Duarte's Child

‘Don’t you think he’s just a little young for this?’ Emily remarked.

‘This is our family. Nothing comes before family. Not business, not anything,’ Duarte imparted with considerable gravity. ‘My earliest memory is of my father bringing me here and telling me what it means to be a Monteiro.’

Not noticeably impressed, Jamie went to sleep draped over Duarte’s shoulder. When Emily came back downstairs from settling their son for a nap, three estate workers were engaged in removing Izabel’s giant portrait from the wall in the salon. The whole room would have to be redecorated. She wondered where the painting was going, looked at that gorgeous sultry face and sighed to herself. For so long, she had tormented herself with pointless comparisons between herself and Duarte’s first wife. Now she was receiving what would seem to be her just reward. She now had live competition that struck her as much more threatening.

Nothing comes before family, Duarte had stated with unequivocable conviction. Finally he had answered that loaded question she had shot at him in the car. Jamie came first, so therefore Jamie’s needs would take priority over more personal inclinations and mothers were not interchangeable. But where did Bliss fit into that picture?

That night she lay in her bed watching the door which had been expertly repaired stay resolutely closed. She was not one whit surprised. Duarte had been angry when she turned away from him during that kiss. Duarte would sooner burn alive than give her a second such opportunity. He was so damnably proud and stubborn.

So there you are, once again you did the wrong thing, Emily told herself wretchedly. Here she was worrying that the man she loved might be, at the very least, seriously attracted to a woman who was on convenient call for him throughout his working day. And what had Emily done? Angry with him, striving to protect her own pride, she had rejected him and she could not have picked a worse time to do it…

CHAPTER EIGHT

FIVE days later, on the afternoon of the party which Bliss had organised, Emily was fiddling in desperation with a vast floral arrangement in the main hall.

Victorine had been creative with flowers. Emily was not. In spite of all her efforts, the blooms looked like they’d been dropped from a height into the huge glass vase and persisted in standing like soldiers on parade when what she really wanted them to do was bend.

The past five days had been an ongoing punishment. The long-awaited removal of Izabel’s portraits had left ghastly marks on the panelling in the main hall and on the wallpaper in the dining room and the salon. As there wasn’t time for redecoration, she’d attempted to move the furniture around, which hadn’t worked very well. In the end she’d taken paintings from other places to try and cover up the damage. At one stage she had been tearing her hair out to such an extent she had even seriously contemplated approaching Duarte and begging for Izabel’s wretched portraits to be brought back from wherever they had gone…on a temporary basis. Only the prospect of his incredulity at such an astonishing request had prevented her.

Her mood was not improved by the reality that she and Duarte were existing in a state of armed neutrality in which her bedroom door stayed closed and might even be left to gather cobwebs. That was not good for her nerves. Last night she’d decided that even having it smashed down in what now seemed like true heroic style wouldn’t make her bat an eyelash and would indeed be welcomed.

Meanwhile, Duarte was being teeth-clenchingly courteous and charming, his entire demeanour that of a male wholly untouched by anything so uncool as a desire for the smallest physical contact with his wife. She knew he would not break…at least, not in her direction. At the same time she had the dubious comfort of knowing that Bliss was rarely out of his reach. At her lowest moments, Emily wondered if he was already slaking his high sex-drive with the glamorous blonde and even if Duarte and Bliss could have been secret lovers long before Toby came into Emily’s life…

Indeed, her imagination had taken her to the outer reaches of her worst nightmares. In those worst-case scenarios, Duarte figured as the biggest four-letter word on planet Earth and behaved with Machiavellian cunning and cruelty to deceive his dumb, stupid wife. Now she was finding herself recalling her own trusting friendship with Bliss’s cousin, Toby Jarrett.

‘It’s so simple,’ Bliss had laughed. ‘You want Izabel’s portraits out of the way, you have yourself painted and present your husband with the canvas as a gift. He is certain to take the hint.’

But Bliss had had an uphill battle persuading Emily that she was worthy of being painted. To sit for her own portrait had required a level of self-esteem that Emily did not possess. However, in the end Emily had allowed herself to be convinced and, by then, Toby had already been renting a tiny house and studio in the village below the quinta.