Duarte's Child

Unsettled by that news and quick to pick up on the brittle quality of her friend’s manner, Emily said in surprise, ‘Didn’t Victorine object?’

‘That hateful old cow?’ Bliss laughed. ‘Oh, not being a softy like you, I soon settled her! I let her know that her ideas about entertaining were fifty years out of date and an embarrassment to Duarte. Ever since then, when there are guests, she takes an early night.’

That unfeeling explanation filled Emily with uneasy distaste. Victorine had her flaws but Emily would never have dreamt of referring to the older woman in such terms. ‘Bliss—’

Bliss merely talked over her. ‘Mind you, I never thought I’d see you back here again either. I was very annoyed when you did your vanishing act last year.’

Grateful for that honesty, Emily spoke up immediately. ‘I’m really sorry I didn’t keep in touch but—’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about. When I told you about that little chat I overheard between your husband and his lawyer, I was warning you to get your own legal advice instead of sitting on the fence, hoping all that nasty divorce stuff would go away. I wasn’t expecting you to flee the country and put everybody into a loop trying to find you!’

Emily paled at that censorious clarification.

‘In tipping you off, I felt like I had personally deprived Duarte of his child,’ Bliss admitted in no more comforting continuance. ‘What on earth possessed you? And now to come back here, regardless of how Duarte feels about you—’

‘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.