LITMIR.BIZ

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imagine how helpless I feel most of the time.” Her pain made him want to go out destroying everything that had ever made her feel this way. “I try to reach out to as many children as I can—to provide them with someone who cares, who’s there to listen to their problems and ideas, to take part in their activities, to encourage their interests and talents. But no matter how hard I try, I always feel nothing I do is enough. Thank God for people like the sisters who do far more. But someone like you? You can do the most.”

      His throat tightened. “What you do will make a difference in those children’s psyches. I just throw my money and weight around, but I never made a child’s day better in person. Truth is, I never even interacted with one, until Diego today.”

      “But without your ‘money and weight,’ we wouldn’t have the places and projects to offer any children anything.”

      “So we complement each other.” She snuggled deeper into his chest, nodded. “We already knew that, just not how completely we do.”

      Raising her face, her smile and gaze caressed him. “But you must now know everything about me since I sprouted my first baby teeth. And I know nothing about you.”

      He rose on one elbow. “What do you need to know?”

      “Tell me about your family.”

      He’d been prepared with a fabricated history. But he couldn’t bear more lies between them than necessary. He’d tell her the truth—a carefully edited version of it.

      “My parents divorced when I was ten. My mother remarried two years later and had three more children, two girls and a boy. My father remarried much later, and had two children, a girl and a boy. I exited their lives early and never reentered it. I sort of watch them from afar, keep my distance.”

      “Is this what you want?”

      “With my kind of life, with what I’ve been involved in, they were better off with me as far away as possible. When it became feasible for me to approach again, I still felt it wasn’t in their best interests for me to disrupt their lives.”

      “How can you say that? I’m certain they’d love to have you be an integral part of their lives.”

      He tickled her, trying to inject lightness into what was suddenly oppressively serious. “Who’s being biased?”

      She grinned impishly, then turned back to seriousness at once. “But I really do imagine they would choose to be as close as possible to you if you gave them the choice.”

      The talons in his throat sank a little deeper at her conviction. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

      He expected her to probe this vagueness, but she only exhaled. “As long as you’re sure that it’s for the best. But even if it is, I still hate to think you’ve exiled yourself from your family. That you’ve chosen to be alone.”

      “I’m not alone. I’m part of a...brotherhood, if you will.”

      “One of them is that terror you have for a partner, huh?”

      He guffawed at her wary-feline expression. “He was an addition to our brotherhood. He used to be my mentor.”

      “He thinks he’s your father. Or your ‘Big Brother.’”

      He laughed harder as she made the quotes gesture. “You’re uncanny. You analyze everything with such absolute accuracy.”

      “He didn’t need analysis. He knocked me over the head with his ‘shining qualities.’” Another quote gesture.

      “I assure you he hasn’t gotten and won’t get away with it. But speaking of family...I insulted your father almost as much as Richard did you.”

      “Oh, no, there’s just no comparison. My father almost didn’t notice you, as anxious as he was about me.”

      “I would still like to apologize. Will you please set up a proper meeting?”

      A still look came into her eyes. “You want to meet him...as my father or as a potential partner?”

      “Can’t I meet him as both?”

      She grimaced. “You know where I stand on this issue.”

      “Why don’t you let me handle this?”

      “I’ve never been as miserable as I was last night, and I don’t want to risk something like that happening again.”

      “It won’t. I promise.”

      The troubled look that gripped her face almost made him tell her to forget it. But before he could say anything, she nodded, then nestled back into him.

      As he received her into his embrace, that trust he craved, which she was bestowing on him in full again, weighed on him. It didn’t feel like a privilege anymore but a responsibility.

      One he ultimately had to betray.

       Seven

      The meeting with Ferreira took place the very next afternoon. During lunch hour so it would be brief, at Eliana’s request.

      Rafael picked Casa de Feijoada, a busy spot in the posh beachside Ipanema district, a mile away from Eliana’s place, and Ferreira’s offices, for their convenience. The restaurant was cozy, with a tropical, rattan-walled look and family-style table service. He came a bit early to arrange a table on the beach and order the lunch courses in advance so no unnecessary delays would occur during their hour-long meeting. They arrived at one o’clock sharp, and Eliana greeted him with the same ardent kiss with which she’d said goodbye when he’d left her apartment at 2:00 a.m.

      Though she’d confided that she’d told her father everything, so he must have an idea how things stood between them, he glimpsed a spurt of anxiety in Ferreira’s eyes as he witnessed that intimacy. But like the gentleman everyone believed him to be, the impeccably dressed and behaved Ferreira made no comment. Not on that nor on Rafael’s offensive behavior during the last ball, nor his no-shows in the previous ones.

      From then on, they settled down to the smooth flowing lunch courses. Apart from the effort Rafael expended to sit across from Ferreira—the man he’d once loved as an uncle and who’d betrayed him in the most unspeakable way—pretending this was their first real meeting, nothing of note happened.

      Ironically, the man who’d been trying to meet him for the past two months didn’t seem to care that Rafael possibly held his professional future in his hands, only that he might affect his daughter’s adversely. Ferreira spent the entire lunch watching them interact, saying little. He never once broached the subject of the partnership. The only questions her father asked him were when Eliana went to the ladies’ room: oblique ones probing his intentions and warning him against toying with her. In turn, Rafael as indirectly let Ferreira know that where Eliana was concerned, they were on the same page. She came first to him, too.

      That seemed to disturb Ferreira instead of reassure him. He considered Rafael’s statement an exaggeration, since the sum total of their liaison had taken place over three days. But when Rafael told him that the power of their connection had dispensed with the usual stages needed to reach their current level of involvement, Ferreira finally relaxed. Though he’d evidently never thought Rafael was capable of forging such a connection, from what he’d heard about him, he confessed that he knew how it could be that way from intimate experience. It had been the same between him and Eliana’s mother. They’d married a week after meeting and had lived ecstatically ever after—until aggressive pancreatic cancer had taken her from him.

      On Eliana’s return, the conversation turned to anecdotes about Eliana’s mother, and her half brothers and their mother. Ferreira had had two extreme opposites in the marriage department. The first one when his father had arranged his marriage to his partner’s daughter and the battlefield that marriage had turned into. Then the marriage to the love of his life, which

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