Silence fell between them. She wondered if he was judging her for her situation, then brushed off the thought with disgust. She had far bigger problems in her life than worrying about the opinion of a powerful man who had never known the true cruelty of life at the bottom of the pecking order. He might think her in the habit of random flings, but that seemed preferable to the embarrassing truth.
The only man she’d ever let her guard down with was standing five feet away from her.
And he didn’t remember a single thing.
She reached out and laid one hand on the small cot beside the bed, reminding herself of the tiny life that now relied on her strength. She needed to convince Duarte to leave, to forget all about her and Liam. Once that part was done, she would get back to her original plan.
Her heart seemed to twinge with the pain of knowing she would never see him again, but she forced the pain away, knowing she must survive losing him all over again for the sake of her son.
She had to.
‘You said you wanted details about what happened that night? I’ll write down everything I can remember and send it to you.’ She spoke quickly. ‘I’ll tell you everything you need to know.’
Strong arms folded over an even more powerful chest as he stared down at her. Nora ignored the flare of regret screaming within her. The urge to confess everything and beg him to take her and Liam away from Rio, away from the reach of her father and the memories of all the mistakes she’d made, bubbled up inside her.
But she couldn’t trust him—not after everything that had happened. She couldn’t
put her child’s future in his hands, or gamble on the hope that he might be merciful. She needed to be strong, even if it meant doing something that felt fundamentally wrong to her on every level.
‘Why do you act as though you are afraid of me?’ Duarte asked darkly, his jaw tight enough to cut through steel. ‘I pose no danger to you. You can trust me.’
‘I trust no one—especially not men like you.’ The words slipped from her mouth and she saw them land, anchoring him to the spot. ‘Please...just leave.’
She closed her eyes and lay back against the pillows, willing him away along with the one million worries that had come with his reappearance in her life. She lost track of how long she lay there, eyes closed tight against the sight of him. She fought against the need to reach out and beg him to stay, to breathe in the scent of him one last time.
When she opened her eyes again he was gone.
She didn’t cry, but the walls of the hospital room blurred into one wide canvas of beige and white as she stared upwards into nothingness.
If this was what shock felt like, she welcomed it—welcomed the cold that set into her fingers and the heavy exhaustion deep in her bones.
She had no idea how long she stared up at the ceiling before she drifted off to sleep, one hand still tightly clutching the railing of her son’s cot at her bedside.
Duarte left the hospital in a foul mood, instructing one of his guards to remain for surveillance. Whether that was to protect Nora Beckett or to ensure she didn’t try to disappear he didn’t quite know yet. But one thing was for sure: his mystery woman was deeply afraid of something. And, even though it made no sense, he had the strangest feeling that that something might be him.
The drive out of the city and high up into the hills to his modern villa passed in a blur. He had purchased the house a few years ago, but had very few memories of staying there. It was a visual masterpiece of clean lines and open living spaces, designed by an award-winning architect. Every feature took the natural surroundings into account, so that the building seemed to slot effortlessly into the rocky mountain face that surrounded it.
As a man who had taught himself to conceptualise and build ships just by observing the masters and trusting his feeling for what was right, he had a deep appreciation of design in all its forms. Usually the sight of this home filled him with awe and appreciation for such a feat of skilled, thoughtful engineering. But today he just saw a load of concrete and glass.
Duarte parked in the underground garage and found himself staring at the wall, processing the turn his day had taken in just a few short hours. He felt the sudden urge to grab a full bottle of strong cachaça and switch his mind off. To another man, the lure of getting rip-roaring drunk might have been attractive after a day like he’d had. But he was not another man, he reminded himself.
Perhaps he should have gone into the city, to one of the trendy upscale night spots along the coast. The bars would be teeming with beautiful women only too happy to help a man like him forget his troubles... But he doubted he’d even remember how to chat up a woman it had been so long.
Since he’d woken in the hospital all those months ago his days had been consumed only by recovery and, more recently, revenge. But maybe it was exactly what he needed. To indulge himself, to shake off the edge that had refused to pass since his dreams of the redhead began. Dreams of the woman who had saved him.
Nora.
He shook off the thought of her and made his way into the spacious entrance hall just as his phone began to ring. He looked at the name on the screen and answered the call from his father’s oldest friend with a weary smile.
‘Angelus—tudo bem?’
The old man was eager to hear about his meeting with the mystery redhead and apologised for believing Duarte had simply imagined the woman.
‘She must have been the one to alert me that night,’ Fiero mused, not needing to elaborate any further. They both knew what night he referred to. ‘I got a text from your personal phone number simply stating the address of that shipping yard and the fact that you were in danger. You and Valerio had been missing for seven days at that point.’
Duarte swallowed his frustration at his lack of memories of his captivity. He had no clue as to what had occurred other than the scars that covered his body and the haunted look in Valerio’s eyes. His best friend had refused to go into detail about whatever had befallen them during their long days and nights of captivity, stating that he was better off not knowing.
Nora had saved him—but why had she disappeared?