She was, in other words, a mess.
And she was beautiful. So beautiful, she made his heart ache.
"Yara," she said, without looking around, "quem estα aν? Is it the man with the truck? If it is-"
"Hello, Gabriella."
Gabriella sprang to her feet so quickly that she kicked over a stack of books piled on the floor.
That voice. She had never expected to hear it again. Never wanted to hear it again-and yet, the sound of it made her heartbeat quicken. And when she turned and saw Dante, the joy that swept through her was indescribable.
The intensity of it shocked her. Joy? For what? This man meant nothing to her. She meant nothing to him. She put her hand to her temple, where last night's headache had taken up what felt like permanent residence.
She was coming down with something, and was that not perfect timing?
This was even worse timing. That Dante should turn up again …
And why was he looking at her that way? As if she were a … a specimen in a zoo. She was a mess; she knew it. She'd dressed for the work of the day. A torn shirt. Ragged jeans. In New York, she had dressed for him, she had done everything for him because she had been fool enough to think she mattered to him.
But she never had.
She'd just been another of the endless string of shadow women who moved through his life, and if she'd lasted a little longer than most, so what? It had all come to nothing in the end.
Dante had never known the real her.
But she knew the real Dante Orsini. The man who had it all, who never looked back, who believed commitment to a relationship didn't involve anything deeper than temporary exclusivity and pricey gifts, although there had been times like that one weekend, that lovely, glorious weekend …
"What are you doing?"
He was looking from her to the box of dusty books, scowling as if he'd discovered something unpleasant on his shoe. It made her angry. Everything about him made her angry, especially after last night. To think she'd been fool enough to believe he'd really wanted to help her …
She blew an errant curl off her forehead.
"I have a better question," she said coldly. "What are you doing here?"
He flashed a quick smile. "Such a warm greeting."
Gabriella narrowed her eyes. "My lawyer told me you went back to New York."
"Your lawyer," he said, his mouth twisting. "Is that what you think that double-dealing bastard is?"
"Answer my question. Why didn't you return to the States?"
"I started to." He moved slowly toward her. "But I thought things over and I realized … I decided to come back and try to sort things out."
"There's nothing to sort out. Not anymore." Her chin rose. "Senhor de Souza explained everything to me. You chose not to buy the fazenda after all, and Ferrantes-"
"De Souza's a liar!"
"Is he?" Her chin rose. "Then why is Ferrantes the new owner of Viera y Filho?"
"He's the new owner because your wonderful attorney sold you out! He and Ferrantes and the bank sneaked a joker into the deck. I didn't know a damned thing about it until I saw de Souza an hour ago."
She gave a weary shrug. "It does not matter. You had already decided not to give the ranch to me. You made that clear. And that was for the best. It was a mistake for me to have asked such a thing of you."
"It wasn't a mistake, dammit! You had every right to ask. You and I were-we were close, once."
"No," she said stiffly, "we were not close. We were a man and a woman who came together in bed. Nothing more."
She was right. That was how it had been, how he had wanted it. Then why did hearing those words make him so angry? Like it or not, there'd been more between them than sex. Like the weekend they'd gone away to his house in Connecticut, the one Nick had dragged him north to look at and he'd ended up buying instead of Nick. He'd planned two long days and nights of making love, but the house hadn't cooperated. It had been built in the 1600s, and that weekend every piece of it decided to admit its age. You turned a faucet, the indoor plumbing-installed in the 1800s-coughed once and that was it. You turned on the furnace, vintage early 1900s, and nothing happened. The refrigerator-a handsome 1950s antique-groaned and died. And then there was the final insult: a storm sprang up and rain found a hole in the roof, right over their bed.
So, no. There had not been two days and nights of endless sex … but they'd had a wonderful time, anyway.
He'd turned up an old Scrabble set and she'd beaten him, three games running. She'd beaten him at gin, too, and at checkers, and he'd sighed and hung his head and talked her into one more game of everything, Scrabble and gin and checkers, winner take all, and when he won each and every time, she accused him of letting her win the first time around and he grinned, pulled her into his arms and said the "all" he wanted was her, naked in front of the fireplace … .
Dammit, what did old memories have to do with anything? He'd come here to do exactly what he'd said. To sort things out, nothing more.
"There's no sense debating our relationship," he said gruffly.
"I agree. So if that is what you came here to do-"
"It isn't. I was on my way home and then I began to think about things."
"What things?"
Dante looked at the woman who'd let him into the house. She stood, arms folded over her ample bosom, glaring at him as if he were here to steal the family silver.
"Do me a favor, okay? Ask your guard dog to step out of the room."
Gabriella laughed. Yara, a native of the Pantanal, did look as if she was standing guard. She'd stood that same way early this morning, when Ferrantes had come by, unannounced, with his ugly news.
Dante, for all his faults, was not Andre. He had hurt her heart once, he had even managed to hurt it again yesterday, but he would never hurt her physically.
She told that to Yara. "You can leave us alone," she said, in a rapid burst of Portuguese. "This man will not hurt me."
Yara's bushy eyebrows drew together. "What you mean is that he will not strike you." Gabriella smiled at the old woman's wisdom.
"No. He will not."
"But he will hurt you in other ways."
Gabriella shook her head. "He no longer has that kind of power over me."
Yara made a sound that made it clear she did not believe that. Still, she threw Dante one last meaningful look and left the room. Gabriella wiped her dusty hands on her jeans and looked at Dante.
"Now," she said, "tell me why you have come here."
Dante took a deep breath. Where to start? He thought of all the tough business meetings he'd survived, of how there was always the right thing to say and the right way to say it, knew that this was going to be more difficult than any of those, and that the only way to handle it was head-on.
"I came back because of the boy. Daniel."
Gabriella raised an eyebrow. "This time he has a name?"
"To tell you that … that I accept responsibility for him."
"He has a name-and you've had a change in attitude. How interesting."
"Dammit, you're not making this easy … "
"Did you expect that I would? Get to the point, please. I have much to do."
Dante took another deep breath. "I had time to think. And I realized that I want to do the right thing for him. For you both. If he's my son-"
"If?" she said coldly. "If he is your son?"
"Gabriella, you know what I mean."
"No. I do not. Why don't you explain it to me?"
"Try looking at this from my vantage point. You walked out. I didn't hear a word from you, and all of a sudden here's this child-"
She moved quickly, covering the distance between them before he could think, and lifted her furious face to his.
"You keep saying that I walked out. I did not. You did the walking, senhor. And no, you did not hear a word from me. Why would you? What could we have said that had not already been said by you that night you sent me away?"
"All right." His mouth thinned. "Have it your way. This has to do with the baby. With Daniel. If he's mine-"
"Stop saying that! Do you think I would lie about such a thing? That I would have slept with another man after-"
"Would you?" Dante's voice was rough. "Would you have slept with another man after you'd been with me?" He moved forward quickly, framed her face with his hands, forced her to look up at him. "Because I don't want to think of you that way, Gabriella, I don't want to think of you in someone else's bed with your hands on him the way they used to be on me, your mouth on his, your skin hot against his."