Duarte's Child

‘I didn’t—but maybe I was a bit tough on you last night because understandably, you were very, very angry with me after what you saw—’

‘Emily, shut up,’ Duarte groaned. ‘You probably weren’t tough enough. I need you to stand up to me—’

‘I don’t like confrontations but I’ll try.’ Emily watched Duarte breathe in very deep and slow. ‘You don’t need to say anything more. I know why you’re saying all these things…’

‘You do?’ Duarte looked dubious.

‘You’re afraid that I’m planning to get off this plane and take Jamie and refuse ever to come back to Portugal but I wouldn’t do that to you again,’ Emily assured him heavily.

‘Actually…’ Duarte released her hand and flung himself back into his own seat. He surveyed her with bleak dark eyes. ‘That wasn’t why I was saying those things. For once in my life, you are ahead of me. Believe it or not, I hadn’t considered that possibility.’

‘I won’t part you from Jamie,’ Emily reaffirmed a second time.

‘If you come back to Portugal with me this evening, you can have the dress, the honeymoon and the very moon itself if you ask for it,’ Duarte asserted with brooding darkness. ‘Whatever you choose to do, I will not issue any threats.’

Emily was hurt that he had so little faith in her promises. She just could not fathom what was going on inside that darkly handsome head of his. He was like a man suffering from ever-growing shock. His moods were all over the place. He was as tense as a rumbling volcano. He was talking like she had never heard him talk before in his life. Was he really so scared of losing Jamie? Then why wouldn’t he be? Without very much thought at all, she had denied him any contact with his son for many months. How could she blame him for doubting her?

‘Duarte…there’s a couple of things I’d like to say,’ Emily admitted in a rush. ‘Please listen, even though you don’t believe what I’m telling you…’

‘I’m listening…’

‘I never told you that I had become friendly with Bliss because she said that you’d think it was inappropriate and that it might damage her career prospects with you,’ Emily related, deliberately not looking at him lest she lose her nerve. ‘I met Toby in her apartment and she persuaded me to let him paint me. The portrait was supposed to be a present for you—’

‘I don’t really want to hear any more,’ Duarte incised in a charged undertone.

Emily ignored him and started talking even faster so that she could finish. ‘When I left the house in the Douro eight months ago, it was only because Bliss phoned me to warn me that she had overheard you speaking to your lawyer and discussing your chances of taking my baby away from me as soon as he was born.’

The silence simmered like a heatwave about to explode into violence.

Emily mustered her courage and glanced at Duarte. His attention carefully pinned to some point in the middle distance, his bronzed skin was stretched super-taut across his hard bone structure. Pallor was stamped round his set mouth, the pallor a male restraining and containing rage.

‘Is there any more?’ he almost whispered.

‘Nothing important.’ Shrivelled by his silent, smouldering reaction to her revelations, Emily grabbed up her magazine again, grateful the jet was coming in to land.

Thirty minutes later, in the crowded concourse inside the airport, Emily turned to say to Duarte, ‘I’m leaving Jamie with you…OK?’

Her husband emerged from his extreme preoccupation and frowned at her. ‘But we’re going to see your family together—’

‘I thought you had a business meeting—’

‘I had it rescheduled.’

Emily interpreted that sudden announcement as confirmation that he did not trust even her out of his sight, never mind Jamie. ‘It’s just I’d prefer to see my family alone—’

‘I’m coming with you,’ Duarte informed her in a studiously level tone. ‘We’ll let Jamie and his nanny go straight to Ash Manor and join them there later.’

‘You’re not listening to me. I want to speak to my mother alone. I want to talk to her in private. I don’t want company.’

‘When I said I could make changes, I did not mean I could turn into New Age man overnight,’ Duarte drawled. ‘Your mother will walk all over you and upset you. She always does. If I’m there she stays within certain limits.’

‘I don’t want New Age man, Duarte…I just want you to respect my wishes.’