Page 2 of The Brazilian's Blackmailed Bride

‘Hearing you say that does not particularly help.’

‘You do not understand…’

‘You can say that again,’ he uttered. ‘I thought I was the son of a man I loved and revered above all men. Now I find out I’m the result of an extra-marital affair you enjoyed with some globe-trotting Brazilian polo-playing stud!’

‘It wasn’t like that.’ Maria was going paler by the second. ‘I was…with Enrique before I married your f-father.’

‘So let me get this right,’ Anton said, seeing the red mist of his growing fury swim up across his eyes. ‘You had an affair with this guy. He left you pregnant, so you looked around for a gullible substitute to take his place, found Sebastian, and simply foisted me on to him? Is that it?’

‘No!’ For the first time since this had begun his fine-boned slender mother showed some of her Brazilian fire by shooting to her feet. ‘You will not speak to me in this insulting tone, Anton! Your father knew. He always knew! I was honest with him from the start! He forgave me—and he loved you as his own son! His name is on your birth certificate. He raised you! He was proud of your every achievement and not once did he treat you as anything but the shining light in his life! So don’t you dare hurt his memory now by turning it into a thing to speak of with contempt!’

Anton flung himself back to the window, seething inside with an eruption of feeling that was crucifying him with anger and bitterness and now tinged with a remorse that placed a sting in his eyes. He’d loved his father, looked up to him in every way a loving son could. When Sebastian had been killed in a freak road accident, Anton had lived for months in a black hole filled with inconsolable grief.

‘I always knew I looked nothing like him.’ The words arrived hoarse and uneven, pulsing with a deeply felt emotion that forced poor Maria to muffle a sob.

‘My brother knew he could not have children, Anton,’ Max filtered in huskily. ‘He was already aware of that when he met and fell in love with Maria. When she told him about you he saw your coming birth as a gift.’

‘A gift he insisted must be kept secret.’

‘Don’t deny him the right to some pride,’ his uncle sighed.

But Anton couldn’t think of anyone else’s pride right now. ‘I’m the son of a Brazilian,’ he muttered. ‘That makes me about as un-English as I can get. I live like an Englishman, I speak, think, behave like an Englishman and—hell!’ A second explosion of emotion sent his clenched fist pounding into the window’s wood casement, because he’d just remembered something. Something he’d spent the last six years trying to forget!

Now a face swam up in front of him—an excruciatingly lovely face, with dark eyes and a lush red mouth. ‘But I cannot marry you, Luis, My father will not allow it. Our Portuguese blood must remain pure…’

; ‘Is Ramirez a Portuguese name?’ he demanded roughly.

Still quaking from her son’s sudden burst of violence, his mother breathed out a quavering, ‘Yes.’

Anton tried for some air but didn’t make it. That burst of blistering rage was now pooling inside his head as he replayed once again that unforgettable moment when five feet four inches of Latin scorn had told him that he wasn’t good enough for her.

His teeth came together, accentuating that cleft in his chin. Not good enough—not good enough! No one before or since had ever dared say such a thing to him.

And he was damned if he was going to give her the chance to say it to him again.

It was then that the ice took over—an ice that those who knew him recognised with dread. Turning to face the room, he saw his mother was trying to fight back the tears still. His uncle just looked old. Maximilian’s health wasn’t good. He’d suffered his first heart attack which had forced him to retire from the bank, only weeks after his brother’s death. His words to his then grief stricken and shock-battered nephew had been, ‘Take the reins, boy. I have every confidence in you to make this family proud.’

That word again—proud.

The muscles around his heart contracted. To be really proud of someone you had to accept them as they were, warts and skeletons alike. These people who claimed to love him only loved a lie they’d constructed to protect their own pride.

Anton stepped back to the desk that had been Sebastian’s before he had died leaving everything he possessed—including this house in Belgravia, the family estate near Ascot and the major share in the Scott-Lee Bank—to the person he had been proud to call his son.

Well, Anton didn’t feel proud of them right now. He felt angry and cheated in too many ways to count.

On the desk lay the documents that had been delivered to him from the lawyer attending to the Ramirez estate. Splintering emotions threatening to take him over again, he sent long blunt ended fingers flicking through the papers until he found the one he was searching for.

‘There is more to this,’ he clipped out, and saw from beneath his lowered eyelashes his mother and his uncle tense up. ‘I am not the only poor swine Ramirez is laying claim to. There are two more like me out there somewhere. Two more sons…’

Two half-brothers with their own lying mothers? His top lip curled in contempt.

‘Considering the globe-trotting lifestyle Ramirez enjoyed, they could be anywhere…’

‘You mean he does not say?’

‘No, not exactly,’ Anton drawled cynically. ‘How much amusing mileage would he get from making it as simple as that?’