by Lynne Graham
'Meu Deus!' Duarte exclaimed and immediately reached for her to help her to her feet again. 'Are you all right?'
'So...s-so,' she stammered, refusing to massage the throbbing ache assailing her bruised hip.
'Didn't you see it?' Smoothing her down, Duarte focused on the bin which was about four feet tall and hard to miss.
Emily clambered into the limousine on wobbly legs. She would keep her tongue between her teeth for the whole drive home. Just then, she recalled that odd little scene she had witnessed at the airport between Duarte and Bliss. The way he had taken a few extra minutes to speak to Bliss in private before joining Emily in the car, the tension she'd witnessed between them. What had he been saying to Bliss to make her freeze and turn red? Exactly how ultimate were they?
'When did you get so friendly with Bliss Jarrett?' That demand just erupted out of Emily's mouth and she was horrified at herself, at the clumsiness of that leading question, not to mention its undeniably accusing tone.
There was one of those truly awful laden silences.
Duarte elevated a sardonic brow and his spiky black lashes partially screened his dark deepset gaze. 'I don't think that's a subject we should open.'
What the heck was that supposed to mean? An evasive response was the very last thing she needed, in the mood she was in, but she really did try very hard to let the subject stay closed. She bit down on her tongue so hard, she tasted her own blood. She told herself that she ought to trust him but, the trouble was, she knew she no longer trusted Bliss. And even though Duarte was emanating sufficient vibes to warn her off, she ignored them.
'It's natural for me to be curious.'
'I'm not sure that you'll be grateful for my explanation. Bliss was very embarrassed when she realised that you had had an affair with her cousin and she offered to resign,' Duarte advanced in a glacial tone.
'Did she really?' Emily whispered shakily, feeling like he had just dropped a giant suffocating rock on top of her.
'After those developments, it would have been a little difficult for us to return to our former working relationship as though nothing had happened. I have great respect for Bliss both as an employee and a personal friend. I would appreciate it if you would keep that fact in mind.'
Tm not really sure what you're saying,' Emily mumbled although she was dreadfully afraid that she did. She was also horribly tempted to say that, in terms of personal friendship, Bliss spread herself around behind other people's backs, but it sounded mean and petty and she stopped herself just in time.
Duarte angled his proud dark head back and viewed her with chilling dark eyes without the smallest shade of warmer gold. 'You have no right to question me. You had an affair. You broke up our marriage. You then vanished and it was seven months before an investigator even picked up on your trail—'
'Duarte...' she broke in jaggedly, her voice breaking under, that onslaught.
'Throughout those months I didn't know whether you were dead or alive or even whether or not I was actually a father. It was a very difficult time for me. During that period, Bliss became something more than just an employee—she became a supportive friend.' His beautiful dark eyes were like a card-player's eyes, remote, cool, but disturbingly challenging.
She wanted to kill him. Then she wanted to strangle herself. He was telling her the cruellest thing. He was telling her that her own behaviour, her stupid immature vanishing act and all those months of silence had laid the foundations of what he termed a 'friendship'. Was he telling her that Bliss was his mistress and that he wasn't giving her up? And was it unjust and melodramatic of her to suspect that Bliss might have a far more ambitious agenda than mere friendship in mind? Hadn't Bliss frightened Emily into leaving Portugal and then made use of that opportunity to increase her own standing with Duarte? Or was Emily asked herself, she trying to justify her own mistakes and blame Bliss for the fall-out?
At that point what felt like the last piece of a bewildering puzzle seemed to fall into dismaying place and Emily stared at Duarte in sudden horror. 'Bliss is that third party you mentioned, isn't she? That discreet person who confirmed that I was carrying on with Toby when I wasn't—'
'I won't dignify that accusation with an answer,' Duarte countered drily.
It was as if he was slamming a door in her face without conscience. She wanted to ask him how intimate his relationship with Bliss had become but was not entirely sure she could stand to hear an honest answer at that moment. He would not feel that he had to defend himself. After all, didn't he believe that she had betrayed him with Toby first? She could feel his anger, contained but always mere between them, awakened by the reminder of her supposed affair! His attitude hardened by the manner in which she had questioned him about Bliss.
'Tell me,' she muttered dry-mouthed, feeling that no matter where she turned she was in a no-win situation and always in the wrong, would you even have considered bringing me back to Portugal had I not bad Jamie?'
"The jury's still very much out on that one,' Duarte drawled with freezing cool. 'Right now, I'm changing direction like a metronome.'
Neither of them said another word for the remainder of the drive back to the quinta.
After they arrived Duarte strode off with the terse explanation that he had an important call to make, Emily went upstairs to fetch Jamie and scooped him out of his cot with eager hands. After stopping for a chat with the nanny and discussing at some length the reality that her son needed more clothes, she cuddled Jamie all the way down to the ground floor again. There she set him on a rug in the salon to talk to him.
'Your father doesn't like me very much right now but that's OK,' Emily informed her six-month-old son with a rather wooden bright smile, destined to reassure him that she really wasn't sad. 'I'm just warning you that whenever you do anything stupid, it will come back and haunt you for a good hundred years. It will smack you in the face at every turn and leave you feeling awful—' .
'I think you're taxing his concentration span...' Duarte murmured from somewhere behind her at the same time as she noticed that Jamie was kicking his feet and demonstrating definite signs of excited welcome at the approach of someone he liked.
'I didn't know you were there!' Emily was seriously rattled by his appearance.
'Put on the fake smile again. Jamie's not very discerning.' Duarte hunkered down by her side to grasp their son's extended chubby fingers. 'He wouldn't know a pity-fest from a celebration.'
'If that's supposed to make me feel better—'
'No...but this is...' Anchoring one powerful hand into her tumbling hair, Duarte tugged her head around and captured her startled lips under his. Instinctively, she began to tip towards him. That slow-burning kiss awakened a bone-deep yearning inside her for the pure reassurance of physical contact and acceptance.
And then something funny happened. Her memory threw up a perfect recollection of his last words before they vacated the car. Just as quickly, she found herself pulling back from him for the first time in her life and she caught the flash of surprise in his stunning gaze before he veiled it.
'If I'm only here for Jamie's benefit, we'd better not stretch me too thin,' she said tightly.
Duarte reached forward and lifted their son with the same carefulness he might have utilised in handling a bomb. And her heart twisted because she knew it was her fault that he was still afraid of being rejected by Jamie. Emily being Emily, she then felt immediately horrible for not allowing Duarte to kiss her as much as he wanted to.
'Victorine tells me that you invited her to stay on,' Duarte murmured while he struggled to get Jamie into a comfortable position on one raised, lean, powerful thigh. 'In the circumstances that was extremely generous of you. However, she's asked me if she can move into a house on the outskirts of the estate which is currently unoccupied. I've agreed.'
'With me in charge, .prepare yourself for a sudden slump in staff efficiency,' Emily told him apprehensively.
'If there's a problem, you come to me and I wil
l deal with it.'
Meanwhile Jamie chortled and dug delighted hands into Duarte's luxuriant black hair and pulled hard.
'He's not scared of me any more,' Duarte breathed with a sudden grin.
Duarte took Jamie upstairs to the picture gallery which was lined with distinctly gloomy canvases of Monteiro ancestors and gave their infant son a potted history of the family with a perfectly straight face.
'Don't you think he's just a little young for this?' Emily remarked.
'This is our family. Nothing comes before family. Not business, not anything,' Duarte imparted with considerable gravity. 'My earliest memory is of my father bringing me here and telling me what it means to be a Monteiro.'
Not noticeably impressed, Jamie went to sleep draped over Duarte's shoulder. When Emily came back downstairs from settling their son for a nap, three estate workers were engaged in removing Izabel's giant portrait from the wall in the salon. The whole room would have to be redecorated. She wondered where the painting was going, looked at that gorgeous sultry face and sighed to herself. For so long, she had tormented herself with pointless comparisons between herself and Duarte's first wife. Now she was receiving what would seem to be her just reward. She now had live competition that struck her as much more threatening.
Nothing comes before family, Duarte had stated with unequivocable conviction. Finally he had answered that loaded question she had shot at him in the car. Jamie came first, so therefore Jamie's needs would take priority over more personal inclinations and mothers were not interchangeable. But where did Bliss fit into that picture?
That night she lay in her bed watching the door which had been expertly repaired stay resolutely closed. She was not one whit surprised. Duarte had been angry when she turned away from him during that kiss. Duarte would sooner burn alive than give her a second such opportunity. He was so damnably proud and stubborn.
So there you are, once again you did the wrong thing, Emily told herself wretchedly. Here she was worrying that the man she loved might be, at the very least, seriously attracted to a woman who was on convenient call for him throughout his working day. And what had Emily done? Angry with him, striving to protect her own pride, she had rejected him and she could not have picked a worse time to do it...
CHAPTER EIGHT
FIVE days later, on the afternoon of the party which Bliss had organised, Emily was fiddling in desperation with a vast floral arrangement in the main hall.
Victorine had been creative with flowers. Emily was not In spite of all her efforts, the blooms looked like they'd been dropped from a height into the huge glass vase and persisted in standing like soldiers on parade when what she really wanted them to do was bend.
The past five days had been an ongoing punishment. The long-awaited removal of Izabel's portraits had left ghastly marks on the panelling in the main hall and on the wallpaper in the dining room and the salon. As there wasn't time for redecoration, she'd attempted to move the furniture around, which hadn't worked very well. In the end she'd taken paintings from other places to try and cover up the damage. At one stage she had been tearing her hair out to such an extent she had even seriously contemplated approaching Duarte and begging for Izabel's wretched portraits to be brought back from wherever they had gone...on a temporary basis. Only the prospect of his incredulity at such an astonishing request had prevented her.
Her mood was not improved by the reality that she and Duarte were existing in a state of armed neutrality in which her bedroom door stayed closed and might even be left to gather cobwebs. That was not good for her nerves. Last night she'd decided that even having it smashed down in what now seemed like true heroic style wouldn't make her bat an eyelash and would indeed be welcomed.
Meanwhile, Duarte was being teeth-clenchingly courteous and charming, his entire demeanour that of a male wholly untouched by anything so uncool as a desire for the smallest physical contact with his wife. She knew he would not break...at least, not in her direction. At the same time she had the dubious comfort of knowing that Bliss was rarely out of his reach. At her lowest moments, Emily wondered if he was already slaking his high sex-drive with the glamorous blonde and even if Duarte and Bliss could have been secret lovers long before Toby came into Emily's life...
Indeed, her imagination had taken her to the outer reaches of her worst nightmares. In those worst-case scenarios, Duarte figured as the biggest four-letter word on planet Earth and behaved with Machiavellian cunning and cruelty to deceive his dumb, stupid wife. Now she was finding herself recalling her own trusting friendship with Bliss's cousin, Toby Jarrett.
'It's so simple,' Bliss had laughed. 'You want Izabel's portraits out of the way, you have yourself painted and present your husband with the canvas as a gift. He is certain to take the hint.'
But Bliss had had an uphill battle persuading Emily that she was worthy of being painted. To sit for her own portrait had required a level of self-esteem that Emily did not possess. However, in the end Emily had allowed herself to be convinced and, by then, Toby had already been renting a tiny house and studio in the village below the quinta.
They had first met at Bliss's apartment. He'd had his girlfriend with him, a wealthy and possessive divorcee who did not trust other women within an inch of Toby's blond good looks and easy boyish charm. But Toby had never flirted with Emily when she went down to his studio for sittings. His lady friend had soon tired of superintending Emily's visits like a suspicious chaperone.
With Toby living so close to the Quinta de Monteiro, Emily had felt it was only polite to invite him to dine with her and Duarte one evening. So she had told her first lie to Duarte and had pretended that she had just got talking to the young Englishman in the village. Prevented from revealing her friendship with Bliss, how could she possibly have told the truth? And, since she'd wanted the portrait to be a big surprise, she had had to keep her visits to Toby's studio a secret.
After a meal during which her husband and Toby seemed to radically disagree on virtually every subject under the sun, Duarte had drawled, 'Try to bury him in a larger gathering of guests if you invite him again. He's as argumentative as a rebellious teenager and, if he's such a wonderful artist, why did he drop out of his art college in England?'
Duarte had been extremely unimpressed by Toby. Emily, by then in the early stages of pregnancy and suffering from horrible morning sickness and a distinct feeling of abandonment because Duarte had not made love to her in weeks, had felt defiant. Whatever else, Toby might be, he was, in Emily's humble opinion, an incredibly talented painter. As far as she was concerned, any artist who could make her look almost beautiful was gifted beyond belief. She'd looked forward to the prospect of Duarte being forced to eat his own words.
Nobody had been more astonished than Emily that fatal night when Toby suddenly broke into an impassioned speech on the terrace beyond the salon. Telling her that he loved her, that Duarte did not deserve her, that if she ran away with him, he would cherish her forever and never neglect her as Duarte did. Since Emily had seen no warning signs of Toby falling in love with her, she'd been transfixed by shock. The most enormous self-pity had engulfed her when she appreciated that, for the very first time ever, someone was telling her that they loved her. Duarte, she'd thought in an agony of regret that evening, would never ever look at her that way or speak to her as though she was some unutterably precious being whom he could not live without .
'Men Deus...' Duarte breathed without the smallest warning from behind Emily.
Dredged at dismaying speed from her miserable recollections of the past, Emily turned scarlet because even thinking about Toby made Emily feel ultra-guilty. She spun round to find Duarte, sleek and sophisticated in a superb dark business suit, engaged in studying her floral arrangement with raised dark brows.
'Was the vase knocked over?' Duarte enquired.
Emily paled and surveyed the results of her creative efforts with tragic eyes and a sense of injustice! Bad had gone to worse. Several stems had broken
beneath her too-rough handling and the blooms now hung forlorn.
'No, the vase didn't fall,' Emily admitted in a small, wooden voice devoid of any human emotion. 'I was trying to arrange the flowers.'
Beside her, she heard Duarte draw in an audible breath. 'I was looking at it from the wrong angle. It's one of those trendy displays...right?'
'Oh, shut up!' Emily launched at him, shocking him as much as she shocked herself with that outburst that rejected his face-saving excuse. She dashed a defensive hand across eyes that were now filled with stinging tears. 'It looks blasted awful and you know it does! I'm no good with flowers—'
'Why should you be?'
'Because other women are and I'm no good at anything? Emily lamented bitterly and went racing for the stairs before she broke down altogether. On the first wide landing, she glanced back over her shoulder. Towards the back of the hall, Duarte's uniformed chauffeur, who was holding a pile of fancy-looking gift boxes, stood like a graven image. Duarte was just staring up at her with stunned dark eyes that seemed to suggest that not only was she lousy in the feminine creativity stakes but also decidedly unhinged. Emily fled on up the stairs like a lemming gathering speed to jump off a cliff. Why not? A night of horrible humiliation stretched before her. Playing hostess with Bliss smirking on the sidelines at her awkwardness. The even more horrendous challenge of choosing what to wear. The crazy but superstitious conviction that having her predecessor's portraits banished had been the kind of move calculated to bring serious bad luck.
Therefore, it was decidedly disorientating for Emily to race for the sanctuary of her bedroom and find the bed stripped, the wardrobe doors hanging open on empty spaces and two maids engaged on a thorough clean-up. Slowly she backed away again, only to find something or someone very solid blocking her retreat. She whirled round, trembling, shaken, bewildered by what she had just seen.
'Calm down,' Duarte spread eloquent hands in a soothing motion.