He could not be truly independent or free until he had met the terms of the trust one way or another. Hedged by restrictions throughout childhood and adolescence, he had railed against the trust when he had finally understood how it would limit him. He was the last da Rocha and he enjoyed enormous wealth but until he fulfilled the conditions imposed by that trust he had no more rights than a child to control the diamond mines and the vast business empire built on the back of their profits. He felt sidelined, powerless and dispossessed by his current weak position and there was little he would not have given to be free of it.
‘My lawyers tell me that if I marry and fail over time to produce a child they think there would be little problem breaking the trust,’ Zac revealed grimly, his chiselled cheekbones taut. ‘But that would take years and I’m not prepared to wait for years to run what is mine by right of blood.’
Charles expelled his breath in a slow hiss. ‘So, you’re going to get married,’ he assumed.
Zac frowned. ‘I don’t need to get married,’ he countered. ‘Any heir will meet the terms of the trust, boy or girl, legitimate or otherwise.’
‘Legitimate would be better,’ Charles protested quietly.
‘But the ensuing divorce settlement would cost me a fortune,’ Zac responded with resounding practicality. ‘Why marry when I don’t have to?’
‘For the child’s sake,’ Charles supplied with a grimace. ‘To protect the child from growing up as both you and your mother did, isolated from normal life.’
Zac parted his lips as though he was about to say something and then thought better of it, swinging restively away. His grandfather had found himself married to a barren wife. He had then impregnated a maid in the household, who had given birth to Zac’s mixed-race mother. Antonella had been whisked away to be raised at a remote ranch, separated from her mother and never acknowledged by her aristocratic father once her arrival had refuelled his wealthy lifestyle. She had been an heiress but one from the kind of humble background the rich and sophisticated delighted in despising.
Initially, Zac’s stepfather, Afonso, had assumed that Zac was his child and he had married Antonella, willing to turn a blind eye to her embarrassing background if he could share her riches. When Zac was three years old, however, his need for a blood transfusion after an accident had roused Afonso’s suspicions about his parentage and the truth had emerged. Zac still remembered Afonso screaming at him that he was not his child and that he was ‘a dirty, filthy half-breed’. After that fallout, Zac had been transported to the ranch to be raised by staff, out of sight and out of mind while Antonella worked on repairing the marriage that meant so much to her.
‘He’s my husband and he comes first. He has to come first,’ Antonella had told Zac when he’d asked to go home with her after one of her fleeting visits to see him.
‘I love him. You can’t come to Rio. It will only put Afonso in a bad mood,’ she had argued vehemently years later with tears in her beautiful eyes.
Yet Afonso had enjoyed countless affairs during his marriage while Antonella struggled to give him a child of his own, suffering innumerable miscarriages and finally the premature birth that had claimed her life when she was already well beyond the age when child bearing was considered safe. Afonso had not even come to the funeral and Zac had buried his weak-willed but lovely mother with a stone where his heart should’ve been and the inner conviction that he would never ever marry or fall in love, because love had only taught his mother to reject and neglect her only child.
‘I married two very beautiful women, neither of whom was the least maternal,’ his father, Charles, told him heavily, pulling Zac suddenly back into the present. ‘Angel and Vitale paid the price with unhappy home lives. Right now you’re at a crossroads and you have a choice, Zac. Give marriage a chance. Choose a woman who at least wants a child and give her the opportunity, with your support, to be a normal mother to that child. Children need two parents because bringing up a child is tough. I did the best I could after the divorces but I wasn’t around enough to make a big difference in my sons’ lives.’
It was quite a speech and it came from the heart; Zac almost groaned out loud because he could see where his father was coming from. Although marrying would cost him millions when it inevitably broke down, that legal framework would provide a certain stability for the child. It would be a stability that he had never enjoyed but then, unlike his grandfather, he had always planned to be involved in his child’s life, hadn’t he? Even so, if he wasn’t married to the mother of his child, his freedom to be involved would be dictated by her. He already knew those facts, had worked through all possible options with his legal team and preferred not to think about those facts because they only depressed him. After all, the odds of him having a good relationship with his child’s mother were slim, he reflected impatiently.
Women always wanted more from Zac than he was prepared to give...more time, more money, more attention. But all he had ever wanted from a woman was sex and once that was over, he was done. He was an unashamed player, who had never been in a real relationship, who had never pledged fidelity and who could not bear the sensation of being caged by anyone or anything. In many ways, he had been caged most of his life, raised on a remote ranch before being placed in a stiflingly strict boarding school run by the 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