by Lynne Graham
'Please don't tell me any more...' Emily urged in a wobbly voice as tears clogged her throat. 'It's only going to make me hate myself for running away even more than I already do—'
'No. I think you had to do a vanishing act before I could admit to myself how much I loved you. And, having admitted that to myself, it sort of got it out of the way and you can be sure I didn't think about it again until very recently,' Duarte confided.
On the threshold of their bedroom, Emily surveyed him with very wide eyes of shock.
Duarte removed the flowers from her arms and settled them on the nearest piece of furniture.
'You can't leave them lying there. They'll die out of water,' Emily mumbled, no longer sure what she was saying. 'You just said that you loved me...'
Duarte closed both hands over hers and pulled her over the threshold and closed the door with a well-aimed kick. 'That is so bad for the wood,' Emily rebuked, feeling distinctly dizzy.
Duarte drew her close and splayed his fingers to her cheekbones. 'I wanted you the minute I laid eyes on you—'
'I bet you don't even remember the first time you laid eyes on me!' Emily objected, regarding that lesser claim as an equally contentious subject and wondering dismally if he thought that he needed to pretend that he loved her to make her happy.
A winged dark brow climbed. 'Don't I?'
'No way do you remember,' Emily told him a second time.
'You were wearing ancient jeans with holes in the knees and an old green sweater,' Duarte recounted with a certain amount of self-satisfaction. 'Your gorgeous hair was tied back with a piece of baling twine—'
'You remember...' Emily acknowledged in open disbelief at the accuracy of that description. 'But you didn't even seem to look at me—'
'So I'm subtle! Minha jóia,' Duarte teased with glancing amusement brimming in his gaze as he absorbed her continuing shock. 'I thought you were very fanciable but I wasn't planning to do anything about it—'
Emily was hanging shamelessly on his every word. 'What changed your mind?'
'You dragged my dog out of a barn on fire and I was hugely impressed. There you were, not only sexy but nice into the bargain and so modest. Then I took you home to your family and realised you were Cinderella in disguise. All my protective instincts were roused—'
'Were they?
Having begun Duarte was now eager to tell all. 'I thought up that job so that I could get to know you better—'
'Without committing yourself to anything more,' Emily slotted in helplessly. 'And after you had looked your fill on me being kind and helpful with little children and animals, you asked me out to dinner with a view to what?'
'Marrying you. What's wrong with that?' Duarte went on the defensive, bright golden eyes clinging to her taut expression and troubled eyes with forceful intensity. 'OK, so I was terrified of making another mistake and I didn't rush in to asking you out—'
'It's all right. You may not have rushed in to asking me out but you did rush in to asking me to many you,' Emily conceded but somehow still contrived to make it sound as if she had received the consolation prize.
Duarte hauled her into his arms, troubled eyes colliding with hers. 'And doesn't the fact that I couldn't wait to make you my wife tell you something?'
'You decided you'd wasted enough time observing me?'
'Inferno!' Duarte groaned as he stared down at her in frustration. 'I was in love with you. I just didn't want to admit that even to myself!'
She searched his lean powerful face and the intensity she met in his stunning eyes set her free forever from the belief that he did not love her. Her heart went off on a roller-coaster ride that left her breathless. 'So when did you appreciate how you felt?'
Perceptibly, Duarte winced. 'When we were separated and I started thinking that maybe I should give you a second chance—'
'It took you that long?' Emily probed unimpressed.
'Slow learner...' Possibly feeling that they had dwelt enough on his reluctance to face the strength of his feelings for her, Duarte claimed a slow deep kiss that made her pulse race.
'Just one thing you haven't explained,' Emily recalled as she surfaced. 'I assume Bliss was the third party who confirmed that I was supposedly having an affair with Toby—'
Paling, Duarte gave her a look of deep regret. 'Who else? She said that Toby had confided in her and that she had urged him to break off the relationship—'
'That conniving little shrew—and you couldn't see the wood for the trees!' Emily condemned hotly.
'If it hadn't been for that kiss I witnessed, I wouldn't have been so easily convinced,' Duarte argued. 'But, at the time, as far as I was concerned, Bliss had no axe to grind and every reason to avoid referring to the fact that her cousin had seduced my wife!'
'You should have had more faith in me—'
'After Izabel, trust was a problem for me. As for having more faith,' Duarte continued, deftly closing his hands to her waist and lifting her off her feet to deposit her down on the bed. He followed her down with easy grace and studied her. 'I still haven't heard an explanation of why you asked me the day I found you and Jamie if I was intending to have other women again?'
'Oh...that!' Her own ire doused by a dose of the same medicine, it was Emily's turn to look uncomfortable. 'Bliss never once said that you had other women but she used to sort of hint that she suspected that you strayed when you were away on business—'
'Never once,' Duarte delivered. 'I always valued our marriage. I would not have risked it—'
'Even when the bedroom door was locked?'
'I put that down to your being pregnant...just not being in the mood,' Duarte confided huskily. 'But when I saw you with Toby, I put a very different construction on that locked door.'
Raising a newly confident hand, Emily let her fingertips stroke down over one hard sculpted cheekbone in a loving caress. 'I love you loads and loads and loads but please don't ask me why it took me so long to decide I wanted a divorce.'
:'Are you kidding?' Duarte groaned, the last of his tension dissipating as he heard those words and studied her hectically flushed face with intensely appreciative eyes of gold. 'Every time you mentioned divorce, I went into panic mode. I thought I was going to lose you again. When we were flying into London and I was facing the fact that Bliss was lying and I had got everything wrong, I felt like I was fighting for my life—'
'So that was why you were behaving that way. Sort of desperate...' Emily recalled with a heady sensation of having more power than she had ever dared to hope over the male she loved.
'And you were so convinced that my sole objective was hanging on to Jamie, I saw that if I told you I loved you then; there was no way on earth you were likely to believe me,' Duarte confessed with a ragged edge roughening his dark deep drawl.
'You're probably right. On the other h-hand,' Emily stammered slightly as a lean hand glided in a possessive sweep from her waist to her breast.
'You were saying, minha jóia?'
'I forget...' And she looked up at him, her fingers lacing into the thick black hair she loved to touch, her aquamarine eyes shimmering over him with wondering satisfaction while he slowly lowered her down on to the pillows.
Duarte frowned and abandoned her with startling abruptness. 'That reminds me.'
Emily sat up in shock and watched him stride through to his dressing room. 'Reminds you of what? Where are you going?'
Duarte emerged again with a large parcel which he balanced on the foot of the bed while he ripped off the packaging.
As Emily focused on the painting of herself which she had last seen at Toby's studio, her soft mouth opened in considerable shock.
'You were right. Toby is one hell of an artist. I took the painting from him because I felt that he had no right to keep an image of my wife,' Duarte informed her loftily, a possessive glow in his gaze as he surveyed her. 'I intended to destroy it but, when I looked at the canvas, I could not bring myself to commit such an act of destruction.'
Emily's eyes stung. 'Now I truly believe that you love me—'
'Never doubt it, minha esposa. I will never stop loving you,' Duarte swore, abandoning the canvas to gather her back into his strong arms and claim her mouth with hot and wholly appreciative fervour.
* * * * *
Eighteen months later, Emily tucked Jamie into his bed. Their son had learned to walk early and at supersonic speed he'd demonstrated extraordinary persistence at escaping from his cot. A little bed shaped like the toy cars he adored had seemed a safer option for their miniature mountaineer.
Smoothing his tumbled black hair from his brow, she watched him slide into the sleep of exhaustion, contentedly clutching his faded blue teddy and looking impossibly angelic. Throughout the day Jamie ran on pure livewire energy and Emily was very grateful to have not only the assistance of a nanny but also of Victorine, who had become one of Jamie's most devoted slaves. Emily adored her son too but she was already recognising many of Duarte's traits in their son. The try, try again determination, the bone-deep stubbornness and the hot temper—and she was equally grateful that Jamie had a father willing to exert loving but firm control.
There had been quite a few changes in their lives over the past eighteen months, she reflected with the lightness of heart that had become second nature to her. No longer did she worry herself sick about imminent disaster. Knowing that she was loved and valued and very much needed by Duarte had made a huge difference to her self-esteem. Even her Portuguese had improved by leaps and bounds, enabling her to overcome her former shyness and enjoy company and make proper friends.
After exchanging stilted taut phonecalls with her mother the year before in an effort to ease the tension between them and visiting again, Emily had finally acknowledged that she and her mother were never likely to be that close. Her mother's husband, Peter Davies, had never had any interest in her and that had not changed but, now that she understood why that was so, it no longer hurt her.
However, it had been a very welcome surprise when both her sisters, initially shaken by the effect of Emily finally asserting herself, had slowly come round to seeing her as she was rather than as the illegitimate kid sister whom they had pretty much been taught to despise. Only then had she realised how easily families could all sink into the same bad pattern of behaviour. She had finally appreciated that neither Hermione nor Corinne were that close to Lorene either but over the past year her sisters had steadily become closer to Emily..
'They just copied your mother. It wasn't until you made them stand back and question their attitude that they saw how it had been. They're adults now and they've started thinking for themselves,' Duarte had asserted with immense approval, no longer referring to them as the ugly sisters and indeed making much-appreciated efforts to introduce them to eligible men.
And Duarte? Emily crossed the corridor into their bedroom—the nursery had been moved to a more convenient location. Emily smiled as she noticed the adrenalin kit in the bedroom—Duarte had insisted they had one in every room.
Duarte strolled out of the bathroom, still wet from the shower, only a towel wrapped round his lean hips. 'Is Jamie asleep?'
He still took her breath away, Emily conceded, striving not to stare like a teenager at all that potent masculinity on display. 'Out like a light—'
'It'll be the five o'clock start he had today.' Duarte gave a slight shudder at the memory of being bounced into rude wakefulness at dawn by his energetic son.
'Oh, well,' Emily said wickedly. 'You are the man who once wanted a really big family and I have reached a decision—'
Duarte had tensed. 'What about?'
'I want another baby—'
'Two to bounce on us at dawn?' Duarte tried to tease but shock was written all over him at that announcement. 'Emily, you really don't have to make the kind of sacrifice for me. There's a lot more to family than numbers. I'm perfectly happy with Jamie—'
'But I'm not and this has very little to do with you,' Emily told him with dancing eyes, touched by his efforts to dissuade her when she knew how much he regretted never having had the opportunity to really share her last pregnancy with her. 'I just have this yen for another child—'
Duarte searched her smiling face with a frown and he argued, 'I don't want you being sick and miserable—'
'But it's not going to be like that again—'
'How do you know?'
'I know,' Emily told him with an air of feminine superiority. 'I just know...OK?'
He reached for her and drew her lazily up against his big powerful body, sending her temperature rocketing. Stunning golden eyes glittered over her with possessive heat. 'It's just we come first and I want you to be happy—'
'You're the man who promised me the moon,' Emily said plaintively, lashes cast down. 'I'm still waiting...'
Duarte vented a deeply appreciative laugh and backed her down on the bed. 'Are you ever going to let me live that down, minha esposa?'
'Probably not.' She smiled up at him, her heart in her eyes, luxuriating in the adoring look he could not hide, thinking how lucky she was and how gloriously happy. It had not taken the gift of the moon to bring about that transformation. All it had taken was love.
'I love you more every day,' Duarte groaned hungrily against her extended throat, feeling her quiver and arch in instant encouragement. 'You've got me flying home for lunch now. You make me insatiable—'
'Hear any complaints?' Emily teased, inching off his towel like a shameless woman set on seduction. 'Instead of some boring working lunch, you get me—'
'And the more I get of you, the more I want you,' Duarte confided, stringing a trail of tormenting kisses across her delicate collarbone. 'OK...we'll think about another baby when we've really talked over the idea in depth.'
Arabel Monteiro was born nine months and two weeks later and their daughter's conception never was discussed in depth. Emily was neither sick nor miserable during her second pregnancy and Duarte presented her with a very beautiful diamond-studded moonstone pendant and earrings.
'You're not getting off the hook that easily,' Emily warned him cheerfully.
'I think you finally know me, minha esposa,' Duarte pronounced with loving eyes and his wonderful smile.