Duarte's Child

The front door behind her opened again. ‘Would you like to come back in?’ Lorene asked awkwardly.

‘Thanks for the offer but no,’ Emily muttered in harried surprise and without looking back she hurried back out to the limousine parked and screened by the high hedge.

Hurried steps sounded behind her. A hand briefly touched her arm. ‘Emily, I’m sorry…’ Lorene Davies suddenly sobbed.

In any other mood, Emily would have been astonished by that display of emotion in her direction but just then she could not deal with it and all she wanted was to escape. As she flew through the garden gate and back on to the pavement, the rear passenger door of the limousine opened and Duarte stepped fluidly out in front of her.

‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped chokily.

He scanned her pasty, white face and opened his arms and she threw herself against him with a strangled sob. She’d never been so glad to see anybody. It felt so good to be held. Nothing else seemed to matter. Nothing seemed to hurt so much. He lowered her into the car and nudged her along the seat to climb in beside her.

‘How did you g-get here?’ she stammered in bewilderment.

‘Cab. I suspected that you were planning to confront your mother and I thought I should be within reach just in case it didn’t pan out the way you wanted it to.’

She wiped her streaming eyes with the tissue he supplied. ‘It didn’t. I asked her why she didn’t like me and I thought…I thought maybe she would deny it. Or say I had been an extra child she’d never wanted ’cos my sisters are so much older…or that I was a bad pregnancy or a very difficult baby—’

As the limo moved off, Duarte pulled her back against him and curved his arms lightly round her. ‘And instead?’

‘It turned out I’m the family’s dirty secret—’

‘Stop exaggerating,’ Duarte urged, smoothing her tousled hair back from her damp brow. ‘Come on…’

‘Mum had an affair with a real creep and he was my father—’

‘I suspected something of that nature,’ Duarte confided quietly.

Emily tensed and tipped her head up to squint up at him in the most awkward way. ‘You…suspected?’

‘You don’t resemble any one of your relatives, minha jóia. That in itself could have been simple genetics but, taken in tandem with the manner in which they treated you, it did make me wonder.’

Looked at from upside down, Duarte really did have the most incredible long lashes, Emily conceded absently. She sighed. ‘I feel like I’ve just lost my whole life…like I’m not the person I thought I was—’

‘You’re Emily Monteiro,’ Duarte reminded her instantaneously. ‘We’ll do some research on your true father if you like. A few details that did not relate to him being a “real creep” might help you come to terms with this.’

‘My mother got so upset after telling me…but when she started telling me she was so hard about it.’

‘She’s probably been dying to get it off her chest for years but I’m sure she didn’t get much of a kick out of confessing when it came to the point. Especially as, knowing you, you probably said thanks in your politest voice before tottering away.’

‘Pretty much… How do you know that?’

‘If you could thank me after I demanded a separation, you could certainly thank your mother for hurting you.’

Emily was so shaken by that statement that she pulled away from him and turned round to face him levelly. ‘Did I say thanks that night after you had said you wanted a separation?’

Duarte nodded in confirmation. ‘I took it to mean that you had decided that you did want to be with Toby Jarrett—’

‘Oh, no…you misunderstood!’ Aquamarine eyes aghast, Emily shook her head. ‘How could you think that?’

‘Emily…what I saw and heard that night was a major, not minor shock to my system and you weren’t the only one of us saying things you hadn’t thought through.’

‘Oh… What did you want me to say?’

Duarte gave her an almost wry smile that tugged at her heartstrings for a reason she could not define. ‘You were supposed to get down on bended knees and plead for a second chance. Instead you went upstairs and started packing.’

Emily shut her eyes and slumped back against the seat. Duarte had just told her something she would rather not have known, for it tore her apart. She might have got all that nonsense about Toby cleared up there and then and they might never have separated at all!

‘Why is it that you seem to be such a predictable woman and yet you never ever give me the response I expect?’ Duarte demanded in rampant frustration.