clergy and forced to follow endless rules. He hadn’t known a moment of true freedom until he reached university and it was hardly surprising that he had then gone off the rails for a while. In fact, it had been a few years before he got back on track and completed his business degree.
And what had brought him back? The discovery that at heart he was a da Rocha and that he couldn’t run away from his birthright. A workers’ dispute in which he was powerless to intervene on their behalf had persuaded him to start attending business meetings and, although he still couldn’t legally call the shots, he had discovered that the directors were very wary of making an outright enemy of him. Like Zac, they looked to the future.
‘How long will you be away?’ Charles prompted, aware that Zac was leaving London to check out the diamond mines in South Africa and Russia.
Zac shrugged. ‘Five...maybe six weeks. I’ve a lot to catch up on but I’ll stay in touch.’
Leaving his father’s office, Zac headed back to The Palm Tree, the small, exclusive and very opulent hotel he had bought in preference to an apartment of his own. His thoughts immediately turned in a more frivolous direction, escaping with relief from the serious ramifications of his father’s sage advice. He had bet his brother that he couldn’t find an ordinary woman and pass her off as his socialite partner at the royal ball to which he had also been invited. Unsurprisingly, Vitale, who didn’t have a humorous bone in his entire body, had been unamused by the challenge but, on emerging from his meeting with their father earlier, Vitale had startled Zac by not only accepting the bet but also by making his own. And what had followed had had very much an ‘own goal’ feel for Zac...
Remember that little blonde waitress who wanted nothing to do with you last week and accused you of harassment? Bring her to the ball acting all lovelorn and clingy and suitably polished up and you have a deal on the bet.
Freddie? Lovelorn and clingy? That was the challenge to end all challenges when he couldn’t even get her to join him for a drink! His even white teeth clenched hard in frustration. Zac had never before met with an outright rejection from a woman and it had infuriated him, his innate need to compete making him persist. But Freddie had interpreted persistence as harassment and had burst into tears in Vitale’s presence, a fiercely embarrassing moment that had frozen Zac where he’d sat in all male horror at what he had unleashed on himself in a public place. Even more gallingly, Vitale had stepped straight in to defuse the scene with all the right soothing words until another waitress had arrived to rescue them. But then that was Vitale, all smooth, slippery and refined in a way Zac was distinctly aware that he himself was not. The most formative years of Zac’s life had been the dropout years when he had belonged to a biker club, not rubbing shoulders with the rich and sophisticated in polite society.
In polite society, Zac was mobbed by women seduced by his great wealth and he avoided such women like the plague, well aware that they would’ve been equally enthusiastic even if he were old, bald and unpleasant. That he was none of those things simply made him more of a target. He had loved the male brotherhood in the club, the easy acceptance, the loyalty and the complete lack of rules that had enabled him to be himself. He had enjoyed women equally happy to enjoy him in bed, women without an agenda, only looking for pleasure. But after a while, even that had got old and as soon as the Brazilian media had discovered his hideout and exposed the story of the billionaire biker boy, he had moved regretfully on, knowing that phase of his life was over.
He revelled now in the anonymity of his life in London and had avoided his siblings’ social gatherings out of a strong desire to preserve it. Spoiled, privileged young women with cut-glass accents didn’t do it for him because they saw him as a prize trophy to be won. He had met with more sincerity and honesty in people his brothers would probably snobbishly deem to be vulgar and uneducated. And even conservative Vitale had conceded that Freddie was a real looker.
Zac only knew that he had never wanted a woman with such instantaneous lust. Lust at first glance, he conceded grimly, thinking it ironic that out of all the many women who wanted him back his libido had had to focus on one who not only did not want him, but also actively appeared to dislike him. He couldn’t accept that he had done or said anything to incite that reaction from her and the injustice had outraged him, encouraging his damaging determination to change her attitude. Meu Deus, after her outburst, he would scarcely be looking in that direction again, which meant that Vitale had won the bet outright and as the loser he would have to hand over his cherished sports car. Exasperation and growing annoyance gripped him. He would now be gone for weeks in any case.
One last try...
When he got back to London next month, what would he have to lose? He could attempt outright bribery, Zac decided with sudden savage cynicism...use the power of money to persuade for once in his life. Freddie had refused his first generous tip and then had just as swiftly changed her mind and accepted it, he recalled with a sceptical curl of his full sensual mouth. She would turn out to be like every other woman he had ever met: she would surrender for money. After all, she wasn’t working all day on her feet as a waitress for fun.
* * *
Freddie was having a dream about a man with eyes the colour of crushed ice, a wealth of silky blue-black hair and a full sensual mouth.
It was a wonderful dream until a little hand shook her arm and a little voice said, ‘Bekfast? Auntie Fred...bekfast?’ while one warm little body pushed for space in her single bed and another warm little body crawled up over the top of her.
With a groan, Freddie woke up and checked her alarm in case she had slept in. Some hope of that with her nephew and niece around, she thought ruefully, with three-year-old Eloise pinning her up against the wall and ten-month-old Jack lying on top of her in a happy baby sprawl.
‘You don’t lift Jack out of his cot,’ she told her niece for the tenth time. ‘He could get hurt. It’s not safe if I’m still asleep—’
‘You wake now,’ Eloise pointed out cheerfully as Freddie scrambled over her with Jack in her arms and went to change him.
A vague recollection of her dream flushed her triangular face and her soft mouth tightened, her brown eyes sparkling with self-loathing. Loser alert, loser alert, she chanted inside her head in exasperation. Eloise and Jack’s father, Cruz, had been a very good-looking guy as well, beautifully dressed and polite, but he had turned out to be a terrifyingly violent drug dealer and a pimp. Her older sister, Lauren, had died of a drug overdose within days of Jack’s birth, utterly destroyed by the man she had loved, who had not only refused to acknowledge his children but had also so far escaped paying a single penny towards their support.
Zac whatever-his-name-was might not be either beautifully dressed or polite, but he had been staying for weeks in the very expensive penthouse suite in the exclusive hotel where she worked in the bar and, although he had been gone for over a month now, the suite was apparently being held for his return. How the heck was he affording that when as far as she could see he didn’t engage in any normal form of work? He also mixed with some very flash, international, business-suited men. He was dubious and up to no good, of course he was, she told herself angrily, furious that the Brazilian had invaded her dreams. It had been bad enough, she acknowledged, when she’d had to see him every day in the bar. And now that he was gone, why hadn’t she completely forgotten about him?
It was even more weird that he had shown such an interest in her in the first place, she reflected irritably. She had seen how attractive he was to women while she worked. Zac wasn’t a mere babe magnet, more a babe tornado. She had seen desperate women do everything but strip in front of him in an effort to gain his attention. They nudged up to him at the bar, tripped nearby, tried to strike up conversations and buy him drinks. And he acted as if they didn’t exist, behaving like a blind celibate monk in their radius. Weird and suspicious, right?
After all, Freddie knew she wasn’t a show-stopper. She was way too undersized to be one. Barely five feet tall and slender, with only a very modest amount of curves. She had dark blonde hair that fell halfway to her waist and plain brown eyes. So why would a guy with Zac’s attributes chase a waitress unless he was