Duarte's Child

Every bone in Duarte’s lean dark devastating face was rigid by the time she had finished speaking. ‘I cannot excuse myself for my lack of sensitivity.’

‘No, you can’t,’ Emily agreed with very little in the way of satisfaction. Then nothing he said could touch or ease the hard knot of pain inside her. Even while she railed at him, she was thinking how pointless her reproaches were. Those oversights had merely spelt out his basic indifference to her feelings. He’d never been in love with her and only a man in love would have considered such things. But she’d said enough, knew that if she said anything more, he might realise just how jealous she’d been of his first wife. Not very nice, she reflected guiltily. Izabel had proved to be an impossible act to follow.

‘It’s all water under the bridge now.’ Emily drew in a slow steadying breath, for she knew exactly what she needed to find peace of mind—her freedom. Freedom from such demeaning comparisons between herself and a dead woman. Freedom from wanting the love she could never have because that wanting was self-destructive. ‘So, before you start telling me things you would much prefer not to tell me, I have something to say.’

‘You have my full attention,’ Duarte drawled in the most insidiously discouraging way.

‘How do you do that?’ Emily found herself asking. ‘How do you manage always to make me feel that I shouldn’t say what I’m about to say? I mean, you don’t even know what I’m about to say!’

Duarte reached for her tense hands and unlaced them to hold her taut fingers in his. A bleak look had darkened his amazing eyes to a midnight glimmer of light as he gazed down at her. ‘I’m not planning to smash any more doors down, minha esposa. Is that what is worrying you?’

The warmth of his hands on hers was a subtle enticement, as was the endearment. Pinned to the spot by those brilliant, dark, sexy eyes of his, she shivered, every tiny muscle she possessed tensing. That close, she could feel the heat of his lean powerful body, smell the evocative scent of him, composed of warm male laced with a faint hint of some exotic aftershave. All so familiar, all so devastatingly familiar that her senses reacted to him no matter what she did.

‘I’m sorry if I frightened you. I lost control of my temper but it will not happen again,’ Duarte intoned huskily, the very sound of his dark, deep voice setting up a quiver at the base of her spine.

‘Stop it…’ Emily urged shakily, desperately seeking to muster her defences against that wholly seductive onslaught of sensations.

‘Stop…what?’ Duarte probed with a sincere incomprehension that infuriated her.

Her teeth gritted behind her compressed lips. She saw just how weak she was. It seemed she never learnt where he was concerned. He got close and her brain seemed to go into free fall—and yet he was still being cool and precise and he was not deliberately striving to set her wretched body alight. That knowledge just made her feel so horribly humiliated by her own lack of control that she dragged her hands free of his and stepped back.

‘What’s wrong?’ Duarte murmured levelly. ‘Are you still angry with me?’

Angry? Was she still angry? Mulling over that question, Emily conceded that she’d started being angry with Duarte within weeks of marrying him. Even while loving him to distraction, she’d been angry from the instant she laid her devastated eyes on Izabel’s gorgeous photogenic face. Angry because she wasn’t loved the same way, angry that her only value to him seemed to lie in supplying him with the child he wanted but angrier still that she was so hopelessly and helplessly obsessed with a man who neither needed nor loved her. In one way or another, she’d been made painfully conscious of that reality almost every day of their marriage.

‘There’s nothing wrong…’ Emily said, not quite levelly. ‘I just want a divorce.’

Duarte stilled the way people did when they got an entirely unexpected response. ‘And you don’t think that comes under the heading of there being something wrong?’

‘Right now…’ Emily breathed, colour highlighting her heart-shaped face, ‘I do not want you getting clever with me.’

‘Clever…’ Duarte flung his proud, dark heard back.

Her fingers coiled into fists by her side as she forced herself on. ‘I told you yesterday…I told you I didn’t want to be your wife anymore—’

‘Last night…’ Duarte trailed out those two words until she felt like her face was burning, ‘you gave me a rather different message.’

‘I didn’t know what was going on last night. I wasn’t myself,’ Emily stated between compressed lips of mortification. ‘But that mistake is not going to make me change my mind about what’s best for me—’