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‘Damn!’
Arden shot up from the table, grabbed the frozen dinner, and plopped it into the garbage bin. What was the matter with her tonight? Charm? Conor had charm, all right, the sort conmen had relied upon for years. As for his soft whispers, she thought grimly, they’d been about as substantial as cobwebs.
Not that she cared. By now, she knew that she’d never loved him at all. What she’d been was dazzled—by his looks, by his charlatan’s practised charm—no, she thought as she strode into the living-room and sank down at the old secretaire she’d salvaged from the flea market on Third Avenue, no, she’d never cared one little bit for Conor Martinez. If she’d just kept to the opinion she’d had of him right from the start, she’d have saved herself lots of time and tears.
At least, it would be over soon. Arden’s jaw firmed as she pulled open the top drawer of the secretaire and withdrew an envelope stuffed with papers. She pulled them out, spread them across the desktop, and riffled through them. Felix’s will had passed through probate, and El Corazon was now officially hers. The letter of formal notification had arrived two weeks ago, and now she could shut the door on this part of her life.
Arden smoothed the letter open and read it for perhaps the tenth time.
‘Dear Miss Miller: I am pleased to inform you that...’
Her eyes skimmed the page. Yes, it was true. The finca belonged to her now. Conor had lost his bid for it—if you could call the one effort he’d made at getting the codicil invalidated a ‘bid’. A grim smile touched Arden’s lips. Conor had threatened she’d be run over by a legal juggernaut but, in the end, he’d backed off.
His lawyers had notified hers that he was going to fight the will, hers had fired back a reply warning that she was prepared to dig in her heels and fight—and, after a lengthy silence, Conor had surrendered.
‘My letter of intent convinced his legal staff of the strength of our case,’ Arden’s lawyer had wired proudly.
Arden had let him think what he liked, but she’d known the truth, that it was Conor’s unremitting practicality that had won out over his hatred of her.
‘Attorneys are the only people who profit in cases like this,’ he’d said.
And that, plain and simple, was why El Corazon was hers now, without a prolonged legal battle. She’d been right about Conor all along. He hadn’t wanted the finca so much as he’d wanted to avenge his father. And as for her—in the end, he hadn’t even hated her enough to squander money fighting her. She’d been a disturbance in his life, nothing more, nothing less. By now, he’d probably forgotten all about her, forgotten those nights she’d spent in his arms, forgotten all the things she would never forget...
Arden’s breath hissed between her teeth.
‘Stop it,’ she said, her voice angry and sharp in the silence. ‘You’re behaving like a fool!’
The ranch was hers now, hers and no one else’s, and—and...
And she didn’t want it. Winning El Corazon had seemed a victory, but now she saw it for what it was, for what it always would be: a bittersweet reminder of pain and sorrow, an open wound that would never heal so long as she was mistress of El Corazon. But what choice did she have? She could sell it, of course, but the thought of knowing that someone other than Conor was riding that land was unsettling. It was crazy, of course, because she hated Conor with every breath she took, but that was the way she——
‘Wait a minute,’ she whispered. A little smile began curving across her lips. Conor had threatened Felix with some organisation when the old man had wanted to sell the cloud forest. What was it called? Friends of the Land? The Forest Conservers?
‘Friends of the Forest,’ she said delightedly, and her smile became a grin.
By this time next week, she’d be free of El Corazon and all it stood for, forever.
But it took longer than that even to set the wheels in motion.
‘I want to give El Corazon to Friends of the Forest,’ she told her attorney when she phoned him the next day.
‘What?’ he said. ‘We have a poor connection, señorita. I thought, for a moment, you said you wanted to give El Corazon to——’
‘That’s exactly what I said. Contact them, please, and draw up the necessary papers.’
It was obvious he thought she’d lost her gringa mind. ‘You must think about this,’ he kept saying through phone call
after phone call, until Arden called the organisation herself and asked them if they’d be interested in being gifted with a hundred thousand plus acres of land in Costa Rica.
Two months later, everything was in place. The phone lines had hummed between San José and New York, she had signed what seemed hundreds of papers, and now all that remained was the one final paper, the deed that would give El Corazon to the organisation for all time to come.
The organisation’s secretary telephoned Arden at work late one Friday afternoon.
‘Our representative is in New York, Miss Miller,’ he said. ‘We hoped we could arrange a Press conference for tomorrow.’
‘No Press conference,’ she said firmly. ‘I thought I’d explained, I want this all done very quietly.’
There was a brief pause. ‘Are you sure? This is quite a large gift, after all, and we should like to acknowledge your kindness in some way.’
