Duarte's Child

‘Calm down,’ Duarte spread eloquent hands in a soothing motion.

‘Calm down? Where am I being moved to now? Out the front door? Or down to the cellars with the rats?’

‘Let’s not get totally carried away, Emily. There are no rats in the Monteiro wine cellars.’ Duarte made what she considered to be a totally unnecessary contradiction.

‘But there is one upstairs!’

Duarte frowned. ‘You are joking, I hope—’

‘Why are you always so literal? I’m referring to you!’ she hissed in frustration.

Duarte tried to reach for her hand. She folded her arms but he was persistent. Unfolding them by the means of gentle pressure, he imprisoned one of her hands in his. Then he dragged her down the corridor, across two landings and all the way over to the other side of the house. Nothing short of thumbscrews would have squeezed a demand to know where he was taking her from Emily’s mutinously compressed lips.

Duarte cast open the door of his own bedroom, indeed threw it dramatically wide. Emily stalked in, seething with so many uncontrolled emotions she was afraid she might explode.

‘Now look around you,’ Duarte suggested, sounding just a little taut.

Her teddy nightshirt was spread across one corner of his bed like a major statement. ‘But…b-but, we’ve never shared a room—’

‘Any reason why we shouldn’t?’

Straying away from him, thrown into a loop by this unexpected development, Emily plucked her nightshirt off the bed, embarrassed that it had been put on show when it was so very unworthy of public display.

‘Is that a…no?’

Emily shrugged and rubbed the fringe on the rug with the toe of her canvas-shod foot. But in the depths of the eyes she kept tactfully lowered lurked surprised satisfaction. Indeed, it was amazing how powerful she felt at that moment. He would have done anything sooner than ask up front. She could feel his tension. A non-verbal invitation to share a marital bed was quite a proclamation of intent on his part and a none-too-subtle step in the right direction. Suddenly the past five days of dreadful stress she had suffered while attempting to seem unconcerned by the divisions between them seemed very worthwhile—ultimately, he had come to her.

‘It’s a big bed,’ Emily acknowledged softly. ‘I suppose we can be as frigidly polite in that bed as we are at the dinner table.’

‘OK,’ he murmured with a level of cool that almost made her smile. ‘By the way, I’ve bought you a present.’

Emily was stuffing the nightshirt into as small a ball as possible and endeavouring to lose it discreetly by pushing it with a prodding toe below the bed. ‘A…present?’

Duarte indicated the gilded boxes now stacked two feet high on the dressing table.

‘For…me?’ Emily hurried over to the stack to investigate with great curiosity. Never before had Duarte given her a surprise gift.

She hauled all the boxes over to the bed. The lid of the biggest one went flying and she ripped into the tissue paper and was astonished to emerge with some sort of garment. ‘You bought me…something to wear?’

‘For the party tonight.’

‘Why would you buy me something to wear?’ Emily asked in sincere bewilderment.

Duarte elbowed back his well-cut jacket and dug two lean hands into his trouser pockets and shifted a wide shoulder in an understated shrug. ‘A whim…’

She shook out the incredibly tiny garment. ‘But it looks like…’ She bit back the tactless word, ‘underwear’, and studied the fine glistening fabric with wide questioning eyes.

‘A dress?’ he suggested.

‘A…d-dress?’ she stammered, striving valiantly to conceal her horror at the prospect of appearing in public with bare arms, legs on display and nothing whatsoever to draw attention away from her non-existent bosom. ‘But it’s too small to be a dress…’

Duarte breathed in deep.

‘And it’s so pale in colour.’ A sort of delicate palest blue that was certain to make her naturally fair skin look washed-out and ghostly.

‘Maybe this wasn’t one of my better ideas,’ Duarte remarked in a rather strained undertone.

Dear heaven, she was being so cruelly tactless! He finally made the effort to go and buy her an unexpected and personal gift and she stood around moaning about it like an ungrateful brat. If he wanted her to appear with every skinny bone accentuated, she would do so. If he wanted her to wear a dustbin bag, she would try to wear it with a smile. It was the thought which counted, not the actual gift.

With forced enthusiasm she dug into the remainder of the boxes, terrified of what other horrors awaited her. Shoes to match but so flat, she would disappear; only two-inch high heels, she noted in dismay. Lingerie fine enough to flow through the proverbial wedding ring alongside the dress but at least while she was shivering, she would be benefiting from an extra layer. An unpadded bra…how could he? Was nothing sacrosanct?