“Your wife is fine,” the doctor had just told him. “She’s completely recovered. Life can go back to normal.”
He’d offered Rafe a quick man-to-man smile. Rafe knew what the smile meant but it was not anyone’s business that he had no intention of being his wife’s husband in anything but name only.
The jet gained altitude quickly and headed towards the Sierra Gaúcha mountains that separated the endless prairie from the ocean. He watched until it was out of view, then touched his stirrups to his horse’s sides and headed back to the house, and to his office. One of his men ran up and took the horse’s reins from him as Rafe dismounted. He nodded his thanks, automatically slapped the dust from his jeans and went across the patio and into his office.
It was cool inside the house, thanks to high ceilings and slowly revolving fans that cast gentle shadows on the pale cream walls as they stirred life into the torpid air. Rafe drew the chair from his desk, sat down, turned on his computer and began reviewing the records of the last six weeks.
Rio de Ouro was doing well, just as it had been ever since he’d bought the ranch a dozen years ago. His cattle grew fat on the grass of the pampas. His horses had some of the world’s finest bloodlines. And away from the ranch, his varied interests in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were successful beyond anything he’d ever imagined.
“Whatever you touch turns to gold,” Claudia had told him once.
Rafe frowned. That was true, if you judged success by the number on the bottom line of an accounting statement. But if you judged it by his relationship with his wife…
What did that have to do with anything? He had a child he loved, one who would grow up with two parents. That had been his goal, and he had achieved it. Someday, Amy would ride this land beside him and love it as much as he did. His frown eased away; his lips curved in a smile. Surely, a man could not be faulted for taking pleasure from seeing his dreams come to fruition.
After almost an hour, Rafe signed off the files and shut down the computer. He swiveled his chair around so that he was facing the glass doors that led to the patio, tilted back, laced his hands behind his head and let his thoughts drift down the long road he had traveled to get to this time and this place.
Sometimes, even now, he could hardly believe it. He’d almost told that to Carin the night he’d brought her here.
“Where are we?” she’d murmured, her voice husky with sleep as she stirred in his arms.
He’d been holding her ever since she’d begun tossing in her sleep. The nurse he’d hired to accompany them to Brazil had reached for her medical bag.
“Your wife is restless,” she’d said. “I’ll calm her with a sedative.”
My wife, Rafe had thought. He’d watched as the woman took a hypodermic syringe from the bag. “No,” he’d said quickly, “she doesn’t need that.”
Then he’d reached for Carin. She’d gone into his arms with a soft sigh, quieting right away, looping an arm lightly around his neck and laying her head against his shoulder, the way she had the night they met. Rafe had gathered her close against him, feeling not the hot tug of desire in his belly but a sudden fierce protectiveness.
His wife didn’t need a sedative. She needed the feel of a man’s arms around her.
His arms.
He’d held her that way for hours, even after his shoulder began to cramp, telling himself that he was only doing it because it was right. Eventually, he’d dozed off, too, his face against her sweet-smelling hair, his body warm with the heat of hers. And he had dreamed.
He’d dreamed that his bride smiled as he carried her over the threshold of his house; that she came to him in the darkness, dressed in a long gown of sheerest white lace, and pressed her open mouth to his; that she awoke in his arms to tell him how happy she was to be home with him, in the place he’d built with his own hands.
And then he’d awakened, to find Carin stirring in his arms as the plane kissed the ground, to hear her say, “Where are we?” in a tone that implied the answer might well be that he had taken her into the bowels of Hell or the darkest side of the moon.
Rafe rose from his chair and paced to the patio doors.
He knew she hated it here. She hadn’t said it but she said hardly anything to him. Still, he could tell how she felt about Rio de Ouro. It was in her eyes, as she looked out across the endless pampas, in the set of her shoulders as she made her way through the house…but then, he hadn’t expected her to love it. He had brought her here against her wishes. She despised the ranch, the house…
She despised him.
It didn’t matter. He had done what he’d known he must do, for his daughter. As for the ranch—why should he care what Carin thought? He loved it. That was sufficient. He had always loved this place, even before he’d laid eyes on it. This land had been part of him, of his dream, for as long as he could remember.
He had grown up on his mother’s bedtime descriptions of the ranch. Her vision of it, anyway, because she had never seen it, either. His mother had been a dancer in a nightclub in Rio when she met his father, and though Eduardo da Silva had never deigned to bring his mistress to his home, he’d described it to her.
She, in turn, had described it to her son, even long after da Silva had left, even when he was nothing but a memory. She’d told Rafe about the big house, the outbuildings, the endless prairie and the rugged mountains.
Amalia Alvares had given her child a dream.
When Rafe was twelve, his mother died. Of poverty, of despair, of what happens to women who lose their youth and their beauty, and have nothing else to sustain them.
Rafe lived on the streets and on his wits until he was fourteen. One morning, kicked awake by a policeman, cold and hungry but mostly filled with anger at the mother who’d died and left him and the father who’d never acknowledged him, he’d decided to take his destiny into his own hands.
Deus, how could he have been so naive? Skinny, dirty, hiding his fear under a layer of street-smart toughness acquired hustling touristes on the beach at Copacabana, he’d set off for the paradise his mother had described, and for the father he’d never seen.
It had taken him weeks to cover the distance between Rio de Janeiro and the endless prairies and mountains of Rio Grande Do Sul. He hitched rides on carts and in wheezing old trucks, walked until his feet were blistered, begged for food and stole it when his belly was so empty it growled, and slept wherever he could.
Why was he doing this? he’d asked himself, as the miles slipped past.
He’d been sure he knew the answer. He was going to confront the man who was his father.
Rafe took a bright red apple from a silver bowl, tossed it up and caught it. Then he pushed open the patio doors. A rush of afternoon heat enveloped him; he stepped outside, slid the doors closed, and walked slowly to the iron railing that enclosed the patio.
If he’d had a plan beyond that, he couldn’t recall it. Curse Eduardo da Silva? Tell him that the woman he’d once claimed to love was dead? Beat him until he begged for mercy?
Rafe smiled thinly, tossed the apple again and propped one booted foot against the base of the railing.
In the end, he’d done none of that. His long journey ended at a ranch in a state of ruin. Parched land, a handful of bony cows and tired horses. Outbuildings on the verge of collapse, a house with holes in the roof…and an old man, sick, dying, and pitiful.
Rafe had left the place within hours.
Eight years later, he came back. He had lived a lifetime in those years, learning to read and to write, to think with his head and not with his heart and fists. Best of all, he was rich, his pockets filled with the gold he’d panned for in a river hidden deep in the jungle.
And Rio de Ouro, even sadder-looking than before, was for sale.
Rafe sold his gold, put half the money into investments nobody but he believed in, and sank the rest into the purchase of the ranch. To this day, he could recall the sly look on the face of the agent who’d sold it to him.
r /> “You have made an excellent buy, senhor,” he’d said, even though his smile said Rafe was a fool.
“I believe I have,” Rafe had replied politely, and he’d meant it.
He’d gone into the small towns that clung to the foot of the Sierra Gaúcha, to the rougher towns scattered over the pampas, searching for men who were not afraid of hard work. Together, they’d torn down what remained of the da Silva house and built a new one. It was not a dark, Spanish-style fortress like his father’s but a house made of glass and tile, open to the sun, the wind, and the beauty of the land.
They built stables and barns and fences. They burned scrub. And Rafe worked as hard as his men, even after the investments others had sneered at turned into the first of his millions. When a man created his own private world, he wanted his sweat and blood, his pain and his joy, to be part of it.
Time passed. He moved in circles of wealth and power, and he began thinking about the future, and about passing on all he had built. When he met Claudia, things seemed to fall into place. She was charming and beautiful, and came from an old Brazilian family. He assumed she understood the importance of continuity, but the only things she understood were parties and jewels and herself.
He knew they were not right for each other, and he ended their engagement, vowing to be more careful next time.
He’d choose a woman who would cherish the world he’d built.
Rafe stood straight and gazed blindly towards the mountains.