Tina Beckett - Postcards From Rio

Wealth certainly had great benefits, Diego mused. But his penthouse apartment in Rio, his various other properties around the world and even his collection of luxury sports cars were simply toys to amuse him. Nothing filled the void inside him or made him forget the poverty and deprivation of his childhood. When he was growing up, what he had wanted more than anything was to feel loved. Love was more precious than gold or glittering gems but, after thirty-seven years without it, his heart had become as hard and unbreakable as the diamonds he mined.

He forced his thoughts back to the present when he realised Sister Clare was speaking. ‘It must have been difficult for your mother to be a single parent. Did you spend your childhood in Manaus?’

‘I grew up in a favela in the city of Belo Horizonte.’ Diego gave a cynical laugh. ‘The name translates to beautiful horizon, but there was nothing beautiful about the overcrowded and filthy slum where my mother and I lived.’

‘Is that why you like being in the rainforest, because it is wild and beautiful and you can be alone?’

Diego glanced at her. ‘I’m not alone now,’ he drawled. His gut clenched as he watched rosy colour stain her cheeks. She was so beautiful. But perhaps it was the fact that she was out of bounds that made her all the more desirable. It was one of life’s ironies that you always wanted what you couldn’t have, he mused.

He was surprised by Sister Clare’s perceptiveness, and also how easy he found it to talk to her. He was an expert at chat-up lines, but he rarely talked to women, probably because they rarely listened, he thought sardonically.

‘I can breathe in the rainforest,’ he admitted. ‘There is an honesty here that I have never found anywhere else. It’s one of the few places on earth where Mother Nature is truly untamed, and that makes her fearsome but fascinating.’

He was an instinctive poet, Clare thought. He wove a pattern with words and revealed his love of the rainforest in his gravelly voice. Who was the real Diego Cazorra? So far she had met the loner gold prospector and the notorious womaniser the Mother Superior had warned her about. But she sensed that Diego rarely allowed anyone to see beyond his outward persona of a laid-back, charismatic charmer.

She remembered the book of poems by the English romantic poet John Keats that she had found in the back of the Jeep.

‘“To one who has been long in city pent, ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven—to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament,”’ she quoted softly.

Diego glanced at her.

‘“Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair A gentle tale of love and languishment?”’ he finished the quote. ‘It seems we have one thing in common, at least. Which other poets do you like, apart from Keats?’

‘Oh, Wordsworth, Shelley. I love the work of many of the poets of the late eighteenth century. I am an unashamed romantic at heart. How about you?’

‘Am I romantic?’ He laughed. ‘What do you think, Sister Clare?’

‘I think you are more than a tough gold prospector.’ She hesitated, then felt compelled to ask, ‘What happened to your ear?’

‘An accident,’ he said abruptly. Instantly the connection between them was severed. Clare wished she had suppressed her curiosity, but it was too late to withdraw her question and Diego’s answer revealed nothing. She could not tell him her interest was not nosiness, but that she carried with her a box containing what was very possibly a piece of her sister’s ear, cut off by the criminals who had kidnapped Becky.

She had only glimpsed Diego’s ear, but it had been enough time for her to notice that the top half appeared to have been sliced off. The skin had healed over, as if the injury had not happened recently. Clare had read that a common tactic used by gangs in Brazil to scare families into paying a ransom for their kidnapped relatives was to send them a piece of the victim’s ear. There were even cosmetic surgeons who specialised in rebuilding mutilated ears. But Diego had told her that he had grown up in a slum after his father had abandoned his mother, and it seemed unlikely that he had been kidnapped and a ransom demanded for his release.

The mystery surrounding him grew ever deeper. She glanced at him as he concentrated on steering the Jeep around the potholes in the road. He had tipped his hat forwards so that the brim hid his expression, and she sensed that the barriers he had briefly lowered were back in place.

* * *

The rain did not stop after an hour or so as it had the previous day, but continued to fall in a relentless torrent that turned the dirt road into a muddy river. Clare lost count of the number of times the Jeep became stuck and she had to get out and help Diego free the wheels from the ochre-coloured soup. By late afternoon she was so tired that she moved on autopilot as she aided him in laying wooden planks beneath the Jeep’s front wheels. Diego climbed into the driver’s seat and accelerated until slowly, slowly the vehicle inched forwards. He drove into a small clearing in the trees where the ground was covered in a tangle of creeping vines and watched Clare trudge towards him.

‘I’ll say this, Sister. You are one determined lady.’ There was admiration in his voice. ‘Most people would have given up by now and asked to turn back, but I haven’t heard you complain once about the rain and the damned mud.’ He felt a flicker of something that could have been tenderness as he watched her valiantly try to haul herself into the Jeep. She was so tired she could hardly lift her foot on to the step and she did not protest when he lifted her up and deposited her on the seat.

Clare gave him a weary smile. ‘I will get to Torrente, whatever it takes. A bit of mud won’t stop me.’

She leaned her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, giving Diego an opportunity to study her without her being aware of his intent scrutiny. Her nun’s habit and veil were rain-soaked and her shoes and legs were covered in mud. She was pale with exhaustion so that the golden freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks were noticeable against her creamy complexion.

Desire, as inexplicable as it was inconvenient, tugged in Diego’s gut. He liked leggy blondes whose sexual experience matched his own, and he could not understand why it took all his will power to resist covering Sister Clare’s mouth with his lips and kissing her until she responded as passionately as she had when he had kissed her that morning.

She lifted her lashes, and Diego stared into the deep blue pools of her eyes. Deus, why did he feel an urge to open his heart to her and tell her things about himself that he had never revealed to anyone else?

Cursing his stupidity beneath his breath, he restarted the engine and drove back to the road. ‘The rain is easing up and I reckon we’ll get to Torrente in a couple more hours.’

When they reached the town he would leave her at the church and never see her again. She had chosen a way of life that prevented her from having a relationship with a man. And he had to face it, Diego mocked himself, he could not have offered her a relationship. All he wanted was to have sex with her, and once he had sated his desire he would no doubt have grown bored of her as quickly as he did with all his mistresses.

‘Do you know of a big waterfall near to Torrente?’

He nodded. ‘Branco Cachoeirao. The waterfall is three or four miles outside the town.’

‘I believe there is a cave nearby, and inside there is a shrine to the Virgin Mary which was carved out of rock by a missionary who was one of the first non-indigenous people to visit Torrente many years ago.’