‘Or something?’ he drawled by return.
Her eyes gave a warning flash. ‘Do you?’ she persisted.
His turn to utter a sigh as he glanced at his watch, then gave a shake of his head. ‘If you’re going to show me around the place then we don’t have time for food and drink. There’s a weather front coming in,’ he explained. ‘I would rather use the helicopter to see Santa Rosa from the air while we can…’
It was a complete refusal to give in to anything, Cristina noted. Standing here, looking at him, stubbornly willing to continue the fight, she caught the signs of tiredness around his eyes, and for the first time the hint of strain playing with the corners of his mouth.
And she surrendered—for now.
Time later to be stubborn again, she told herself, as without another word she turned to seek out Pablo, who was still standing in the shadow of the barn, and ask him to take Luis’s bag into the house.
With a very hooded look at Luis, and a nod of his head to her, Pablo complied. Cristina knew that by the time they arrived back here the whole of Santa Rosa would know that she had been steamrollered by a man.
Luis took off his jacket and with a polite ‘Thank you’ handed it to Pablo to take inside with his bag. By then Cristina had unearthed a bottle of water from the chiller she kept in the truck. Silently she handed the bottle to Luis, and he drank thirstily on the way to the helicopter. Ten minutes later they were in the air, and Cristina was quietly explaining what they could see while he sat beside her, listening, asking shrewd questions and controlling the helicopter as if he had been born to do it.
Which he probably had, she thought ruefully.
Anton listened to the way her voice began to soften as she described what lay beneath them. And he understood why her voice did that. Santa Rosa was a stunning place of breathtaking contrasts.
They flew over wide open plains scattered with cattle and the occasional gaucho, then on to the first change in scenery as they swept over rich green meadows threaded with gushing streams not quite wide enough to be called rivers but impressive nonetheless. She directed him to fly over a hill and into a valley dotted with small neat whitewashed houses, each surrounded by their own small plot of land.
‘This is part of Santa Rosa?’
Cristina nodded. ‘The valley beneath us is the land the Alagoas Consortium wants to turn into a spur from the highway to the forest,’ she explained, and Anton did not need telling what the people who lived in the whitewashed houses down there would be losing if the developers had their way.
Then she directed him to fly over the other side of the valley. Almost instantly Anton saw exactly why she had instructed him to come this way. Even before they rose above the valley rim he saw the forest rising up like a huge dark wall in front of them. Majestic, invincible…or so you would like to think. But from up here it didn’t take words for him to see what was so valuable to the developers. A natural fault in the earth’s crust had carved a deep groove in the forest that stretched for miles and miles towards what he saw in the misted distance was the sea.
‘This is it?’ he said, as they tracked along the fine vein of water that threaded the base of the groove.
‘Sim.’
‘What happens to the river when the rains come?’
‘It floods.’
‘So what do they intend to do with the flood when they build their road?’
Not if but when, Cristina noted with a shiver. ‘They plan to run their road along either side of it, above the flood line.’
Her eyes scanned the area of forest that would have to be demolished to achieve such an aim. Beside her she could feel Luis doing the same thing.
‘The banker in me says what a goldmine you’re sitting on. The human in me says what a sick, criminal waste,’ was his only comment.
Cristina said nothing. And that was how it remained between them as they made the journey back the way they had come. They landed back in the paddock behind the house, but not before Anton had circled the two-storeyed plaster-walled mansion house. He said nothing about its poor state of repair, but his mouth maintained a flat line as he settled them back down to earth again.
The heat of the afternoon was intense, and the silence between them all the more so—growing as they walked towards the house, passing the collection of ageing barns and paddocks as they did. The house itself was surrounded by a low whitewashed wall which sectioned it off from the rest of Santa Rosa. An open archway took them into gardens that would once have been beautiful but had, like the house itself, fallen into decay.
They hadn’t seen a single living soul since they landed. ‘It’s very quiet,’ he remarked.
‘Siesta time,’ Cristina murmured.
Now, there’s an idea, Anton mused, but kept the thought to himself.
The tension between them grew even stronger when they entered the coolness of the house itself. Without another word passing between them Cristina led the way across a high-ceilinged hallway and up a wide, gracefully curving flight of stairs. Anton looked around him at the once elegant but now scuffed and chipped tiled floor, and the walls hung with heavy-framed oils that looked as if they’d seen much better days.
Mentally crossing her fingers that Orraca had instructed Pablo to place Luis’s bag in the only useable guest bedroom out of twelve, Cristina pushed open the door.
His bag sat, on the heavily carved ottoman, she saw with relief and stepped aside to allow him to precede her inside.