Chapter 3
The handwritten ledgers and the digital printouts from the system didn’t match.
I’d been sitting on the research station porch since five in the morning, surrounded by stacks of last quarter’s reports and mugs of cold coffee.
The sun had barely started pounding the tin roof, but my head was already throbbing.
The scheme the Falc?o family was running wasn’t amateur work.
It was meticulous livestock fraud, woven in the shadows of a system that rarely audited the big players.
I ran my index finger down the column of Animal Transit Guides—the GTAs.
There was a batch of three hundred head of Nelore cattle listed as dead from a sudden clostridial disease outbreak at the northern outpost, on the property’s border.
The problem was that the ranch pharmacy’s inventory showed vaccine purchases sufficient for double that herd, and there wasn’t a single technical report attached proving the carcasses had been disposed of or incinerated.
The cattle hadn’t died. They’d been diverted.
I slammed the folder shut with a sharp crack, raising a cloud of fine dust from the wooden table.
I needed to see the northern outpost with my own eyes. I had to walk the ground where those animals had supposedly dropped, to find traces of the trucks that—I was absolutely certain—weren’t hauling carcasses but fattened cattle bound for illegal slaughterhouses.
I pulled on my canvas jacket, grabbed my field kit, and strode toward the horse corral. The inspection jeep wouldn’t make it through the muddy bogs leading to the back of the ranch this time of year. I needed a strong animal.
The smell of fresh manure and cut grass filled my lungs when I reached the holding pen. I picked out a tall horse, grabbed a saddle from the shed, and started cinching the girth with the skill I’d inherited from my father, ignoring the sweat already pooling at the base of my neck.
“Where do you think you’re going alone?”
The deep, drawling voice came from right behind me, making my entire body go rigid.
I glanced over my shoulder. Jo?o Bento was leaning against the saddle shed doorframe.
He wore jeans faded at the thighs from years in the saddle, dirt-caked boots, and a dark blue button-down shirt.
The wide-brimmed hat partially hid his brown eyes, but it didn’t conceal his domineering, irritated stance.
“Doing my job, Bento,” I replied, yanking the leather strap to secure the bay’s saddle. “I don’t recall reading in my contract that I needed an escort from the heir to inspect phantom pastures.”
“You don’t know the boundaries of that winter pasture. The terrain is treacherous, and this week’s rains left the riverbanks unstable,” he countered, pushing off from the wood and walking toward me. “You’re not going alone.”
“Try and stop me.”
I turned to face him, gripping the horse’s reins. Bento stopped inches from me. His height always forced me to tilt my chin up—a physical disadvantage I hated, because the heat radiating from his broad chest invaded my space uninvited.
“I’m not here to play authority games with you, Rosário,” Bento said, dropping his voice to a rough, dangerously intimate tone. “If you want to go to the northern outpost and dig up dirt, go. But I’m going with you.”
Fury burned in my veins. I knew exactly why he wanted to come. It wasn’t for protection. Bento wanted to keep an eye on me, make sure I didn’t find the trail of fraud his father was running.
“Saddle your horse, then. And try not to slow me down.”
I swung into the saddle in one quick movement, touched my spurs to the horse’s flanks, and rode out of the corral before he could respond.
The ride was silent hell. The Pantanal was steeped in that unbearable, dense mugginess that precedes big storms. The air felt solid, sucking the moisture from our skin.
We rode side by side for miles across the floodplain.
The sound of hooves crushing dry grass and thin mud was the only thing that broke the suffocating tension between us.
I watched him from the corner of my eye.
Bento rode with enviable ease, his body swaying in perfect sync with the dark horse beneath him.
Memories of our horseback escapes as teenagers, of carefree laughter and naive promises, tried to invade my mind, but I shoved them violently into the depths of my bitterness.
We reached the northern outpost fence after almost two hours.
As I suspected, the pasture was clean. There were no bones, no disposal pits, no backhoe tracks that would justify burying three hundred carcasses.
There were only the deep, wide marks of cattle truck tires in the dried mud near the gate.
I dismounted and crouched near the fence, running my fingers over the grooves in the earth.
“Dual tires. Heavy load,” I murmured to myself, feeling victory turn bitter in my mouth.
I looked up at Bento, who remained mounted.
“The cattle didn’t die, Bento. They were loaded up.
You faked a clostridial outbreak to justify the shortfall and sold the animals off the books—no taxes, no health traceability. ”
He didn’t look away. His expression was a stone mask.
“You should go back to the station, Rosário. You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
“I know exactly who I’m messing with! The same family of criminals who thought they could trample my father until he died of a broken heart!” I shouted, my outrage exploding beyond my control.
The sound of my shout was swallowed by a colossal crash from the sky.
Thunder tore through the black clouds that had gathered over our heads with terrifying speed.
The sky, which moments before had been a hazy dome of muggy heat, plunged into violet darkness.
The wind howled suddenly, bending the tall grass and raising a curtain of dust that blinded me for an instant.
“Mount up!” Bento shouted, his voice cutting through the gale. The horse beneath him whinnied, startled by a flash of lightning that streaked across the horizon. “The storm’s about to hit full force! We’re the highest point in the pasture—lightning’s going to fry us out here!”
Fear didn’t paralyze me. I leaped into my horse’s saddle the exact moment the first drop—thick and cold as a rock—struck my cheek.
Within seconds, the world transformed into a chaos of water. The Pantanal rain wasn’t gentle; it crashed down with brutal fury. Visibility dropped to nearly zero.
“To the storage shed!” Bento pointed to a low brick building at the edge of the pasture, used by the ranch hands to store mineral salt and tools.
We spurred the animals through the curtain of water.
We reached the small storage shed skidding in the mud, and Bento jumped down first to shove open the reinforced wooden door.
We led the horses to the side veranda, sheltered by the low roof, and ducked inside, away from the fences, the livestock, and the isolated trees.
The thick walls muffled part of the gale, though rain continued hammering the tiles violently.
I dismounted any way I could and ran for shelter, slipping in the mud at the entrance. My legs gave out, but two strong, warm hands grabbed my waist before I fell.
Bento pulled me up. His breathing was ragged, his chest heaving against mine. We were soaked. His red hair clung to his face, and his light shirt hung heavy on his skin, completely transparent whenever lightning illuminated the small window.
The shock of the cold rain and the adrenaline from the gallop made my body tremble, but it was his refusal to step away that stole the air from my lungs.
Bento’s fingers stayed firm on my waist. He was so close that water dripping from the brim of his hat fell directly onto my collarbone.
“Let me go.” My voice came out as a whisper, betraying any intention of sounding threatening. I tried to push him away at the chest, but my fingers slipped on the soaked fabric of his shirt.
He didn’t loosen his grip. He took a step forward and pinned my back against the rough wall of the storage shed.
“I warned you not to come out here, Rosário.” His face hovered millimeters from mine, water streaming down his beard and dripping onto my neck. His brown eyes burned with a predatory, desperate, insane intensity. “Why don’t you ever listen? Why do you have to be so stubborn?”
“Because I don’t take orders from you! I’m not the little maid you tossed aside the second daddy gave the word!” The bitterness escaped along with tears mixed with rain.
“You think it was easy for me?” Pain tore through the mask of control he’d maintained for ten years as he held my arms against the wall. “You think I didn’t die a little every day, knowing you were out there convinced I was a monster?”
“You’re a coward!” I struggled against him, blinded by hurt and the maddening desire that closeness provoked. “You left! You turned your damn back and...”
The sentence died in my mouth.
Bento couldn’t take it anymore. The fury, the trapped words, the brutal longing, and the panic of the storm exploded in a single action. He released my arms, cupped the back of my neck with both hands, threading his cold fingers through my wet hair, and crushed his mouth against mine.
The impact was devastating.
There was no gentleness, no romantic hesitation. It was a violent shock, a collision of planets. His lips devoured mine with primitive, desperate hunger, mixing the taste of rain, earth, and tears.
I should have pushed him away. My mind screamed that he was the enemy, that he represented the corruption that killed my father, but my body was a miserable traitor.
I opened my mouth in a strangled moan, and his tongue invaded—hot, demanding, possessive—dominating every corner of me as if reclaiming territory he believed was still his. The heat of Bento’s mouth sent an electric charge so potent down my spine that my knees buckled.
I grabbed the collar of his wet shirt and yanked him toward me, pressing our bodies together until not a millimeter of air remained.
My tongue met his in a fierce dance, and I bit his lower lip, taking out on the flesh of the man I hated all the desperation of still loving him with the same sick intensity as before.
Bento groaned against my mouth, a deep, hoarse sound that vibrated straight to my lower belly.
He tightened his grip on my waist and lifted me off the ground with ease, forcing me to wrap my legs around his hips.
My back hit the rough wall of the storage shed, but the discomfort vanished beneath the obscene, delicious friction of his hard body against my core.
We kissed as if the world were ending inside that shelter.
With rage, teeth, salty tears, and a chemistry so explosive it seemed to outshine the lightning outside.
His touch burned through my defenses, stripping away the armor and exposing the woman who’d spent an entire decade dreaming of exactly this moment in the dark.
The need for air finally forced us apart.
Bento pulled his face back only a few centimeters, keeping his forehead pressed to mine. His breathing came in heavy, gasping bursts, mixing with mine. His eyes, once filled with anger, had transformed into two black pools of pure lust and desperation.
He slid his trembling hands down my back and gently set me on the ground, mud staining my boots.
We stood staring at each other in the darkness, the torrential sound of rain isolating us in our own bubble of chaos. His chest rose and fell violently.
I touched my fingertips to my swollen lips, still feeling the warm tingle of the kiss. My heart pounded so hard it hurt, and the cruel reality of what we’d just done began to settle like a cold anchor in my stomach.
The defenses had fallen, the fire had been lit, but the dirty war of the Pantanal still waited outside, and looking into the eyes of the man who destroyed me with a single kiss, I knew my ability to judge him objectively had just been fatally compromised.