she born?”
Her response was matter-of-fact. “September eighth.”
He shook his head. “I have a daughter.”
Tears streamed out of her eyes and down her cheeks. They dropped with thudding splashes against her thighs.
“Did you really think … My God.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “My God,” he repeated. “I’ve never known anyone like you. Are you crazy? Did you really think you could keep her from me?”
She bit down on her lip. A sob tore from her body.
“Did you think I’d stay here this week, and that we’d be together like this, whenever our bodies desired, and in the mean time, you would tend to the child I had no clue about?”
“Please,” she said, the word torn from her.
“Please?” He mimicked. “Please? Please what? Please forgive you? Please stop being angry? Please tell you that it doesn’t matter? Ava, you have lied to me by omission about perhaps the most serious matter on earth. What do you ask me to ‘please’ do now?”
She was crying properly now, enormous sobs were wrenching from her body. But Cristiano couldn’t feel sympathy for her. He was too angry. Too hurt. Too shocked.
“She is my child. Mine. Not just yours. You should have told me.”
“I tried,” she shouted, clutching her hands to her chest. “I tried to tell you.” She stared up at him through her tear-coated eyes. “I came to Rio. I was pregnant. I knew that you’d want to know.”
“You were still married,” he said with a ripple of anger. “You married him, why? Intending to pass my child off as his? Is that why he divorced you? Because he discovered the truth? No one could believe that little girl was Angus Edwards’s.”
“No!” She spat, the denial rich with sincerity. “Don’t be absurd.” She stood, her legs shaking beneath her. She put a hand on his chest but he shook away.
“Don’t touch me, Ava. You disgust me. I cannot believe I ever thought I loved you.” He sucked in a breath; it burned with fury. “You have robbed me of something you had no business concealing. Did you do it to hurt me? Did you do it to punish me for leaving you?”
“No!” She pressed her palms to her eyes, despair making her weary. “You are so, so wrong. I did it because I loved you.”
“What?” He demanded, his brows lifting in fury. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
She swallowed. “You didn’t love me enough to st
ay here.” She crinkled her forehead, trying to find the right words. The right order in which things had happened. She desperately needed him to understand her mindset. “You left.”
“So you were angry enough to hide my child from me?”
“I tried to tell you!” She reminded him forcefully. “And if you’re going to shout question after question at me, at least let me answer!”
A knock sounded at the door and Ava spun away from it, embarrassed by what she must look like. It creaked inwards, and Marie poked her head around. “Sorry to interrupt,” she addressed Cristiano, for Ava wasn’t looking in her direction. “But Milly’s getting a little upset at all the yelling.”
“Christ,” Cristiano muttered. “Of course. Ava and I are to go out.”
She glared at him sidelong, her expression mutinous. “You’re to go out. I’m staying here.”
“Ava Anne Henderson, I am not above lifting you over my shoulder and kidnapping you, if that is what it will take to have this conversation privately.”
Marie would have swooned if the tension weren’t so obvious. She looked from one to the other and nodded. “We’ll be fine here.”
Ava felt like she was hyperventilating. “She’s never heard me yell,” she said, more to herself. “Poor Milly must be beside herself.”
“Then let us spare her any further distress,” he muttered. “Do you need anything?”
She looked at him bleakly and shook her head.
“My car is outside.”
She nodded. What purpose could be served by objecting? She walked stiffly beside him, pausing only to slip her feet into a pair of sandals by the door. She was numb through. The moment; this day of reckoning … it had finally come.
The sun was dazzling and the heat intense. Ava slid into the car, and stared straight ahead at the rows of green vines. Far in the distance, she could see Cristiano’s friends – her guests – assembled on the green lawn. Again, she was hit with the sense of how carefree they all were. How different his life must be to Ava’s.
She gripped her hands in her lap.
“Marie says you’re in a relationship with that American woman.”
He stirred the powerful engine to life and turned the car towards the long, sloping drive. “Does she?” The words were choked from his mouth.
“Are you?”
Anger flushed his system. “Let us be frank about something. Who I am sleeping with, and who you are sleeping with, is immaterial.”
“Not to me it’s not.”
His lips were grim. “This isn’t about us. It never should have been. Not since I’ve been back. You should have greeted me with this news. The minute I walked in that door you should have told me. Hell, you should have told me two years ago.”
She angled her face so that he wouldn’t see the tears that were streaking down her cheeks. “Should I?” It was a whisper. A husk of a word.
He swore angrily and pushed the car up a gear. He hadn’t been in the Valley for years but he still remembered the roads perfectly. Just as he had her body. He took the turn towards the beach.
“What did you think? That she wouldn’t want to know about me? What would you have told her?”
Ava dashed at her tears angrily. “I … I never knew my dad. I accepted what my mum told me about him.” She shrugged weakly. “I thought … Milly would feel the same.”
His emotions darkened. “You were going to tell her that I didn’t want her? Like your mum told you about your own father?”
“You don’t want her!” She snapped, her tension finally unravelling. “You’re angry now, but that’s just your first reaction. You don’t like having the choice taken out of your hands but I still think I made the right decision.”
It was preposterous. “That you can defend this makes me want to scream,” he retorted.
“You would have hated it!” She said, almost deranged with the truth of what she was saying. She needed it to be true, or everything she’d felt would fall apart.
“Oh?” He turned the corner again and drove the car into the carpark that overlooked the glistening Indian ocean. Little clumps of grassy bushes lined the shore directly in front of the car, and in the distance, a group of beach goers were lying like dropped skittles, enjoying the sun’s rays.
“You can’t walk away from a child.”
Her words were little shards of torture. He unclipped his seatbelt so that he could shift his weight in the seat to look at her. “You kept this from me because you thought I would walk away from my responsibilities.”
“I know you, Cristiano. You’re not capable of being what Milly needs.”
His laugh was a harsh sound. “You mean I’m not capable of being what you need. You kept her from me because you felt rejected. You did this to punish me, and you’re dressing that up in a way you hope seems noble and selfless.”
She shook her head. “You’re so wrong.” She drew in a deep breath, trying to calm her misfiring nerves. “If you knew about Milly, you might have stayed. But you would have hated me, and I firmly believe you would have come to hate her. You would have been miserable. How could I ask that of you? How could I expect you to sacrifice the life you loved?”
He made a noise of disbelief. “Your story is fundamentally flawed. You came to Rio to tell me, or so you claim. So which is it? Did you want me to know? Or did you want to keep it from me?”
She sobbed. Her chest hurt with the exertion of breathing. “Both. I couldn’t know, with certainty, what was the right choice. Of course I questioned myself. It was Angus who convinced me that I had to at least tell you.”
Accusation was written on his expression. “He knew?”
“Yes, of course.” She ran her finger over the dashboard. “Not at first. When we married, he knew that I loved you. But he said that … he said that he loved me enough for both of us. That he was sure it would rub off on me in the end.”
He said a word in his own language, and judging by his inflection, it was an indictment of Angus. “So he manipulated you.”
“No!” Her laugh surprised her. “You’re so quick to see the worst in everyone. He loved me. He genuinely loved me. You were gone. You weren’t coming back. You’d made that obvious. And our wedding was only a month away. Everything was arranged.” Her words were quivering with emotion. “And I did love him, in just the same way I always had. He is one my best friends to this day.”
Cristiano collapsed back against his seat and focussed on the view.
“So?”
“So we married,” she said slowly. “But I had no idea about Milly then. You and I were always careful.”
“Except that first time.”
“Yes,” she nodded.
He did the arithmetic. “We slept together in February. She was born in September.”
“Very good,” Ava said bitterly, trying to bite back her anger. “She was early.”
“Why? Were there problems?”
Darkness engulfed her momentarily. Ava took three deep breaths to stave off her anxiety and grief. That time in her life had been darker than dark. Nothing had compared to it. “She’s fine now,” she said, closing off the line of questioning.
“And so what? When you found out about the baby, he didn’t want to be pushed into raising another man’s child?” Cristiano could only imagine how he would have felt in a similar circumstance.
“No, again. He’s far better than you give him credit for. He would have done anything I’d wanted. But I couldn’t do it to him. I couldn’t ask him to devote his life to me, and our child, when I knew I’d never love him. He deserved better. Angus deserved a wife who loved him properly. Openly and honestly.”
“So he left you pregnant and alone?”
“You left me pregnant,” she retorted angrily. “And don’t make it sound like I was some kind of weak, pathetic lovelorn woman in need of rescuing. I’ve done great. I’ve done fine. I’ve had my sisters, and now I’ve got Marie and Jackson, and even without all of them, I would have coped
. I would have.” Tears strained her voice. “And Milly is perfect.”
Silence hummed between them with the weight of accusations and doubts. “Let’s be clear about one thing. I am her father. I am going to raise her. Whether that’s here or in Brazil or America depends entirely on how reasonable you are prepared to be.”
The bottom began to crumble out of Ava’s world.
She stared up at him, while her body coursed with hot and cold. “You’re actually suggesting … are you threatening to take her from me?”
“No. I never make threats. Threats are idle. Threats are useless. I make promises.”
“I don’t understand.”
He grunted. “You evidently understand nothing about me. So let me be clear as this day is bright. I am her father. She is my child. You? You are just the woman who kept me from my own kin. Nothing more. You are nothing to me now but a liar I once loved.”
6
“I’m her mother.” The words were a choked plea into the silence of the car. The atmosphere buzzed with tension; the distant rumbling of the waves was magnifying her sense of panic.
He didn’t respond at first. What could he say?
“Did you actually believe I wouldn’t want to be a part of her life?”
“You wanted to travel,” she managed, her desperation obvious. She spun in her seat and put a hand on his arm. This time, he didn’t jerk away. “You told me a thousand times that you wanted to see the world. You would never have been happy living as I have.”
“Have you been happy?” He pushed, his dark eyes angrily scanning her face.
“I…” She shut her mouth in consternation. “I’m different to you.” Her tone was unconsciously belligerent. “I never sought the lifestyle you did. We both knew that. Having Milly hasn’t changed my life for the worse in any way.”
“As it would have mine?” He prompted with rich disbelief.
“Yes!” She ran a hand through her hair in exasperation. “You would have found it utterly constricting.”