Duarte's Child

‘Jamie?’ Duarte slotted in, smooth as a stiletto.

Emily paled. ‘I’m willing to live in Portugal so that you can see as much of Jamie as you like—’

‘All right, you move out and I keep Jamie.’

Emily’s lower lip parted company with her upper in sheer shock.

‘Now I wonder why you aren’t into that solution when it is only the reverse of what you are suggesting that I should accept,’ Duarte pointed out without remorse. ‘Only twenty-four hours after I get to meet my son, you want to deprive me of him again and you somehow expect me to be cool about it?’

‘All right, you’re making me feel horrible…’ Emily muttered, unable to avoid seeing the unlovely comparison he’d put before her. ‘But feeling as you do about me, you have no right to expect me to live with you just for Jamie’s sake.’

‘Haven’t I? You were perfectly happy last night until I blew it,’ Duarte reminded her without hesitation. ‘Now, had you said then that you could not bear me to touch you, I would have agreed that at the very least we should separate.’

Emily caught on fast to that argument. Hugely aware that he could talk semantic circles round her and tie her into knots to the extent that she would soon not know where she was in the dialogue, she grasped hurriedly at the get-out clause he had put before her. ‘Well, I’m saying it now. I can’t bear for you to touch me!’

‘Where do you get the nerve to say that to me?’ Duarte derided, reacting to that statement with a level of incredulity that was seriously embarrassing.

Flushed to the roots of her red-gold hair, Emily backed off several steps. ‘I’m not taking back a word of it…’

Like a leopard on the prowl, Duarte followed her retreat.

‘I don’t have to justify wanting a divorce—’

‘Yes, you do,’ Duarte overruled with infuriating logic.

‘OK…’ Trapped between the wall and Duarte’s lean powerful physique, Emily came to a halt with her shoulderblades up hard against the plaster. ‘When I married you, I was too young to know what I was doing. You took advantage of the fact that I was in love with you. I had a lousy hole-in-the-corner wedding and I didn’t even get a honeymoon!’

Duarte elevated a winged black brow with pronounced disbelief. ‘That’s…it?’

‘That’s only to begin with!’ Emily slung, her temper firing up fast at his refusal to take her seriously. ‘Then you brought me home to a house ruled by your ex-mother-in-law, who hated me on sight. After that, you hardly bothered to notice that I was alive—’

A charismatic smile began to form on Duarte’s wide, sensual mouth. ‘I seem to recall noticing that you were alive so often and with such frequency that I once fell asleep in a board meeting!’

Chagrinned by that literal interpretation of her words, Emily changed tack to suit that line of argument as well. ‘So you admit that all you ever shared with me was a bed—’

‘If you wanted to share the board meetings too, you should have mentioned it.’

Pure rage filled Emily. ‘When I phoned you during the day, you never once returned my calls!’

Duarte frowned. ‘What calls?’

‘I daresay there was a time or two when you were much too busy to speak to me but there is just no excuse for you never once phoning me back—’

‘I never refused a call of yours in my life,’ Duarte interrupted with a palpable edge of masculine annoyance. ‘I have better manners. We Portuguese are not so taken up with business that we overlook either courtesy or family during working hours.’

‘Well, I was overlooked time and time again until I got the message!’ Emily raked back at him in a growing fury at her inability to make any charge stick and draw blood. ‘And where were your precious manners when you failed to turn up for the dinner parties I arranged in my deadly boring, dutiful role of being your wife?’

‘Again you are making false accusations, not one of which you have ever mentioned before,’ Duarte condemned with chilling bite. ‘Where is all this nonsense coming from and why have you wandered from the point?’

‘My point is—’ Emily stabbed the air between them with a raised hand and, even in the grip of her temper, was rather pleased with the effect.

Without warning, Duarte moved forward and brought his hands up to plant them on either side of her startled face, long fingers meshing into the strands of her fiery hair. Shimmering golden eyes that had the flashfire charge of lightning clashed with hers. ‘Your point is non-existent or else you might have said something worth listening to by now,’ he grated rawly, half under his breath, as he gazed down at her. ‘I asked you here so that we could talk in private and I could express my regrets for my behaviour last night. But you have refused to listen. Instead you have done nothing but sling lies at me!’