Duarte's Child

CHAPTER THREE

BY THE time she was nineteen, Emily had qualified as a riding instructor.

Her two older sisters had found lucrative employment in their father’s wine-importing business but Emily had not been offered the same opportunity. Indeed, urged by her mother to leave home and be independent long before she was earning enough to pay a decent rent, Emily had finally given up on the job she loved. She had taken work as a live-in groom at Ash Manor, Duarte’s English country house.

The stable manager had hired Emily and, working at the manor, she had had an interesting insight into the lifestyle of a super-rich and powerful banker. Aside from his private jet, his fleet of helicopters and luxury cars, Duarte owned half a dozen palatial homes, superb horseflesh and a priceless art collection. He was the guy with everything, the target of endless awe, speculation and envy. But the one thing Duarte Avila de Monteiro did not have, it seemed, was the precious time to enjoy his innumerable possessions.

It had been weeks before Emily actually saw her wealthy employer in the flesh but she had already been told what he was like. Cool, polite, distant, formal, not the type to unbend with lesser beings, very much the product of a Portuguese aristocratic lineage said to stretch back to the thirteenth century.

His incredible silver sports car pulled up one afternoon while Emily and another female groom were cleaning tack. The stable manager hurried from his office to greet Duarte.

‘That car’s a MacLaren F1, worth six hundred grand,’ Emily’s companion groaned. ‘And just wait until you see him. When I first came here, I assumed the banker boss was some old geezer, but he’s only twenty-eight and he’s pure sex on legs. If you got him on his own without his bodyguards, you’d lock him in your bedroom and throw away the key!’

Even more than two years on, Emily still remembered that first shattering sight of Duarte. Sunlight gleaming over the luxuriant black hair stylishly cropped to his proud head as he climbed out of his car, a crisp white shirt accentuating his bronzed complexion but most of all she had noticed his stunning eyes, deepset and dark as sable at first glance but tawny gold as a hunting animal’s the next. She was shocked and bemused by the unfamiliar leap of her own senses and the quite ridiculous stab of loss which assailed her when he turned away to open the passenger door of his car.

In place of the beautiful woman she had expected to see in Duarte’s passenger seat was an absolutely huge shaggy dog curled up nose to tail into the smallest possible size.

The other groom backed into the tack out of sight. ‘I’m not going to get stuck with that monster again. That dog’s as thick as a block of wood, won’t come when you call it and it’s as fast on its feet as a race horse!’

Before the other girl even finished speaking, the stable manager called Emily over and told her to exercise the dog.

It was an Irish wolfhound. Unfolded from the car, it had to measure a good three feet in height and Emily was just one inch over five feet tall herself. But although Emily had not been allowed to have a pet as a child, she adored dogs of all shapes and sizes.

‘Be kind. Jazz is getting old,’ Duarte’s rich, dark, accented drawl interposed with cool authority.

Emily angled a shy upward glance at him, overwhelmed by his proximity, his sheer height and breadth and potent masculinity. She had to tip her head right back to see his lean, dark, devastating face. She collided with sizzling dark golden eyes and for her it was like being knocked off her feet by a powerful electrical charge. She trembled, felt the feverish heat of an embarrassing blush redden her fair skin, the stormy thump of her heartbeat and the most challenging shortness of breath. But Duarte simply walked away from her again, apparently experiencing no physical jolt of awareness, feeling nothing whatsoever, indeed not really even having seen her for she had only been another junior employee amongst many: faceless, beneath his personal notice.

And, no doubt, had not fate intervened, her acquaintance with Duarte Avila de Monteiro would never have advanced beyond that point. However, in those days, Duarte had left Jazz behind at the manor when he was out of the country. The dog should have stayed indoors but the housekeeper had disliked animals and as soon as Duarte departed, she would have the wolfhound locked in the barn. Exercising Jazz fell to Emily for nobody else wanted the responsibility.

‘The boss is fond of that stupid dog. If it gets lost or harmed in some way, well it’ll cost you your job,’ the stable manager warned Emily impatiently. ‘That’s why we just leave it locked up. I know it seems a little heartless but the animal’s well fed and it has plenty of space in there.’

But Emily was too tender-hearted to bear the sound of Jazz’s pathetic cries for company. She spent all her free time playing with him in a paddock and she gave him the affection he soaked up like a giant hungry sponge. So, the evening that the barn went up in fire, when everyone else stood by watching the growing conflagration in horror, Emily did not even stop to think of her own safety but charged to the rescue of an animal she had grown to love.

Although she contrived to calm Jazz’s panic and persuade him out of the barn, she passed out soon afterwards from smoke inhalation. Surfacing from the worst effects, she then found herself in a private room in the local hospital with Duarte stationed by her bedside.

The instant she opened her eyes, Duarte sprang up and approached the bed, his appearance startling her out of what remained of her scrambled wits. ‘Risking your own life to save my dog was incredibly foolish and incredibly brave,’ he murmured with a reflective smile that in spite of its haunting brevity had more charm than she had believed any smile might possess.

‘I just didn’t think,’ she mumbled, transfixed by the drop-dead gorgeous effect of him smiling.

‘You are a heroine. I contacted your family.’ His strong jawline squared. ‘I understand that they are very busy people and, of course, I told them that you were already recovering. I am not sure whether or not they will find it possible to visit.’

Paling at that sympathetic rendering of her family’s evident lack of concern at the news that she had been hospitalised, Emily veiled her pained gaze. ‘Thanks…’

‘It is I who am in debt to you. One of the grooms had the courage to confess that, but for you, Jazz would have spent every hour of my absence imprisoned in that barn,’ Duarte admitted grimly. ‘You are the only one in a staff of almost twenty who had the kindness to take care of his needs.’

Embarrassed by that unsought accolade, Emily muttered, ‘I just like animals and Jazz may be a bit daft but he’s very loving.’

The forbidding look on his lean dark features dissipated and he vented a rueful laugh. ‘Jazz has a brain the size of a pea. He was my sister’s dog. After her death, he should have been rehomed but I did not have the heart to part with him.’ His face shadowed again. ‘Perhaps that was a selfish decision for I am often away on business—’

‘No. He just adores you. I couldn’t get him to settle at night until I got the housekeeper to give me an old sweater of yours to put in his bed,’ Emily volunteered in a rush.

There was an awkward little silence. Faint colour now scored his superb cheekbones. He studied her through black lashes lush as silk fans, palpably questioning why he had unbent to such an extent with her. A minute later, he had been the powerful banker again, politely taking his departure, having done his duty in visiting her. A magnificent bouquet of flowers and a basket of fruit had been delivered soon after his departure. She had not expected to see him again except at a distance when he was at the manor.

But the next day when she was released from hospital, Duarte picked her up and insisted on driving her home to convalesce with her family. She spent the whole journey falling deeper and deeper in love with a guy so out of her reach he might as well have come from another galaxy. There was only a little conversation during that drive for Duarte was often on the phone.

Her family took one astonished but thrilled look at Duarte and his chauffeur-driven limousine and invited him to stay to dinner. Billionaire single bankers were hugely welcome in a house containing two young, beautiful single blondes. Indeed, her sisters Hermione and Corinne had competed for Duarte’s attention with outrageous flattery and provocative innuendoes. Sunk in the background as usual by their flirtatious charm, Emily had felt painfully like the ugly duckling amongst the swans.

Emily was sprung back to the present by the necessity of boarding the jet. Soon after take-off, she realised that Jamie was overtired and cross. The steward showed her into a rear compartment where a special travel cot already waited in readiness for its small occupant. It took Emily a good twenty minutes to settle Jamie and then, with pronounced reluctance, she returned to the luxurious main cabin again.

Duarte rose from his seat and straightened to his full commanding height. ‘Is Jamie asleep?’

Emily nodded jerkily, her tension rising by the second.

‘Verbal responses would be welcome,’ Duarte added drily.

Encountering brilliant dark golden eyes, she reddened hotly. ‘Yes, he’s asleep but maybe I should sit with him for a while in case he wakes up again.’

‘Trying to impress me with maternal overkill? Tell me, who looked after Jamie while you were giving riding lessons?’

‘Nobody—’

‘Nobody?’ Duarte queried with hard emphasis.

Emily frowned in surprise. ‘It really wasn’t a problem. I was only instructing a couple of hours a day and I would park Jamie’s buggy outside the paddock. He was never more than a few feet from me and he usually had the company of parents watching their child’s lesson.’

As Duarte listened, his lean powerful face tautened, his wide sensual mouth compressing. ‘Usually? A working stables is no place to leave a baby unattended. You know as well as I do that riders can’t always control their mounts and that your attention must’ve been on your pupil—’

Under that attack, Emily had stiffened and lost much of her natural colour. ‘Jamie was always safe. I did the very best that I could—’

‘But your best wasn’t halfway good enough,’ Duarte cut in with biting derision. ‘You left my son at the mercy of passing strangers instead of ensuring that he received proper care—’

‘I wanted to spend every minute with him that I could and you’re making this sound much worse than it was,’ Emily protested defensively. ‘Everywhere I worked, Jamie got loads and loads of attention. Most people like babies, especially happy ones—’

‘That’s not the point,’ Duarte said coldly.

Emily worried at her lower lip and then said heavily, ‘Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have afforded to pay someone to look after him—’

‘And whose fault was that?’

As her tension climbed, Emily trembled and her tummy churned. Thinking straight had become a challenge; she had never been much good at confrontations. However, on this occasion she found herself struggling to speak up in her own defence. ‘Whose fault was it that I left Portugal in the first place?’

Far from looking impressed or indeed startled by that comeback, Duarte inclined his arrogant dark head to one side and levelled his incisive gaze on her in the most formidable way. ‘Presumably you are about to give me the answer to that strange question?’ he prompted.

‘I only left Portugal because I thought that you were planning to try and take my child off me the minute he was born!’ Emily countered in an accusing rush.

Duarte angled an imperious brow. ‘What kind of a nonsensical excuse is that? Before this morning, I never made a threat in that line. To be frank, my patience with you came to an end today. But who or what gave you the idea that I might have been considering such a dramatic move last year?’

Emily flinched and dropped her head, shaken at how close she had come in her turmoil to revealing Bliss’s role in events eight months earlier. Had she done that, she could never have forgiven herself. Bliss had been the truest of supportive friends during Emily’s troubled marriage, cheering Emily up when her spirits were low while offering helpful advice and encouragement. Although Emily had not contacted the other woman since leaving Portugal, she assumed that her friend still worked as Duarte’s executive assistant. Bliss had eavesdropped on that confidential dialogue between Duarte and his lawyer and had forewarned Emily. Were Duarte ever to discover that a member of his own staff had been that disloyal, Bliss’s high-flying career would be destroyed.

‘I just got the idea…at the time, the way you were treating me—well, er…it seemed to make sense to me and I was afraid that you were planning to separate me from my child—’

‘So you chose to separate our son from me instead. Is that how this sorry story goes?’ Duarte dealt her a look of shimmering challenge that made her breath trip in her already tight throat. ‘This convenient angle that continually seeks to turn you into a poor little victim? Well, I have news for you—I’m not impressed, querida.’

‘I’m not trying to impress—’

‘No?’ Without warning, Duarte sent her a sudden slanting golden glance as hard and deadly as an arrow thudding into a live target.

Feeling the sudden smouldering surge in the atmosphere but unable to comprehend what had caused it, Emily untwisted her laced hands and made a jerky move with one of them as if she was appealing for his attention. ‘I know I’ve made mistakes—’

‘Mistakes?’

‘—but now I’m just being open and honest—’

‘Open…and honest,’ Duarte repeated with a brand of electrifying soft sibilance that danced down her rigid spine like a fullscale storm warning. ‘Que absurdo! An honest whore you were not!’

Emily’s lips parted company and she fell back a faltering step in dismay at the proclamation and that particular word being aimed at her. Even in the aftermath of finding her in another man’s arms, Duarte had not employed such an emotive term. ‘B-but—’

‘But what? You were carrying my baby when you slept with another man. How many women have affairs while they’re pregnant with their husband’s child?’ Duarte demanded in a derisive tone of disgust that nailed her to the spot. ‘But no such fine sensibilities restrained you. You even dared to introduce me to your lover. You also brought him into my home. Only a whore would behave like that.’

Forced to recognise the extent of the sins being laid at her door, Emily gasped strickenly, ‘Duarte, it wasn’t like that and Toby was never my—’

‘Do you really think I’ll listen to your pathetic excuses? You are nothing to me.’ Duarte made that wounding statement with a savage cool that bled all remaining colour from her shaken face.

You are nothing to me. That he should feel that way was hardly news but spoken out loud that acknowledgement cut Emily in two.

‘But you belong to me. Minha esposa…you are my wife,’ Duarte completed with sardonic bite.

Under the onslaught of that ultimate putdown, Emily felt something curiously akin to a re-energising flame dart through her slim tense body and she flung her head back. ‘No…I don’t belong to you like your cars and your houses and your wretched art collection,’ she heard herself asserting. ‘I may be your wife but I’m not an object without any thoughts or feelings or rights—’

Although she had no recollection of him moving, Duarte was now a step closer, threateningly close. Even as she was still fighting to understand quite where her own unusually spirited defence had come from, she was awesomely conscious of the expanse of all that lean, taut masculinity poised within inches of her own much smaller frame.

In the electrifying silence that had fallen, shimmering golden eyes sought and held her scrutiny, all the powerful force of will he possessed bearing down on her. ‘You have no rights in this marriage.’

‘I don’t believe you mean that…you couldn’t,’ Emily reasoned, tearing her gaze hurriedly from his as her heart rate speeded up. ‘You’re just very angry with me—’