by Lynne Graham
'But it wasn't like that tonight, Duarte,' she argued vehemently. 'I know you're fond of her and I reminded her of that and asked her to think again—'
'I have more trust in her ability to tell the truth than I have in yours. If you ever do anything like this again, you will pay a high price. Don't turn away from me like that!' Duarte raked at her, making her flinch.
So now as well as being the most hated person in the house and a trollop and that other word which she could bear to recall even less, she was also a nasty shrew and an outright liar. Emily kept on turning away, for she had too much pride to let him see how savaged she was by his refusal to place even the smallest trust in her word.
Long powerful fingers settled on her slight shoulder and flipped her back again with a masculine strength that was far from reassuring. 'When I say jump, now you say, "How high?" Haven't you got that message yet?'
'No...and I won't,' Emily told him, her gaze glimmering with angry tears. 'You are not going to make me feel any worse about myself than I already feel!'
'So you feel bad?' Duarte loosed a derisive laugh that broke the surging tension with the disturbing effect of shattering glass. 'But I bet not one tenth as bad as I felt [about bringing you back into my home this evening...'
Emily dropped her head and tried to swallow the great fat lump of guilt in her throat. She was in turmoil, wanting to scream and sob and attack him all at one and the same time. Once again she'd been her own worst enemy. Why, oh why had she been foolish enough to even speak to Victorine? Why hadn't she just minded her own wretched business and walked away? But she knew why, didn't she? She had not wanted to feel that the older woman's departure was yet one more sin to be piled up at her door.
'But now you're about to make me feel much better about that difficult decision,' Duarte completed in a charged undertone that sent the oddest tremor down her responsive spine.
'Oh...and how am I going to do that?' she prompted chokily, fighting to hold the tears back until he left her again. He hated her, he absolutely hated her and she could not imagine how she had ever managed to persuade herself that Duarte had no truly strong emotions where she was concerned.
'Sex.'
Engaged in an apparently enraptured scrutiny of his soft leather loafers, Emily blinked rapidly in receipt of that explanation. Mentally she strained to persuade herself that he had not uttered that single unexpected word with the smooth cool of a male who had already overcome his anger while she was still struggling even to think like a rational being.
The silence seemed to rush and eddy around her like a high wind.
She raised her gaze to the well-cut beige chinos sheathing his long, long powerful length of leg and lean hips, up more slowly still to the belt encircling his narrow waist and the casual white shirt open at his bronzed throat. 'Sex...?' Emily almost whispered as if it physically hurt her to say the word.
Duarte lifted a lean hand and pushed up her chin. Volatile golden eyes set between spiky black lashes inspected her disbelieving face. 'Sim, querida.'
Yes, he said in confirmation but her brain refused to credit the evidence of her hearing.
CHAPTER FIVE
'S-SEX?' Emily stammered helplessly.
"The concept appeals and intrigues,' Duarte murmured silkily.
Emily drew in a very ragged breath but still her voice was faint. 'Does it really? Tell me, when did this sudden attack of lust occur to you? Is this like...your equivalent of that ancestor of yours who bricked his wife up alive in a wall?'
'Such a very insightful question, querida.' Duarte surveyed her with brilliant dark eyes alight with hard amusement 'But rather naive. I don't need to explain myself to you and why would I?'
As Duarte narrowed the distance between them, Emily went as rigid as a porcupine going on the offensive. 'Don't you dare touch me!'
Duarte scanned the flushed oval of her delicate face, his strong jawline hardening. 'Perhaps I want to remind you that you're mine. Perhaps it is that basic...I don't care.'
'Basic's not me,' Emily framed unevenly because she trusted herself even less than she trusted him. She could feel his proximity with every skin cell she possessed. In her mind's eye she could even visualise every shameless skin cell sitting up and begging and that made her cringe. For what had always lain at the very heart of Duarte's total irresistibility had been the simple truth that her own resistance was nil.
He hooked a lean brown finger into the towel she was still clutching. 'Overkill, don't you think?'
She trembled, a liquid sensation of heat pooling deep inside her, her legs welding her to the spot. He was so close she could smell the warm male scent of his sunwarmed skin, so close she could feel deliciously threatened by the sheer size differential between her and the potent masculinity of his lean hard physique.
'You signed up for your own personal punishment plan while we were still airborne,' Duarte delivered in a tone as smooth as silk.
She was staring up at him, wholly enveloped in her own growing reaction to him. It had always been that way, which was why when things were wrong between them she just never looked directly at him, out of fear that he would guess how great his power was. Only now, she'd reached the point where she could not stop staring, drinking in every taut angle of that strikingly dark and handsome face of his, the proud arrogant jut of his nose, the fabulous cheekbones that lent his features such pronounced strength and definition, the fine grain of his skin that roughened round his hard jawline. And still she was not satisfied; still it was not enough to satiate that need within her.
'S-sorry? Punishment plan?' she echoed a whole ten seconds after he had finished speaking and only after frantically plundering her memory.
'My kind of punishment,' Duarte spelt out with measured satisfaction.
Stunning dark golden eyes held hers as he finally jerked loose the screening towel so that it drifted down into a heap on the rug. Strong hands lifted to snap round her wrists and prevent her startled attempt to stoop and retrieve it.
'Duarte...?' Emily gasped, very much taken back by his behaviour.
He held her back from him and let his intent gaze roam at a leisurely pace over her slim, slight figure. She tried to curve away from him, curl in protectively on herself while still standing, but he held fast to her. Visually exploring the rise and fall of her small breasts beneath the barrier of her bra, his attention strolled down to her tiny waist and the swell of her hips where a pair of white cotton panties that were not of the diminutive variety shut off his view.
"The cotton look was fine when sweet and wholesome was the draw but it's not to my taste now,' Duarte confided while Emily's pale skin coloured up like the rising sun beneath an appraisal that was reducing her to agonies of embarrassment. 'And since pleasing me must necessarily be your top priority—'
'Why? Why would it be?' she broke in, wild in her humiliation.
'Security, of tenure,' Duarte specified in cool warning 'And please let's ditch the I'm-so-shy routine I used to respect because I don't respect it any more.'
Her heart was thudding so fast, she could hardly catch her breath. 'It wasn't a routine—'
'But it must have been,' Duarte asserted in interruption as he backed her inexorably in the direction of the bed. 'All those hot afternoons you spent in his studio in pursuit of a surprise portrait supposedly for me? At a time when you had locked the door between our bedrooms you were attending all those sittings purely for my benefit? And you're still trying to persuade me that the same lout that I personally heard swearing eternal devotion to you never laid a finger on you?'
Emily nodded jerkily, conscious of how very unlikely he made her being innocent sound but still ready to argue. 'I was hardly ever alone with him. He had a girlfriend—'
Duarte elevated a winged dark brow. 'Get a better story. Or even better, tell me exactly what you did do with him—'
As he swept her up into his arms and settled her squarely down on the centre of the big bed and stepped back from her, sh
e said feverishly. 'Nothing, absolutely nothing.'
'I beat the hell out of him,' Duarte informed her with chilling exactitude.
Suddenly the atmosphere was sizzling like a stick of dynamite ready to blow. In considerable shock, Emily gazed back at Duarte, all her colour ebbing—for the very last thing she would have expected from Duarte was that kind of violence.
"That was my right,' Duarte stated soft and low and dark, watching her like a hawk ready to pounce, smouldering dark golden eyes welded to her sincerely shaken face. 'Do you think that I didn't know that he followed you to the villa in the Douro? That he repeatedly attempted to see you? And that when that failed, he kept on phoning?'
A pin could have been heard dropping in her appalled silence.
Duarte studied her with a hard force she could feel in every atom of her being. 'If you had encouraged him then, if you had once spoken to him or seen him, you would not be here now.'
So throughout that winter she'd passed at the country house, nothing that happened there had gone unreported to Duarte. Emily was genuinely shattered by that discovery. 'We...we were separated,' she whispered shakily.
Savage anger flared in his blazing look of challenge. 'You were still my wife and what is mine stays mine until I choose to relinquish it!'
Before her she saw a male with traits she had failed to recognise before. The male that existed behind the deceptive patina of sophistication and cool courtesy. A more primitive breed of male, every bit as aggressive and possessive of what was his as any backstreet fighter. She'd never been so shaken in her whole life—for only then it occurred to her that naturally, Duarte used the same forceful drives for his personal life that he used every day in a more civilised way in business—in that field his ruthlessness was a living legend.
'Turning him away in the Douro was the only thing you did right,' Duarte pronounced grittily.
Emily was now realising that the only reason that Duarte had left her alone on the bed was to undress. She lay there with the curious sensation of being weighted to the mattress while she watched him finish unbuttoning his shirt. As he bent to remove his shoes, the shirt hung loose, disclosing an enervating glimpse of a broad chest the colour of living bronze, with dark curling hair emphasising his powerful pectoral muscles and the hard flat contours of his stomach. Her breath locked in her throat. As he straightened to his full six foot four inches, she couldn't take her eyes from him. He was a stunning vision of raw masculinity and it had been so long since she had seen him like that. Indeed, it was over a year since they had shared the smallest intimacy, she reminded herself, dimly seeking excuse for her total absorption in him.
"There will be no separate bedrooms this time, no locked doors,' Duarte spelt out, sending the zip rasping down on his chinos, angling his narrow hips in a slight movement that she found inexplicably but hugely sexy.
Her fair skin coloured up hotly on that straying thought and, dredging her eyes from him in severe embarrassment, she focused on the edge of the linen sheet already neatly folded down by a maid in readiness for an occupant. Two occupants, she reflected, her brain moving at a tenth of its usual capacity. Duarte was going to make love to her. It occurred to her that saying 'no' was still an option and that she really ought to say something.
'I really don't want this,' Emily told him.
'Just who are you trying to kid?'
Aghast at that blunt comeback, Emily blinked in dismay and was betrayed into a sudden upward glance. Duarte surveyed her in flagrant challenge, sardonic amusement gleaming at her shaken expression. He stood there naked and magnificent, his hard shaft fully erect.
'You are not chained to the bed but you're not running anywhere. Why?'
For a timeless moment, she simply stared at him, seriously wrongfooted by that enquiry. Throwing her a look of irredeemably male logic, Duarte came down on the bed and reached for her so fast, she gave a stifled gasp of fright.
'Let me tell you why,' he urged, knotting long fingers into her tumbled red-gold hair as he brought her up against his hard muscular chest. 'I can turn you on just by looking at you!'
Crushed into the unyielding strength of him yet forced to maintain an eye contact that she would have done just about anything to avoid, Emily felt as if she was fighting for her last ounce of pride. 'No...not any more—'
He tugged her head back, shimmering eyes scorching down into hers. 'So what was that little demonstration of total surrender on the jet, then? One last fling?'
Her whole body was already reacting to the steely contours of his with insidious little quivers of heat and a drowning weakness that was even more dangerous to her self-discipline. The fresh warm scent of him was in her nostrils with every breath she drew, achingly familiar, achingly erotic. 'You...you took me by surprise—'
'No te acredito... I don't believe you,' Duarte derided, his breath fanning her cheek and then his hot hard hungry mouth claiming hers with a raw assurance that made denial impossible.
It was a shattering kiss, full of explosive demand. His tongue stabbed into the tender moist interior of her mouth and plundered the sweetness with an invasive force that made her heart hammer as fast as if she'd run a three minute mile. She trembled beneath that onslaught, her hands clenching, nails biting into her palms as she attempted to withstand the raw sexual enticement of his expert mouth on hers. But the little kernel of nagging heat he had already awakened low in her belly was too seductive. She started shifting in his grasp, pushing into him in a helpless surge and all the time, Dear heaven, I want him, want him, want him, was running like a charged mantra through her mind.
'Indeed, belief would be a great challenge,' Duarte husked, ungenerous in victory as only a rogue male can be—and then he did something that truly shook her. Taking her hand, he curled her fingers round his bold erection. 'That's more like it...'
He felt like hot steel sheathed in silk. Her hand shook a little and her face burned scarlet at being asked to do what she had previously only done in darkness and beneath concealing covers. But an undeniable excitement gripped her and she stroked his hard masculinity, feeling the inexorable surge of answering heat between her trembling thighs.
In response, he caught her back to him and mated his mouth to hers with ferocious hunger. Then he drew back from her when she was clinging to him. Her hands dropped from him and she was disorientated by the sensation of her breasts coming free from her bra without her having had anything to do with it. She glanced down at herself to see that the front fastening had already been undone. Even as she whipped up her hands to cover herself, Duarte was ahead of her, imprisoning her fingers in his own, forestalling her.
'Stop it...' she gasped, embarrassed by the sight of her own bare flesh because she felt that she could not compare to other women with the small pouting swells crowned by rosy distended nipples.
Duarte used his superior strength to flatten her back on to the bed and stared down at her with hot hungry eyes of appreciation. 'You can't hide the evidence of your own desire,' he breathed, lowering his head to capture a swollen, throbbing tip between his lips.
Her entire body jerked, for she had always been almost unbearably sensitive there. Her hands flexed within the hold of his and he released them but she dug her fingers into the sheets beneath her instead. Excitement was like a damburst inside her, pressure building up with every second and she could not withstand her own intense need to be touched. A low keening sound was torn from her as he tormented the rosy crests with the kind of skill that drove her absolutely wild. So somehow they got to the stage where he was holding her down purely to keep her still and her hands had, seemingly without an input from her, risen to lace into his luxuriant black hair, urging him on in helpless writhing yearning.
'So tell me you're not mine now, minha pequena esposa,' Duarte invited, a roughened edge to his dark, deep drawl as he lifted his head from the glistening buds still begging for, his attention.
'Don't stop...please,' she heard herself beg like a supplicant and even
as she said it she knew she would cringe for herself later, but just then the sheer craving he had unleashed took precedence.
'Was it like this with Jarrett?'
For a split second she could not think who 'Jarrett' was. Toby, Bliss's cousin. Toby Jarrett. The name stood out in her mind's eye and made her tummy clench. She gazed up at Duarte, suddenly as terrified as an animal knowing it was about to be slaughtered, and knowing that there was absolutely nothing she could do about it because he wouldn't believe her.
'You are just sick with shame,' Duarte bit out, studying her as if he had her under a microscope and could read every nuance of expression.
She shut her eyes on the hot scorch of threatening tears. Even while her wretched body leapt and burned for him and her every thought was at bay, he was still in sufficient control to attack.
'Much good that does either of us,' Duarte growled in an oddly ragged undertone and then suddenly he was gathering her back into his arms, reclaiming her mouth with a kind of blazing fiery desire that went through her quivering body like sheet lightning. He shuddered against her and then he stilled and, for a split second of horror, she thought he was about to pull free of her and instinctively she wrapped her arms round him as tightly as she could.
And then she felt a long forefinger stroking her cheek where a tear had escaped and left a telling trail and he cursed in Portuguese. He claimed her lips again at the same time as his exploring hand teased the aching points of her breasts. That instant of all too painful self-awareness was sent into oblivion by the renewed force of her own response.
'Duarte...' she moaned at the peak of an almost agonised gasp as his stroking fingers discovered the dampness of the triangle of fabric stretched taut between her restive thighs.