Mistress of His Revenge (Bought by the Brazilian #1)
Read Mistress of His Revenge (Bought by the Brazilian #1) Online
Authors: Chantelle Shaw
“I don’t think force will be necessary to persuade you to give me what I want,” he murmured.
Sabrina’s stomach muscles clenched as his sensuous, molten-syrup voice tugged on her senses. Time seemed to be suspended and her breath was trapped in her lungs. Her eyes widened as she watched his dark head descend, and her heart gave a jolt when she realized that he was going to kiss her. He wouldn’t dare, she assured herself. But this was Cruz Delgado—a man who would dare to make a deal with the devil if he believed the odds were in his favor.
“I warned you, I’ll scream.” It was melodramatic, but she felt melodramatic. She gasped as he pulled her against him and she felt the heat from his body melting her bones.
He gave a wolfish smile. “Perhaps you will. I remember how you used to scream with pleasure and claw me with your sharp nails,
gatinha
.”
“Cruz!” In desperation she thumped his shoulder with her fist, but her blows had as much effect as a mosquito landing on a rhino’s hide.
“You are so beautiful,” Cruz said harshly. He could not resist her and he was shamed by his weakness. If he kissed her, perhaps the heat blazing inside him would cool and he would be released from this mad desire that made his muscles taut and his heart pound. He clamped one arm around her waist and slid his other hand into her hair to clasp her nape as his mouth swooped down and captured hers in a kiss that instantly engulfed Sabrina in a white-hot flame.
Bought by the Brazilian
Claimed by passion!
Cruz Delgado and Diego Cazorra—two men brought up in Brazil’s
favelas
—have literally dragged themselves up from dirt to a diamond empire.
But having the world at their feet and dripping with their jewels is not enough. Now, they will have their revenge against the women who walked away.
It’s time for Cruz and Diego to claim what’s theirs...and for both of these women to be
Bought by the Brazilian
!
Read Cruz and Sabrina’s story:
Mistress of His Revenge
Read Diego and Clare’s story:
Master of Her Innocence
CHANTELLE SHAW
Mistress of His Revenge
Chantelle Shaw
lives on the Kent coast and thinks up her stories while walking on the beach. She has been married for over thirty years and has six children. Her love affair with reading and writing Harlequin stories began as a teenager, and her first book was published in 2006. She likes strong-willed, slightly unusual characters. Chantelle also loves gardening, walking and wine!
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
T
HE
H
ONOURABLE
H
UGO
F
FAULKS
—with two Fs—was drunk and being sick into a vase. Not just any vase, Sabrina noted, her lips tightening with annoyance. The vase was a fine example of early eighteenth-century English porcelain and had been valued at fifteen hundred pounds by an auction house that had recently catalogued the antiques at Eversleigh Hall.
Compared to the value of the hall’s art collection, which included two Gainsboroughs and a portrait by Joshua Reynolds, fifteen hundred pounds was not a vast sum, but in Sabrina’s current financial crisis she needed every penny she could lay her hands on and selling the vase would at least allow her to pay the staff’s wages and the farrier’s bill.
A frown crossed her smooth brow. If only horses did not need shoeing every six weeks. The cost of the farrier, plus vet’s bills, feed and hay meant that Monty was becoming an expense she simply could not justify. She had spoken to a reputable horse dealer who had assured her that she should get a good price for a seven-year-old thoroughbred, but the thought of selling Monty was unbearable.
She turned her attention to Hugo, who was now leaning on one of the other party guests and trying to stagger in the direction of the bar.
‘Take him to the kitchen and get some black coffee into him,’ Sabrina instructed Hugo’s friend. She wished she could phone Brigadier Ffaulks and ask him to come and collect his son, but Hugo’s parents had paid her a sizeable fee to organise a twenty-first birthday party at Eversleigh Hall. Hugo and fifty of his friends had arrived the previous evening and would be staying at the hall for the weekend. Tomorrow after breakfast—if any of them could face a full English breakfast—they would be able to enjoy clay-pigeon shooting on the estate and fishing in the private lake.
Opening up Eversleigh Hall for weddings and parties was the only way that Sabrina could afford the huge running costs of the estate until her father returned.
If he ever returned.
She quickly pushed her fears about the earl to the back of her mind with the rest of her worries and smiled at the elderly butler who was walking stiffly across the drawing room.
‘I’d better fetch a mop and clear up the mess, Miss Sabrina.’
‘I’ll do it, John. I don’t expect you to clear up after
my
guests.’ She could not disguise the rueful note in her voice. The butler was well aware that she hated seeing Eversleigh Hall being treated carelessly by the likes of Hugo and his friends, who seemed to think that having money, and in some cases aristocratic titles, gave them the right to behave like animals. And that was an insult to animals, Sabrina thought when she caught sight of a female guest lighting up a cigarette.
‘How many times must I repeat the “no smoking in the house” rule?’ she muttered.
‘I’ll escort the young lady out to the garden,’ John murmured. ‘You have a visitor, Miss Sabrina. A Mr Delgado arrived a few minutes ago.’
She stiffened. ‘Delgado—are you sure that was the name he gave?’
The butler looked affronted. ‘Quite sure. I would hazard that he is a foreign gentleman. He said he wishes to discuss Earl Bancroft.’
‘My father!’
Sabrina’s heart missed another beat. She took a deep breath and groped for her common sense. Just because the unexpected visitor’s name was Delgado did not automatically mean that it was Cruz. In fact the likelihood was zero, she reassured herself. It was ten years since she had last seen him. The date their relationship had ended and the date a week earlier when she had suffered a miscarriage and lost their baby were ingrained on her memory. Every year, she found April a poignant month, with lambs in the fields and birds busy building nests, the countryside bursting with new life while she quietly mourned her child who had never lived in the world.
‘I asked Mr Delgado to wait in the library.’
‘Thank you, John.’ Sabrina forced her mind away from painful memories. As she walked across the entrance hall, past the portraits of her illustrious ancestors, she tried to mentally compose herself. It was likely that the mystery visitor was a journalist sniffing around for information about Earl Bancroft. Or perhaps Delgado was one of her father’s creditors—heaven knew there were enough of them. But in either case she was unable to help.
She had no idea where her father was, and since he had been officially declared a missing person his bank accounts had been frozen. Sabrina thought of the mounting pile of bills that arrived at Eversleigh Hall daily. Since the earl’s disappearance she had used all of her savings to pay for the upkeep of the house, but if her father did not return soon there was a strong possibility that she would be forced to sell her family’s ancestral home.
A week earlier in Brazil
‘We have to face the facts, Cruz. Old Betsy is finished. She’s given us the last of her diamonds and there’s no point wasting any more of our time and money on her.’
Cruz Delgado fixed his olive-green eyes on his friend and business partner, Diego Cazorra. ‘I’m convinced that Old Betsy hasn’t revealed all her secrets,’ he said with amusement in his voice. He could not remember now if it had been him or Diego who had christened the diamond mine they had bought as a joint venture six years ago Old Betsy, but the name had stuck.
‘Your belief that there could be deposits of diamonds deeper underground is founded purely on speculation fuelled by rumour and the drunken ramblings of an old miner.’ Diego lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the blazing Brazilian sun and glanced around the two-thousand-acre mine site.
The ochre-coloured earth was baked as hard as clay and lorry tyre marks criss-crossed the dusty ground. Directly above the mineshaft stood the tall metal structure of the head frame, looking like a bizarre piece of modern art, and next to it were the huge winding drums used to operate the hoist that transported men and machinery down into the mine. In the distance, the glint of silver denoted the river, and beyond it was the dense green rainforest. An alluvial processing plant stretched along one river bank, its purpose to recover diamonds found in sediment sifted from the river bed. But the best diamonds, those of gem quality and high carat weight, were hidden beneath the earth’s surface and could only be retrieved by men and machinery tunnelling deep underground.
‘I believe Jose’s story of the existence of another mine, or at least an extension of the original mine,’ Cruz said. ‘It confirms what my father told me before he died, that Earl Bancroft had discovered some historic drawings of tunnels that run far deeper than we currently operate.’
Cruz removed his hat and swept his sweat-damp hair back from his brow. Like Diego, he was over six feet tall and his muscular physique was the result of years of hard physical labour working in the mining industry. Both men were deeply tanned, but Cruz’s hair was black while Diego’s was dirty blond—evidence that his father had been a European, although that was all Diego knew about the man who had seduced his mother and abandoned her when she had fallen pregnant.
Cruz and Diego had been friends since they were boys growing up in a notorious
favela—
a slum in Belo Horizonte, the largest city in the state of Minas Gerais. When Cruz’s father had moved his family north to the town of Montes Claros to find work in a diamond mine, Cruz had persuaded Diego to join them at a mine owned by an English earl. They had been excited by the idea of making their fortunes but it had been many years before they had struck lucky and too late for Cruz’s father.
‘The geological sampling and magnetotelluric surveys we commissioned showed up nothing of interest,’ Diego pointed out. ‘Do you really believe a story about an abandoned mine over modern scientific surveying techniques?’
‘I believe what my father told me with his dying breath.’ Cruz’s jaw hardened. ‘When Papai discovered the Estrela Vermelha, Earl Bancroft persuaded him that there could be other rare red diamonds. My father said the earl showed him and the old miner Jose a map of a forgotten section of the mine, which had tunnels running deeper than a thousand metres.’
‘But Earl Bancroft sold the mine soon after your father died following the accident. If there
had
been a map, Bancroft should have given it to the prospector who bought the mine from him. When we raised the money to buy Old Betsy from the prospector six years ago, you asked him about an old map but he denied any knowledge of one.’
Cruz shrugged. ‘So maybe the earl kept the map a secret from the prospector. It wouldn’t surprise me. I remember Henry Bancroft was a wily fox who looked after his own interests at the expense of the men he employed. The roof fall was a direct result of Bancroft’s cost cutting and failure to adhere to safety procedures. When he sent my father into an area of the mine that he knew to be dangerous he effectively signed Papai’s death warrant.’
Bitterness swept through Cruz as he thought of the mining accident that had claimed his father’s life. Ten years ago Vitor Delgado had been buried beneath tons of rock, but Cruz remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. Clawing at the rubble of the collapsed mine roof with his bare hands, choking on the thick dust as he had desperately tried to reach his father. It had been two days before they had brought Vitor to the surface—alive, but so severely injured that he had died from internal bleeding a few hours later.