Master of Her Innocence (Bought by the Brazilian) (14 page)

He walked over to the door and glanced back at Clare. Was it his imagination or did her breasts look slightly fuller beneath the cream silk dress she was wearing? Her auburn hair tumbled in silky waves around her shoulders.
Deus
, would he ever escape the spell she had cast on him that made him think of her all the time, and want to be with her day and night?

‘I will provide you and the child with an excellent standard of living. You will want for nothing. There will be no need for you to work, unless you choose to resume your career at some point.’ He hesitated. ‘I realise that you are young and attractive and might want to have a personal relationship...with a man,’ he elaborated when Clare looked puzzled.

‘Are you suggesting I could have an affair?’

‘As long as you were discreet for the child’s sake.’ The idea of Clare with a lover caused bile to burn like acid in Diego’s throat and he gripped the door handle as he fought the temptation to stride across the room and pull her into his arms.

‘Are you
leaving
?’

He heard disbelief in her voice and could not bring himself to look at her. ‘I have to fly up to Boa Vista to carry out a geological survey of a potential gold mine site in the rainforest. Before I go I’ll submit our registration of marriage form. We are legally required to give twenty days’ notice prior to getting married. We will marry when I return to Rio, and after the ceremony I will arrange for you to fly back to England.’

‘Go then.’ Clare gave a contemptuous laugh. ‘Run away, Diego. When you helped Becky and me to escape from Rigo and his henchmen I believed you were the bravest man I’d ever met. But I see now that you are a coward. It makes no difference how much money or material possessions you give to our child, because if you won’t even try to be a proper father you are no better than the man who fathered and abandoned you.’

Her words stabbed Diego through his heart. Clare was right; he
was
no better than his father. But it was not cowardice that had led to his decision to live apart from his child. Clare did not understand that he was trying to protect their baby and her.

He groaned and slumped against the door. ‘I
can’t
be the husband you want me to be, or the kind of father I wished for when I was a boy,’ he said harshly. ‘There are things about me that you don’t know.’

‘So tell me.’ Her voice was no longer contemptuous, but soft and clear as a mountain stream, and the scent of roses filled Diego’s senses when she walked over to him and placed her hand lightly on his shoulder. ‘Help me to understand your demons, because the child we created so carelessly will need both of us to be part of their life.’

Diego turned round and stared down at her. She was so petite next to his tall frame, so fragile compared to his muscular build. The knowledge that he could easily hurt her terrified him. He was certain that if he told her the truth about himself she would insist on taking their child to live far away from him, away from the danger he represented. But where did he start? He remembered the questions she had asked that morning when she had woken him from his nightmare.

‘You had better sit down,’ he said roughly. When she did so, he sat on the sofa opposite her and took off his hat, twisting the brim between his fingers.

‘I met Miguel in prison. We shared a cell—’ he grimaced as memories of the terrible conditions flooded his mind ‘—along with ten other prisoners.’ He looked up and saw Clare’s startled expression. ‘We were both on remand. Miguel had been accused, wrongly, of fraud, and I was waiting to be tried...for murder.’

She drew a sharp breath. ‘Were you wrongly accused like Miguel? Or...had you actually...killed someone?’

‘I don’t know.’ Diego looked away from the horror he could see in Clare’s eyes. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Clare’s voice shook as she tried to absorb Diego’s astounding revelation. ‘How can you not remember whether you murdered a person? Surely it’s not something you’d forget.’

Diego saw her place her hand on her stomach, as if she was instinctively seeking to protect the fragile new life developing inside her. Protect their child from him, he thought grimly. But, strangely, now that he’d started to talk he wanted to continue. He couldn’t run away from himself any more, he acknowledged, feeling a bone-aching weariness from twenty years of running and hiding from his past. Clare was clearly shocked, but she was still here, waiting for him to explain.

‘My mother was a drug addict,’ he said emotionlessly. ‘Dealers often used our one room in the tenement as a base where they sold drugs, and most nights I slept on the streets and searched for food in bins.’

Clare pictured Diego as a little boy, roaming the dark and dangerous alleyways of a slum, searching for a place to shelter for the night. Learning that she was pregnant made his description of his childhood even more poignant.

‘By the time I was a teenager I’d seen things no child should see, and from necessity I’d learned how to take care of myself. I was hot-tempered and often involved in fights.’ Diego twisted his hat in his hands. ‘One night it was raining hard and I had nowhere to go but home. When I arrived, I found my mother bleeding and crying while her dealer beat her because she could not pay for her next fix.’

He swallowed convulsively. ‘She was only little, about the same height as you, and defenceless.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I lost my temper and punched the guy. Hard. I wanted to kill him.’

‘But did you?’ Clare said shakily.

‘I honestly don’t know. The guy retaliated and we fought. The last I remember was his fist coming towards my face. The next thing I knew was when I opened my eyes and saw the man lying on the floor and a pool of blood round his head.’ Diego’s voice was hoarse. ‘It was obvious he was dead. The police had arrived and my mother told them...’ He fell silent.

‘What did your mother tell the police?’ Clare prompted.

‘She said I’d gone crazy and kept punching the guy even after he’d collapsed to the floor. According to my mother, I had been in a manic rage and she had been unable to stop me from hitting the man. It was as if I had suffered some kind of fit that made me act with uncontrolled violence, until eventually I passed out.’

Diego forced himself to look at Clare. She was obviously shocked by what he had told her but, to his surprise, there was no hint of revulsion in her blue eyes.

‘The police arrested me and charged me with murder,’ he continued. ‘At seventeen I should have been sent to a juvenile detention centre, but it was full so I was locked up in an adult prison to await trial. But I couldn’t afford a lawyer and the only witness to what had happened was my mother, who had disappeared.’

‘You must have been scared. How long were you held in prison?’

‘Two hellish years. It’s where I lost the top of my ear.’ He brushed his hair back to reveal his disfigured ear. ‘I saved Miguel from a beating by some of the other prisoners, and as punishment they held me down and sliced off part of my ear with a razor blade.’

‘Dear God,’ Clare whispered. ‘No wonder you have nightmares.’

‘I was befriended by the prison chaplain, Father Vincenzi.’ Diego’s strained features softened into a smile. ‘The priest is a truly good man. He believed I was innocent and fought to have the charges against me dropped due to a lack of evidence.’

Diego recalled the mixed emotions he had felt on the day he had walked out of prison: relief that he was free, but also a terrible uncertainty that perhaps he was guilty of murder, which he still felt two decades later.

‘After I was released I went to stay with Cruz and his family and we both worked in Earl Bancroft’s diamond mine. A few years later, Father Vincenzi was contacted by a lawyer in England who was trying to find me to give me the news that I was the heir of the lawyer’s deceased client, a man called Geoffrey Hawke. He was my grandfather and he’d left me a sizeable fortune in his will, which enabled me to buy the Old Betsy diamond mine with Cruz.’

‘Why did the priest believe you were innocent?’ Clare asked.

‘There were inconsistencies in the statement my mother gave to the police. Also, forensic evidence indicated that the man had died from a blow to the back of his head by something heavy. But I have no recollection of using a weapon. Father Vincenzi thought that my mother may have lied about what actually happened.’ Diego shook his head. ‘But she knew I would go to prison. Why would my own mother lie to the police about me?’

‘I don’t know.’ Clare frowned. ‘Have you ever tried to find her to ask her?’

‘I searched for my mother for years and I believe she is still alive, simply because if she were dead her death would have been registered. A couple of times there were promising leads, and a year ago I received information that she was being treated in a hospital. But I had no response when I tried to contact her and since then she has disappeared again. I came to the conclusion that she doesn’t want to see me, and I stopped looking for her.’

‘Why wouldn’t she want to see her only son,’ Clare mused, ‘unless she has something to hide? It suggests that she
might
have lied to the police.’

Diego rubbed his hand across his brow. ‘It suggests to me that my mother witnessed me turn into a violent murderer and she is scared to meet me,’ he said grimly. ‘Don’t you see, Clare?
I don’t know if I lost my temper and killed a man
. Perhaps I was gripped by a manic rage, as my mother said, and I can’t take the risk of it happening again in front of my child.
I dare not be a proper father when there is a chance I am a murderer
.’

He dropped his hand down from his face, and Clare’s heart turned over when she saw a betraying glimmer of moisture in his eyes. She thought of how he had protected her in the rainforest and helped her to rescue her sister from the kidnappers. Feeling an instinctive need to comfort him, she got up from the sofa and knelt in front of him.

‘Diego, you were a boy of seventeen, and you were trying to protect your mother from being beaten,’ she said gently. ‘Even if you did punch the man who was hitting your mother, it wasn’t a premeditated attack. I don’t believe you would have intended to kill him, and I don’t think a judge would have believed it either. Father Vincenzi obviously didn’t believe you were a murderer, or he wouldn’t have worked to secure your release from prison.’

He looked unconvinced, and his jaw clenched. ‘I won’t risk our child’s safety, or yours, when I don’t know if I can trust myself to control my temper.’ His throat worked as he swallowed hard. ‘Last night I had proof that I still have a hot temper. When I saw you dancing with Penry, I wanted to throw him over the side of the yacht and I hoped he’d drown.’

Clare’s eyes widened. ‘Why did you feel like that?’

‘I was jealous,’ Diego grated. ‘It’s not an emotion I am familiar with,’ he added, sounding more like his old, cynical self.

He had been jealous because she’d danced with Mark!
Clare forced her mind back to Diego’s harrowing story of his past. ‘You might have wanted to throw Mark overboard, but you
didn’t
act on those feelings, which shows that you can trust yourself to control your temper.’

His hand was resting on his knee, and she linked her fingers with his. ‘You don’t know if you were unwittingly responsible for a man’s death, but I
do
know that you saved my life and my sister’s life when you arranged our escape from Rigo. I’m sorry I accused you of being a coward,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘It must have taken a lot of courage to tell me the reason why you feel you can’t be a proper father.’

She looked into his eyes. ‘In Torrente you asked me to trust you, and I am ashamed that at the time I didn’t. But I do now. I trust you completely, and I want to help. It seems to me that the only way for you to come to terms with your past and move forwards with your life is if you make another attempt to find your mother and discover the truth about what really happened when you were seventeen.’

Diego looked down at their linked fingers and felt as if his heart was being squeezed in a vice. Clare was as fierce as a tigress and he was touched by her determination to help him. But her faith in him and her refusal to judge him strengthened his resolve to protect her and their child from himself if necessary.

‘If I find my mother, are you prepared to learn the truth about me, whatever it might be?’

She held his gaze steadily. ‘Nothing your mother might say will make me lose my trust in you.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

H
OSPITALS
ALWAYS
SMELLED
of disinfectant, Clare thought as she walked with Diego into a hospice in the city of Belo Horizonte. She recalled the private hospital in Rio, where a week ago she and Diego had had an appointment at the antenatal unit for her ultrasound scan. The scan had confirmed that she was now twelve weeks pregnant.

She had been surprised at how clear the image of the baby was when the sonographer had pointed out on the screen the infant’s head and chest and a tiny beating heart. Tears had filled Clare’s eyes at this first sight of the child developing inside her, and when she had glanced at Diego and had seen his jaw clench she knew he was trying to hide his emotions.

Since his revelation that he might have killed a man twenty years ago, they had both been living in a strange sort of limbo. Clare had insisted that they wait until she was safely past the three-month stage of her pregnancy before they discussed marriage. She had suffered badly from morning sickness, and the constant nausea plus the pregnancy hormones zooming around her body had made her desperately tired so that she was often in bed by early evening.

She had felt quite relieved that Diego hadn’t suggested they resume a sexual relationship. Her wan complexion and the fact that she had to rush to the bathroom all the time was probably not a turn-on for him, she thought ruefully. But, with sex off the agenda, a different relationship had developed between them and they had become good friends. To Clare’s surprise, Diego talked openly about his deprived childhood and the terrible two years he had spent in prison, and speaking about his horrifying experiences seemed to be cathartic for him.

He had asked Clare to work on ideas for a publicity campaign to raise money for the Future Bright Foundation, and she had been glad of something to do to take her mind off feeling sick. The charity project was also the reason she had given her father to explain why she could not return to England and resume her role as head of A-Star PR. She had decided not to tell her parents about her pregnancy until she had some idea of what would happen between her and Diego. Rory Marchant had sounded happier than he had for a long time as he’d explained that her mother’s health had improved significantly and he was now able to go back to running the agency.

Another surprise had been the news that Brazil’s most wanted criminal, Rodrigo Hernandez, known as Rigo, had been arrested for drug trafficking. A few days ago the Estrela Rosa, the Rose Star Diamond, had been returned to Diego. But Clare knew he was not thinking of the diamond as they walked through the hospice where, he had learned two days ago, his mother was a patient.

He had hired a team of private detectives to search for his mother but, as the weeks had gone by, Clare had secretly begun to despair that Shayla Cazorra would ever be found, and Diego would never discover what had really happened when he had been a teenager. Whatever had taken place that night twenty years ago would not alter her belief that Diego had been a victim of circumstance, a boy who had been trying to protect his mother. She trusted the man who had protected her since she had come to Brazil, and she could no longer deny to herself that she loved him.

She pulled her mind back to the present as a nurse stepped out of a room and greeted them. ‘Your mother is awake, Mr Cazorra, and she is anxious to see you.’

Clare gave his arm a gentle squeeze. ‘I’ll go and sit in the waiting room while you talk to your mother.’

‘I’d like you to meet her.’ His jaw was rigid. ‘I intend to tell her about the baby and this is perhaps the only chance for her to see you.’ He glanced at the nurse, who gave a nod of confirmation.

‘Your mother’s cancer is very advanced and I am sorry to have to tell you that she does not have long to live.’

They went into the room. The woman lying in the bed was desperately thin and her dark hair was streaked with grey. Clare could see no resemblance between her and Diego, but Shayla Cazorra held out her bony hand to her son, who she had not seen for two decades.

‘Diego,
meu filho. Me perdoe
,’ she whispered.

‘Mãe.’
Diego did not know how he had expected to feel when he met his mother after so many years. He had thought of her so often, especially while he was in prison, and he’d felt angry that she had disappeared when he’d needed her. But hearing her call him
my son
evoked an ache in his chest. He would not have recognised the husk of a woman who looked so frail lying on the pillows. Instinctively he knew she had days rather than weeks to live.

‘
Mãe
, this is Clare.’ He spoke in Portuguese, guessing that his mother had not learned to speak English since he’d last seen her. ‘We are going to have a baby.’

Shayla’s face crumpled.
‘Me perdoe,’
she said again, tears sliding down her cheeks.

Diego could feel his heart thudding beneath his ribs. ‘
Me perdoe
means
forgive me
,’ he translated quietly for Clare. He took his mother’s hand in his and felt her bones beneath her papery skin. ‘Why do you want me to forgive you?’ he asked her gently.

Instead of replying, she lifted up her other hand from the bed and gave him a piece of paper which he saw was a handwritten letter. For a moment he hesitated, afraid to read it. Would he finally learn the truth about himself? He felt sick. What if his mother’s letter confirmed that he had killed a man years ago? A small hand slipped into his and he glanced at Clare and thought, as he often did, that he could drown in her deep blue eyes.

‘I think your mother wants you to read the letter,’ she urged softly.

Taking a deep breath, Diego skimmed the words his mother had written, once, twice.
‘Deus...’
His voice was choked with emotion.

‘What does it say?’ Clare asked tautly.

‘She killed him.’
He read the letter a third time. ‘While I was fighting with the man I’d found beating my mother, she hit him on the back of his head with a chair leg. She realised he was dead. I was unconscious from the punch he’d landed on me just before she attacked him. Someone had called the police, and she panicked and told them I had killed the guy while I’d been in a manic rage.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘She explains in the letter that she thought I would be sent to a youth detention centre, but she knew she would spend the rest of her life in prison and she was scared of being locked up in a cell.’

Diego’s throat ached and he felt an unfamiliar sting of tears in his eyes. For twenty years he had been haunted by the idea that he could be a murderer, and all the time he had been innocent. Tears were sliding down his mother’s face and his gut clenched. She hadn’t been much of a mother, but she hadn’t had much of a life after his father had seduced her and abandoned her when she fell pregnant, Diego thought. He looked into his heart and found no anger, just pity.

‘Mãe...’
He took a tissue from the bedside cabinet and wiped away her tears.
‘Eu perdoô voce.’
I forgive you.

He did not see Clare wipe tears from her eyes as she quietly left the room.

* * *

The flight from Belo Horizonte back to Rio took an hour, and it was late afternoon when the limousine that had collected them from the airport drew up outside the Cazorra skyscraper. ‘Are you sure you didn’t want to stay at the hospice with your mother?’ Clare asked as they walked across the foyer.

Diego shook his head. ‘We both said everything we needed to say.’ His mother had fallen asleep while he’d sat with her, and the nurse had assured him that Shayla was sleeping peacefully for the first time since she had been admitted to the hospice.

‘You don’t have to come in the lift with me,’ Clare said as he followed her into the elevator. ‘I know you prefer to take the stairs.’

The lift door closed and Diego waited to feel the familiar tightness in his chest, the sensation that he couldn’t breathe. But nothing happened. He could breathe normally. He thought of the time Clare had helped him cope with his claustrophobia by kissing him. Her distraction method had certainly worked, and the memory of the passion that had blazed between them had a predictable effect on his body.

They had not made love for over two months while she had been suffering with sickness caused by her pregnancy. He had felt guilty that it was his fault she was so pale and fragile, but in the last few days the nausea had lessened and now she looked radiant. There was colour in her cheeks again and her auburn hair shone like silk. To anyone else her pregnancy was not yet visible, but Diego noted that her breasts were fuller and there was a new voluptuousness to her body that made him long to undress her and explore her lush curves.

‘How do you feel?’ she asked innocently.

Deus
, he wasn’t going to admit he was so turned on by his fantasies of having sex with her that he was surprised she did not notice the bulge of his erection beneath his trousers.

‘You must feel relieved now your mother has told you the truth, that you didn’t kill a man.’

‘I’m still stunned,’ Diego admitted. ‘For twenty years I was afraid that I was capable of extreme violence, and I avoided close relationships because I didn’t trust myself. Now it’s as though a huge weight has been lifted off me and I feel free.’ Life suddenly seemed full of possibilities and for the first time in his life he was excited by the future, Diego realised.

As he looked at Clare, he was aware of a strange constriction in his chest that was not caused by his claustrophobia. His gaze lowered to the very faint swell of her stomach and the ache in his heart intensified as he visualised the scan image of their baby that he had seen on the ultrasound screen a week ago.

Emotions flooded through him, but he had spent twenty years suppressing his emotions and he was almost afraid of the strength of his feelings. He needed to regain control of himself and take charge of the future.

‘We need to talk, and make plans,’ he said gruffly. ‘First off, you need to sign the document so that we can register our intent to marry.’ He frowned as the lift halted unexpectedly at the eighth floor, which was where the Cazorra Corporation’s offices were. The doors opened and a huge cheer went up from the dozens of members of staff who were crowded around the lift entrance.

‘What’s going on?’ Diego demanded as his PA stepped forwards.

‘The figures for DC Diamonds’ first two months of trading have been issued, and profits are double what they were predicted to be,’ Juliana explained. ‘I’m sure you haven’t forgotten that you had arranged for all the staff to be paid a bonus today. Everyone wanted to say thank you.’ She had to raise her voice above the loud cheer that went up from the crowd.

Diego glanced at the sheet of figures Juliana had given him and grinned. ‘The profits made by the Cazorra Corporation’s newest venture are certainly something to celebrate with champagne.’

The staff gave another cheer, someone was blowing into a
vuvuzela
—a long plastic trumpet more usually heard at football matches. Champagne corks shot into the air and Diego was pulled into the party.

Clare was left alone in the lift. She watched Diego chatting with Juliana before he was mobbed by some of the dancers from his nightclub, who crowded round him. The sound of his laughter was audible above the babble of voices and he looked more relaxed and happier than Clare had ever seen him. But moments ago he had been frowning when he’d mentioned the marriage application document, which she had yet to sign.

She pressed a button to close the doors, and as the lift ascended to the top floor she pictured Diego surrounded by his staff who clearly adored him. He had looked as if a weight really had been lifted from him. For the first time since he had been freed from prison he was truly free.

* * *

Diego sipped his champagne and looked around the open-plan office for Clare. He smiled as he watched his staff enjoying the impromptu party, but he could not see her auburn hair amid the crowd, and when he asked his PA if she’d seen her, Juliana shook her head.

He wanted to celebrate DC Diamonds’ success with her. After all, it was Clare’s brilliant PR campaign to promote the jewellery shop that was responsible for the excellent profits. He owed her so much. Without her support he would not have made another attempt to find his mother and he would have spent the rest of his life believing he had once acted with such violence that he had killed a man.

He understood now that he had deliberately avoided close relationships because he had been afraid of hurting someone he cared about if he ever lost his temper. But now that fear had gone, just as his irrational fear of confined spaces had disappeared. When he had told Clare he felt free, he hadn’t fully realised the implications of his newfound freedom. He did now. He was free to admit to the emotions surging through him, free to open his heart to love.

The lift took him swiftly up to the penthouse and he checked in the lounge and library before he hurried down the hallway to Clare’s bedroom. His heart was pounding with a mixture of nerves and hopeful anticipation, but when he knocked on the door and entered her room he felt a jolt of surprise that turned to unease as he saw her rucksack on the bed.

She walked through from her sitting room and Diego’s confusion deepened at the sight of her in the khaki shorts and T-shirt that she had been wearing when they had escaped from Torrente. His gaze zoomed to her passport that she was holding and he guessed from her pink-rimmed eyes that she had been crying. That shocked him the most. He had never seen her cry before, even when she had been scared by the python in the rainforest and terrified by the far more dangerous snake Rigo.

He wanted to stride across the room and pull her into his arms, but two decades of hiding his feelings was a hard habit to break, and he leaned nonchalantly against the door frame and folded his arms over his chest. ‘I see you found your passport in my room, although I don’t know why you need it. I’m also curious about why you are wearing your old clothes. Are we going to take another trip through the rainforest? I’ll get my hat.’