by Lynne Graham
While she talked herself mentally into that state of calm and security, Emily drank her way through two glasses of wine. She rarely touched alcohol, for she did not have much of a head for it, but she felt in dire need of a little Dutch courage.
'Emily...?' called a bright familiar voice.
It was Bliss, all smiles and self-satisfaction. 'I've arranged a terrific party, haven't I?'
'Yes...absolutely.' Emily plastered what she hoped was a serene smile on to her lips and prayed for an interruption.
Across the room, she glimpsed Duarte, his brilliant eyes centred on both women. Emily smiled so hard at Bliss her face hurt.
'He's mine. Just you watch me in action,' Bliss invited.
'I trust him...' Emily didn't know if she did but it sounded good and strong. What she really wanted to do was lock Duarte up somewhere very secure, just to be on the safe side.
'When Duarte found you, he was about to instigate divorce proceedings.'
Emily widened her eyes in the desperate hope that that made her look incredulous. 'I asked for a divorce. He said no.'
'I don't believe that for a moment!' Bliss derided with blistering scorn. 'We're lovers. Haven't you worked that out yet?'
Emily froze. Her heart divebombed to the soles of her feet. Her tummy performed a sickening somersault 'I don't believe you.'
'Suit yourself.' Bliss simply laughed and walked away.
Emily finished her wine with a shaking hand. Lovers! That announcement was not a cue to panic, she instructed herself. In dismay, she watched Duarte move out on to the dance floor with Bliss. Emily wriggled through the clumps of chattering guests round the edge of the floor. Peering under arms for a better view and stretching her neck and standing on tip toe, she kept Duarte and Bliss under close surveillance.
She lifted another glass from a passing tray and watched Bliss press her lithe body into intimate connection with Duarte. But a moment later, Duarte backed off from that contact. Bad move, Bliss, he's not into intimate displays in front of audiences, Emily thought angrily. But then, when had Bliss ever been able to resist a challenge? Hadn't Bliss once told her that a clever woman could easily manipulate any man into doing her bidding? Now Bliss was whispering coyly into Duarte's ear. Duarte flung his arrogant head back and laughed and Emily felt stabbed to the heart and her bravado curdled at source.
If he fell for an Izabel, he could fall for a Bliss. Lovers? While she herself had been in England? Emily didn't know what to believe. One minute she was suffering agonies of jealousy but the next, she was telling herself that she could not trust anything that Bliss said. Forcing herself to stop spying on her husband and his 'friend', Emily turned on her heel.
Only minutes later, Duarte curved an imprisoning hand to her elbow and tagged her back against him to murmur ruefully, 'The one drawback of those shoes is that I can't see you in the crowd. Where have you been?'
'Oh...around.'
Now it seemed it was her turn to be whirled round the dance floor. She snuggled up so close to his lean hard body that a postcard could not have squeezed between them. Duarte tensed a little in surprise.
'If you push me away, you're dead,' Emily swore. 'It's bad enough having to smell her perfume on you.'
'Isn't jealousy hell?' Duarte imparted with a silken lack of concern that was just about the last reaction she had expected to receive.
'What would you know about it?' Emily snatched in a charged breath arid then just stormed right to the heart of the matter. 'Bliss told me that you were lovers!'
Assailed by that dramatic contention, Duarte responded in the most withering of tones, 'Que absurdo! Why would Bliss say such a thing? That is not my idea of a joke, Emily.'
'Are you saying you don't believe me?' Emily's voice rose in volume at the same velocity as her temper.
Duarte tightened the arm he had curved to her rigid spine like a restraining bar. 'No comment—'
'If you don't give me a straight answer, I'm walking off this floor!'
'You've been drinking...you're upset—'
Emily flung her head back and studied him with tormented aquamarine eyes. No. He didn't believe her. He was being smooth, evasive, possibly even extremely cunning.
'Bliss said that you weren't comfortable with her being here,' Duarte murmured very drily. 'Even at a distance of a hundred feet, I could see that too. You really don't need to make up childishly silly stories as well.'
Emily wrenched herself free of him with a sudden movement that took him by surprise. She felt violent, furious, incredibly bitter. Bliss and her games, always one step ahead. Duarte? If he was innocent, nothing short of a tape-recording would convince Duarte that Bliss had said such a thing. If he was guilty, all he had to do was accuse his wife of being intoxicated and jealous!
Concentrating on avoiding Duarte, Emily circulated. Every time he came within twenty feet of her, she moved on and plunged into animated conversation with someone else. At last their guests began to take their leave but it was a slow process. Then an elderly woman announced that her handbag had gone missing and immediately became very upset. Emily could have done with her husband's calming presence—her own level of Portuguese was unequal to the challenge of soothing the poor woman. Unfortunately, Duarte was nowhere within view and Emily had to martial the anxious and weary staff into an ordered search. The bag was finally found intact in the cloakroom. Telling the servants just to go to bed and clean up the party debris in the morning, Emily ushered their volubly apologetic guest out to her limousine with great relief.
As Emily walked back indoors, the big house felt eerily silent and empty. Had Duarte just gone up to bed? From the amount of light reflecting on the landing window, Emily realised that the lights had been left on outside in the courtyard garden. With a groan, she went back downstairs to switch them off. She frowned when she saw that the garden doors were still open and then she stopped dead in her tracks: Duarte and Bliss were outside.
Even as Emily looked, Bliss made a sudden almost compulsive movement and tipped forward into Duarte's swiftly extended arms. They were locked together like two magnets in the split second it took Emily to surge forward and gasp strickenly, 'You rotten, lying bastard!'
CHAPTER NINE
DUARTE thrust Bliss hurriedly back from him and wheeled round, his lean strong face startled, his whole demeanour one of almost exaggerated incredulity.
'Did you think I'd gone to bed?' Emily's voice broke on that rather meaningless demand but her brain was locked on that intimate image of them together and the sheer horror of the discovery that her very worst fears should have been proven right before her eyes.
Bliss strolled forward, her scarlet dress shimmering in the lights, her exquisite face offensively cool and collected. 'This is rather embarrassing but I do assure you that you misunderstood what you just saw. I simply stumbled and Duarte saved me from a nasty fall—'
'Do you honestly think I'm s-stupid enough to swallow that old chestnut?' Emily stammered, half an octave higher, utterly thrown by the blonde's reaction until she worked out that Bliss was assuming yet another role and this time for Duarte's benefit. That of supportive lover engaged in a tactful cover-up!
Duarte studied Emily's drawn and accusing face and he squared his broad shoulders. 'Don't be silly, Emily,' he urged in the most galling tone of authority. 'It's a warm night and Bliss was feeling faint. She almost fell and I steadied her. End of story.' Duarte rested expectant dark deepset eyes on his wife.
Instantly, Emily looked away, away from both of them. She was trembling and sick with shock at their behaviour. Why were they doing this to her? Couldn't Duarte, at least, have come clean? Instead, they stood united against her, both of them making the same stupid excuse and both of them treating her as if she was an hysteric making wild childish allegations!
'I think I ought to go home, Duarte. I'm so sorry about this,' Bliss sighed with regret.
Enraged by the other woman's composure, Emily spun back. 'Tell me, what role are you
playing now, Bliss? You're a very good liar but I have to admit that my head's spinning tonight!'
'Get a grip on yourself, Emily,' Duarte grated.
Emily couldn't bring herself to look at him. She kept on staring at Bliss. 'Have you told my husband about what a great friend you were to me before I left Portugal?'
'I really don't know what you're referring to,' Bliss responded drily.
'Oh, really?' Emily marvelled that she herself did not simply spontaneously combust with rage and sheer violent frustration. 'You mean you don't remember all those cosy lunches we shared at the Faz Figura restaurant in the Alfama? You don't recall the dozen shopping trips either? Not even my visits to your apartment?'
Bliss directed a marvellous look of sublime discomfiture at Duarte as if she was listening to the ravings of a very confused and drunken woman.
'Well then, if I never visited your apartment, tell me how I know that you have your dining room chairs covered in fake zebra skin?' Emily asked fiercely, determined to corner and entrap Bliss in her own lies. 'How come I know that you have a grandfather clock that belonged to your parents in your sitting room? Leather seats, glass tables—?'
As Emily's desperation to expose the blonde's lies rose to a charged peak, Bliss expelled a weary sigh. 'Well, I do have a leather suite but then so do many people and I would adore a grandfather clock but I've never owned one. As for the fake animal fur seats?' Bliss grimaced. 'I have rather better taste.'
Emily's rigid shoulders slumped. Evidently it would take someone a great deal cleverer than she was to catch Bliss out.
'Please go home, Bliss,' Duarte urged in an electrifyingly quiet request. 'I'm sorry you had to witness this.'
Bliss strolled past Emily like a queen and walked back indoors.
Duarte swore in driven Portuguese, and strode over to Emily, who was staring emptily into space. He gripped her by the arms to force her round to face him. 'What the hell has got into you? A friendship with Bliss? Since when? Are you practically drunk and delusional? How could you make such an ass of yourself?' he demanded with savage incredulity.
Emily was in a daze. 'Bliss does have a grandfather clock,' she protested shakily. 'And we were friends and I'm not drunk but I'm beginning to feel delusional!'
His smouldering dark golden eyes narrowed and he converted his hold on her limp arms to a supportive soothing hold. Looking distinctly at a loss, Duarte expelled his breath in a slow hiss. 'Look, I think you need to get some rest...OK?'
'You think I'm crazy. Or do you? Maybe you're as big a deceiver as she is! If that's how it is, fine. I don't care any more.' Emily raised her arms in an abrupt movement to shake free of his lean hands. Turning away from him, she set off down the corridor.
'I'll be upstairs in five minutes...' Duarte called after her. 'Do you want me to come up with you?'
'No, thanks.' If he thought she was going upstairs to share a bedroom with a male who thought she was only one mental step removed from a nervous breakdown, he had better think again.
Emily trudged back across the echoing main hall and out the front doors just in time to see the tail lights of Bliss's sleek silver sports car disappearing down the winding drive. Naturally one grandfather clock would now be speedily disposed of or possibly Bliss had got rid of that parental legacy months ago, Emily reflected numbly, for the clock had not suited the ultra-modern decor of Bliss's city apartment.
Unable to bear the claustrophobic silence of the house or the prospect of another confrontation with Duarte, Emily wandered out into the moonlit gardens. The dew-wet grass crunched beneath her feet. The palms cast spiky, mysterious shadows that faded the further she moved away from the house. She saw the domed bulk of the building the Monteiros called a summerhouse glimmering in the darkness beneath the trees. A grand eighteenth-century folly built of white marble, it was large enough to house a full orchestra. Mounting the steps, Emily dropped down on to a hard marble bench. Just then, the folly had a great deal more appeal than any bed containing Duarte.
Her husband thought she was nuts. He had gone from outraged disbelief to sudden grave concern. Right now, he was probably ringing one of his many medical friends to ask for some serious advice and book her an appointment with a psychiatrist.
In the quiet of the folly, Emily skimmed her shoes off to flex her crushed toes and willed herself to be calm. She saw that once again she had been set up by Bliss. Having seen Emily watching her with Duarte, Bliss had staged a pretend fall. No other explanation made sense. If Duarte wanted to snatch Bliss into a passionate embrace, he was highly unlikely to do so in a well-lit courtyard in full view of more than forty windows.
So, in that sense, she had made an ass of herself, Emily acknowledged grimly. But it was difficult to care when she was truly at the end of her tether. Bitterness was rising inside her like a dam surging to break its banks. Assert yourself, Duarte had told her when he was telling her how to deal with her own family.
But when had she ever asserted herself with Duarte? She was Mrs Doormat Monteiro and it was little wonder that Bliss was able to best her at every turn. Eleven months ago, Duarte had demanded a separation and he had dispatched her to the house in the Douro and she had gone without a murmur. She had behaved as if she was an unfaithful wife!
Why? She had been consumed with guilt over a kiss that she had neither invited nor enjoyed. Why had she beaten herself up for so long over that stupid episode? She had not been unfaithful and she had not betrayed her husband. But, totally intimidated by Duarte's chilling rage and his even more appalling conviction that she had actually been sleeping with Toby Jarrett, she had become so distraught that she had been incapable of offering a convincing self-defence.
As Emily sat there ruminating on her cold marble bench, she began to see that she had spent most of the twenty-two years of her life blaming herself for every bad and unlucky thing that had ever happened to her. When her parents didn't hug her as a child and her older sisters bullied her, she had assumed that the fault was in her and not in them. She had felt guilty and ashamed that she wasn't sufficiently loveable and had just tried harder and harder to please in the hope that somehow matters would improve. Only they never, had improved, she conceded sadly.
Then she had married Duarte. Duarte with his domineering force of will and powerful personality. She had put up with everything thrown at her. Victorine, Duarte's endless absences on business, a lifestyle she disliked. Had she ever complained? No! She had blamed herself for not being content with what she had and for wanting too much. Instead of putting the blame squarely where it belonged on Duarte's shoulders.
Hearing a twig snap somewhere nearby, Emily froze into stillness.
'Are you trying to play hide-and-seek now?' Duarte derided as he strode into view from below the screening darkness of the trees. 'It is three o'clock in the morning. Do you realise how long I've been searching for you? How concerned I've been? If I hadn't found your tracks across the grass, I'd have been turning the staff out of bed to look for you!'
Emily studied him with a glorious sense of calm and not the smallest desire to apologise for her lack of consideration. In moonlight, Duarte was a dramatic study in black and white. So tall, so dark, so handsome. Always in control, preferably in control of her—yet he was losing his reserve at a staggeringly fast rate this time around. Why? She wasn't the same woman she had been at the time of their separation, eleven months ago.
'You really have been a lousy husband,' Emily sighed. 'And I don't need to be hysterical or intoxicated or nuts to tell you that—'
'You can abuse me all you like indoors,' Duarte stated icily. 'I refuse to stand around in the garden at this hour listening to this nonsense.'
'Fine. Goodnight,' Emily said quietly.
'Look, you're overwrought—'
'You're not at the bank, Duarte...so drop the command tone of voice. I won't be bullied or browbeaten—'
'But you might just be strangled,' Duarte intoned, mounting the steps at an aggressive pace. 'No
w, I understand that you feel threatened by Bliss and that it may even be my fault that you feel jealous and insecure—but no way are you going to make a major event out of that stupid incident in the courtyard!'
'Am I not?' Emily sat up a little straighter and raised her chin.
'It's outright nonsense for you to pretend that you suspect me of infidelity!' Duarte delivered in the same thunderous tone. 'And, in your heart, you know it is—'
'Do I?' was all Emily said and not in a tone that suggested she was greatly interested in the subject.
'I would not have an affair with an employee—'
'I thought she was your friend...and wasn't I once an employee? And in a much humbler capacity than Bliss has ever been.'
Duarte dealt her, an electrifying look of smouldering frustration. "That was different!'
'So maybe Bliss was what you call different, too—'
'Are you trying to wind me up?' Duarte demanded incredulously, staring at her expressionless face with probing intensity.
'Why would I do that? Bliss need not be a problem, Duarte...providing that you can prove to my satisfaction that you are innocent.'
'What the hell is that supposed to mean?' he launched at her.
'That this evening I witnessed something suspicious between you and Bliss,' Emily reminded him in the same reasonable tone that seemed to be making his even white teeth clench. 'I don't need to justify my expectation that you should now immediately convince me beyond all reasonable doubt that you are blameless.'
'And how am I supposed to do that?' Duarte bit out furiously.
Emily lifted a slight shoulder and dropped it again. 'I don't know. It's not my problem, is it?'
'I've had enough of this!' Duarte growled and, taking a sudden step forward, he bent down and scooped her off the bench and up into his powerful arms. 'You've gone haywire since last night! You're trying to play games with me—'