The South American's Wife

The handbag yielded a pouch containing a pale pink lipstick, smoky eye-shadow and a mascara wand. No surprises there: she’d never used a lot of make-up. She donned the touch of lipstick she’d spoken of, and ran a comb through her dried hair. The bruising looked worse than it had the night before, as did the grazes on her cheek and jaw, but she had more to think about than her appearance.

Her last clear memories were of attending a leaving party for a workmate, followed by dinner out with a group from the office. Julie had been out herself when she had got back to the flat. She’d made a hot drink and gone straight to bed.

That had been the twelfth of September. The day before yesterday, so far as her mind was concerned. Luiz had said they’d been married three months, but that didn’t tell her the date now.

He supplied an answer to that question on his return.

‘It’s the twenty-seventh of January,’ he said. ‘More than halfway through our summer. The temperatures on the plateau are milder than here on the coast. While the days are hot at this time of the year, the humidity is low, the nights refreshingly cool.’

‘It sounds good.’ Karen was doing her utmost to stay on top of her emotions.

Luiz came to close and lock the suitcase she’d left open on the bed, hoisting it effortlessly up. ‘I have a taxi waiting to take us to the hotel.’

‘Hotel?’ she queried.

‘I think it better that the two of us spend some time together before returning to Guavada,’ he said. ‘We have a great deal to discuss.’

Karen forced herself into movement, reluctant to abandon the only bit of security she knew right now. Luiz went ahead to open the door for her, falling into step at her side to traverse a short, beautifully tiled corridor to a bank of lifts.

The one that arrived silently and smoothly in answer to his summons was empty. They descended without speaking, to emerge in a luxuriously appointed lobby. The receptionist on duty at a central desk bade them a smiling farewell, expressing what Karen took to be good wishes for the future. A forlorn hope indeed while the past months remained a blank.

Although it was still only a little after nine-thirty, the temperature outside was already soaring. Karen was glad to dive into the air-conditioned taxi-cab. With the suitcase stowed, Luiz slid in beside her. His thigh lay next to hers, the firm muscularity clearly de-fined beneath the fine cotton of his jeans when he moved.

Stripped, he would be magnificent, came the unbidden thought, bringing a sudden contraction deep down in the pit of her stomach. She would have seen him like that for certain—as he had no doubt seen her. She wondered how she, so unpractised in full-blown lovemaking, had managed to satisfy a man who would certainly have been no virgin.

They drove down through a city humming with workaday energies to a luxury hotel overlooking a superb crescent of white beach that was already heavily populated. Sugar Loaf reared now to the left, outlined against a sky beginning to cloud over a little.

‘Is it going to rain, do you think?’ Karen asked, turning from the balconied window—more for something to say than through any real interest in the weather. ‘Summer is the rainy season out here, isn’t it?’

Watching her from across the superbly furnished and decorated room, Luiz inclined his head. ‘It is, yes.’ His regard was penetrating. ‘You recall that much then?’

‘Not the way you mean,’ she said. ‘I must have read it somewhere.’

‘Then the view out there means nothing to you?’

Karen’s brows drew together. ‘I’ve seen it in pictures.’

‘But no more than that?’

‘No.’ Heart thudding against her ribcage, she added, ‘What else might it mean?’

‘It’s the view you had from your room in this same hotel three months ago,’ he said. ‘Not the same room, I admit, but a replica of it. I hoped it might strike some spark of recollection.’

‘It hasn’t.’ Her tone was flat. ‘I must have won quite a lot to afford to stay in a place like this.’

‘Several thousand pounds, I believe. A one-time opportunity to see how the other half lived, was how you excused the extravagance. There would have been little left to take home with you, for certain.’

‘Except that I found myself a husband who could afford to stay in places like this.’ She made a gesture of self-disgust. ‘Forget I said that, will you?’

The dark head inclined again. ‘It’s forgotten.’

Considering his expression a moment ago, Karen doubted it. If she wanted to alienate him any more than he already must be alienated, considering the reason he’d followed her to Rio, she was going the right way about it.

He was leaning against a chest of drawers on the far side of the queen-size twin beds. Karen could only be thankful that there were two of them—although the thought of sharing even a room with him was daunting.

‘I have the room next door,’ he said, reading her mind with an ease she found daunting in itself. ‘I’ve no intention of pressuring you into anything you find distasteful.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Karen scarcely knew what else to say. ‘It isn’t that I find you…unattractive.’

‘A start, at least.’ His tone was dry. ‘Patience is no particular virtue of mine, but it seems I must learn to employ it. Perhaps sight of our home will help.’

‘Perhaps.’ Karen hesitated, reluctant to put the idea in his mind if it wasn’t there already, yet needing reassurance. ‘You don’t think I’m pretending to have lost my memory, do you?’

His expression underwent an indefinable alteration. ‘What might cause you to do such a thing?’

She lifted her shoulders. ‘Fear of retribution, perhaps.’

‘You see me as a wife-beater?’

‘I don’t know what you’re capable of.’ She was beginning to wish she’d kept her mouth shut. ‘It isn’t true, anyway. If I were capable of putting on that kind of act, I’d belong on the stage!’

‘I believe you would.’ His shoulders lifted. ‘There have been moments in our relationship when you’ve sorely tried me, I admit.’

Karen eyed him in silence for a moment. ‘We had rows?’

‘We had some differences of opinion. You’re a strong-willed young woman.’

‘Where I come from, all women have minds of their own,’ she claimed.

‘As do Brazilian women—except that they are rather more subtle in their employment of it.’ The pause was brief, the sudden change of tone emphatic. ‘We have to put this behind us, and begin again.’ He held up a staying hand as Karen started to speak. ‘I’ll arrange a hire car and show you the sights—the way I did when we first met. Perhaps then things will start to come back to you.’

He straightened away from the chest, turning towards the door. ‘Come to the lobby in half an hour.’

Karen stood where she was for several moments after he’d left the room, mulling over everything that had been said. There were still so many questions to be answered, and only Luiz to supply those answers.

But was what he told her the whole truth? Why had she felt the need to turn to another man at all?

CHAPTER TWO

THE limousine Luiz had hired was already waiting for them outside when she went down. He put her into the front passenger seat before going round to slide behind the wheel.

He had shown her the sights this way when they’d first met, he’d said upstairs. If the hotel itself, plus the view from the window, had failed to stir her memory, it was unlikely that this was going to work either, but it was worth a try, Karen supposed. Anything was worth trying!

They headed for the mountains backing the city, leaving the congested streets to enter a world of tropical rainforest where thick lianas hung like pythons from tree branches furry with moss. The tangled canopy far above filtered out the sunlight, casting an eerie green glow over writhing creepers and huge tree ferns. There were flowers in abundance, their colours jewel-like among the foliage.

Karen was mesmerised, hardly able to believe that they were still within the city limits.

‘It’s like another planet!’ she exclaimed, viewing a begonia bush bursting with bright yellow blossom and smothered in bees. ‘What’s making all the noise?’

‘Monkeys,’ Luiz advised. ‘We invade their territory. This is the Terra da Tijuca, Rio’s national park. It spreads over a hundred or more square miles.’

‘It’s wonderful!’

He cast a swift sideways glance at her rapt face. ‘But in no way familiar?’

‘No.’ The enthusiasm faded as reality reared its head again. ‘To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen any of this before.’

She sank back into her seat, head against the rest, eyes closed. ‘I feel I’m living someone else’s life!’

‘I can assure you you’re not,’ Luiz responded. ‘Your memory will return when you’re ready to remember.’

Karen stole a glance at the hard-edged profile, feeling the fast-becoming-familiar tension in her lower body. ‘Supposing that’s never?’

His jaw compressed momentarily. ‘Then we accept matters the way they are and live our lives accordingly.’

‘I’m not sure I can accept it,’ she said, and saw the compression come again.

‘There’s no other way.’

It was obvious that any further protest on her part would be a waste of time and breath, Karen acknowledged silently. Whatever she’d done, she was his wife and she was staying his wife.

Topped by the towering white statue of Christ, the granite peak of Corcovado afforded a panoramic view over both city and coastline. The skyscrapers below were reduced in size to toytown dimensions, the beaches of Copacabana and Impanema to curving crescents of white dotted with ants. Karen was overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle.

‘You were equally impressed the first time you saw it,’ said Luiz, watching her face as she gazed at the scene. ‘As you were with everything.’

‘Including yourself,’ she murmured.

‘Including myself,’ he agreed. ‘As I intended you to be.’

‘How long did I hold out?’

Dark brows lifted. ‘Hold out?’

‘Before you got me into bed with you?’

It was a moment before he answered, his tone quizzical. ‘Does it matter to you?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I need to know.’

His shrug was brief. ‘We made love on the first night of our acquaintance.’

Karen swallowed. ‘You must have thought me the easiest conquest you’d ever made!’

‘No such thought entered my mind,’ he denied. ‘We were two people drawn by the same overwhelming force.’

She couldn’t bring herself to meet the dark eyes full on. ‘Would you still have wanted to marry me if I’d had previous experience?’

‘I would have accepted it, yes.’

Karen looked at him then, oblivious to the other people on the platform. An arm resting against the guard rail, head outlined against the sky, he looked at ease in a way she envied. She had a sudden urge to disrupt that equanimity.

‘Tell me about Lucio Fernandas,’ she said with deliberation. ‘Who exactly is he?’

She gained her wish as his face hardened. ‘I prefer not to speak of him.’

‘We have to talk about him,’ she insisted.

Straightened now away from the rail, Luiz studied her for a moment in silence. When he spoke it was in tautly controlled tones. ‘There’s little enough I can tell you of his background. He was employed by one of my foremen. Had I had any notion…’ He broke off, gritting his teeth together. ‘Suffice to say he would have been in no fit state to arouse any woman’s interest!’

Karen’s chest felt tight as a drum. Luiz Andrade was a proud man; it didn’t take intimate knowledge to be aware of that. The discovery that his wife had been having an affair at all would have hit him hard enough, but for her to have become involved with a mere employee!

‘I’m still not convinced it’s the truth,’ she said defensively. ‘What actual proof do you have that there was any affair to start with?’

Amber lights glinted in the depths of his eyes. ‘What proof do I need other than that you provided yourself in running off with him?’

‘There had to be some prior signs, surely?’

‘There apparently were, had I been willing to see them. Beatriz suspected, but failed to warn me.’

Karen put up an involuntary hand to her temple as pain lanced briefly through it. There was an odd buzzing in her ears, a sense of being drawn somewhere she didn’t want to go.

Luiz moved swiftly to catch her as she swayed, arms sliding about her to hold her close. She could feel the strong beat of his heart at her breast, the sun-stoked heat of his body.

‘I’m all right now,’ she managed. ‘Just a bit of a dizzy spell, that’s all.’

He made no attempt to stop her as she pulled away from him. ‘I should have refused to discuss the matter,’ he said. ‘This isn’t the place.’

What attention they’d drawn from those in the vicinity had now been returned to the scenery. Karen tilted her head to let the breeze cool her cheeks, both hands on the guardrail to steady herself.

‘Who is Beatriz?’

Luiz made a curt gesture. ‘As I said, this isn’t the place. We’ll return to the hotel.’

She made no protest. The name had meant something to her, that was obvious, but there was no further break in the curtain.

It was well into the afternoon when they reached the hotel again. Luiz accepted Karen’s plea that she was tired and needed rest rather than food without demur, simply saying that he would see her later.

A shower was a first priority on reaching her room. She luxuriated for several minutes in the glass-walled cabinet, blanking out everything but the feel of the water streaming over her skin.

Towelled dry, she donned the robe provided and returned to the bedroom to extract fresh underwear from the suitcase. There seemed little point in unpacking fully when she had no idea how long they would be here.

Her throat closed up at the thought of what she would be facing when they did return to the ranch. However much she might want to disbelieve it, all the evidence pointed to the fact that she really had been having an affair with another man.

Where would she have been now, she wondered, if there had been no accident? What kind of life would she have had with a man capable of leaving her lying unconscious in the road? How could she have been drawn to another man at all when she was married to one as charismatic as Luiz Andrade?

Unless Luiz wasn’t the man he appeared to be either. How could she be sure what their marital relationship had really been like? There had been rows, that much he’d admitted. She only had his word that there had been no serious rift between them.

He left her alone until eight, by which time she had begun to wonder if he had deserted her after all. When he did put in an appearance he was wearing a light linen suit that sat on his frame as if made to measure.

‘I felt the need of fresh clothing,’ he said. ‘You at least have that facility.’ He ran an appraising glance over her slender curves in the lilac silk tunic that had been one of the few items in the suitcase she considered suitable for dining out. ‘Did you rest well?’

Karen turned away, unable to hold his gaze for long. ‘As well as can be expected, considering. What happens now?’

‘We have dinner here in the hotel. If we repeat, as far as is possible, the details of our time here together, perhaps it will stir something in your memory.’

‘Every detail?’ she asked after a moment.

‘I said as far as is possible,’ he responded. ‘I make no demands on you.’

‘For now,’ she murmured, and heard him draw a roughened breath.

‘Do you think me so easily able to banish the thought of you with Fernandas from my head? Whenever I close my eyes I see you in his arms!’

Karen made herself look at him, seeing the anger glittering his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said wretchedly. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’ She paused, searching for words. ‘Do you think you ever will be able to put it aside?’

‘If not I must learn to live with it.’ He was in control again, though his voice remained taut. ‘The marriage will not be dissolved.’

There was nothing she could say to that. Nothing likely to help the situation. But there were still so many things she needed to know.

‘This morning you mentioned someone called Beatriz,’ she ventured. ‘Who is she?’

Something flickered deep in the dark eyes. ‘She’s the wife of my brother, Raymundo.’

The latter name struck no chord either. ‘Does he work on the ranch too?’

‘He and Beatriz have their home there,’ came the somewhat ambiguous reply. ‘As does my young sister too. Regina was devastated by your leaving.’

Karen sank to a seat, her legs no longer supportive. Just how many people would she be facing on her return to the home she had fled?

‘How old is Regina?’ she asked.

‘Eighteen now.’

Green eyes lifted to view the incisive features. ‘And Raymundo?’

‘Twenty-eight. Four years younger than myself. There was another brother between us in age, but he died some two years ago.’

Empathy came swiftly, born of her own loss. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You never knew him.’ Luiz moved abruptly, crossing to open a cabinet Karen hadn’t attempted to explore. ‘I think we’re both in need of a stimulant.’

He poured a colourless liquid for them both, bringing both glasses back to where she sat to thrust one into her hand. Not gin, she realised, putting it to her lips, but white rum. The spirit burned her throat, but she finished it, glad of the immediate effect. Alcohol was no solution to her problems, for certain, but it helped take the edge off them.

‘What about parents?’ she said.

‘I lost my father some years ago. My mother married again, and now lives in Brasilia.’

Karen viewed the empty glass in her hand with lacklustre eyes. ‘Have we met?’

‘Just the once, when I took you to visit her.’

‘Did she approve? Of the marriage, I mean?’

‘No.’ His tone was unemotional. ‘She would have preferred that I marry a woman of my own race.’

‘That’s understandable.’

‘It’s of no consequence.’ His own glass also drained, he took hers from her unresisting hand, depositing both on the nearest surface. ‘Enough questions for now. You need to eat.’

Food was the farthest thing from her mind, but she rose obediently to her feet. It would be embarrassing going into a restaurant looking like this, she acknowledged, catching sight of her face in a nearby wall mirror, but there was little to be done about it.

There were others in the lift descending to the ground floor. Karen could feel the glances. If Luiz was aware of them too, he gave no sign. The subdued lighting in the restaurant afforded some comfort. All the same, it was a relief to gain the relative privacy of the alcove table.

There was nothing in the least bit familiar about the plush surroundings. She hadn’t really expected there to be. She left it to Luiz to choose her meal, eating what was put in front of her without tasting a thing. The wine he’d ordered went straight to her head. She drank only half a glass, afraid of losing her grip altogether.

‘This isn’t going to work,’ she said bleakly over coffee. She cast a glance at the man seated opposite, senses stirred by his dark masculinity. ‘I don’t think anything is.’

‘There’s nothing to be lost by trying,’ he said. ‘From here we went to a club.’ His gaze was on her face. ‘And then back to the hotel.’

Karen felt a pulse throb suddenly at her temple, setting her heart pounding in empathy. She tried desperately to grasp the image that fleeted through her mind.

‘What is it?’ Luiz’s voice was low but urgent. ‘Do you remember?’

She slowly shook her head. ‘Just a feeling for a moment. Nothing concrete.’

‘But it meant something to you, that was apparent.’

‘It seems so.’ She studied the vital features, wishing she could tell what he was thinking right now. ‘Does everyone know about Lucio Fernandas?’

The glitter sprang in his eyes for a moment, then subsided again. ‘Beatriz is the only one with that information.’

‘You trust her to keep it to herself?’

‘She had better do so. Regina believes you left merely because of dissidence between us. Your amnesia will be difficult enough for her to accept.’

Not nearly as difficult as it was for her, Karen thought. Recollection might not be palatable, but it had to be better than this blankness.

‘We could always try keeping it a secret,’ she said, and saw his lips thin.

‘You find the situation one to treat with flippancy?’

She made a small apologetic gesture. ‘No, of course not. It’s just…’ She paused, swallowing thickly. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like to sit here and listen to you telling me about people and places and matters I’ve absolutely no concept of? The person I seem to have become bears no relationship to the person I believe myself to be. It’s like looking in a mirror and seeing someone else’s reflection!’

Luiz inclined his head, face set. ‘Difficult for both of us. To be deceived is bad, but to be forgotten…’

He left it there, lifting a hand to signal to the waiter. Up to now, Karen had been too involved with her own feelings to give any real thought to what he must be going through. She tried to put herself in his shoes, to imagine how it must feel to be wiped completely from her mind after months of living together as husband and wife. What man could handle that with equanimity?

She watched him sign the bill that was brought to the table. Those lean, long-fingered hands would know every inch of her, came the thought, sending a frisson the length of her spine. In three months she would no doubt have got over any inhibitions she might have had herself: the way her body was reacting at this moment gave every indication of it. She might not remember loving this man, but she was vitally attracted by him. Whatever had driven her to seek another man’s arms, it couldn’t have been because Luiz no longer stirred her.

She made an effort to compose herself as the waiter departed, to meet the eyes raised to her. ‘What now?’ she asked.

‘As I said before, we follow the same pattern.’

‘You really think it’s going to help?’

‘Whatever chance there is of stirring something in your memory, we must take,’ he stated. He got to his feet, rounding the table to draw out her chair. ‘The night is still young.’

It was gone ten o’clock, Karen saw from the thin gold watch on his wrist as she rose. Handsome, charismatic, obviously not without money, it could be said that Luiz Andrade was everything any woman could possibly want. Yet she had left him for a man whose backbone, it seemed, was so weak he had left her lying in the road. It didn’t make sense.

They took a taxi to what appeared at first sight to be a large private residence. Luiz handed over a card in the well-appointed entrance hall, and they were duly signed in to wander at will through rooms devoted to various pastimes.

Luiz ignored the crowded casino, leading the way to a smaller, dimly lit room where couples swayed to the beat of an excellent four-piece combo. There were tables set around the periphery of the room, but he ignored those too, drawing her on to the floor and into his arms.

Held against the hard male body, Karen concentrated on matching her steps to his. She felt his hand warm at her centre back, his breath stirring the hair at her temple. Her mouth was in line with the hollow of his throat, revealed by the open neckline of his shirt; the male scent of him tantalised her nostrils.

All sensations of the present not the past, she told herself. Luiz was a man to whom any woman with an ounce of red blood in her veins would respond. Perhaps if they actually made love…

She rejected the thought immediately. Even if she could bring herself to try such an experiment, Luiz almost certainly wouldn’t with the images he’d spoken of earlier crowding his mind. He had followed her to Rio with the intention of fetching her back because his pride wouldn’t allow him any other course, but that wasn’t to say he’d have been prepared to make love to her again.