Duarte's Child

Well, actually, she registered in the midst of her growing turmoil, Duarte Avila de Monteiro might still be the love of her life but she had pretty much hated him as much as she loved him once it became clear that her pregnancy concluded his interest in her. Once he had impregnated her, that had been that. Duty done, mission accomplished. She closed her aching eyes. The low-maintenance wife project had gone belly-up when he least expected it.

Sick and tired of her own emotionalism, Emily headed for the nursery. Jamie was sure to be close to waking and hungry by now. The door stood ajar and, hearing Duarte laugh, Emily hesitated in surprise. Then she heard the nanny issuing serious advice on how best to hold a baby and just had to sneak a look. She saw Duarte sprawled in a chair, long powerful legs extended as he held Jamie cradled in his arms and struggled to coordinate a feeding bottle held at an awkward angle.

‘I need another hand,’ he groaned in Portuguese.

Yet his lean, boldly masculine profile was relaxed. There was even the hint of a rueful smile at the corner of his expressive mouth as he dealt with the unusual experience of not being an immediate brilliant success at something. Evidently, he did not mind the young nanny as an audience to his efforts to get acquainted with his baby son. But he would not have turned to Emily for similar advice and support. Cut to the bone by that humiliating awareness, Emily crept back to her room, feeling like the most hated woman in the world. Even Jamie wasn’t crying for her, she reflected painfully.

An hour later when she dared to emerge from her room again, Jamie was sound asleep in his cot. Emily was dying to lift her son and hold him close but there was a baby listener beside the night light. If Jamie cried, the staff would come running and she would look like an irresponsible mother. That warning image sent her into retreat.

She was leaving the nursery when Victorine intercepted her.

‘You have Duarte’s son. You must be feeling very pleased with yourself,’ the older woman condemned bitterly.

‘Please don’t feel you have to leave. This is your home,’ Emily pointed out, ignoring that opening sally.

The older woman pursed her lips. ‘It hasn’t been my home since you first came into it. When Duarte put someone like you in my daughter’s place, he…’

At the sound of that all-too-familiar refrain, Emily suppressed a groan. Once the centre of her mother’s world, the late Izabel had been a renowned beauty as famed for her style as her effervescent charm. Unable to come to terms with Izabel’s premature death, Victorine had deeply resented Duarte’s remarriage.

As the older woman paused for breath in what had grown into a rant freely interspersed with spiteful comparisons, Emily simply sighed, ‘Your daughter is no longer here but you’re still part of Duarte’s family and he’s fond of you.’

Frustrated by Emily’s lack of reaction to her gibes, Victorine dealt her a look of boiling resentment and hurried back the way she had come. Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me, Emily rhymed to herself. But, feeling in dire need of some fresh air, she went out to the charming courtyard at the back of the quinta. There she sat on a stone bench in rueful appreciation of the superb box-hedged herbal gardens designed by her talented predecessor. The light was fading fast and using the same service staircase she had employed earlier, she returned to her room to have a shower before bed.

She’d already shed her top and skirt when someone turned the handle on her bedroom door and partially opened it. Freezing in dismay, she heard Duarte’s deep drawl as he addressed one of the staff in the corridor and she dived into the bathroom in a panic to snatch up a towel.

‘Emily?’ Duarte breathed, a raw edge to his dark, rich voice that sent a current of foreboding through her.

She emerged with pronounced reluctance from the bathroom. ‘Yes?’

Shimmering golden eyes raked over her shrinking figure and the death grip she had on a towel that was just a little too small for its purpose. She had one unpremeditated clash with his smouldering gaze and she hastily looked away again, her heart jumping as if she had jammed a finger in a live electric socket. The anger she had seen in him earlier was no longer contained. It leapt out at her like a physical entity and radiated around him like a dangerous aura. From the fierce set of his lean dark devastating face, the rigidity of his broad muscular shoulders and the clenching of his long brown fingers into fists, she read a level of unholy rage she’d truly never ever expected to see in a male as self-disciplined as he was.

‘How could you?’ he demanded wrathfully.

‘How could I…wh-what?’ she stammered, tummy churning at the terrible tension in the atmosphere.