They lunched in the elegant dining room and were just finishing their coffee prior to departing when the door opened without any warning and Bliss strolled in carrying a document case.
‘I’m sorry, Duarte. I didn’t realise that your wife was here. Mrs Monteiro…’
‘Miss Jarrett,’ Emily muttered, barely able to look at the blonde after the unpleasantness of their meeting earlier in the day.
But Duarte was already rising from his chair, his charismatic smile lighting up his darkly handsome features. ‘My apologies, Bliss. I changed my plans and neglected to inform you.’
A dewy smile free of her usual mockery fixed to her exquisite face, Bliss sighed softly, ‘I really ought to be used to that by now.’
‘I’m going home for the rest of the day.’
Emily watched the little tableau playing out in front of her with wide eyes of disconcertion. She saw Duarte stride to greet Bliss and receive the document case rather than wait for her to come to him as he once would have done. Duarte was, as a rule, formal with his employees and un-given to addressing them by their first names. When had he decided to relax his formidable reserve with Bliss?
‘I’ll see you out,’ Duarte assured Bliss.
As they left the room together, Emily sat like a stone in her chair for several seconds. Just when had such a staggering change taken place in Duarte’s relationship with his executive assistant? Unable to sit still, she found herself getting up and walking restively over to the window. She recalled Bliss’s low soft voice, a tone she’d never heard the blonde employ before and she’d never seen her smile like that either, like an infinitely more feminine version of the harder-edged Bliss she herself had got to know. Out of nowhere, a tension headache settled round Emily’s temples like a tightening circle of steel. Thump, thump, thump was her body’s enervated response to the mental alarm bell going off at shrieking decibels inside her head.
Duarte and Bliss? Were her suspicions insane? Was she even thinking straight? But hadn’t Bliss carefully ended their friendship only a few hours earlier? Hadn’t Bliss made it clear that her sympathies now lay squarely with Duarte? And, finally, hadn’t Bliss venomously pointed out that Duarte might already have another woman in his life?
Was Bliss that other woman? Her tummy churning at the very thought of such a development, Emily struggled to get a grip on her flailing emotions. She felt like a truck had run over her. She felt cold inside and out. Why shouldn’t Duarte be attracted to Bliss? Bliss was beautiful and witty and clever. Bliss was exactly the kind of wife Duarte should have picked to replace Izabel. Was he sleeping with her? Had he slept with her? Exactly when had his relationship with his executive assistant become so familiar that he smiled at her like that? Smiled with warmth and approval and intimacy?
Was she crazy to be thinking these kind of thoughts? There they were, calling each other by their first names and exchanging smiles, and suddenly she had them tucked up in bed together? She was not going to leap in and say anything to Duarte. She was not. Any such questions would be very much resented.
And while she stood there, fighting to put a lid on her emotional turmoil, she found herself thinking back to her friendship with Bliss Jarrett. Within months of her marriage to a male who worked very long hours, Emily had become very lonely. Although she’d been dragged out everywhere by Victorine on social visits and had met several women whom she might have become friendly with, the language barrier had reigned supreme. She’d met very few people who spoke fluent English and it had taken her a long time to master even the basics of Portuguese.
When she had phoned Duarte’s office, she had always been put through to Bliss. She would leave a message with Bliss but Duarte would never call back. Once or twice in those early days, she had phoned just to check that her message had been passed on to him. With an audible suggestion of embarrassed sympathy on Emily’s behalf, Bliss would gently assure her that her husband had received the message.
Eventually they had begun chatting and Emily had confided that she hated shopping alone. Bliss had offered to accompany her and then hastily retracted the suggestion with the apologetic explanation that Duarte would not approve of his wife socialising with a mere employee. Desperate for company, Emily had pointed out that what Duarte didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
And so the friendship that she had valued had begun, a friendship that was a breath of fresh air to someone as lonely and insecure as she had been then. Shopping trips, lunches and, on several occasions when Duarte was abroad on business, Bliss had invited her to her apartment for a meal. There she had met Toby and there she had come up with the stupid childish plan to have her portrait painted in the forlorn hope of displacing an image of Izabel from even one wall of the quinta.