Duarte's Child

‘Aside from my wealth, I had nothing to offer you but you appeared to want very little.’ Duarte studied her with spectacular dark golden eyes that had the most scorching effect on her already heated flesh. ‘Apart from me…and you wanted me like you wanted air to breathe. At the time it seemed a fair exchange.’

Her mind a mess of jumbled and inane thoughts, Emily quivered as she literally struggled to concentrate on what he had just said. Understanding came in a trickle and then a gush and almost washed her away in a floodtide of pain and humiliation. Like an accident victim, she reeled back a step from their proximity, aquamarine eyes shattered, shame over her own weakness where he was concerned following fast.

You wanted me like you wanted air to breathe…

It was the most hurtful but demeaning truth she had ever had to swallow. Momentarily it threw her back into the past and a time when she would have done anything, accepted anything on any terms just to be with him. And all this time he had known that, a little voice of horror wailed inside her head. She was appalled and then shaken by her own refusal to accept that he had recognised from the very outset just how deep his hold over her was. All the shameless heat he had awakened without even trying drained away, only to be replaced by a fiery surge of hot colour that dwindled equally fast.

‘You shouldn’t have asked,’ Duarte murmured, smooth as glass.

‘Once…you wouldn’t have answered,’ Emily parted numb lips to respond and her own voice emerged all bumpy and broken.

‘That was then. This is now and much has changed.’ Duarte surveyed her with hard dark eyes of satisfaction. ‘But, sadly for you, not, I think, your hunger for me.’

‘Well, that’s where you’re dead wrong…’ A sudden revivifying burst of bitter anger powered through Emily’s quivering length. ‘As you said, that was then and this is now and I got over my stupid crush when you got me pregnant and then decided to forget I even existed!’

‘Did you really get over it?’ Duarte reached for her with such a complete lack of warning and such shattering cool that she stared up at him in a wide-eyed daze, a frown just beginning to form between her brows. Before she even had the chance to blink, his hard sensual mouth came down on hers with all the explosive force and expertise of a heat-seeking missile.

Since that onslaught was the very last reaction she’d expected, she had no time to even try to muster her defences. She was blasted from angry shame straight into stunned and helpless response, a muffled gasp torn from her throat as he crushed her into the steely contours of his hard powerful physique. She couldn’t breathe, didn’t want to, couldn’t think, didn’t want to. Her whole body seemed to surge up and into his, instantly fired by the burning heat of desire he could unleash. He pried her lips apart, let his tongue delve in carnal and provocative exploration of the tender interior of her mouth and she shuddered and moaned as the upswell of electrifying sensation became more than she could bear.

‘Duarte…’ she gasped feverishly. ‘Duarte—’

‘Jamie’s crying. You should go to him.’

Like a woman lost in a dream she let him set her back from him. Her brain felt befogged and her body was still gripped in the talon claws of an excitement she had never expected to feel again.

‘Jamie…’ Duarte said again.

And, in the same instant, her wits returned and she emerged from the grasp of the sensual world which had betrayed her with a sudden nasty jolt. Blinking rapidly, she pressed a trembling hand to the tiny pulse flickering like mad above her collarbone and she stared up at Duarte in resounding shock. His lean, dark, devastating face was cool as ice, his brilliant dark golden eyes challenging.

Jamie! Finally recognising the faint cry that she normally reacted to within seconds, Emily hurried away, pale as death and all knotted up inside with maternal guilt and self-loathing. Jamie had mislaid his teddy but he calmed down the instant his mother reappeared. The teddy restored to his grasping hand, his sleepy brown eyes pinned to her face and then slowly began to drift closed again. Emily sat down on the bed by the cot.

She was still trembling and her body ached from that elemental surge of hunger which she suppressed for so long. Of course, it had been so much easier to deny that side of her nature when Duarte was not around. Reliving the immediacy with which she had fallen into his arms, she squirmed and hated herself. She should have had more pride. But on another level she was simply stunned that Duarte should actually have touched her again. Duarte who, eleven months ago, had said he could not even stand for her to remain beneath the same roof.