Duarte's Child

Duarte rose from his seat and straightened to his full commanding height. ‘Is Jamie asleep?’

Emily nodded jerkily, her tension rising by the second.

‘Verbal responses would be welcome,’ Duarte added drily.

Encountering brilliant dark golden eyes, she reddened hotly. ‘Yes, he’s asleep but maybe I should sit with him for a while in case he wakes up again.’

‘Trying to impress me with maternal overkill? Tell me, who looked after Jamie while you were giving riding lessons?’

‘Nobody—’

‘Nobody?’ Duarte queried with hard emphasis.

Emily frowned in surprise. ‘It really wasn’t a problem. I was only instructing a couple of hours a day and I would park Jamie’s buggy outside the paddock. He was never more than a few feet from me and he usually had the company of parents watching their child’s lesson.’

As Duarte listened, his lean powerful face tautened, his wide sensual mouth compressing. ‘Usually? A working stables is no place to leave a baby unattended. You know as well as I do that riders can’t always control their mounts and that your attention must’ve been on your pupil—’

Under that attack, Emily had stiffened and lost much of her natural colour. ‘Jamie was always safe. I did the very best that I could—’

‘But your best wasn’t halfway good enough,’ Duarte cut in with biting derision. ‘You left my son at the mercy of passing strangers instead of ensuring that he received proper care—’

‘I wanted to spend every minute with him that I could and you’re making this sound much worse than it was,’ Emily protested defensively. ‘Everywhere I worked, Jamie got loads and loads of attention. Most people like babies, especially happy ones—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Duarte said coldly.

Emily worried at her lower lip and then said heavily, ‘Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have afforded to pay someone to look after him—’

‘And whose fault was that?’

As her tension climbed, Emily trembled and her tummy churned. Thinking straight had become a challenge; she had never been much good at confrontations. However, on this occasion she found herself struggling to speak up in her own defence. ‘Whose fault was it that I left Portugal in the first place?’

Far from looking impressed or indeed startled by that comeback, Duarte inclined his arrogant dark head to one side and levelled his incisive gaze on her in the most formidable way. ‘Presumably you are about to give me the answer to that strange question?’ he prompted.

‘I only left Portugal because I thought that you were planning to try and take my child off me the minute he was born!’ Emily countered in an accusing rush.

Duarte angled an imperious brow. ‘What kind of a nonsensical excuse is that? Before this morning, I never made a threat in that line. To be frank, my patience with you came to an end today. But who or what gave you the idea that I might have been considering such a dramatic move last year?’

Emily flinched and dropped her head, shaken at how close she had come in her turmoil to revealing Bliss’s role in events eight months earlier. Had she done that, she could never have forgiven herself. Bliss had been the truest of supportive friends during Emily’s troubled marriage, cheering Emily up when her spirits were low while offering helpful advice and encouragement. Although Emily had not contacted the other woman since leaving Portugal, she assumed that her friend still worked as Duarte’s executive assistant. Bliss had eavesdropped on that confidential dialogue between Duarte and his lawyer and had forewarned Emily. Were Duarte ever to discover that a member of his own staff had been that disloyal, Bliss’s high-flying career would be destroyed.

‘I just got the idea…at the time, the way you were treating me—well, er…it seemed to make sense to me and I was afraid that you were planning to separate me from my child—’

‘So you chose to separate our son from me instead. Is that how this sorry story goes?’ Duarte dealt her a look of shimmering challenge that made her breath trip in her already tight throat. ‘This convenient angle that continually seeks to turn you into a poor little victim? Well, I have news for you—I’m not impressed, querida.’

‘I’m not trying to impress—’

‘No?’ Without warning, Duarte sent her a sudden slanting golden glance as hard and deadly as an arrow thudding into a live target.

Feeling the sudden smouldering surge in the atmosphere but unable to comprehend what had caused it, Emily untwisted her laced hands and made a jerky move with one of them as if she was appealing for his attention. ‘I know I’ve made mistakes—’