Blood ties…his son’s birth being kept from him…his brothers being kept from him…
She watched him carry their child out of the room. Their departure was followed by a silence loaded with far too much painful family history to be easily bridged. Javier Estes did not move to take his leave, didn’t even suggest it. He seemed rooted to the spot, perhaps shocked into a reassessment of his role as executor of a will that viewed people as puppets to be manipulated into play.
‘This is a sad business,’ he finally murmured, grimacing over his failure to win Nick’s co-operation with the master plan.
‘A gift might have been good, Mr Estes,’ Tess said quietly. ‘Something freely given…’
‘When has something freely given ever been valued?’ he tossed at her derisively, then shook his head. ‘It seemed he was complying with the conditions…’
‘What were the conditions?’ Tess asked, determined on knowing the full truth now.
‘To find a woman he loved, marry her, have a child, set up a family life…stop flitting aimlessly from woman to woman in empty relationships.’ The lawyer gestured an appeal. ‘Is that not good advice? Does it not suggest a father’s caring to you?’
A woman he loved…
The watchdogs had apparently missed the point that she’d already had Nick’s child and their marriage was based on love for their son, not love for each other.
‘I came because he had not contacted me,’ the lawyer said in frustration. ‘The other two had. It was the natural thing to do.’
‘The other brothers?’
‘Yes. And the meeting date has been set.’
‘They have completed their missions?’
He frowned. ‘I’m not at liberty to say.’
‘But the meeting date has been set,’ Tess pressed, thinking how pointless it was to set a date if no one was going to turn up.
‘February the fourteenth. Four o’clock in the afternoon. In my office,’ he reeled off.
‘In Rio de Janeiro?’
‘Of course. There is the matter of settling the estate.’
‘Nick is not about to change his mind on the inheritance, Mr Estes,’ Tess said, mocking that purpose.
He winced. ‘The face to face rejection when he was eighteen…it is not forgotten, nor forgiven. It is a rather bleak irony, do you not think, that it was he who impressed Enrique so much…’ He sighed. ‘…and he who gains nothing from it?’
‘Perhaps the other brothers did not have such a displaced life. For Nick and for me…having to pay a price for what should be our natural rights as human beings…it eats at our souls, Mr Estes. And we have to save ourselves from that, or at least limit the damage.’
A musing little smile curled his lips and his eyes seemed to glint with respectful admiration. ‘You understand him.’
‘I love him,’ she stated simply.
A slow nod of acknowledgement. ‘I regret that I cannot break the terms of the will. I cannot give him his brothers. If you love him, Tessa Steele Ramirez, you will not leave him displaced. You know the date and time for the meeting…’
But I didn’t say Nick loved me back, Mr Estes.
She escorted the lawyer from Brazil to the front door, watched him leave, then wandered back through the beautiful family home Nick had bought for them, reviewing in her mind every step made to where they were now.
Their marriage had nothing to do with an inheritance. Nadia Condor had been very wrong about that. But had Nick started on this journey with her to get to his brothers?
Had the destination of the journey changed?
If so…when and why?
Tess kept seeing the image of a set of scales being loaded with her and Zack on one side and Nick’s two half-brothers on the other. The weight had been dramatically tipped this morning with the brothers being discarded. Nevertheless, this did not leave Tess with any sense of winning. She knew Nick was losing and there was no way of forgetting the pain of his loss.
It had to be addressed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NICK felt too raw, too angry, too exposed, to be anywhere near Tess. Nor was he in a fit frame of mind to be looking after their son. It was wrong to use his own fatherhood as a blind to the churning hatred stirred by his father’s attitude towards himself and his brothers—owing them nothing except their lives, giving them nothing, not even each other. He had to deal with this alone, get past it, move on into his future.
He sought out Carol Tunny, the Karitane nurse who was now an integral part of their household, finding her in the nursery quarters where Zack was due to have his morning nap. Having left his son in her care, he decided what he needed was some hard, mindless, physical task to get rid of this sickening inner turbulence.
He headed for the boatshed beside the wharf, discarding the white bathrobe at the pool terrace on his way down to the harbour foreshore. His small racing yacht was up on the slips, ready for the hull to be scraped clean of barnacles—precisely the kind of job that should work him back in control of himself.
He’d been at it for a good hour when Tess walked in. He stopped scraping and stared at her, realising she probably had some issues rising out of the Brazilian lawyer’s visit, though he’d gone all out to refute the inheritance shadow on their marriage. She couldn’t believe that any more.
Yet he sensed the barriers were up again. She looked as cool, calm and collected as she’d always been when they’d worked together, discussing the casting of the right people for particular projects. Her clothes were neatly co-ordinated, smart but not sexy, her make-up minimal, her glorious red-gold hair pulled back into a pony-tail because of the summer heat, although quite a few provocative little ringlets escaped confinement.
To Nick’s intense chagrin, it wasn’t just her appearance reminding him of former times. It was the on guard expression on her face, the wariness sharpening the clear blue of her lovely eyes. The intimacy of their marriage should have changed this. The violent feelings he’d been working hard at setting aside, boiled up into frustration that Tess still didn’t trust him.
‘Hot work,’ she remarked, shooting a glance over his sweaty, grime-streaked chest and arms. Her gaze didn’t fall as low as the brief swimming costume he was still wearing. In fact, it quickly diverted to the small bar-fridge in the corner of the boatshed. ‘Can I get you a cold drink, Nick?’ she asked, already moving to supply it.
She was nervous of him.