‘No.’ Her voice sounded strained, but she found a smile to reassure Gabe.
‘You must love your job to make it everything,’ he said, staring at her keenly.
‘Yes, I do.’ It helped her to live with the memories by taking up so much of her time, and she was looking forward to escaping the safety net Luc had always provided for her. She wanted to taste life, to try and learn to live with the past, and where better to do that than here on the pampas she had almost forgotten she loved so much?
‘Hey, Dante!’
Her heart leapt into her mouth as she swung around to follow Gabe’s greeting. She was just in time to see Dante vault a fence as he went to check on some horses in the paddock.
His virility shocked her. How could she have forgotten?
She hadn’t forgotten, but in this setting it seemed more pronounced than ever. Dante was brutally masculine, so strong and hard-muscled—and yet so gentle and affectionate towards the horse, she noticed. Animals loved him, and she loved watching his interaction with them. There was nothing left of the polished businessman here, or even the startlingly good-looking playboy featured in so many magazines. Dante was a gaucho through and through, and here on his fazenda he was at home, back in control of his land.
She tensed as he raised a hand to acknowledge Gabe, noticing how Dante’s black stare remained fixed on her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
KARINA WAS REALLY HERE. Forget the checks he usually made on his return to the ranch. Gabe could handle them. Dante felt alive—more alive than ever before. His senses were on full alert, with every instinct he possessed honed to the sharpest point. Having Karina on his ranch and under his roof was like warm honey singing through his veins. They’d been apart too long. And here there could only be truth between them. The pampas was too vast, too beautiful, too unforgiving to allow for human shortcomings. It revealed and exposed. It was harsh and true. It brought out the best in people...and the worst.
Seeing Karina here took him back to the past, a place he usually avoided. It was never easy to remember the way his father had treated his mother, not even troubling to hide his countless infidelities. His father had seen these as proof of his virility, rather than a tragedy that had broken his mother’s heart. He glanced at the ranch house his mother had called home, and which he had renovated in her memory, knowing the housekeeper would be settling Karina in, and she would be meeting up with the happy chaos that characterised his lifestyle. He smiled to himself as he wondered what she’d make of it.
* * *
The housekeeper welcomed Karina into a vaulted hallway where the noise levels were off the scale. Gabe was right. There were hordes of children. Which was the last thing she had expected of Dante.
‘Descuplas! My apologies!’ the housekeeper, who had introduced herself as Maria, exclaimed with an indulgent laugh as she took hold of Karina’s arm to steer her out of the way of a makeshift raft on wheels manned by several youngsters. ‘Today is a very special day. The master is home and everyone is excited.’
Dante, the master of all he surveyed? Karina smiled, admitting to herself that she felt completely at home here in the chaos. Riding tack and footballs, along with discarded toys and a number of junior bicycles piled up in a heap competed for space with sturdy antique furniture, polished to within an inch of its life.
‘So?’ She jumped at the sound of the deep male voice. ‘What do you think of my home, Karina? Do you approve?’
‘Dante!’ She spun on her heel. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here today.’
‘Why?’ He shrugged. ‘This is my home.’
‘Gabe said—’ She bit her tongue and let it go. Dante was entitled to change his mind.
‘Do you like what I’ve done with the house?’ he prompted, giving her a look that made her stomach clench with pleasure rather than alarm.
He was talking about the mess, which she didn’t care about at all. It was a happy home. She could feel that right away. And that was all that mattered.
‘As it happens, I like it a lot,’ she said.
‘Good.’
Dante’s deep, husky voice shivered through her like a hot knife through melting meringue. His wicked smile was something she hadn’t seen enough of, though he was making it increasingly hard for her to confine her thoughts to business. It didn’t help that he was as tall and as dark and as devastatingly handsome as he’d ever been—but not quite so menacing now that he had a group of children clinging to his legs.