by Lynne Graham
'What are you saying?' Emily faltered in growing shock at what she was hearing.
'Come on, Emily...all Duarte cared about was getting his son back and resident in Portugal. Now he's got him, he won't let you take him away again. In a marriage that was failing from day one, where does that leave you?'
'I've never discussed Duarte or our relationship with you,' Emily reminded the other woman uncomfortably.
Her exquisite face an icy mask, Bliss rose to her feet. 'Well, excuse me for presuming on our former friendship—'
Emily flew upright in distress. 'No, Bliss...I didn't mean—'
'Don't come crying to me when you find yourself divorced and without your precious son!' Bliss told her scornfully. 'Can't you see the bigger picture here? Doesn't it occur to you that Duarte may already have another woman in his life?'
Emily's tummy gave a sick somersault and she could barely credit that the blonde was a woman she had once believed was a true friend. 'Why are you behaving like this?'
'Maybe you should have settled for my cousin, Toby, while you had the chance,' Bliss derided dulcetly before she departed, leaving Emily standing in the salon in a stricken daze.
Had Duarte met someone else? Well, why not, a little voice demanded. Wouldn't he have felt he had every excuse to find solace elsewhere? She could feel herself inwardly coming apart at the seams under the new stress which Bliss had imposed on her already overwrought system.
She'd just heard Bliss's car driving off when a phone was brought to her.
It was Duarte on the line. 'Will you meet me for lunch?'
Emily blinked in disconcertion. Duarte was neither in the habit of phoning her during his working day nor of inviting her to meet him for lunch.
'I have something to tell you,' he murmured tautly.
A woman who drove him to smashing locked doors open was not for him. He regretted bringing her back to Portugal, recognised his mistake. No, more probably he planned to tell her that he had met someone else. Slow, agonised tears started trekking down her cheeks.
'Emily?' he prompted. 'I'll send a car for you. Please come.'
He rang off without another word. She went upstairs to see if the more dressy clothes which she had left behind when they separated were still intact in the room she had once occupied. They were. She fingered through the many options available. Cerise pink, fire-engine red, fluorescent orange, traffic-stopping purple. Picking the jazzy pink which hurt her aching eyes, she got changed. He was going to dump her again. She knew he was. Last night, he had more or less said right out how hard he had had to push himself to go to bed with her again. Mind you, at the time, he'd seemed fairly enthusiastic!
The car ferried her the thirty-odd kilometres into Lisbon. Duarte had a superb apartment on the Avenida da Libertade and, as she ascended from the car in the long tree-lined boulevard, sick butterflies were dancing in her tummy.
Ushered into the imposing drawing room, where she'd once fallen ingloriously asleep during a supper with his friends, following an evening at the opera she focused on Duarte. Her heart started behaving as if someone was playing football with it and her mouth ran dry.
Poised by one of the tall nineteenth-century windows, black hair gleaming in the sunlight, his elegant light-grey pinstripe suit cut to fit his broad shoulders and long powerful thighs, Duarte looked absolutely spectacular. Studying those lean, darkly handsome features of his and hurriedly evading those all-seeing, all-knowing, stunning golden eyes, she ran out of breath. Suddenly, all she could think about was the passion of the night hours and all she could feel was the intimate ache that still lingered at the core of her own body as a result.
"Thank you for coming,' Duarte said with grave quietness.
'I'd never have the nerve to stand you up,' Emily confided, her fingers biting so hard into the clutch purse she was holding that her hands were hurting. 'Where are we going for lunch?'
'I thought we could eat here.'
Instantly, she felt trapped. True, a public place was hardly suitable for the delivery of any revelation likely to upset. But couldn't he just have waited until he came home for dinner? Instead, she'd been summoned like a schoolgirl to hear her fate and that felt distinctly humiliating.
'Do I have to eat?' she enquired brittlely. 'I'm not hungry.'
'As you wish. Would you like a drink?'
'A brandy...' She glanced at him while he dealt with her request, seeing the tension etched in the hard cast of his bronzed profile. The atmosphere was so strained, she felt an unwary word might snap it in two.
Sitting down on the edge of an opulent antique sofa, she sipped nervously at the brandy.
"This morning, Victorine admitted that she'd deliberately mislead me about what you said to her—'
'I know. She also spoke to me and apologised,' Emily responded.
Duarte paced forward from the window and moved his hands in a very expressive gesture of regret. 'I misjudged you and I owe you a very big apology for I have never known you to be cruel.'
Emily shrugged jerkily, unable to reap the smallest satisfaction from that acknowledgement. 'It was just another metaphoric stick to beat me with, wasn't it?'
Dulled colour rose to accentuate the strong slant of his high cheekbones. 'You may be right. However, when my former mother-in-law then went on to confess that she'd resented you from the very hour that I married you, I was very much shocked.'
Surprised though Emily was that Victorine had gone that far in her need to ease her conscience, Emily simply sighed. She was more concerned about what he might have to say next.
'I was foolish to believe that Victorine would easily accept another woman as my wife,' Duarte stated with a harshened edge to his dark, deep drawl. 'Had I not had a board meeting early this morning, I would've come to speak to you immediately.'
'Well, business first and last,' Emily breathed helplessly. 'There's nothing new in that.'
'No...but I think today business came first because it was easier to handle,' Duarte conceded, startling her with that frank admission. 'Naturally I feel guilty. Our home should have been the one place where you could feel relaxed and content but Victorine's spite must've made you very unhappy.'
Emily felt like a stone. Old resentments and bitterness had hardened her usually soft heart. 'I always blamed you more than I blamed her...'
Duarte's golden eyes zeroed in on her and narrowed. The taut set of his jawline revealed his surprise at that condemnation. 'But you never once complained about Victorine—'
'And why would I have?' Emily got up in a sudden movement, powered by angry defensiveness at that suggestion that she ought to have spoken up sooner. 'Why would I have thought that complaining would have got me anywhere with you? After all, you are not the world's most sensitive person either, are you?'
A sardonic black brow quirked. 'Meaning?'
'Those portraits of Izabel in the salon, the dining room and the main hall...' Emily illuminated tightly. 'I could've understood that if you'd had children with her but you didn't. How was I supposed to feel that the Quinta de Monteiro was my home?'
Duarte was studying her with frowning intensity but a faint perceptible pallor was spreading round his taut mouth. 'I never thought...I was so used to them being there—'
'Well, you know...your first wife may have been a great beauty and the paintings may be wonderful art, but you should've had them moved to less prominent places. I felt intimidated by them. And although I'm not terribly interested or indeed gifted in any way at fancy interior design and stuff like that,' Emily admitted flatly, 'I would've appreciated the freedom to redecorate just one room and feel that it, at least, was mine.'
Every bone in Duarte's lean dark devastating face was rigid by the time she had finished speaking. 'I cannot excuse myself for my lack of sensitivity.'
'No, you can't,' Emily agreed with very little in the way of satisfaction. Then nothing he said could touch or ease the hard knot of pain inside her. Even while she railed at him, she was thin
king how pointless her reproaches were. Those oversights had merely spelt out his basic indifference to her feelings. He'd never been in love with her and only a man in love would have considered such things. But she'd said enough, knew that if she said anything more, he might realise just how jealous she'd been of his first wife. Not very nice, she reflected guiltily. Izabel had proved to be an impossible act to follow.
'It's all water under the bridge now.' Emily drew hi a slow steadying breath, for she knew exactly what she needed to find peace of mind—her freedom. Freedom from such demeaning comparisons between herself and a dead woman. Freedom from wanting the love she could never have because that wanting was self-destructive. 'So, before you start telling me things you would much prefer not to tell me, I have something to say.'
'You have my full attention,' Duarte drawled in the most insidiously discouraging way.
'How do you do that?" Emily found herself asking. 'How do you manage always to make me feel that I shouldn't say what I'm about to say? I mean, you don't even know what I'm about to say!'
Duarte reached for her tense hands and unlaced them to hold her taut fingers in his. A bleak look had darkened his amazing eyes to a midnight glimmer of light as he gazed down at her. 'I'm not planning to smash any more doors down, minha esposa. Is that what is worrying you?'
The warmth of his hands on hers was a subtle enticement, as was the endearment Pinned to the spot by those brilliant, dark, sexy eyes of his, she shivered, every tiny muscle she possessed tensing. That close, she could feel the heat of his lean powerful body, smell the evocative scent of him, composed of warm male laced with a faint hint of some exotic aftershave. All so familiar, all so devastatingly familiar that her senses reacted to him no matter what she did.
'I'm sorry if I frightened you. I lost control of my temper but it will not happen again,' Duarte intoned huskily, the very sound of his dark, deep voice setting up a quiver at the base of her spine.
'Stop it...' Emily urged shakily, desperately seeking to muster her defences against that wholly seductive onslaught of sensations.
'Stop...what?' Duarte probed with a sincere incomprehension that infuriated her.
Her teeth gritted behind her compressed lips. She saw just how weak she was. It seemed she never learnt where he was concerned. He got close and her brain seemed to go into free fall—and yet he was still being cool and precise and he was not deliberately striving to set her wretched body alight. That knowledge just made her feel so horribly humiliated by her own lack of control that she dragged her hands free of his and stepped back.
'What's wrong?' Duarte murmured levelly. 'Are you still angry with me?'
Angry? Was she still angry? Mulling over that question, Emily conceded that she'd started being angry with Duarte within weeks of marrying him. Even while loving bun to distraction, she'd been angry from the instant she laid her devastated eyes on Izabel's gorgeous photogenic face. Angry because she wasn't loved the same way, angry that her only value to him seemed to lie in supplying him with the child he wanted but angrier still that she was so hopelessly and helplessly obsessed with a man who neither needed nor loved her. In one way or another, she'd been made painfully conscious of that reality almost every day of then marriage.
"There's nothing wrong...' Emily said, not quite levelly. 'I just want a divorce.'
Duarte stilled the way people did when they got an entirely unexpected response. 'And you don't think that comes under the heading of mere being something wrong?'
'Right now...' Emily breathed, colour highlighting her heart-shaped face, 'I do not want you getting clever with me.'
'Clever...' Duarte flung his proud, dark heard back.
Her fingers coiled into fists by her side as she forced herself on. 'I told you yesterday...I told you I didn't want to be your wife anymore—'
'Last night...' Duarte trailed out those two words until she felt like her face was burning, 'you gave me a rather different message.'
'I didn't know what was going on last night I wasn't myself,' Emily stated between compressed lips of mortification. 'But that mistake is not going to make me change my mind about what's best for me—'
'Jamie?' Duarte slotted in, smooth as a stiletto.
Emily paled. Tm willing to live in Portugal so that you can see as much of Jamie as you like—'
'All right, you move out and I keep Jamie.'
Emily's lower lip parted company with her upper in sheer shock.
'Now I wonder why you aren't into that solution when it is only the reverse of what you are suggesting that I should accept,' Duarte pointed out without remorse. 'Only twenty-four hours after I get to meet my son, you want to deprive me of him again and you somehow expect me to be cool about it?'
'All right, you're making me feel horrible...' Emily muttered, unable to avoid seeing the unlovely comparison he'd put before her. 'But feeling as you do about me, you have no right to expect me to live with you just for Jamie's sake.'
'Haven't I? You were perfectly happy last night until I blew it,' Duarte reminded her without hesitation. 'Now, had you said then that you could not bear me to touch you, I would have agreed that at the very least we should separate.'
Emily caught on fast to that argument. Hugely aware that he could talk semantic circles round her and tie her into knots to the extent that she would soon not know where she was in the dialogue, she grasped hurriedly at the get-out clause he had put before her. 'Well, I'm saying it now. I can't bear for you to touch me!'
'Where do you get the nerve to say that to me?' Duarte derided, reacting to that statement with a level of incredulity that was seriously embarrassing.
Flushed to the roots of her red-gold hair, Emily backed off several steps. Tm not taking back a word of it...'
Like a leopard on the prowl, Duarte followed her retreat.
'I don't have to justify wanting a divorce—'
'Yes, you do,' Duarte overruled with infuriating logic.
'OK...' Trapped between die wall and Duarte's lean powerful physique, Emily came to a halt with her shoulderblades up hard against the plaster. 'When I married you, I was too young to know what I was doing. You took advantage of the fact that I was in love with you. I had a lousy hole-in-the-corner wedding and I didn't even get a honeymoon!'
Duarte elevated a winged black brow with pronounced disbelief. 'That's...it?'
"That's only to begin with!' Emily slung, her temper firing up fast at his refusal to take her seriously. "Then you brought me home to a house ruled by your ex-mother-in-law, who hated me on sight. After that, you hardly bothered to notice that I was alive—'
A charismatic smile began to form on Duarte's wide, sensual mouth. 'I seem to recall noticing that you were alive so often and with such frequency that I once fell asleep in a board meeting!'
Chagrined by that literal interpretation of her words, Emily changed tack to suit that line of argument as well. 'So you admit that all you ever shared with me was a bed—'
'If you wanted to share the board meetings too, you should have mentioned it.'
Pure rage filled Emily. 'When I phoned you during the day, you never once returned my calls!'
Duarte frowned. 'What calls?'
'I daresay there was a time or two when you were much too busy to speak to me but there is just no excuse for you never once phoning me back—'
'I never refused a call of yours in my life,' Duarte interrupted with a palpable edge of masculine annoyance. 'I have better manners. We Portuguese are not so taken up with business that we overlook either courtesy or family during working hours.'
'Well, I was overlooked time and time again until I got the message!' Emily raked back at him in a growing fury at her inability to make any charge stick and draw blood. 'And where were your precious manners when you failed to turn up for the dinner parties I arranged in my deadly boring, dutiful role of being your wife?'
'Again you are making false accusations, not one of which you have ever mentioned before,' Duarte condemned
with chilling bite. 'Where is all this nonsense coming from and why have you wandered from the point?'
'My point is—' Emily stabbed the air between them with a raised hand and, even in the grip of her temper, was rather pleased with the effect.
Without warning, Duarte moved forward and brought his hands up to plant them on either side of her startled face, long fingers meshing into the strands of her fiery hair. Shimmering golden eyes that had the flashfire charge of lightning clashed with hers. 'Your point is non-existent or else you might have said something worth listening to by now,' he grated rawly, half under his breath, as he gazed down at her. 'I asked you here so that we could talk in private and I could express my regrets for my behaviour last night. But you have refused to listen. Instead you have done nothing but sling lies at me!'
'Lies...?' Intimidated in a very physical way by the manner in which he had her cornered, Emily was nonetheless conscious of a sudden maddening and truly insane need for him to touch her in exactly the way she had told him minutes earlier that she could not bear to be touched.
'Desire is not a one-way street. I know when I am wanted by a woman,' Duarte spelt out in the same dark dangerous undertone that was playing merry hell with her awakened senses.
'Really? Absolutely always?' Emily framed doggedly but no longer quite sure of what she was saying and why. Other reactions were taking over at mind-bending speed: the steady acceleration of her heartbeat, an alarming shortness of breath, a sensation of exhilaration and awareness so intense it was like standing on a razor edge.
Duarte laced his hand into a whole hank of fiery red-gold strands to hold her fast and then he brought his hot hard mouth crashing down on hers. Fire in the hold, she thought crazily, every inch of her jolted by the surge of wild excitement charging her. He dropped his hands and inched up the skirt of her dress, long sure fingers gliding up over her slender thighs with a knowing eroticism that only added fuel to her response.
She was shaking, clinging to him. She did not know how or when her hands had crept up to grip his wide shoulders but only by holding on to him was she staying upright With a sudden hungry groan, Duarte cupped his hands to her hips and lifted her against him, pushing her back against the wall, letting her feel the full force of his arousal. Any grip Emily had on reality vanished at that point.