Reckless Night in Rio Read online

  Gabriel swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat. He couldn’t force her to marry him. He couldn’t seduce or charm or bully her into it. When did she get so steady? When did she get so strong?

  Raking his hair back, he looked at her. “Laura,” he said slowly. He exhaled a deep breath. “I can’t do it. What you’re asking. I wish I could, but I can’t. I can’t…love you.”

  Pain flashed across her face, raw and sharp. Then she straightened her shoulders in her wedding gown. Reaching up, she pulled the vintage lace veil off her elegant blonde chignon. Her blue eyes were stricken but steady.

  “Then I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But if you can’t love us…you can’t have us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GABRIEL had to hurry. Every second he wasted with Laura was like a grain of sand falling through a fatal hourglass. He had to leave at once.

  And yet he couldn’t.

  Leaving her felt like a death. He took a deep, shuddering breath. “This isn’t over,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll be back after I close the deal in Rio.”

  “Of course.” Laura’s shoulders straightened, even as her lower lip trembled. “I will never stop you from seeing Robby. I hope…I hope you’ll see him often. He needs his father.”

  Gabriel heard the music start to play downstairs and thought of the guests surrounded by white roses and candlelight, waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin. He clenched his hands, feeling that same strange spinning, sinking feeling in the region of his chest.

  “Remember,” he said tersely, looking at her. “This was your choice. I wanted to marry you.”

  She swallowed as tears streamed unchecked down her pale cheeks. “I’ll never forget that.”

  No, he thought suddenly. It couldn’t end like this. Not like this!

  With a sudden, ragged breath, he seized her in his arms. Pressing his lips against hers, he kissed her with every ounce of passion and persuasion he possessed. He never wanted to let her go.

  She was the one to pull away. He saw tears falling down her cheeks as she stepped back, out of his reach. “Goodbye.”

  He sucked in his breath. But there was nothing he could do. Nothing to be done. “I’ll be back,” he said heavily. “In a few days.”

  She gave him a wan smile. “Robby will be glad whenever you choose to visit.”

  He left the room. Went out the door. Walked past her mother, who was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He went outside into the cold winter air to the limo waiting outside. Gabriel felt a sudden pain in his chest when he saw that someone—one of Laura’s friends, perhaps—had written Just Married across the back window in white shaving cream, and attached aluminum cans to the back bumper to drag noisily down the road.

  His hands clenched as he flung himself heavily into the backseat of the limo. Carlos, who’d apparently been texting someone as he waited in the driver’s seat, jumped.

  “Mr. Gabriel! What are you doing, so soon…? And where is Mrs. Laura?”

  “She’s not coming,” he replied tightly. His throat hurt. “And she’s not Mrs.”

  “But senhor… What happened?”

  Gabriel looked bleakly out the window, at the beautiful fields of endless white. “Just go.”

  Laura stood by the closed door until the sound of Gabriel’s footsteps faded away.

  Sagging into a chair, she covered her face with her hands. She’d been happy to be a bride, a single mother no longer—so pleased to finally leave the scandal behind her. She thought of her baby, downstairs now with one of her cousins, and a sob came from her lips.

  But she’d had no other honorable choice. If she’d been willing to accept a life without love forever, what would that have done to her soul? What would that have taught her son?

  She’d done the right thing. So why did she feel so awful?

  She heard the door squeak open and looked up with an intake of breath.

  Her three sisters, all dressed in elegant bridesmaid gowns, stood in the open door with their mother. “Why did Gabriel storm off like that?” Ruth asked tremulously. Then she saw Laura’s tearful face. “Oh, sweetheart!”

  A moment later, Laura was crying in their arms as they hugged her, and her scowling little sister Hattie was cursing and offering to go punch Gabriel in the face. That made Laura laugh, but the laughter turned to a sob. Wiping her eyes, she looked up at them.

  “What do I do now?” she whispered.

  Her mother searched her gaze. “The wedding is off? Is it for sure?”

  Laura nodded with a lump in her throat. “He said he didn’t love me, that he would never love me. Or Robby, either.”

  Her mother and sisters stared at her with a unified intake of breath. Then Ruth shook herself briskly.

  “Well then. I’ll go downstairs, tell everyone to head home.”

  Laura folded her arms, her belly sick with dread and grief. “It’ll cause such a scandal,” she whispered. She stared at the patterns on the carpet as the full horror built inside her. “Just when all the rumors were coming to an end.”

  “Weddings get canceled all the time,” Becky said staunchly. “There’s nothing scandalous about it.”

  “Zero scandal,” Hattie agreed quickly, pushing up her glasses. “It’s totally uninteresting.”

  “Not even as interesting as when Mrs. Higgins’s cow knocked over the Tast-E Burger truck,” Margaret added.

  “It’ll be all right, sweetheart,” her mother said, softly stroking Laura’s hair as she sat beside her. “Just stay here. I’ll handle everything.”

  It was very tempting. But with a deep breath, Laura shook her head.

  “I’ll ask your uncle, then,” Ruth said quickly. “He’s waiting to walk you down the aisle. He can simply make a little announcement and—”

  “No,” Laura choked out. “I did this,” she whispered, rising to her feet. “I’ll end it.”

  Climbing onto his private jet at the airport five miles away, Gabriel nearly bit the stewardess’s head off when she offered him champagne. As she scurried off to the back cabin, he grabbed the entire bottle of Scotch from the galley and gulped straight from the bottle, desperate to feel the burn. But when he pulled the bottle from his lips, he realized the pain in his chest had only gotten worse.

  It was his heart. His heart hurt.

  “Ready, sir?” the pilot said over the intercom.

  “Ready,” Gabriel growled. Falling into the white leather seat, he took another gulp of the bottle and stared out his window.

  He felt as if he were leaving part of himself behind. His wife. His child. Robby. His son. Gabriel still couldn’t believe it.

  He didn’t want to go.

  I have to, he told himself angrily. I have no choice. He remembered how his parents had taken Gabriel and Guilherme to visit the factories of Açoazul Steel. It had been truly a family company. His father had been president, his mother vice president of marketing. “Someday, boys,” his father had said, “this company will be yours. Your legacy.”

  The jet’s engine started. Closing his eyes, Gabriel leaned his head into his hands. He still remembered the sound of his father’s laugh, the tender smile in his mother’s eyes. They’d been so proud of their strong, handsome, smart sons. He could still hear his brother saying, at twenty years old, “I never intended to have a family so soon, but now I can’t imagine it any other way. I’m happy, Gabriel. I am.”

  Grief gripped Gabriel’s chest. Why hadn’t he believed him? Why had he been so sure that he was right, and his brother wrong?

  “Robby’s not an accident. He’s not a mistake.”

  He suddenly saw Laura’s beautiful face as she’d stood in the morning light, wearing a wedding gown as luminescent as New England snow.

  “Then what is he?”

  She’d looked up at him. “A miracle.”

  He blinked, staring at the porthole window as the jet’s roar increased. Last year, he’d let Laura go because he’d wanted her to find a man who could love her. He’
d wanted her to be happy. He’d been so angry when he’d thought she’d thrown her dreams aside and fallen into bed with a man who didn’t deserve her.

  But she’d loved Gabriel himself all this time. She’d loved him without hope. She’d taken care of their baby all on her own, while carrying such a heavy weight on her shoulders at home. She’d assumed from the start that she and Robby were on their own.

  Gabriel was the man who didn’t deserve her.

  He’d tried to offer her money. His name. But that wasn’t what Laura wanted. She wanted his love. She wanted…a family.

  Gabriel set down the bottle. His body felt hot and cold at once.

  The jet lurched forward, taxiing toward the runway.

  He gripped the armrests. He had to go back to Rio, or he’d lose his family’s company forever. Açoazul SA would be dismantled. He would lose his last link to his family.

  The jet started to go faster down the runway, and he sucked in his breath.

  His family.

  He’d told himself for twenty years that he didn’t deserve another family. And yet, like a miracle, he had one.

  He had a family. Right here and now. And he was choosing to leave them.

  He sat up straight in his chair. His breathing came hard and fast. What about his family’s legacy?

  Legacy.

  He had a sudden flashback of a million small memories of warmth and joy and home. Visiting the steel factory. Sitting on his father’s shoulders at Carnaval, watching the parades go by. Vacations in Bahia. Dinner together each night. A life of love and tenderness. Until he’d made one dreadful mistake.

  “Your brother would forgive you. Your family loved you,” he heard Laura’s warm, loving voice say. “They would know your heart.”

  The jet hit full throttle, racing down the runway faster and faster, preparing for takeoff.

  And Gabriel suddenly realized he was about to make the worst mistake of his life. And this time it wouldn’t be an accident, a car spun out of control on a rainy road by a nineteen-year-old boy. This time it would be a stupid, cowardly decision made by a full-grown man.

  He hadn’t wanted another family.

  But he had one.

  Gabriel saw the white fields fly past the window. The jet started to rise, lifting off from the ground, and he leapt to his feet with a scream.

  “Stop!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LAURA hesitated outside the closed doors of the huge, flower-strewn library, frightened out of her mind.

  She could hear the rumble on the other side of door, the mutters and whispers. The wedding had been scheduled to start thirty minutes ago, and everyone was obviously starting to assume the worst.

  But there was no way around it. She had to get through it. With a deep breath, she pushed the doors open.

  The enormous two-story library had been modeled after an old English abbey with walls of gray stone. It was now festooned with white roses and candles, with hundreds of chairs set up to create an aisle down the middle.

  At the sight of the bride standing at the end of the aisle, musicians hastily began to play “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” on guitars and violins. Laura stopped the music with a chopping gesture across her neck.

  Silence fell. She could have heard a pin drop as three hundred pairs of eyes turned to her.

  She trembled, passing a hand over her eyes. Then she heard her baby cry out halfway down the aisle. Going swiftly to her cousin Sandy, who held him in her lap, Laura took her son in her arms. Robby looked dapper in a little baby tuxedo just like his father’s, complete with rose boutonniere. She smiled through her tears. For an instant, she just held her baby in her arms, feeling his soft skin and breathing his sweet smell.

  Then, squaring her shoulders, she slowly turned to face her family and friends.

  “Thank you all for coming,” she said loudly, then faltered. “But I’m afraid… Afraid that…”

  “What?” her great-aunt Gertrude demanded loudly from the back. “Talk louder!”

  Laura’s knees grew weak. Did she really have to announce to all her friends and relatives that the only man she’d ever loved had just left her at the altar? How had she ever thought this was a good idea?

  “Did he leave?” one of her hotheaded cousins demanded, rising to his feet in the front row. “Did that man desert you?”

  “No,” she cried, holding up her hand. Even now, she couldn’t bear for them to think badly of Gabriel. He’d always been honest with her from the beginning. She was the one who’d arrogantly tried to change him, who’d thought that if she loved him enough, he might love her back. She was the one who’d thought if he knew Robby was his son, he might change, and love the child he’d never wanted. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I told him to go. I made him leave—”

  “You couldn’t,” a husky voice said behind her. “Though you tried.”

  With a gasp, she whirled around.

  Gabriel stood in the double doorway, dark and dashing in his tuxedo. And most incredible of all, he was smiling at her, smiling with his whole face. Even his black eyes held endless colors of warmth and love.

  “What are you doing here?” she murmured. “I thought you were gone.”

  He started walking toward her.

  “I couldn’t go,” he said. “Not without telling you something.”

  “What?”

  He stopped, halfway down the aisle.

  “I love you,” he said simply.

  She swayed on her feet. She was dreaming. She had to be dreaming.

  He caught her before she could fall. “I love you,” he murmured with a smile, and he looked down at the baby between them. “And I love my son.”

  There was an audible gasp. Gabriel looked around him fiercely.

  “Yes,” he said sharply. “Robby is my child. Laura was afraid to tell me about Robby, afraid I wouldn’t be able to measure up to be the man—the father—he needed.” Gabriel looked back at her. “But I will. I will spend the rest of my life proving I can be the man you deserve.”

  A sob escaped Laura’s lips. Reaching up, she put her hand to his cheek, looking up at him. “You love me?”

  He pressed his hand over hers. She saw tears in his eyes. “Yes.”

  She blinked, sucking in her breath. “But what about the deal in Rio?”

  He looked down at her. “I don’t care about it. Let the Frenchman have it.”

  She gasped, shaking her head desperately. “But you’ve tried to get the company back all these years. It’s all you wanted. All you’ve dreamed about day and night!”

  “Because I thought it was my family’s legacy.” He reached down to cup her cheek. A smile curved his sensual lips. “But it wasn’t.”

  “It wasn’t?” she whispered.

  “My family loved me, and I loved them,” he said. “No accident can ever change that. I will honor their memory for the rest of my life. I will honor them by living as best as I can until the day I die.” He took her hand tightly in his own, looking down at her. “And today, I will start the rest of my life loving you.”

  “I love you….” she choked out. “So much.” She swallowed, then shook her head. “But we can get married later. We should leave for Rio at once. I don’t want you to lose your company, your family’s legacy—”

  “I haven’t lost it. I’ve found it at last. My family’s legacy is love,” he said. “My family’s legacy—” he lifted his shining eyes to her face “—is you.”

  The autumn leaves of New Hampshire were falling in a million shades of red, gold and green against the cold blue sky when Gabriel and Laura returned home from New York.

  Laura sighed with pleasure as their SUV rounded the bend in the road and she caught her first glimpse of the old Olmstead mansion on the hill. It was the Santos house now. The day after their wedding, Gabriel had bought it for her as a present.

  “It’s too big,” she’d protested. “We can’t possibly fill all those rooms!”

  He’d gi
ven her a sly, wicked smile. “We can try.”

  And they had certainly done their best. In fact, they’d done excellent work on that front. Laura blushed. Since they’d moved into the house in March, they’d made love in all forty rooms, and also in the secret nooks of the large sprawling garden. They’d shared many warm evenings on the banks of their private lake, swimming and talking and watching the stars twinkle in the lazy summer night. One big pond, she thought, for what was sure to be one big family. She smiled. She would someday teach her own children to swim there, as her father had taught her.

  She’d been in New York City with Gabriel for only a single night, but she was already glad to be back home. She hadn’t known it was possible for a man to fuss so much over his wife.

  As the SUV stopped, she started to open the door, but Gabriel instantly gave her a hard glare. “Wait.”

  Laura sat back against her seat with a sigh.

  He raced around the SUV and opened her door. Gabriel held out his hand, and his dark eyes softened as he looked down at her. She placed her hand in his, and felt the same shiver of love and longing that she had the very first time she’d touched his hand, in the days when she was only his secretary.

  After helping her from the SUV—it wasn’t as easy as it used to be—he closed the door behind her. He followed her constantly, anxiously, always concerned about her safety and comfort. It might have been irritating, if it wasn’t so adorable.

  “I can close my own door, you know,” she ob served.

  He stroked her cheek, looking down at her fiercely. “I have a lot to make up for. I want to take care of you.”

  Glancing at the sweeping steps that led to the front door, she lifted her eyebrow wickedly. “Want to carry me up the stairs?”

  Grabbing her lapel, he pulled her against his dark wool coat. “Absolutely,” he whispered, nuzzling her hair. He gave her a sensual smile. “Especially since the next flight of stairs leads straight to our bedroom.”

  Lowering his head to hers, he kissed her.

  His lips were hot and soft against her own, and a contented sigh came from the back of Laura’s throat. As he held her, a cold wind blew in from the north around them, scattering the fallen leaves and whispering of the deep frost that would soon come to the great north woods. But Laura felt warm down to her toes.