In the Brazilian's Debt(16)

                As Danny groaned the polo player behind them, muddy and with his hair tousled from a game, exclaimed, ‘Wake up and move along, will you? Hungry people are waiting to be fed here.’

                ‘Calm down, man mountain,’ Danny flashed, rounding on him. ‘We’re hungry too.’

                ‘Then hurry up and choose your food, fresh meat—’

                ‘Watch it, nuts for brains, or it’ll be your meat on the grill,’ Danny fired back.

                ‘I love your ladylike way with words,’ Lizzie murmured as the good-looking guy stared down at Danny with amusement.

                ‘Are you all like this back home?’ he demanded, directing the question at Danny.

                ‘Believe it,’ Danny snapped, exchanging an appreciative look with Lizzie.

                ‘Tiago,’ Lizzie confirmed in a discreet murmur. ‘One of the top players. You must have seen him on the cover of Polo Times? Bad. Very bad.’

                ‘Excellent,’ Danny mouthed.

                ‘That’s your Christmas present sorted.’

                ‘Promise?’

                ‘It’s a deal,’ Lizzie confirmed.

                Danny was about to say something smart back, but her words choked off abruptly when she saw the expression on Lizzie’s face. Nothing more needed to be said. Chico Fernandez had just walked into the cookhouse.





                                      CHAPTER FOUR

                LIZZIE DIDN’T NEED to look at Chico to know he was there when she could feel him in every fibre of her being. Determined not be distracted by the sudden overload of testosterone, she calmly gave her order to the chef. ‘Tomatoes, eggplant, fries, and—’

                ‘And the biggest steak you’ve got,’ a husky male voice interrupted.

                Having casually jumped the queue, Chico was handed a plate already loaded with every delicacy his uniformed chefs could provide. ‘I don’t want my new recruits fainting on the job,’ he explained. ‘Here—take this.’ He pressed his own plate of food into Lizzie’s hands. ‘Well?’ he demanded impatiently. ‘Don’t stand there staring at it. Eat before it gets cold.’

                ‘I’m a vegetarian.’

                ‘Vegan?’

                ‘No.’

                ‘Slap a hunk of cheese onto her plate,’ he ordered the chefs, swapping plates.

                Lizzie passed the plate forward to the waiting chef. ‘Cheese omelette, please.’

                Damn, if she didn’t sound like the prissiest food freak on the planet, but no way was she being told what she could eat. Chico Fernandez might rule what she did as a student, but her downtime was her own. Tilting her chin at a determined angle, she joined Danny at a table by the window where they could chat undisturbed—only to discover that Danny, like everyone else in the cookhouse, had been watching Lizzie’s exchange with Chico with interest. Didn’t anyone ever take him on? Lizzie wondered.

                ‘Do you have to provoke him?’ Danny demanded.

                ‘Why not? It’s fun. I had to stand up to him. Dinosaur—trying to make me eat his plate of flesh.’ She flashed a glance at Chico’s table, knowing it was more than Chico’s dietary concerns for her. These brief encounters with him were bringing it all back to her—the times they’d shared, the jokes they’d told, the gossip they’d exchanged, and the wild rides they’d enjoyed through the magical glens of Scotland. And weighted against that—very heavily weighted against that—was the pain he’d caused her, and that was like a reopened wound as if Chico deserting her had only happened yesterday. She’d gone downstairs on the morning he left to find all the other grooms in the stable yard at Rottingdean, but no sign of Chico. She could still feel the sickening blow of incredulity when they told her he’d gone back to Brazil with Eduardo. She couldn’t believe them—and now? Looking back, she had to admit her feelings all those years ago had been the overreaction of a hormonal teenage girl.