Page 44 of Marriage Bargain With Her Brazilian Boss (Billion-Dollar Fairy Tales)

“Just speaking the truth,querida.” And just like that, she understood the deeper significance of his protectiveness of her.

A long exhale made her chest rise and fall. “What happened to him?”

“He died of heart disease when I was thirteen.”

“Oh.” She didn’t utter any trite comforting words. It was clear that it had devastated him as a child. That it continued to wreck him even now. “Is that when the company fell apart?”

“No. It fell apart, year by year, one underhanded contract after another, one corrupt scheme after the other, once his partner took over. When he realized he didn’t have long left, Papa signed over the power of attorney to his partner Carlos. My mother...” such stark anguish crossed his features that it froze Nush in acrid fear, “was a simple soul. She never cared about business or politics or wealth. Papa’s partner took advantage of her grief, of her loneliness, of her ignorance, married her within a year of Papa passing. Then he proceeded to drive a wedge between her and me, until she asked me to give up my right to the company. By the time I left to live with Rao, she and I...had become strangers to each other.”

The carefully dispassionate way he spoke of his mother...only made the truth that much clearer to Nush. It hid a well of unhealed, festering wounds made of nothing but hurt and pain.

She wanted to throw her arms around him then, to simply hold him. But there was a forbidding quality to him, a brittleness that threatened to shatter everything that was new and fragile between them if she so much as touched him.

“When did she die?”

“Two years after I left. I begged her to join me.” Such pure bitterness spewed from his words that Nush wouldn’t have been shocked to see them land like acid drops on the air. “But she kept saying her sons needed her.”

“Hersons?” She wasn’t able to keep her shock out of it.

“She has two sons with him. Twins. Jorge and Javier.”

Shock turned her words into a whisper. “Your brothers, you mean?”

Another shrug.

Her chest was so tight that she had to force herself to breathe. “You never saw her again?”

He shook his head and upended another glass of wine down his throat.

“I’m so sorry, Caio. I can’t imagine...not being able to say goodbye.”

“It is what it is, Princesa. Her priorities were different from mine.”

Nush wanted to argue, to say she didn’t agree with that. She wanted to delve but was it for anything other than to satisfy her curiosity? Was it for any reason other than to poke her finger into an unhealed wound and make it spill forth more poison? But if he didn’t talk about this with her, if that hurt wasn’t purged...

He’s shared this much, Nush. Give it time.That voice distinctly sounded like Thaata and Nush pushed away the more intrusive questions.

“But you’ve bought the company now,” she said, infusing a lightness she didn’t feel into her words. “You can build it up bigger and better than before. Bring back all those principles your father valued. Make it a monument to his big heart and values.”

Caio stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown two horns, his sensuous mouth twisting into a distasteful slant. “No.”

“What do you mean no?” she said, any semblance of remaining the steady, sensible one in this difficult conversation shattering at the resolute will of that single word.

“There’s nothing of my father or his legacy left in that company, Nush.”

Nush got to her feet, startled by the vehemence of his words. “You bought it to destroy it?” Clarity came like a veil being lifted permanently. “You set your stepfather up to fall, to lose everything, didn’t you?”

“Carlos already destroyed everything good about it, Princesa.” By the way he spat that name, Nush knew it was his stepfather. “Lured by the idea of more and more profits, he made one bad deal after the other when he had no resources to deliver. His son Enzo embezzled the pension funds of the employees. Carlos is in crippling debt, all the livelihoods under his care ruined, and he was still looking for a payout. All that’s left to do is to pull out its very rotten foundation and grind it to nothing, to reduce the rubble to ashes.”

Emotions thrashing in her chest, Nush stared at him. She’d always known there was a well of anger and pain under Caio’s smooth facade. Had realized, even as a teenager, that something dark fueled his every move. But to know it as vague speculation and to see it were different. To stand in its direct path was terrifying at a soul-deep level. “And you’ve been planning this for how long?”

“More than a decade.”

“That’s...horrible.” Agitation pushed her words out. This was why her grandfather had been against Caio going ahead with this. Because if he did this, he was permanently shutting down any connection left to his past. With the bad, he was burning down the good too. “To work toward that kind of destruction for years...you’d have to be...empty of all good things.”

“Are you already regretting your promises, Nush?” he said, taking in her defensive posture with her arms around her waist. The distance she’d imposed between them.

She pressed a hand to her forehead, refusing to let him make this about her. “I’m just sad that all of his good name, everything your father stood for, it has to come to dust and ashes like this. That everything you...” She plunged her fingers into his hair, feeling as if her own heart suddenly had a crack in it. “This can’t be it, Caio. Tell me the truth. Tell me that’s what has been hounding you for the past week. Tell me it feels like a defeat.”

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