Шантель Шоу – Postcards From Rio: Master of Her Innocence / To Play with Fire / A Taste of Desire (страница 11)

He stripped and dived into the pool, relishing the cool water washing over his heated skin. He felt more at home in the rainforest than he did in a city. Here, he was free to live his life on his terms without the need to bow to social conventions. Compared to the favela where he had spent his childhood, and prison where he had lost his soul, the tropical wilderness, although dangerous in its own way, provided him with a sense of peace. He would not allow a novice nun with the face of an angel and the body of Aphrodite to disturb his sanctuary, he assured himself.

He looked up at the sky and watched a bank of clouds roll in above the tree tops. Experience told him that another day of heavy rain lay ahead, and flooding would make the road from Inua village up to the border virtually impassable. He shrugged. His task was to escort Sister Clare to Torrente so that she could teach at the Sunday school and prepare to make her final vows and, although he felt she was making a mistake by committing her life to the church, it was her choice and none of his business.

* * *

Clare was conscious of Diego’s brooding gaze as she stepped out of the guest hut and walked over to where he was leaning against the Jeep. She assumed he had swum in the river as his hair was damp, but it was drying quickly in the stifling heat and turning blonder by the minute. At least he was fully clothed, but his tight-fitting white T-shirt clung to the hard ridges of his abdominal muscles and evoked memories of when she had run her hands over his naked torso.

Although she was too hot in her nun’s habit, she was glad that her body was hidden from his view, especially when she felt her hard nipples chafe against her bra. She was shocked by her wanton response to Diego and determined to keep her distance from him for the second leg of their journey to Torrente.

As she drew nearer to him he jammed his hat on to his head and pulled the brim down over his eyes, almost as if he wanted to hide his expression from her. If only her veil offered the same protection, she thought ruefully. A large raindrop landed on the dusty path in front of her, followed by another and another. She glanced up at the sullen clouds that had covered up the sun. ‘I’m ready to go. I expect you want to get on the road before the weather worsens.’

She expected him to agree, but he did not move, and her intense awareness of him detected his sudden tension.

‘Are you sure you want to continue?’ Beneath the brim of his hat his eyes gleamed as bright and hard as polished steel. ‘It’s not too late for you to change your mind...and choose a different path.’

Clare realised he was not talking about her journey to Torrente. For a split second she was tempted to tell him the truth about why she needed to go to the town, but she could not forget the kidnappers’ threat to kill her sister if she involved anyone else. She did not know if she could trust Diego. She barely knew anything about him and the few facts he had divulged about himself made him even more of an enigma.

‘I am quite sure of the path I must follow,’ she said in a low voice, her throat tightening with fear as she faced the prospect of meeting the kidnappers.

‘Deus. Just because your boyfriend was a jerk, you are going to cut yourself off from life, from love?’ Diego forgot his decision not to get involved in Sister Clare’s life. ‘When we kissed, you were warm and responsive in my arms. What will you do with all your passion and fire when you are shut away in a convent?’

Clare laughed derisively. ‘What do you know about love? A man who describes marriage as limiting himself to choosing only one flavour of chocolates from a selection box?’

He stared at her and then shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re right. I’ve never experienced love.’ He opened the door of the Jeep and, before Clare had time to realise his intention, he lifted her off her feet and dumped her on the passenger seat. She took a deep breath to steady her racing heart as he climbed in beside her and started the engine.

‘Never?’ she asked curiously. ‘Didn’t your parents love you?’

He did not reply while he negotiated a series of deep holes in the road, but after a few minutes he said, ‘I never met my father. He abandoned my mother after he got her pregnant with me. The only information she told me about him was that he was an Englishman called Philip Hawke who had come to work as a travel rep at the hotel in Brazil where my mother was a chambermaid. They had an affair, but when she told him she was expecting his child he returned to England and she never heard from him again.’

But Diego had heard from his father’s family. Soon after his release from prison he had been contacted by a law firm in England, who had explained that Philip Hawke had died some years earlier but had confided to his own father that he had an illegitimate child in Brazil. Geoffrey Hawke had spent his remaining years searching for his grandson without success. Before Geoffrey died he had instructed the law firm to continue the search, and eventually they had tracked Diego down and gave him the astounding news that his grandfather had left him a fortune in his will.

The money had allowed Diego to become a business partner with his friend Cruz Delgado. They had bought the Old Betsy diamond mine where Cruz’s father had found the famous Estrela Vermelha—the Red Star diamond. The discovery in the mine of diamonds worth millions of dollars—including a rare pink diamond, the Estrela Rosa, which Diego had found and kept in his private collection of gems—had made the two men multimillionaires. Recently, another mine that had been abandoned many years ago and was only discovered when Cruz had been given a map of the hidden tunnels by his father-in-law, Earl Bancroft, had been found to contain a huge supply of diamonds, making Diego and Cruz two of the richest men in Brazil.

Wealth certainly had great benefits, Diego mused. But his penthouse apartment in Rio, his various other properties around the world and even his collection of luxury sports cars were simply toys to amuse him. Nothing filled the void inside him or made him forget the poverty and deprivation of his childhood. When he was growing up, what he had wanted more than anything was to feel loved. Love was more precious than gold or glittering gems but, after thirty-seven years without it, his heart had become as hard and unbreakable as the diamonds he mined.

He forced his thoughts back to the present when he realised Sister Clare was speaking. ‘It must have been difficult for your mother to be a single parent. Did you spend your childhood in Manaus?’

‘I grew up in a favela in the city of Belo Horizonte.’ Diego gave a cynical laugh. ‘The name translates to beautiful horizon, but there was nothing beautiful about the overcrowded and filthy slum where my mother and I lived.’

‘Is that why you like being in the rainforest, because it is wild and beautiful and you can be alone?’

Diego glanced at her. ‘I’m not alone now,’ he drawled. His gut clenched as he watched rosy colour stain her cheeks. She was so beautiful. But perhaps it was the fact that she was out of bounds that made her all the more desirable. It was one of life’s ironies that you always wanted what you couldn’t have, he mused.

He was surprised by Sister Clare’s perceptiveness, and also how easy he found it to talk to her. He was an expert at chat-up lines, but he rarely talked to women, probably because they rarely listened, he thought sardonically.

‘I can breathe in the rainforest,’ he admitted. ‘There is an honesty here that I have never found anywhere else. It’s one of the few places on earth where Mother Nature is truly untamed, and that makes her fearsome but fascinating.’

He was an instinctive poet, Clare thought. He wove a pattern with words and revealed his love of the rainforest in his gravelly voice. Who was the real Diego Cazorra? So far she had met the loner gold prospector and the notorious womaniser the Mother Superior had warned her about. But she sensed that Diego rarely allowed anyone to see beyond his outward persona of a laid-back, charismatic charmer.

She remembered the book of poems by the English romantic poet John Keats that she had found in the back of the Jeep.

‘“To one who has been long in city pent, ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven—to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament,”’ she quoted softly.

Diego glanced at her.

‘“Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair A gentle tale of love and languishment?”’ he finished the quote. ‘It seems we have one thing in common, at least. Which other poets do you like, apart from Keats?’

‘Oh, Wordsworth, Shelley. I love the work of many of the poets of the late eighteenth century. I am an unashamed romantic at heart. How about you?’

‘Am I romantic?’ He laughed. ‘What do you think, Sister Clare?’

‘I think you are more than a tough gold prospector.’ She hesitated, then felt compelled to ask, ‘What happened to your ear?’