Duarte's Child

Stunning dark golden eyes held hers as he finally jerked loose the screening towel so that it drifted down into a heap on the rug. Strong hands lifted to snap round her wrists and prevent her startled attempt to stoop and retrieve it.

‘Duarte…?’ Emily gasped, very much taken back by his behaviour.

He held her back from him and let his intent gaze roam at a leisurely pace over her slim, slight figure. She tried to curve away from him, curl in protectively on herself while still standing, but he held fast to her. Visually exploring the rise and fall of her small breasts beneath the barrier of her bra, his attention strolled down to her tiny waist and the swell of her hips where a pair of white cotton panties that were not of the diminutive variety shut off his view.

‘The cotton look was fine when sweet and wholesome was the draw but it’s not to my taste now,’ Duarte confided while Emily’s pale skin coloured up like the rising sun beneath an appraisal that was reducing her to agonies of embarrassment. ‘And since pleasing me must necessarily be your top priority—’

‘Why? Why would it be?’ she broke in, wild in her humiliation.

‘Security of tenure,’ Duarte specified in cool warning. ‘And please let’s ditch the I’m-so-shy routine I used to respect because I don’t respect it any more.’

Her heart was thudding so fast, she could hardly catch her breath. ‘It wasn’t a routine—’

‘But it must have been,’ Duarte asserted in interruption as he backed her inexorably in the direction of the bed. ‘All those hot afternoons you spent in his studio in pursuit of a surprise portrait supposedly for me? At a time when you had locked the door between our bedrooms you were attending all those sittings purely for my benefit? And you’re still trying to persuade me that the same lout that I personally heard swearing eternal devotion to you never laid a finger on you?’

Emily nodded jerkily, conscious of how very unlikely he made her being innocent sound but still ready to argue. ‘I was hardly ever alone with him. He had a girlfriend—’

Duarte elevated a winged dark brow. ‘Get a better story. Or even better, tell me exactly what you did do with him—’

As he swept her up into his arms and settled her squarely down on the centre of the big bed and stepped back from her, she said feverishly. ‘Nothing, absolutely nothing.’

‘I beat the hell out of him,’ Duarte informed her with chilling exactitude.

Suddenly the atmosphere was sizzling like a stick of dynamite ready to blow. In considerable shock, Emily gazed back at Duarte, all her colour ebbing—for the very last thing she would have expected from Duarte was that kind of violence.

‘That was my right,’ Duarte stated soft and low and dark, watching her like a hawk ready to pounce, smouldering dark golden eyes welded to her sincerely shaken face. ‘Do you think that I didn’t know that he followed you to the villa in the Douro? That he repeatedly attempted to see you? And that when that failed, he kept on phoning?’

A pin could have been heard dropping in her appalled silence.

Duarte studied her with a hard force she could feel in every atom of her being. ‘If you had encouraged him then, if you had once spoken to him or seen him, you would not be here now.’

So throughout that winter she’d passed at the country house, nothing that happened there had gone unreported to Duarte. Emily was genuinely shattered by that discovery. ‘We…we were separated,’ she whispered shakily.

Savage anger flared in his blazing look of challenge. ‘You were still my wife and what is mine stays mine until I choose to relinquish it!’

Before her she saw a male with traits she had failed to recognise before. The male that existed behind the deceptive patina of sophistication and cool courtesy. A more primitive breed of male, every bit as aggressive and possessive of what was his as any backstreet fighter. She’d never been so shaken in her whole life—for only then it occurred to her that naturally, Duarte used the same forceful drives for his personal life that he used every day in a more civilised way in business—in that field his ruthlessness was a living legend.

‘Turning him away in the Douro was the only thing you did right,’ Duarte pronounced grittily.

Emily was now realising that the only reason that Duarte had left her alone on the bed was to undress. She lay there with the curious sensation of being weighted to the mattress while she watched him finish unbuttoning his shirt. As he bent to remove his shoes, the shirt hung loose, disclosing an enervating glimpse of a broad chest the colour of living bronze, with dark curling hair emphasising his powerful pectoral muscles and the hard flat contours of his stomach. Her breath locked in her throat. As he straightened to his full six foot four inches, she couldn’t take her eyes from him. He was a stunning vision of raw masculinity and it had been so long since she had seen him like that. Indeed, it was over a year since they had shared the smallest intimacy, she reminded herself, dimly seeking excuse for her total absorption in him.