Duarte's Child

And from then on in, she gave herself up to voluptuous abandonment. The hot sweet pleasure just took over and she could only breathe in short agonised gasps. In the steely grip of that mounting excitement, her heart thundering, her blood racing like wildfire through her veins, she whimpered and arched her hips to invite his urgent thrusts. She cried out at the peak of a climax of breathtaking power, her entire body wrenched into the explosive hold of that erotic release.

Afterwards, it was like coming back to life after a long time somewhere else. Where else, Emily could not have specified at that precise moment, but it didn’t seem to matter for she felt this glorious sense of unquestioning contentment and delight. Her needs felt few; she was with Duarte and Duarte was with her. Life felt wonderful.

Duarte rolled over, carrying her with him, and gazed down at her passion-stunned face with brilliant golden eyes of satisfaction. ‘I think that settles the divorce question for the foreseeable future.’

Disorientated by that sudden descent to the prosaic and the provocative when her own brain was still floating in euphoric clouds, she blinked and stared up at him. Duarte pushed her head down into his shoulder, dropped what felt like a kiss on the crown of her head and held her close in silence.

‘Duarte?’ she mumbled, trying to ground her brain and focus.

‘I’m going over to London on business next week. You and Jamie can come and we’ll visit your family…OK?’

Thrown by that suggestion, Emily began to lift her head.

‘I was bloody furious when I discovered you’d gone there and they’d thrown you out again,’ Duarte stated, startling her even more, his strong jawline clenching. ‘Not very sympathetic, were they?’

Emily had paled. ‘I hadn’t got around to telling them about us being separated…or anything else,’ she mumbled, shrinking from any mention of that episode with Toby. ‘Mum and Dad just didn’t think it was right that I had left you and they probably thought that showing me the door again would send me back to Portugal more quickly.’

‘Or maybe they thought that helping you might offend me,’ Duarte drawled very quietly. ‘And that if they offended me, I might not be just so generous in putting new business in the way of the family firm. Have you even considered that angle?’

Emily regarded him with shaken reproach. ‘Is that how you think of my family? That’s an awful thing to suggest!’

‘I’m an appalling cynic but, obviously, you would know your own flesh and blood best…’ Duarte murmured, relieving her with the ease with which he made that concession.

Emily relaxed again.

‘It’s just that most parents would think twice before they threw a married, very pregnant and distressed daughter back out into the snow,’ Duarte continued, dismaying her with his persistence. ‘They also took my side. They didn’t even know what my side was but they took it all the same—’

‘People don’t always react the way you expect them to…especially when you take them by surprise, as I did,’ Emily pointed out defensively.

‘I can certainly second that.’

He didn’t like her parents. Why had she never realised that before? Emily lay there in his arms, forced to reluctantly concede that, if anything, the emotional distance between her and her parents had only grown since her marriage and had been almost severed altogether when she turned up on the doorstep without her husband in tow eight months earlier. Her family had visited her only once in Portugal. Although Emily had bent over backwards to ensure their every comfort and provide every possible entertainment, true enjoyment had seemed to elude her relatives. Her mother and her sisters had seemed to band together in a trio of constant criticism which had made Emily feel about an inch high. The couple of invitations she had made after that had been turned down with no great effort devoted to polite excuses.

‘Let’s have lunch and then go home and spend the rest of the day with Jamie,’ Duarte suggested, taking her mind off her regret over her uneasy relationship with the family she loved.

‘That’s a lovely idea,’ she said warmly.

Only then did it cross her mind that she’d come to the city apartment expecting to hear some ghastly revelation that had never transpired. Desperate to conserve her own pride, she’d started rambling on about getting a divorce when a divorce was probably the very last thing in the world that she wanted. Sometimes, she worked herself up into such a state, she acknowledged shame-facedly. Duarte had made passionate love to her twice in twenty-four hours. Was that the behaviour of a man interested in another woman? And wouldn’t she have made the biggest mistake of her life in saying no? They had achieved a closeness that had entirely eluded them the night before.