Duarte's Child

Encountering brilliant dark golden eyes, she reddened hotly. ‘Yes, he’s asleep but maybe I should sit with him for a while in case he wakes up again.’

‘Trying to impress me with maternal overkill? Tell me, who looked after Jamie while you were giving riding lessons?’

‘Nobody—’

‘Nobody?’ Duarte queried with hard emphasis.

Emily frowned in surprise. ‘It really wasn’t a problem. I was only instructing a couple of hours a day and I would park Jamie’s buggy outside the paddock. He was never more than a few feet from me and he usually had the company of parents watching their child’s lesson.’

As Duarte listened, his lean powerful face tautened, his wide sensual mouth compressing. ‘Usually? A working stables is no place to leave a baby unattended. You know as well as I do that riders can’t always control their mounts and that your attention must’ve been on your pupil—’

Under that attack, Emily had stiffened and lost much of her natural colour. ‘Jamie was always safe. I did the very best that I could—’

‘But your best wasn’t halfway good enough,’ Duarte cut in with biting derision. ‘You left my son at the mercy of passing strangers instead of ensuring that he received proper care—’

‘I wanted to spend every minute with him that I could and you’re making this sound much worse than it was,’ Emily protested defensively. ‘Everywhere I worked, Jamie got loads and loads of attention. Most people like babies, especially happy ones—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Duarte said coldly.

Emily worried at her lower lip and then said heavily, ‘Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have afforded to pay someone to look after him—’

‘And whose fault was that?’

As her tension climbed, Emily trembled and her tummy churned. Thinking straight had become a challenge; she had never been much good at confrontations. However, on this occasion she found herself struggling to speak up in her own defence. ‘Whose fault was it that I left Portugal in the first place?’

Far from looking impressed or indeed startled by that comeback, Duarte inclined his arrogant dark head to one side and levelled his incisive gaze on her in the most formidable way. ‘Presumably you are about to give me the answer to that strange question?’ he prompted.

‘I only left Portugal because I thought that you were planning to try and take my child off me the minute he was born!’ Emily countered in an accusing rush.

Duarte angled an imperious brow. ‘What kind of a nonsensical excuse is that? Before this morning, I never made a threat in that line. To be frank, my patience with you came to an end today. But who or what gave you the idea that I might have been considering such a dramatic move last year?’

Emily flinched and dropped her head, shaken at how close she had come in her turmoil to revealing Bliss’s role in events eight months earlier. Had she done that, she could never have forgiven herself. Bliss had been the truest of supportive friends during Emily’s troubled marriage, cheering Emily up when her spirits were low while offering helpful advice and encouragement. Although Emily had not contacted the other woman since leaving Portugal, she assumed that her friend still worked as Duarte’s executive assistant. Bliss had eavesdropped on that confidential dialogue between Duarte and his lawyer and had forewarned Emily. Were Duarte ever to discover that a member of his own staff had been that disloyal, Bliss’s high-flying career would be destroyed.

‘I just got the idea…at the time, the way you were treating me—well, er…it seemed to make sense to me and I was afraid that you were planning to separate me from my child—’

‘So you chose to separate our son from me instead. Is that how this sorry story goes?’ Duarte dealt her a look of shimmering challenge that made her breath trip in her already tight throat. ‘This convenient angle that continually seeks to turn you into a poor little victim? Well, I have news for you—I’m not impressed, querida.’

‘I’m not trying to impress—’

‘No?’ Without warning, Duarte sent her a sudden slanting golden glance as hard and deadly as an arrow thudding into a live target.

Feeling the sudden smouldering surge in the atmosphere but unable to comprehend what had caused it, Emily untwisted her laced hands and made a jerky move with one of them as if she was appealing for his attention. ‘I know I’ve made mistakes—’

‘Mistakes?’

‘—but now I’m just being open and honest—’

‘Open…and honest,’ Duarte repeated with a brand of electrifying soft sibilance that danced down her rigid spine like a fullscale storm warning. ‘Que absurdo! An honest whore you were not!’

Emily’s lips parted company and she fell back a faltering step in dismay at the proclamation and that particular word being aimed at her. Even in the aftermath of finding her in another man’s arms, Duarte had not employed such an emotive term. ‘B-but—’

‘But what? You were carrying my baby when you slept with another man. How many women have affairs while they’re pregnant with their husband’s child?’ Duarte demanded in a derisive tone of disgust that nailed her to the spot. ‘But no such fine sensibilities restrained you. You even dared to introduce me to your lover. You also brought him into my home. Only a whore would behave like that.’

Forced to recognise the extent of the sins being laid at her door, Emily gasped strickenly, ‘Duarte, it wasn’t like that and Toby was never my—’

‘Do you really think I’ll listen to your pathetic excuses? You are nothing to me.’ Duarte made that wounding statement with a savage cool that bled all remaining colour from her shaken face.

You are nothing to me. That he should feel that way was hardly news but spoken out loud that acknowledgement cut Emily in two.

‘But you belong to me. Minha esposa…you are my wife,’ Duarte completed with sardonic bite.

Under the onslaught of that ultimate putdown, Emily felt something curiously akin to a re-energising flame dart through her slim tense body and she flung her head back. ‘No…I don’t belong to you like your cars and your houses and your wretched art collection,’ she heard herself asserting. ‘I may be your wife but I’m not an object without any thoughts or feelings or rights—’

Although she had no recollection of him moving, Duarte was now a step closer, threateningly close. Even as she was still fighting to understand quite where her own unusually spirited defence had come from, she was awesomely conscious of the expanse of all that lean, taut masculinity poised within inches of her own much smaller frame.

In the electrifying silence that had fallen, shimmering golden eyes sought and held her scrutiny, all the powerful force of will he possessed bearing down on her. ‘You have no rights in this marriage.’

‘I don’t believe you mean that…you couldn’t,’ Emily reasoned, tearing her gaze hurriedly from his as her heart rate speeded up. ‘You’re just very angry with me—’

‘I am not angry with you,’ Duarte growled like a leopard about to spring on an unwary prey. ‘But I cannot and will not trust you with the kind of freedom I gave you before.’

‘That…was freedom?’ A startled laugh empty of humour was wrenched from Emily’s working throat, for she had found her duties as a Monteiro wife as rigid a constraint to her days as a prison cell. Every daylight hour had been rigorously organised for her with a weighty yoke of responsibilities that took no account of her own personal wishes.

Hard dark colour scored the hard set of Duarte’s proud cheekbones. ‘So you find my former generosity a source of amusement?’

‘Oh, you mean your money…’ Emily very nearly let loose a second nervous laugh as comprehension finally sank in and her soft mouth tensed. ‘Well, it wasn’t much consolation when you were never around and I never did take to shopping, although I did try hard to like it. You see, I wasn’t the sort of woman you should have married and I still can’t really understand why you did…’

Duarte stared down at her with eyes as dark and fathomless and deep as the midnight witching hour. As he ensnared her fraught gaze afresh, she forgot what she was saying at the same time as she forgot to draw another breath. The atmosphere surged around her like a slow smouldering fire closing in, using up all the oxygen. But still she stood there, plunged without warning into a welter of physical sensations she had never been able to fight. As a wave of excitement as terrifying as it was thrilling washed over her, her heart thumped like a frantic bird trapped inside her, every tiny muscle tensing in reaction to the rush of liquid heat burning between her slim thighs.

‘Can’t you?’ he murmured huskily.

The very sound of that silken dark drawl sent a responsive shiver down her spine. She snatched in a stark audible breath to flood her depleted lungs. She was tormentingly aware of the stirring heaviness of her small breasts and the painful sensitivity of her swollen nipples pushing against the bra she wore beneath her top.

‘Aside from my wealth, I had nothing to offer you but you appeared to want very little.’ Duarte studied her with spectacular dark golden eyes that had the most scorching effect on her already heated flesh. ‘Apart from me…and you wanted me like you wanted air to breathe. At the time it seemed a fair exchange.’