Trying to curb his mounting frustration, he leaned forward, jabbed a button on his phone with an impatient finger and simmered at his desk until Maria appeared.
‘Ask Miss Thacker to join me.’ He spoke in Portuguese, his voice silky smooth, and his fingers drummed a steady rhythm on the table. She had the answers he needed, he was sure of it. It was simply a case of asking the right questions and, up until now, he clearly hadn’t been doing that.
‘Miss Thacker has gone into the forest.’
Little Red Riding Hood, escaping from the wolf.
Rafael’s hand stilled and a frown touched his brows. ‘She’s gone for a swim again?’
Maria shook her head. ‘I don’t think she had a costume with her.’ The housekeeper hesitated. ‘And she looked a little upset.’
Not pausing to question why the opinion of his housekeeper should suddenly matter to him, Rafael shot to his feet, cursing softly. ‘How long ago?’ ‘Maybe half an hour?’
Long enough for her to have got into serious trouble. What had possessed her? Why had she just wandered off like that?
But he knew the answer to that, of course. She’d repeatedly pleaded her innocence and he hadn’t believed her. She’d wandered off because she was upset and he was the one who’d upset her.
By not trusting her.
But why would he have trusted her, he asked himself savagely, when he’d never had reason to trust a single woman in the past?
Without wasting time indulging in the type of analysis and reflection that he considered to be a complete waste of time, Rafael strode out of the lodge and followed the ancient path that led deep into the rainforest. In parts it was barely passable and the tension in his shoulders increased as he contemplated what might have happened to a woman with no experience of the jungle. A woman who was upset and not concentrating.
He called her name but there was no response and he felt something uncomfortable shift inside him as he thought of the dangers of the rainforest.
Venomous spiders, snakes—
And then he gave a silent, self-deprecating laugh as the truth stared him in the face. She’d chosen to face all those rather than risk bumping into him again. So what did that say about him?
That he was a man any decent, honest woman would do well to avoid, and he knew, now, that Grace Thacker was a decent, honest woman. Naïve? Hopeless with figures? Too young and inexperienced to be running a business? Stupid?
Maybe one, if not all, of those things, but dishonest—no.
And this time, when she talked, he was going to listen. Properly. He was going to treat her carefully because clearly she was completely ill-equipped for surviving in the corporate jungle.
Guilt, uncomfortable and unfamiliar, scraped over his nerve-endings and he quickened his pace in the hope that exercise might relieve his growing tension.
He’d warned her, hadn’t he? He’d revealed the man he was right from the start. There was no way she could accuse him of deception or even insincerity.
She’d come to him of her own free will and he wasn’t to blame if she’d imagined something deep inside him that he knew just wasn’t there. Was he responsible for the fact that she’d credited him with a depth of feeling when he knew that there was only emptiness inside him?
Whose fault was that?
His for allowing cynicism to blind him, or hers for allowing naivety to let her imagine qualities that he didn’t possess?
He was so lost in the darkness of his own thoughts that he almost didn’t notice her, sitting on a fallen tree trunk, her face pale.
He gave a low growl. ‘What the hell were you thinking of, walking into the rainforest?’ Anger erupted inside him with explosive force, all his promises to treat her carefully vanishing in his relief at finding her apparently unharmed.
‘Rafael …’ Visibly startled, she began to stand up but then his gaze flickered to something moving above her and he froze, his hand sliding to the stick that he carried in his belt.
‘Stay still!’
He saw her narrow shoulders tense but she did as he ordered and he stepped forward and used the stick to carefully move the black and yellow snake away from her shoulder.
She turned her head slowly, her eyes widening as she focused on the thick, exotically coloured snake that slowly climbed the tree next to her. ‘Is it poisonous?’
‘No. But I didn’t think you’d appreciate a three-metre-long snake snuggling into your lap.’ The glassy pallor of her skin fuelled his temper. ‘It could have been poisonous, Grace.’ More unsettled by that thought than he would have believed possible, he reached down and yanked her to her feet, his eyes blazing into hers.