by Lynne Graham
Jamie! Finally recognising the faint cry that she normally reacted to within seconds, Emily hurried away, pale as death and all knotted up inside with maternal guilt and self-loathing. Jamie had mislaid his teddy but he calmed down the instant his mother reappeared. The teddy restored to his grasping hand, his sleepy brown eyes pinned to her face and then slowly began to drift closed again. Emily sat down on the bed by the cot.
She was still trembling and her body ached from that elemental surge of hunger which she suppressed for so long. Of course, it had been so much easier to deny that side of her nature when Duarte was not around. Reliving the immediacy with which she had fallen into his arms, she squirmed and hated herself. She should have had more pride. But on another level she was simply stunned that Duarte should actually have touched her again. Duarte who eleven months ago, had said he could not even stand for her to remain beneath the same roof.
Yet, he had touched her again and she had made a fool of herself. But then, she ought to be used to that by now, she conceded heavily. Hadn't her gorgeous sophisticated husband always specialised in running rings around her besotted self? And her mind slid back again into the past when just a glimpse of Duarte had lit up her world.
A month after ,the fire in the barn, Emily had been; informed that Duarte wanted to see her. Fresh from the morning exercise run with the horses, Emily had been cringingly conscious of her messy hair and muddy clothing but too worried about why he should want to see her to waste time getting changed.
For the first time, she set foot inside Ash Manor to see the beautifully restored Georgian interior that lay beyond the imposing front door. Jazz raced across the hall to throw himself at her with his usual exuberance. She got down on the floor to give him a hug that turned into a mock wrestling session—and then discovered that Duarte was standing watching her childish antics with his dog.
Momentarily his rare smile glimmered on his lips and he said something but she didn't catch what he said. The visual effect of Duarte after four weeks of deprivation had bereft her of all rational thought and concentration. In strong embarrassment, she'd scrambled up and he had shown her into a library where he invited her to sit down.
Tm pretty dirty.' Emily had scanned the watered silk covering the indicated chair, preferring to look at it rather than at him as her wretched face burned scarlet. 'I'd be better standing.'
'As you wish. I won't be keeping you long.' Duarte lounged back against a polished desk, the very picture of polished elegance in his tailored business suit. 'When I entertain here, my friends and business associates often bring their families with them. I believe you're a riding instructor. I'd like you to start giving lessons to my younger guests. Naturally I'll raise your salary. Are you interested?'
Emily glanced up with a surprised but pleased smile. 'Very much.'
That winter, Duarte spent a remarkable amount of time at Ash Manor. Her duties gradually extended to generally supervising and entertaining any visiting children. At the end of the first month, Duarte said that it would be more convenient if she moved out of the flat she shared with the other grooms and into the manor itself. Dismayed to then be told that she was expected to take her meals in the dining room, she had ducked that challenge on the first night. Settling down to her evening meal in the kitchen, she had been aghast when Duarte strode in.
'What are you doing in here?' he had demanded in exasperation, startling her half out of her wits. 'You eat with my guests now.'
But everyone but Duarte and the children had ignored her in the dining room. Content to be ignored in a gathering of so many wealthy and important people, she had been taken aback when Duarte continually attempted to drag her into conversations.
'I heard Mr Monteiro tell Mum that you're marvellous with children and animals,' one of her temporary charges told her chattily one rainy evening while they, worked on a horribly complex jigsaw. 'And very kind... Can I stay up until we finish this?'
Crumbs to a starving heart, she'd thought at the time, hugging those few words of approval to herself but secretly wishing that those words had been more personal.' But much much later, when she was Duarte's wife, she had finally grasped that she had been under observation during that period, marched out like a reluctant-to-perform animal so that he could see how she behaved, how she thought, how she reacted in different situations. And quiet and shy had ultimately been fine with him. After all, what qualities does a male look for in a low-maintenance wife?
For that was the starring role for which she had been carefully picked with the minimum of required effort on his part. A low-maintenance wife, dead keen on soppy things like kids and dogs, unlikely to require much attention.
'You've done a terrific job,' Duarte informed her some weeks later. 'Let me take you out to dinner.'
Paralysed to the spot, she had stared at him. 'Oh, there's no need for that—'
'Emily—'
'Really, I wouldn't be comfortable imposing on you like that,' she had gabbled, distressed and embarrassed at the idea that he believed that he owed her some sort of treat for admittedly working very long hours.
'But I insist. Dinner... Eight,' Duarte had stated curtly.
So he took her out to dinner and she sat looking at him like a hypnotised rabbit, mumbling responses, spilling her wine and, due to the fancy menu couched in French, ending up with raw steak when what she had really wanted was a well-done one.
'Why are you so nervous?' he had finally asked with an air of imperturbable calm that just might have been laced with concealed exasperation.
'I'm just not comfortable,' she told him miserably.
'But we have often talked before this.'
'This is different—'
'So it is...' Duarte had given her a wry look. 'I don't believe I've had a date this disastrous since I was a teenager.'
'A...a date?' she had stressed in considerable shock.
'Why not? I like you, Emily. What more is required?'
After marrying him, she could have told him exactly what was required. But that evening, offered the substance of her wildest fantasies she had had no such caution and commonsense. She had simply gazed back at him, transfixed by a sensation of wondering joy and gratitude. 'I like you too,' she'd said inanely.
'Excellent,' Duarte had pronounced as the plate of raw steak was discreetly removed at his instruction to be replaced some timeless period later by a cooked one.
'In fact, I like you a lot,' Emily had heard herself adding like an eager schoolgirl.
'Even better,' Duarte had asserted valiantly.
But he hadn't kissed her that week or the next. In fact if she hadn't hovered one night during the third week in the most humiliatingly suggestive way, she honestly believed that he might not have bothered to kiss her at all until he married her. Evidently registering that some lusty enthusiasm was required to impress even the most shy and inexperienced of women, he had got it all over with at once. He had taken her to bed the same night. In the dawn hours, while she was lying on the far side of the bed, wondering frantically whether she ought to be sneaking back to her own room, Duarte had opened his stunning dark golden eyes and rested them on her blushing face and murmured with grave quietness, 'Will you marry me, Emily?'
And she had not asked why. Nor had she or he broached a single one of the questions that she imagined people usually exchanged on such a momentous occasion. She'd just nodded like a marionette having her strings pulled by expert hands. And those expert hands had reached for her again in reality as he breathed lazily, 'I may already have got you pregnant. We'll get married very soon.'
Emily was sprung from her introspection by an announcement over the tannoy that the jet was soon to land. With a groan at the necessity, she lifted her sleeping son from the cot and returned to the main cabin.
CHAPTER FOUR
WHEN Emily emerged from the jet with Jamie in her arms, she saw two limousines waiting on the tarmac to greet them. A slim svelte female, clad in an elegant suit the shade of eau-d
e-nil alighted from the first car. As the woman's pale golden hair glinted in the evening sunlight, a warm smile relaxed Emily's tense mouth and she hurried down the steps in Duarte's wake.
Bliss was still working for Duarte! As Bliss finally spotted Emily and the baby she was carrying, her face froze and she momentarily stilled. Naturally Bliss would be stunned to see her back in Portugal, Emily reflected, and then hurriedly ditched her own smile in an effort to be more discreet. Bliss had said that Duarte would never approve of his wife embarking on a close friendship with one of his personal staff and, naturally, Bliss had not wanted to risk damaging her career prospects.
'Mrs Monteiro...' Bliss acknowledged coolly, her clear blue eyes skimming off Emily just as quickly again, her exquisite face expressionless.
Bliss was being really discreet, Emily decided but she felt just a bit cut off by that greeting and anxiously wondered if she had offended the other woman with her silence in recent months. If she had, it would be ironic for she had stayed out of touch rather than subject her friend to the stress of further divided loyalties.
'Wait in the car, Emily,' Duarte instructed in an arctic tone.
Reddening as Mateus surged ahead of her to open the passenger door of the rear limousine, Emily climbed in and gazed back out at her husband and his executive assistant where they remained about thirty feet away. Duarte looked very grave but, as always, stunningly handsome. All tall and dark and sleek and bronzed, command and authority stamped into every hard line of his lean powerful face. Bliss, who had always reminded Emily of a fairytale princess brought to life, looked curiously frozen and a bright swathe of pink now burned over her delicate cheekbones.
Striding over to the limo, Duarte swung in beside Emily and the car moved off. Surprised that the jet had landed at Lisbon rather than at Oporto, Emily wondered if Duarte was heading to a business meeting. Certain that Duarte intended to send both her and his son back to the house in the Douro, Emily contemplated the very long car journey which lay ahead for her and Jamie.
At least it was spring, she thought ruefully. She had spent the winter of their separation in the country house and it had been dismal. These days the Monteiros only ever used the property for a rustic summer break or during the vindima, the grape harvest when the Portuguese enjoyed getting back to their roots. In winter, the villa had been shrouded in the thick grey mists that rose above the dramatic high banks of the Douro river and day after day it had rained heavily and got colder. Emily shivered at those depressing recollections.
'Perhaps I could spend the winters in England,' Emily proposed in a small taut voice.
Duarte moved a lean, silencing hand for he was talking on the car phone. He frowned at her winged black brows drawing together above clear golden eyes. Biting at her lip, Emily turned away again. The limo had already left the motorway. They were on the outskirts of the pretty hilltown of Sintra and within a startling stone's throw of her former, marital home, the Quinta de Monteiro. She assumed that Duarte was being dropped off home first.
Dense forest covered the hills above the ancient winding streets of the tiny village below the quinta. The verges of the road were carpeted with a colourful riot of naturalised crocus and scilla blooms. It was beautiful. But gooseflesh rose on Emily's arms as she found herself studying the narrow comer building where Toby had once had his artist's studio. The window shutters now bore a faded 'for rent' notice.
'I assure you that you won't be spending the winters or indeed, any other season in England,' Duarte imparted that news with a gritty edge to his dark deep drawl. 'I could not trust you that far from my sight.'
Emily twisted her head back with a bemused look. 'I beg your pardon?'
'From now on, everywhere you go you will be accompanied,' Duarte murmured.
'Wh-what on earth are you talking about?' Emily stammered as the opulent car glided below the imposing turreted entrance of the Quinta de Monteiro.
'You heard me.' Spectacular golden eyes tough as granite settled on her with unnerving force. 'If you go riding, you will take a groom, and for all other outings, you will have a driver and a bodyguard. At any hour of the day, I will expect to know where you are and what you are doing—'
'But I never went riding in the Douro...' Emily was having huge difficulty in comprehending the necessity for such excessive arrangements and her bewilderment was visible.
'I spend precious little time at our country house,' Duarte said drily. 'I was merely pointing out that there is a price to pay for my generosity in taking you back.'
'Taking me back...' Emily mumbled in repetition. 'Taking me back...where?'
'If I did not know you better, I would believe you were drunk,' Duarte delivered a split second before his chauffeur opened the door beside her. 'We will continue this discussion indoors.'
With an enervated flick of her eyes in the direction of the Quinta de Monteiro, a vast sixteenth-century building as monumental and impressive as a castle, Emily repeated uncertainly, 'Indoors? You want me to come inside?'
'No matter how much one might feel like it, one does not leave one's wife to sleep in the car,' Duarte framed with considerable sarcasm.
Emily sat bolt upright, finally pausing to consider that phrase 'taking you back' in a different light. Not just back to Portugal, it seemed, but back to sharing the former marital roof. True, it was an exceptionally large roof, beneath which the most bitter enemies could probably live separate lives, but even so Emily was shattered by the concept. With an effort, she parted her lips, keen to clarify the matter. 'Duarte...I—'
Springing out on to the gravel, he swung back and grasped her hand in an impatient movement to urge her on. 'Come on... Victorine is waiting to welcome us.'
Emily ducked down her head and peered round him in dismay. There stood Victorine like a door sentinel, a middle-aged woman clad from head to toe in unrelieved black, her face set like an ancient Egyptian grave mask. Welcome? Victorine welcome the head of the family's unfaithful wife back to the hallowed ground of the Monteiro ancestral home? Was he joking? Even in the early days of their marriage, Duarte's former mother-in-law had been unable to conceal her antipathy towards Emily.
'I'm not going in,' Emily argued in a feverish undertone. 'I had no idea you were bringing us here. I thought I was going back to the house in the Douro—'
'Then a geography lesson would appear to be in order,' Duarte gritted without hesitation. 'Get out of the car, Emily. For once in your life behave as I might reasonably expect my wife to behave.'
Every scrap of colour drained from her complexion at that wounding statement which reminded her of her every past failure. Then redemption and release came from a new discovery deep within her pain. 'I'm sorry...I really don't want to be your wife any more,' she whispered and her voice might have shook but somehow that admission made her feel stronger than she had felt in a very long time.
'Meu Deus!' Duarte bent down and scooped her out of the passenger seat with powerful and angry hands. "That I should lower myself to the dishonour of taking, back an adulterous wife and that you should dare to display such ingratitude in response!' he growled down at her with enraged golden eyes.
Emily gasped in disbelief when Duarte lifted her bodily from the car with the ease of a male sweeping up a small recalcitrant child. She could not credit that her controlled and reserved husband, who was no fan of public displays, should behave in such a way while Victorine was watching them. But then, never had she seen Duarte's anger before, for he'd not allowed her to see it, and what he'd just said to her was burned like letters of fire into her memory banks. 'Put me down,' she gasped in stricken recoil but her request was ignored.
When they were still several feet from the tall front doors which were spread wide on the huge hall behind her, Victorine spoke. 'I am 'sorry to' say it but if that trollop enters the quinta, I will leave, Duarte.'
'That would be a great pity,' Duarte murmured without expression as he lowered Emily down on to the step in front of him. 'But this is
my home and within my home no one will tell me what I may or may not do, nor will anyone abuse my wife.'
Emily was as shattered by that tough comeback from Duarte as the older woman appeared to be. Victorine's thin features betrayed incredulous resentment.
'Duarte...' Emily began in an agony of discomfiture.
'If my daughter Izabel could see you now with her...' Victorine condemned with a bitterness she could not hide.
Every muscle in Duarte's big powerful body went rigid and his dark deep voice carried an edge of reproach. 'Let your daughter rest in peace.'
As Victorine stalked back indoors in high dudgeon, it was Emily who broke the strained silence that she had left in her wake. 'Jamie's still in the car—'
'He's asleep. The staff will see to him for the moment.' Signalling the housekeeper hovering at the back of the hall, Duarte gave an instruction to that effect. Then, resting a hand to Emily's taut spine, he pressed her into the superb salon with its tall gothic windows and thrust the door shut behind them again.
The wall at the foot of the room was dominated by a huge full-length portrait of Izabel, an exotic brunette in a fabulous blue ball gown. Emily tore her gaze from that familiar but oh, so daunting image. Izabel, Victorine's beloved only child and Duarte's first wife. Five years earlier, Izabel had died in a ghastly car wreck that had also claimed the life of Duarte's twin sister. Rest in peace? Emily's sensitive tummy clenched. One way or another, she had been haunted every day of their marriage by Izabel, the ultimate of impossible acts to follow. Even now, Duarte could not bear to mention her name and the Quinta de Monteiro remained stamped by the spectral presence of its former mistress.
'Please go and speak to Victorine before she does anything foolish,' Emily urged wearily. 'I don't want to stay here anyway, so there's not much point giving her the impression that she has to move out to avoid me.'