He was already getting to know Ramirez, he noted, and didn’t like it—hated it, in fact.
‘But he’s dead—’
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘But still thoroughly enjoying himself at my and my half-brothers’ expense.’ He heaved in a taut breath. ‘You see, he’s been keeping tabs on all three of us for years.’
It was like being invaded—spied upon by some faceless stalker. Ramirez knew things about Anton that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. What schools he’d attended, his academic success. He knew about every damn trophy he’d won on the sports field, every major deal in business he’d pulled off. He even knew about all those other trophies he’d notched up in that other sporting arena—his bed.
‘He sees us as three sex-obsessed chips off the old block,’ he summed up with a white-toothed razor slice. ‘So, in his wisdom, he means to teach my brothers and me a lesson in life that apparently he did not grasp until he was too old and it was too late to change what he was.’
He saw his mother wince at the intimacy already honing his tone when he referred to his brothers. Odd. A nerve flicked in his jaw. But he felt that intimacy in some deep place inside him, like a newly formed artery feeding the blood link, and it was hungry for more.
‘Ramirez was loaded,’ he continued. ‘And we are not talking about a few paltry million here. He owned diamond mines, emerald mines, some of the richest oil fields in Brazil…’ The fact that he could see from their lowered expressions he was telling them things they already knew did not make him feel any better about this. ‘We—his three sons—get to share the booty,’ he explained with sarcastic bite. ‘So long as we fulfil several conditions our dear departed sleazy coward of a father has set out in his will.’
‘Enrique was not sleazy,’ his mother protested.
‘What was he, then?’ Anton asked.
‘N-nice, h-handsome—like you—charming…’
His mother was still fond of the bastard! Another explosion began to gather.
Maximilian shifted in his seat. ‘What kind of conditions?’ he questioned.
Anton fought the explosion back down again.
‘I can only speak for myself, because that’s all that’s referred to here,’ he said. Then a strange kind of smile hit his mouth. ‘I am to mend my philandering ways,’ he enlightened. ‘Get responsible, find a wife, settle down, produce legitimate progeny—’
‘Good God!’ Max expelled. ‘The man’s brain must have been addled by the time he popped it!’
Coming from a confirmed bachelor, his uncle’s attitude made sense.
‘It makes me wonder what my brothers need to do before they win the right to meet me.’
‘You don’t need to do anything, querido,’ his mother inserted. ‘You don’t need his money. You don’t need any of—’
‘I don’t want his damn money; I want to meet my half-brothers!’ Anton lashed out, and watched his mother flinch, despised himself for it, despised Ramirez for doing this to them all. His mother was right, he didn’t need to do anything. But, knowing that did not alter the fact that he felt bloody cheated—denied of the right to know so many things about himself.
He would not be denied this chance to know his own flesh and blood—no matter what the cost!
The cost.
His gaze flicked back to the papers spread out in front of him, green eyes glassing over as he re-read the paragraph in which Ramirez accused him of running out on a woman six years ago, leaving her in dire straits. He was insisting that Anton make reparation and was giving him six months in which to do it. He was then expected to turn up at some lawyer’s office in Rio with this woman as his wife, ripe with his child, or he would never know his brothers and Anton’s share in his birthright would go to her instead.
‘So w-what are you going to do?’ his mother questioned.
Anton didn’t hear her. He was too busy staring at the name typed in bold print that was leaping at him off the page—along with a vision of waist-length black hair with a sexy loose spiral twist framing a small heart-shaped face with a pointed little chin, a lush red provocative mouth, and a pair of she-devil fiery dark eyes that had a habit of turning into burning rubies when she was—
‘Anton…?’
His eyes lifted automatically at that appealing note in his mother’s voice, but he wasn’t seeing her because he was seeing that other woman who had been so instrumental in the making of him. His body was burning, filling with the deep grinding pulse of uncontrolled sexual power that had always been his response whenever he let—
‘Anton, please tell us what you intend to do about this!’ his mother begged.
‘Carry out his wishes,’ he heard himself utter, as cold and hard as death.
‘What—get married at some dead man’s behest?’ his uncle Max gasped in horror. ‘Are you crazy, boy?’
Stark staring mad—but up for it, Anton thought as the heat in him grew and grew. He was going to hunt down, trap and then marry the lying little tramp called Cristina Marques and make her life a sexual hell…