Duarte's Child

‘Why are you so nervous?’ he had finally asked with an air of imperturbable calm that just might have been laced with concealed exasperation.

‘I’m just not comfortable,’ she told him miserably.

‘But we have often talked before this.’

‘This is different—’

‘So it is…’ Duarte had given her a wry look. ‘I don’t believe I’ve had a date this disastrous since I was a teenager.’

‘A…a date?’ she had stressed in considerable shock.

‘Why not? I like you, Emily. What more is required?’

After marrying him, she could have told him exactly what was required. But that evening, offered the substance of her wildest fantasies she had had no such caution and commonsense. She had simply gazed back at him, transfixed by a sensation of wondering joy and gratitude. ‘I like you too,’ she’d said inanely.

‘Excellent,’ Duarte had pronounced as the plate of raw steak was discreetly removed at his instruction to be replaced some timeless period later by a cooked one.

‘In fact, I like you a lot,’ Emily had heard herself adding like an eager schoolgirl.

‘Even better,’ Duarte had asserted valiantly.

But he hadn’t kissed her that week or the next. In fact if she hadn’t hovered one night during the third week in the most humiliatingly suggestive way, she honestly believed that he might not have bothered to kiss her at all until he married her. Evidently registering that some lusty enthusiasm was required to impress even the most shy and inexperienced of women, he had got it all over with at once. He had taken her to bed the same night. In the dawn hours, while she was lying on the far side of the bed, wondering frantically whether she ought to be sneaking back to her own room, Duarte had opened his stunning dark golden eyes and rested them on her blushing face and murmured with grave quietness, ‘Will you marry me, Emily?’

And she had not asked why. Nor had she or he broached a single one of the questions that she imagined people usually exchanged on such a momentous occasion. She’d just nodded like a marionette having her strings pulled by expert hands. And those expert hands had reached for her again in reality as he breathed lazily, ‘I may already have got you pregnant. We’ll get married very soon.’

Emily was sprung from her introspection by an announcement over the tannoy that the jet was soon to land. With a groan at the necessity, she lifted her sleeping son from the cot and returned to the main cabin.

CHAPTER FOUR

WHEN Emily emerged from the jet with Jamie in her arms, she saw two limousines waiting on the tarmac to greet them. A slim svelte female, clad in an elegant suit the shade of eau-de-nil alighted from the first car. As the woman’s pale golden hair glinted in the evening sunlight, a warm smile relaxed Emily’s tense mouth and she hurried down the steps in Duarte’s wake.

Bliss was still working for Duarte! As Bliss finally spotted Emily and the baby she was carrying, her face froze and she momentarily stilled. Naturally Bliss would be stunned to see her back in Portugal, Emily reflected, and then hurriedly ditched her own smile in an effort to be more discreet. Bliss had said that Duarte would never approve of his wife embarking on a close friendship with one of his personal staff and, naturally, Bliss had not wanted to risk damaging her career prospects.

‘Mrs Monteiro…’ Bliss acknowledged coolly, her clear blue eyes skimming off Emily just as quickly again, her exquisite face expressionless.

Bliss was being really discreet, Emily decided but she felt just a bit cut off by that greeting and anxiously wondered if she had offended the other woman with her silence in recent months. If she had, it would be ironic for she had stayed out of touch rather than subject her friend to the stress of further divided loyalties.

‘Wait in the car, Emily,’ Duarte instructed in an arctic tone.

Reddening as Mateus surged ahead of her to open the passenger door of the rear limousine, Emily climbed in and gazed back out at her husband and his executive assistant where they remained about thirty feet away. Duarte looked very grave but, as always, stunningly handsome. All tall and dark and sleek and bronzed, command and authority stamped into every hard line of his lean powerful face. Bliss, who had always reminded Emily of a fairytale princess brought to life, looked curiously frozen and a bright swathe of pink now burned over her delicate cheekbones.

Striding over to the limo, Duarte swung in beside Emily and the car moved off. Surprised that the jet had landed at Lisbon rather than at Oporto, Emily wondered if Duarte was heading to a business meeting. Certain that Duarte intended to send both her and his son back to the house in the Douro, Emily contemplated the very long car journey which lay ahead for her and Jamie.