Anger flared so bright and hot, Rico could hardly see. Teeth clenched, his jaw muscles felt tight enough to snap. He could already feel what would happen next. Teresa was going to do it again. She would run to save her family. She would break her word and disappear. Again.

He took a step forward, intending to stop her before she got one step outside his house, but he halted suddenly when Teresa spoke.

"You don't understand, Bastien," she said, words tumbling from her in a rush. "I won't leave. I gave my word to Rico and I won't break it. Not again. He's my husband and I...care for him. I won't hurt him by disappearing one more time, Bastien. I agreed to stay here for a month and I'm going to."

Rico laid one hand on the doorjamb to steady himself. His world had just been rocked. Teresa had shocked him straight to the bone. She cared for him. Love? Did she still love him? While he stood there outside the room, something flickered to life in the center of his chest. Warmth filled him along with the territorial urge to go to her, hold her tightly to him and sweep her into bed, where he would d.a.m.n well keep her for the rest of their time together.

He shifted position slightly so he could see Teresa better. Her long, thick hair was pulled back into a ponytail at the back of her neck. She was wearing the dark green nightgown he loved to strip from her, with a short white robe over it, loosely belted at her waist. Her long, tanned legs were bare and planted wide apart as if in a fighting stance. But it was the expression on her face that caught and held his attention. She looked...fierce. She was defying her father's attempt at a rescue. In favor of Rico.

This time she had chosen him.

"Your father will not be happy." The older man was speaking again.

"My father is the one who taught me that once your word is given, it is sacred," Teresa told him. "I won't cheat Rico. Tell my father to find Gianni. He still has two weeks to bring the dagger here."

Through the anger at Dominick's duplicity rose a new and unexpected feeling inside Rico. Trust. That warmth rushing through him was enveloping as he watched the woman who was his wife. And though he warned himself to be wary, he knew that something between them had shifted tonight.

Gathering together the threads of his anger, Rico pushed the door open and stepped into the room. Both Teresa and the older man whipped around to face him. She looked stunned and embarra.s.sed. The man she'd called Bastien just looked worried. As he should.

"Get out," Rico said, voice tight with the effort of holding on to the anger churning in his gut.

The man didn't need to be told twice. He scuttled for the terrace doors and only stopped at the threshold when Rico spoke up again.

"Leave the island tonight," he advised. "If I see you here tomorrow I'll have you arrested for trespa.s.sing."

One bob of the man's head told Rico he was understood. In another second, the man was gone and he and Teresa were alone in the room.

"I can explain," she said quickly.

"You don't have to." Rico looked down at her and felt that rush of warmth again. She was beautiful. She was proud and defiant and she was his. For now, anyway. "I heard everything before I came in. Your father sent him."

She blew out a breath before lifting her chin high enough that she met his gaze. "Yes. Bastien is a family friend. Sort of an honorary uncle, I guess."

"Uh-huh." Despite everything, he felt a quick flash of irritation for Nick Coretti. Yet how could he blame the man for trying to save his daughter? Rico or any of the Kings would have done the same for one of their family. Though it burned that the older man had almost put one over on him. Would have, if Teresa hadn't chosen to stay.

"So your father arranged this escape."

"He's worried about me," Teresa told him with a heavy sigh of frustration mingled with exasperation. "He can't find Gianni or the dagger."

"Are you certain that it is you he's worried about?" he asked. "Or is he more concerned with the idea that he and his sons are going to prison?"

She flushed and a spark of anger lit her eyes briefly. "Of course he's thinking about that, too. But sending Bastien was about me."

Scowling, Rico said, "Maybe. But it was a foolish thing to do."

He pulled his phone from his pocket, handed it to her and said, "Call him."

She took a deep breath and held it. Then she punched in her father's number and listened to it ring. "Papa?" She flicked a glance at Rico. "Yes, Bastien was here. I wouldn't go with him."

Rico heard the older man's shout and almost smiled. He, too, hated it when a plan fell apart. As his own plan concerning Teresa had, he thought grimly. But he'd consider that and the ramifications later. For now...

"Let me talk to him." He held out one hand and waited until Teresa slapped the phone onto his palm. Dominick was still shouting at his daughter when Rico interrupted him.

"Do not try something like that again," he warned, holding Teresa's gaze while he listened to Nick Coretti sputter.

"She is my daughter. I want her safe," Nick said finally.

"I understand that," Rico told him, and he meant it. He would do whatever he had to do to keep a member of his family safe. But that didn't mean he was going to let Nick off the hook. "Teresa is safe with me. But if you try to get her off the island again, I'll make sure you and your sons are locked up forever."

The man on the other end of the line was quiet for a long moment, then said, "Agreed."

"Good." Rico looked into Teresa's eyes and added for both her and her father's benefit, "I am a man of my word. At the end of the month, once I have my dagger, I'll hand over the evidence I hold."

"And," Nick said firmly, "you will release my daughter."

He should. It was part of the deal he'd made. Not to mention the fact that he had spent the last five years working to get his errant wife out of his mind and heart. But now, looking at Teresa, Rico knew that he couldn't let her go.

Yes, he'd given his word. But he couldn't, wouldn't let Teresa leave him and disappear again. She was a part of him. A part of his life here on the island and without her...no.

It was unthinkable. But he couldn't very well say that to her father. So instead he said only, "We made a deal. I will stick to it-as you should."

He ended the call and felt the world beneath his feet tilt precariously. All his life Rico had done his best to be a man of his word. To avoid lies and deception. And now the only way he could get out of a bargain he had struck was to break every one of his personal rules.

Which meant he had to find another way out of this.

"He's scared," Teresa said as explanation, dragging him out of his thoughts and back to the present.

"I know." He reached for her before he could stop himself, cupping her cheek in the palm of his hand. "Any father would be. What I want to hear is why you didn't go with Bastien."

She was silent for a few seconds, as if she was considering just how to say what she needed to say. Finally she said quietly, "Five years ago, I made the choice I thought I had to. But tonight I didn't want to repeat the same mistake."

He stiffened slightly, as he always did when reminded of that time five years past. He'd shut her down whenever she had tried to tell him about the night she had left. He hadn't wanted to hear this before, but now he needed to. Rico had to know why she'd left him. Why she'd run-so he could believe that she wouldn't do the same now.

The bedroom was cool and dimly lit from the moonlight pouring in through the open terrace doors and the twin bedside lamps casting golden light across the bed and floor.

"Tell me." His words were short and clipped, but they seemed to release her from a tension that had coiled inside her for too long.

When her eyes met his again, they were damp, looking like gold coins drenched in water. If her tears spilled over, it would tear at his heart, he knew. Rico steadied himself, then took her hand and led her to the bed. Sitting down, he drew her with him and repeated, "Tell me."

"I'm glad you're finally willing to listen."

"I wasn't ready before," he told her. "I am now."

Nodding, Teresa tried to smile, but gave that up quickly. "All right, but first you have to know that when I was eighteen, I told my father that I wasn't going to be a thief. That I wanted a different kind of life."

He hadn't expected to hear that and as he thought about it, he laughed shortly.

She glared at him.

"Sorry," he muttered. "I was just imagining how your father must have taken that decision."

A reluctant smile curved her mouth. "Not well. He was horrified. And disappointed. But in the end, though he didn't understand my decision, he respected it."

Rico silently gave Nick Coretti half a point of admiration for backing off and giving his daughter the room she needed to grow her own way. Not that he was willing to forgive the old thief or anything.

"I took that job at your hotel," she said, starting off slowly, her soft voice hesitant, as if she wasn't sure how to put it now that he'd given her the chance. "And I asked my family to stay away." She smiled wryly. "Usually they did as I asked, not wanting to bring down suspicion on me in a place where I happened to be working. But that was before I took a job with Rico King."

She shook her head and caught his eyes again. "The temptation was too much. The richness of your guests at the Castello de King was enough of a draw all on its own, but there was more. They knew about your dagger. There had been some piece written about it-"

Rico remembered that. Someone had done an interview with him for a national magazine article on the Cancn Castello and during the meeting the reporter had seen the Aztec dagger in a case on his desk. There had been questions and photos and apparently that had been enough to attract the attention of professional thieves.

He hadn't worried about it at the time, because his security at the hotel was top-of-the-line. But the Corettis, he was discovering, were very worthy adversaries. "I remember that article. Go on."

She nodded and threaded her fingers together in her lap, restlessly tugging at them until he laid one hand on top of hers to hold her still.

"My oldest brother, Gianni, loves antiquities. He couldn't resist the lure of that dagger and where he went, so did my father and Paulo." She looked up at him again and held on to his hand tightly. "I swear I didn't know they were going to hit the hotel until after it was done."

Staring into those wide-open, pale brown eyes shining with misery and regret, he could only nod. Rico believed her. But then, if he hadn't been in such pain over losing her, he would have believed her long ago.

Satisfied, she kept talking. "When you discovered the dagger missing, I just...had a feeling. Then you contacted the police and were vowing to hunt down the thieves no matter what it took."

He remembered that, too. His fury at being robbed. The crushing need to retrieve something his father had pa.s.sed on to him.

"While you were with the police, I searched through the guest register and found my family under one of their more familiar a.s.sumed names."

Familiar. a.s.sumed. She had grown up quite differently than he had. Now he saw that lying, to Teresa, had been second nature. Just the way things were done. And he had to admire her for breaking away from the only life she had ever known. What kind of strength was that, to turn your back on your family? Your legacy?

"Gianni was already gone with the dagger," she was saying and Rico came out of his thoughts to listen to the rest of the story.

"My father and Paulo were packing." She winced. "They had already sent what they'd taken from your guests by overnight mail to our home in London."

And those, Rico told himself, were diamonds, rubies and emeralds that would never see the light of day again. At least, he told himself wryly, not in their original settings.

"I begged my father to call Gianni, to get him to return the dagger, but it was too late. My brother had boarded a plane right after-" She broke off.

"Right after stealing from me," Rico finished for her.

"Yes. There was no way to reach him and I'm not sure I would have been able to convince him to return the dagger even if I could have talked to him." She sighed and shook her head, pulling one hand from his to push a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "Maybe if I had confessed that we were married-" she mused. "But I just couldn't do it. You were furious, I knew I would have to leave you and there wasn't a point in telling my family and hurting my father over a marriage that would be ending anyway."

He gritted his teeth and she saw him fight for control. When he finally found it, he spoke again. "This explains the robbery," Rico said quietly. "And why you didn't tell your family about us. It does not tell me why you ran from me. Why you chose them over what we had together."

She pulled in one long, shuddering breath and slid off the bed to stand up. Facing him, she wrapped her arms around her middle, accidentally opening the fall of her robe, giving Rico a glimpse of luscious, tanned skin and the tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s beneath her nightgown. He had to force himself to focus on what she was saying.

"I left my father and Paulo packing and went back to our suite. Do you remember how you were? What you were saying?"

"No," he said. All he recalled clearly was the helpless anger that had had him in a choke hold, strangling him with a sense of helplessness that no King could accept.

"I do," she said softly. "You told me that if it was the last thing you ever did, you would hunt down those thieves. You would see them in prison for a lifetime." She tightened her grip around her middle and held on as if clutching a lifeline in a choppy sea. "You said you would do whatever it took. That you and I would find them. Together. Then you asked if I had seen anything, heard anything unusual around the hotel."

"And you lied to me."

"Yes." She swallowed hard and nodded. "I lied. To protect my family."

"Why, Teresa?" he asked, though he already knew the answer. Her father. Her brothers. Her connection with them ran deep. Perhaps deeper than the link she had had with a new husband and the promise of a future too vague to be real.

"Because I couldn't help you track them down, Rico. I couldn't do what you needed me to do, but I couldn't stay and not help you, either. I would have been living a lie every day, praying that you wouldn't discover my secret." She shook her head so wildly her ponytail swung behind her head like a pendulum. "It was a disaster. Any choice I made, I hurt someone I loved. I didn't want to lie to you, but I thought that one lie was better than a lifetime of them."

"You should have told me," he said, pushing up from the bed to lay both hands on her shoulders. "You should have trusted me."

She laughed now and the sound wasn't musical at all. It was like shards of gla.s.s being ground under steel wheels. "Trusted you? I should have told you that the thieves were my family and please don't prosecute?"

He frowned at her as her words resonated inside him.

"Would you have believed that I had nothing to do with the theft?" she demanded, all traces of tears gone from her eyes now, replaced by sparks of rising temper. "The first thing you said to me when you found me here was that you thought I had married you only to give my family access to your blasted dagger."

Now it was his turn to feel a rush of shame. Yes, he had convinced himself years ago that Teresa had only married him to help her family's thieving. But that had never made sense and he'd known it even while he'd allowed the thought to drive him insane. The Corettis were, if nothing else, excellent thieves. They didn't need to use Teresa. They'd gotten past his security and out of the country almost before he'd known he'd been hit.

No, blaming Teresa had been his pride talking. The wound she'd left when she disappeared had festered until that convenient lie he'd told himself had simply been a way of deflecting the truth.

That she'd chosen another over him.

"You're right," he said, his voice hardly more than a hush.

She blinked at him and shook her head. "Excuse me?"

One corner of his mouth lifted briefly. Of course she would be surprised. He hadn't given her any reason to think he would be on her side in any argument.

"I said, you are right. I would have accused you. I would have been wrong, though." He slid his hands up to hold her face between his palms. His gaze bored into hers as he willed her to believe him. "I know you weren't a part of it. And I can even understand a little now why you made the choice you did."

She huffed out a breath. "Thank you."

"But I need to know why you chose differently tonight, Teresa."

Leaning into him, she said solemnly, "Because I didn't want to hurt you again, Rico. Because this time you were more important. This time I had to trust you."

"Good answer," he murmured and bent down to kiss her. He'd meant only to plant a brief, hard kiss on her lips.

But at the moment of contact, Teresa wrapped her arms around him and held on. She opened her mouth and tangled her tongue with his and they were linked, as they were meant to be, always.

Rico groaned and held her tighter. Lifting her off her feet, he turned back to the bed, laid her down and then lay down beside her. Rising up on one elbow, he looked down into golden-brown eyes. Then he kissed her again and lost himself in the arms of the only woman in the world who held his heart.

Rico met Sean for lunch at a small restaurant near the harbor. It had been two days since Teresa had turned down a chance at escape. Two days since she had chosen him over her family. He liked knowing that she was on his side in this, but he had to wonder how long that would last if her family didn't return the dagger.

Because if that happened, he would go through with his threat. He would hand over all of the evidence he'd collected over the last several years to Interpol. And once he did that, he would lose Teresa. How could he expect her to stay with the man who had imprisoned her family? No, he knew d.a.m.n well she would never forgive him for that.

And if they did deliver the dagger as promised, then he would have to hold up his end of the bargain and not only release Teresa, but divorce her, as well. He couldn't keep her here without going back on his word and couldn't let her go without losing a piece of his soul.