Duarte's Child

And suddenly she was kissing him back with the most desperate surging need powering through her, her slim body quivering at every contact with his. Breathing raggedly, he lifted his head. ‘Let’s go to bed—’

‘It’s barely tea time—’

‘Let’s go to bed—’

‘What about Jamie’s bath?’

‘Our son has a nanny, and I can’t wait and neither can you,’ Duarte assured her with mesmeric intensity, shifting against her to acquaint her with his bold arousal, cupping her hips in the same sinfully erotic way to pull her up to him.

They got to the bedroom without meeting anyone, which had been Emily’s only fear. Duarte brought her down on the bed fully clothed and came down on top of her and kissed her breathless. The need in her was so intense she was raw with it, shaken by her own desire. She just wanted him so much and his passion more than matched hers. He was wild for her and the more she recognised that, the more she threw off her inhibitions. She raked her nails down his back at the height of fulfilment and looked in stricken dismay at the marks she had left on his beautiful back in the aftermath.

Duarte just laughed and hugged her to him with easy strength. ‘You just used me, minha esposa. As a vent for a very upsetting day. I’m not complaining but if I ever call back home at lunchtime and grab you off your feet and pin you flat to the nearest horizontal surface, you have to promise to be equally understanding.’

As Emily could not picture him dragging himself from the bank at lunchtime, she just pressed a kiss to a muscular brown shoulder and drifted off to sleep, satiated and secure.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EMILY spun slowly round in front of the cheval mirror, admiring herself from every angle.

It was the wedding dress of her dreams. Romantic, filmy, the colour of champagne and the most superb fit. Her tiny waist was accentuated which had the miraculous effect of lending her the illusion of a fuller swell in the bosom department. Not that it mattered to anyone but her, for Duarte seemed to have a genuine passion for her just as she was.

Humming under her breath, she feasted her eyes upon herself. He would love the dress. She knew he was bracing himself for the clashing rainbow of colours because he was not to know that dear Bliss had convinced her that that was what most flattered her. But it had only taken one glimpse of herself clad in palest blue for Emily to see the light.

They had spent three weeks at Ash Manor, returning to Portugal only the night before. Three of the happiest weeks of her life. There was a kind of magic in the air between them. No doubt that was her romanticising his erotic and intense absorption in making love to her at every possible opportunity but they had had a lot of fun out of bed too. With Jamie. Out riding together. And all the time she’d been learning that she had spent a long time married to and living with a male she had never really got to know. But then, Duarte had not really wanted her to get to know him then.

‘I thought you would be the kind of wife whom I would always find in the stables with the horses,’ he had confided only the week before. ‘Instead you were always out socialising and shopping and, when you were at home, you threw constant dinner parties. It reminded me of life with Izabel. I hated it.’

Instead of pleasing him with her efforts to fit the role she had assumed he wanted her to occupy, she had actually been pushing him away. The more she discovered, the more she loved him for what he was really telling her was that they were much better matched than she could ever have believed. He liked to entertain friends and family at home but he very much preferred to keep business connections out of their home.

He gave her flowers every day and laughed at the way her arrangements turned out. He gave her true affection that did not always lead to passion. He gave her everything but his heart. And she had pretty much given up on his heart. As she finally came to understand just how much Izabel had hurt him, she knew why he had had the reserve and that desire to control. His heart had brick walls round it except where Jamie was concerned and if she ever told him that all that was wrong with him was his gigantic unconfessed fear of being hurt again, he would never, ever forgive her.

After all, she’d already hurt him with Toby, hadn’t she? She had dwindled into a poor little victim instead of forcing him to recognise that she was telling the truth.

As for Bliss, well, Emily believed that she’d already worked out the most likely scenario on that score. Duarte was probably going to admit to her that he had slept with Bliss during the difficult months that he had been searching for his wife and child. She was going to have to deal with that and she didn’t know how she would. But that explanation made sense as to why Duarte should have insisted on not talking about Bliss for a few weeks, didn’t it? Duarte had decided that if he had risked telling her the truth first, their marriage had no hope of surviving.