Returning to Claim His Heir

CHAPTER ONE

IT WASN’T OFTEN that a man could say he’d looked upon his own grave. Duarte Avelar stood frozen in the sleepy English village graveyard, staring at the elegant family crypt where he and his twin sister had laid their beloved parents to rest seven years before.

But now a third name had been added to the marble plaque.

His own.

Dried wreaths and bouquets lined the resting place, with small notecards and offerings of condolences from friends and business colleagues alike. He’d been told his memorial service had been a grand affair, filled with Europe’s wealthy elite, come to pay their respects to one of their favourite billionaire playboys.

His mind conjured up an image of his twin sister, Dani, accepting their sympathies, standing in this very spot to watch as they lowered an empty coffin into the ground...

His stomach lurched, nausea burning as he turned away and moved swiftly through the empty cemetery grounds. A sleek black car awaited him outside the gates, the young male chauffeur studiously staring at the wet ground as he held the door open. A pair of hulking bodyguards in plain clothes stood nearby, quietly focused on monitoring the surrounding countryside.

He had once enjoyed a certain level of familiarity with his staff. Had prided himself on being considered a likeable employer, easy-going and approachable. And yet for the past two weeks, since his shock return, he had been a pariah. It seemed everyone had been forewarned of his unpredictable temperament and had decided that ignoring him was the safest option.

Still, he caught them trying not to stare at the thick crosshatched scarring that spanned his face from the centre of his left eyebrow to the tip of his ear. He saw their stricken gazes upon seeing the scars along the rest of his torso when he went for his twice-daily swim.

He had gone from being the kind of man who could command a boardroom and charm any woman in his path to being one who avoided his own staff so as not to make them nervous.

His sister had managed the media, laying down an embargo for a couple of weeks until Duarte was ready for the attention. He had walked out of their first press conference less than an hour ago, knowing he hadn’t been ready, but there was nothing to be done now.

The press had called him a walking ghost, a man returned from the dead. They had jumped at the chance to paint him as some kind of hero to fit their own sensational narratives.

No one seemed to understand that his survival was not something he wished to be celebrated for. Not when he was sure that his disappearance and the suffering he had endured had been entirely his own fault.

By rights, he should be dead.

He sat heavily against the back seat of the car, running his hand along the length of the long scar that traced the side of his head above his ear. It turned out that the nightmarish recovery process he’d endured after a gunshot wound to the head had been child’s play compared with trying to fit back into a world where Duarte Avelar had ceased to exist.

As they drove away he watched the sun shine over the picturesque countryside hamlet that his family had adopted as their home after moving from Brazil. As a young boy he had been angry and homesick, barely even ten years old, but this quiet place had soon become home. Even when he had made his fortune, owning homes in every corner of the world, nothing had compared to the feeling of this small slice of peace and paradise.

Now...nowhere felt like home.

Everything was wrong. He was wrong.

He saw it in the glances his sister shared with Valerio, his business partner and best friend. They had witnessed his shifting moods, his restless lack of focus and his irritation with the debilitating

headaches that could hit at any moment.

Two weeks previously, when they had been informed that he had miraculously survived, they’d both rushed to where he’d been kept, at an elite private medical facility on a tiny island off the coast of Brazil. Up until that point he’d had no memory of who he was, and had been singularly focused on rebuilding the physical strength he had lost during the months he’d spent confined to a hospital bed.

Talking to them had been painful, but he had started to recover some memories with their help. Coming back to England had been Dani’s idea, and he had seen her eyes fill with hope that he would somehow come back to their childhood home and magically be restored to his former self.

It had worked to a certain extent. With their help, the gaps in his memory had begun to fill, but he still felt a strange disconnection from it all. Dani was determined to think positively, but Duarte felt nothing but apathy for the strange world he had re-entered. At times he even longed for the peaceful solitude of his anonymous life on the island, then felt guilt for his own selfishness.

In his absence, so much had changed. With every passing day he continued to be reminded of how people had moved on and adapted, growing over the hole he had left behind. Growing together mostly. He scowled, thinking of the look on his best friend’s face when he’d revealed that in Duarte’s absence he and Dani had fallen in love and were now engaged to be married.

His best friend and his twin sister were going to be man and wife. The fact that their relationship had begun as a measure to protect Dani from the corrupt forces who had been behind his kidnapping had only angered him further.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want them to be happy. But they’d buried him. Mourned him. And then they had moved on—all while he had been trapped alone in a living hell.

His anger was a constant presence and it shamed him. They had done nothing wrong. No one could have known he was still alive. In fact, his father’s oldest friend in Brazil had ensured that no one knew until the time was right.

But Duarte hadn’t told them that part of the story yet... He hadn’t told anybody. Telling the truth behind the events that had led to him and Valerio being captured and tortured at the hands of Brazilian gangsters would mean admitting his own part in what had happened. Revealing the secrets he’d kept from them both. Secrets that now had gaping holes in them, thanks to his memory loss.

Dani had been subtle, but pointed in her questions about when he might feel ready to get back to work. Velamar, their luxury yacht charter company, was just about to open new headquarters in the US and in the Caribbean. It was something that he and Valerio had been building towards for more than a decade. His answers to her repeated questioning had been hostile and he had refused to commit to attending.

After the press conference that morning he’d told them both that he was going back to Rio for a while, to assist with securing one of the Avelar Foundation’s charity developments—a sizeable portfolio of prime urban development sites in Rio De Janeiro, which had been the catalyst for all the trouble he had brought into their lives.

Of course the charity was only one of the reasons he was returning to Rio, but he hadn’t told them that.

Dani had been stone-faced and had walked away from him without a single word. Valerio had been torn between them both, his mouth a grim line as he’d urged Duarte to take a large security detail and be careful.

He knew his sister was hurt by his distant moods, but he felt stifled by her company, by her obvious happiness with Valerio and by her questions about his time in recovery. But he didn’t want to talk—didn’t want to remember the pain of learning to walk again and pushing his broken body to its limits. Not when he was so consumed with bringing down the wealthy criminals behind his ordeal and making sure they paid for their crimes.

The insistent chime of his phone grabbed his attention. The screen showed a text message from an undisclosed number.

We found her.