From Enemy's Daughter to Expectant Bride (15 page)

So she demanded to meet them, threatening that if they told Rafael, it would be on their heads when she left him standing at the altar.

Since Raiden and Numair didn’t think much of her, they couldn’t risk her carrying out her threat and complied. Graves didn’t believe her for a second, but followed suit anyway.

After resorting to elaborate maneuvers to throw Rafael’s surveillance off, she now sat in Graves’s ocean-facing penthouse suite at the Copacabana Palace Hotel. Looking at those three Olympians who sat across from her like some ancient tribunal that would decide her fate, she wondered again how they had so much in common with Rafael.

It felt as if they’d been forged in the same merciless crucible, molded into the same brand of lethal weapon.

Raiden was coolly assessing her, as if deciding on an attack strategy. She had no doubt that when he struck, he did so out of nowhere and turned his opponents to ashes, as his code name, Lightning, suggested.

Numair—Phantom—was every bit his code name, too, chilling, elusive and impossible to fathom. With him no one knew where they stood, and she had a feeling that made him the deadliest of all.

Graves was looking at her with the tolerance someone would have for a posturing cat that didn’t realize it wasn’t so much intimidating as endearing.

She finally sat forward. “Got enough of sizing me up?” When the men just continued staring at her, she blew out a breath. “To business, then. As you so kindly shattered my illusions the other night, you now must finish your task and tell me what Rafael won’t.”

Graves shook his head. “Let it go. Knowing the truth would only hurt you.”

“Is there more hurt than knowing the man I love— the father of my baby—is using me to send my father to prison?”

The men looked at each other. The baby was news to them. So Rafael did consider her forbidden territory he shared with no one. But she felt a baby somehow changed everything to them. The shift in their attitude was almost palpable.

“There is always more hurt, Ms. Ferreira,” Numair said in that hair-raising sereneness. “Some snake pits are better left closed forever.”

She gave a mirthless huff. “Well, this one is wide-open, and serpents have been slithering out all over me. I know you’re here because you’d rather spare Rafael further trouble with me. But if he thinks this is hurting me less, I’m telling you he’s wrong. I can’t live with not knowing.”

Another eloquent glance passed between the men before Graves finally sat forward. It seemed they’d elected him to be their spokesman.

Holding her breath, knowing what she was about to hear would change everything, she hung on to his every word as he started talking.

And she finally understood what they’d meant by saying there was always more hurt. This was a level beyond her worst nightmares.

What happened to Rafael, to all of them, the suffering they’d had to endure... It was beyond her worst nightmares.

Numbness spread in her every cell, an attempt to ward off the horror, to protect her psyche from being torn apart. Imagining Rafael as a child, taken and imprisoned, abused and broken...it was...it was... No way to describe, to take in, to bear...

* * *

Ellie’s eyes fluttered open.

Jackknifing to a sitting position, the whole world heaved around her, making her collapse back. On a bed. It had to be Graves’s hotel bed.

“Dammit,” she moaned as she struggled to sit up. Hands on both sides helped her. Raiden’s and Numair’s. “I’ve never even felt dizzy all my life, and now I faint every weekday.”

“You must promise
you’ll
never tell Rafael of this.” Graves’s intimidating face came into wavering focus as he stood at the foot of the bed. “He can’t find out you were in my bed, under any circumstances. I’m fond of certain anatomical parts.”

She looked up at him, at the other two, and tears gushed from her depths.

The men’s consternation rose as sobs almost tore her apart before their eyes. These men who’d vanquished the world’s evils had no way of dealing with a woman’s tears. As they fidgeted and exchanged anxious glances, it was clear they would have rather been dealing with a ticking bomb.

But she couldn’t help it. The more she imagined the atrocities that had befallen Rafael all those years ago, the more violent her weeping became.

Her distress soon overpowered the men’s ability to withstand it, and they took refuge in action. Swarming around her, she found herself propped by pillows from all sides, and they were blotting her tears, bathing her burning face in cold compresses, warming her freezing hands in heated ones and offering her every comfort food and drink that existed in Rio.

Limp with anguish, she surrendered to their ministrations, all but the dietary one. At the first warning heave, they rushed to take ingestible stuff away. She had a feeling they would rather get shot than deal with
that.

It felt like hours before she was finally drained of all her tears, and lay there barely managing the in-out motions of breathing. The men seemed just as depleted, sitting around the bed as if they’d been through a thirty-round fight with a gorilla.

“Please tell us you’re done crying,” Raiden groaned.

Her breath hitched. As they all tensed again, she only nodded. There was nothing more in her. For now.

Exhaling in relief, Graves said, “How is it possible a woman your size has all that water in her?”

“Speaking of water.” Raiden grimaced at the memory as he fetched a carafe. “You need to replace the rivers you lost.”

Contradictorily the one who looked most rattled by her weeping storm, Numair warned, “Sip it slowly. Otherwise, you might choke. Or throw up. Or both. Or do some other catastrophic thing. Like burst into another crying jag.”

As she did as instructed, Numair regarded her heavily. “That was for Rafael. You can’t bear imagining what he’s been through.”

Her breath hitched again. “And that I can’t do anything about it.”

Numair exchanged a look with Raiden. Then he shook his head. “You
do
love him.”

She looked at both men through almost swollen-shut lids. “You figured this out on your own?”

And she saw what she’d thought impossible. A semblance of a smile on Numair’s cruel lips. “It was a long-shot deduction.”

Suddenly, it all crashed into place. “Rafael thinks my father had a hand in his abduction!”

Exchanging another of those glances, and making another decision, Numair was the one who told her the details.

This time there were no tears. Just conviction. It made her sit up steady. “No way my father did that!”

Raiden shrugged. “Rafael has evidence.”

Slumping back with this new blow, she felt her world churning.

Graves, who’d been silent for a while, came forward, checking her temperature.

She clung to his hand. “I need to know more.”

Another shared glance between the men, then Graves asked, “What do you need to know?”

“These aren’t your real names.”

He shook his head. “They are our names now.”

“How did Rafael pick his name?”

“He was wounded on a mission. Bones, our medical expert, performed a desperate field surgery on him, removed his kidney and spleen to stem his internal bleeding, thinking he’d die anyway. But he recovered fully as if by an act of God.”

“Rafael.
God has healed...
”

At Graves’s nod, another sob tore her. That scar. She’d felt it resonate with such...pain, such...loss. She’d been right. Oh, God, Rafael...all he’d lost, all he’d survived...

“He picked Moreno Salazar,” Raiden said. “
Dark old house,
just as I chose Kuroshiro, which means
black castle
in Japanese, as a sort of twisted tribute to our being the product of this ancient, sinister place where we were imprisoned and created.”

“Before you told me all that,” she whispered, “I was thinking you did feel as if you’ve been forged in the same hell.”

“I’m beginning to see why Rafael fell for you,” Raiden said, that assessment in his eyes tinged with approval.

“He didn’t. He was just using me.”

Graves waved her words away as if they were rubbish. “He fell for you. All the way. I was there that first night he did. I can’t begin to explain how it happened, but it certainly did.” At her mournful disbelief, he growled, “Bloody hell, the man went prematurely gray with fright over you. What more proof do you need?”

Silver
had
appeared in his temples after her accident. Rafael had waved the coincidence away, but she’d believed it just the same...until she’d overheard that fateful conversation. Believing it again, believing he loved her, made things worse not better.

Shying away from the implications, she sought a diversion. “If Rafael is Brazilian by birth, why didn’t he make Brazil his base of operations all along?”

“His homeland was always the one place he didn’t want to be,” Numair explained. “He’s one of only three of us who know their family, but when we first escaped, he couldn’t contact his, fearing the Organization might be keeping them under surveillance in case he returned to them. Then he found that his parents got divorced after his abduction, remarried and had more children. But even when we established our new identities, he didn’t want to disrupt their lives all over again.”

That was also what he’d told her, just without the compelling reasons that had stopped him from seeking his family again. It hadn’t been a choice but a necessity that had been forced on him.

“He thought he’d become someone totally different from the boy they’d lost,” Graves said. “He still believes they’re better off not knowing the man he’s become. For years, he watched them from afar, but I guess I wore him down because he finally reentered their lives a couple of years ago. Though the stubborn boy only did so with his new identity and remains a peripheral acquaintance.”

Even when he’d finally sought his family, he settled for the comfort of seeing them up close...as a stranger.

“But he’s in Brazil now as some sort of poetic justice,” Raiden interjected. “Because this was where he was taken, where it started, and it’s where he wants to exact his revenge, where he wants it to end.”

That fist perpetually wringing her heart tightened.

This was all beyond comprehension, beyond endurance. Even if he’d manipulated her, he had an overwhelming reason for it. What had been done to him had been monstrous, unforgiveable, irreparable.

But it couldn’t have been her father who’d done it.

It couldn’t.

* * *

“Rafael...”

He could swear he’d felt Eliana the moment she’d thought of seeking him. But he’d curbed the urge to stampede toward her. If she didn’t give herself voluntarily, it would mean nothing.

But she was seeking him now, standing there on his threshold looking as if she was in deep mourning.

“I know everything.”

He rose slowly to his feet, gritting his teeth on the surge of dismay. “I’ll skin them alive.”

She approached, and it took all the self-restraint he had not to obliterate the distance and crush her in his arms.

“I insisted I wouldn’t go through with the wedding if they didn’t tell me.” She stopped two feet away, red-rimmed eyes filled with a world of pain, reproach and...empathy? “You were wrong to hide the truth from me.”

“I’d rather you hate me than your father.” Surprise flitted across her pale, haggard face. Apparently, that motive hadn’t even occurred to her. “I thought I’d manage to break through your resentment in time, but I didn’t want the world you’ve built on your belief in your father to come crashing down. Even when I punished him, I wanted you to continue thinking of me as the villain, not him.”

She surged forward, gripped his arms. Even though her touch was distraught, it felt like sustenance when he was starving.

“But you have to be wrong, Rafael. My father isn’t a villain. And he would die before he harmed a child.”

Her butchered protest told him if he insisted to the contrary, he risked sundering what remained of their tenuous emotional bond.

Everything inside her had been damaged; everything between them hung by a thread. She was still unable to stop loving or wanting him, but it was still possible he’d exacerbate her injuries, making them incurable, and end up losing her altogether.

He’d
die before he did.

There was only one venue open to him now.

He took it. “I’m open to giving your father every benefit of the doubt, and to uncovering new evidence. However long it may take to find it. Is that acceptable to you?”

And this being who was everything to him looked at him with those eyes that were his world and nodded.

He crushed her in his arms at last, her feel reclaiming him from the wasteland of separation.

“Will you marry me now?”

Eleven

E
liana had agreed to resume their wedding plans.

But it seemed her faith in his feelings was still damaged, or at least hadn’t recovered yet. There had been no return to intimacy between them.

Rafael couldn’t push. Not when everything inside her felt doused, no matter how passionate and attentive he was. All he could think was that she still thought everything he did for her was self-serving, that she continued to think herself an instrument to serve his purposes. First vengeance and now the child he couldn’t wait to have, a child to give the life he’d been deprived of.

There was nothing he could do but continue to love her and hope time would prove to her what pledges never could.

* * *

Ellie rushed through Rafael’s expansive, exquisite mansion, inspecting the guest suites for readiness.

The wedding was tomorrow. And her half brothers were flying in from the States, while all of Rafael’s brothers were coming over for the wedding rehearsal. They’d all be spending the night in the mansion.

Rafael had left it up to her to distribute their guests. He continued to give her carte blanche with everything. Not that this made her feel anywhere near the lady of the mansion. While before she’d felt at least at home here, she now felt like a trespasser, and wondered if that feeling would ever go away.

For now she had to focus on making sure everything was ready for their families’ arrival. She’d assigned the poolside suites to them. Some of the suites had panoramic views of the ocean, gardens, waterfalls and the hillside plunging deeply into Ferradura Bay. Others were tucked away, opened to the lush botanical gardens, sparkling lagoons and cascading waterfalls.

But none had the stunning three-hundred-and-sixty-degree views, open-air shower, sundeck and spa of Rafael’s master suite. What used to be
theirs,
and would be so again starting tomorrow night.

But how could she share his personal space and bed again? Although he’d said he’d consider new evidence, how could she possibly find any? And even with him putting his revenge plans on hold, what kind of life would they have with all of this between them? His initial duplicity, his unresolved animosity toward her father, her unabated fear he’d act on it?

Unable to think any further than today, she went about the mind-emptying chores of stocking all the suites with Rafael’s legion of hired help.

Starting tomorrow night, the rest of her life as Rafael’s wife and the mother of his child would begin. And the idea struck her at once with joy...and despondence.

* * *

In the southern gardens overlooking the Atlantic, Rafael stood watching Eliana as she walked toward him down the aisle with her father, the man who’d sentenced him to hell.

It was only a rehearsal. Only the people who had a role in the ceremony were there. Others, like her half brothers and Ferreira’s PA, Isabella Da Costa, would be coming tomorrow. But everything with her always felt like the real thing. The only thing that mattered.

And as she approached him in her flowing pistachio dress, her hair swept up in that ponytail it had become one of his life’s keenest pleasures to undo, he felt his being well up with love for her.

Her eyes embraced his all the way, so much emotion filling them. He was beside himself being unable to read it all. Then she was a breath away, and that man he’d hated for so long, even before he’d known his identity, was giving him her hand.

He looked at Ferreira for a long moment...and suddenly realized.

He was no longer angry.

He no longer cared about anything. Nothing mattered to him anymore. Nothing but her.

Though this rehearsal was about going through the motions, getting the sequence flowing smoothly, and he wouldn’t be saying his actual vows until tomorrow, he couldn’t wait until then to share his epiphany with her.

So he took her hands to his lips, to his heart. “Eliana, my every answer to my every prayer...I’m letting go of everything, my heart. I cling only to your love, want nothing but your happiness and peace of mind,
meu coração.
”

* * *

Rafael’s pledge had been the last thing Ellie had expected from him. It had been reverberating inside her ever since, knocking down every barrier, ending every uncertainty.

Unable to wait to be alone with him, she gazed at him as the rehearsal came to an end, her heart shedding its sluggish despondence, back to the hammering of anticipation.

As he hugged another three men, the rest of his brothers—minus one all were loath to talk about—she couldn’t really see anything but him.

Dressed in all black, he’d lost weight in the past two weeks. It only made him seem taller, his shoulders and chest even wider in comparison to the sparser waist and hips. His face was hewn to sharper planes and angles, his skin a darker, silkier copper, intensifying the luminescence of his eyes. The discreet silver in his luxurious raven hair, that testament to his absolute love, added the last touch of allure.

Then she was swept up in his arms among his brothers’ hoots and hollers that he was disgracing them by anticipating the wedding night. Not in a condition to be embarrassed, she clung to him all the way to their quarters.

But the moment he placed her on the bed and came down beside her, her disquiet returned.

Twisting her ponytail around his wrist, harnessing her by it, ferocity barely leashed by gentleness, he tilted up her face. “No more distance,
minha vida,
ever again.”

“That’s not it...I just—just... Oh, God, please,
Rafael, show me your evidence against my father.”

His face settled in adamant lines. “I
have
given this up. I consider anything I’ve been through the path to finding you. You remember when you said you’d compensate me? Finding you is more compensation than I’ve ever dreamed I could have.”

“But what you have against him is airtight, right?”

“This is what I was afraid of, for your faith in him to be irrevocably damaged, causing you this much pain.”

Her chest ached, her eyes burned. “Everything in me rebels against believing any such thing of my father, but it isn’t why I’m in agony. It’s for you. What you suffered was unthinkable.”

“It’s in the past.”

“But this is the present and future. How can I share my life and body and baby with you if there’s even the slightest possibility my father committed such an unforgivable crime against you? Even if he had done so under unspeakable duress? Throwing you in hell while he lavished his love on me?” She released a shuddering breath. “Even if you’ve decided to look the other way for my sake and that of our lives together,
I
can’t. I can’t live believing one of the two people my life has been built around did the other such unimaginable injury, for whatever reason.”

After a long moment, he said, “Do you believe in your heart your father didn’t do it—or at least was forced to do it somehow?”

She nodded. “But I can’t even begin to think how this could have happened.”

“Then that’s it. I’m now ready to disbelieve anything but the verdict of your heart. It’s never wrong. That heart saw through the hatred cloaking mine, blew away my bitterness and anger, made me experience what I never thought I was capable of—a love without bounds. I trust your heart, and only your heart.”

She gaped at him, unable to take that much love.

He had more to give. “I’ll do anything to find new evidence in your father’s favor. To that end, if you permit, I want to face him. He’s the only one who might provide missing information needed to paint a truer picture.”

It terrified her that a confrontation might provide definitive proof that her father’s reasons hadn’t been overwhelming enough. But knowing this must be resolved, she consented. But on one condition.

“If it turns out my father did what you think he did and had no acceptable reason for his actions, I want you to deal with him as you see fit, to make no more allowances for his being my father. You have to have justice...and closure.”

Not intending to ever fulfill that condition, Rafael escorted Eliana to her father’s suite.

The man, who’d already gone to bed, seemed to think he wasn’t quite awake when Rafael told him who he really was.

His expression changed from blank, to flabbergasted—then he shot up and pounced on Rafael.

He pulled back, tears in his eyes. “
Deus,
could it really be you? Oh,
meu caro...
your disappearance hit me almost as hard as it hit your parents. The indescribable loss brought me back to your father’s side after we had our stupid falling out and I was idiotically sulking. He clung to my support during the search for you, but then your case was closed. We turned the world upside down looking for you on our own, but once your father became certain you were lost to him, he pulled away from everyone.” Deep sorrow creased his face. “It was why he and your mother divorced. They dealt with their grief in different ways and couldn’t find their way back to one another. I tried to keep in touch with him, but he couldn’t bear knowing anyone from the life that had you in it.”

From Ferreira’s reaction, Rafael no longer doubted he’d had
anything
to do with his abduction. Which left only one explanation. The real culprit had left the threads of evidence that would lead to Ferreira, clues that had been so ingenious, the police had missed all of them, and only he with his abilities and reach had found them twenty-four years later.

Eliana told her father Rafael had thought he was the one who’d orchestrated his abduction, and Ferreira’s dumbfounded reaction solidified his belief in the man’s innocence.

Looking relieved beyond measure, she sought his confirmation, and he rushed to give it to her. “It wasn’t him,
meu amor.
As always, your heart is my compass.”

After a clinging, tearful kiss, she turned to her father. “Do you have any idea who could have framed you, Daddy?”

Ferreira looked dazedly from his daughter to Rafael, obviously struggling to readjust to everything he thought he knew of the past months since Rafael had entered their lives.

Then Ferreira burst out in belated affront, “You’re telling me all this time you thought it was me? You came here to punish me? That’s why you went after Ellie?”

“I wasn’t part of his plan, Daddy.”

Relief and pride spread though Rafael. Her faith in him had been healed, and was back to the purity he now depended on.

“Eliana is why everything was put right,” he said gruffly. “Her love pulled me back from the path of destruction and into a life I never thought I’d have. But I need you to think. Anything you can remember around that time would help. It had to be someone who was close to you. Think, Ferreira.”

The man blinked numbly. Then he said, “You used to call me Tio Teo.”

“I used to love you almost as much as I loved my father.” He tried to smile through the pain stabbing in his chest. “But I don’t think I can call you that now.”

Eliana kissed his shoulder. “How about only Teo?”

Looking down at her, his heart in his eyes, he pledged, “Whatever you wish,
minha alma.
”

Suddenly, Teo grabbed his arm. “There’s something. When I first met Ellie’s mother, she had a stalker. I hired a security specialist to deal with the situation until that stalker was caught. I can’t think of anyone else in my whole life who had the kind of skills and underground connections needed to do something like...like...”

Ferreira fell silent, eyes feverish as he chased new realizations, connected seemingly unconnected events.

Then he focused back on Rafael. “He must have realized through me that you were just what that organization was looking for, and he’d had all the access to me he needed to doctor evidence to incriminate me.”

“Give me his name.”

After Ferreira did so, Rafael rose to his feet and bent to kiss Eliana. “I’ll initiate a targeted investigation at once.”

“Thank you,
meu amor,
” she whispered against his lips.

“Anything and everything for you,
minha vida.
Always.”

* * *

In an hour, Rafael walked back into his father-in-law’s suite. He stopped at the door, savoring the sight of the love of his life curled into her father, with his arm around her and their heads nestled against each other.

Overpowering emotions swept him. And not only for Eliana. But for her father, too. He was again the uncle he’d loved, but now far more, the man whose adoration for his wife had given him Eliana, a being made of total love.

Blinking back the burn behind his eyes, he walked in. And, oh...the welcome, the warmth, he saw on both their faces! He felt any lingering pain and bitterness and rage just drain away.

He came down on his haunches before them, delighting in how Eliana surged forward and took him in her arms, pressing his head to her heart.

“Thank you for believing Daddy,
meu amor.
Even if you can’t find proof, it’s enough you want to.”

“Found anything?” Teo asked anxiously.

Rafael pulled back from her embrace to look at him. “Once I had a name and a connection to you, everything fell...or rather crashed into place. I traced the man’s every move and contact and bank account transaction since the day I was abducted. And there’s no doubt. It
was
him.”

Eliana’s choking cry shook his heartstrings as she pulled them both to her, buried her face in their chests in turn and soaked them in her tears of relief.

His own relief was even fiercer, and all for her, that she didn’t have to live with something this horrible standing between the two people she loved most, that she wouldn’t feel guilty about his ordeals anymore.

After they both kissed and soothed her, he reached for Teo’s hand, squeezed it. “I beg your forgiveness, Teo, for believing in your guilt once my investigations led to you. I didn’t want it to be you, but when I dug again and again to make sure, I kept finding the same trails.”

Teo squeezed his hand back. “It was impossible for you to realize that man’s involvement. Anita was so scared of the whole thing, I couldn’t tell anyone, even your father.” He sighed in regret. “Ironically, it was the massive expenses of hiring that man, and which I couldn’t account for, that led to your father dissolving our partnership. And then I lost her, then your father...and that man disappeared from my memory.”