Duarte's Child

by Lynne Graham

  She heard herself moan under his marauding mouth like an animal. With every invasive stab of his tongue he mimicked a infinitely more primal possession and stoked her desire to more electrifying heights.

  'Duarte... Please,' she gasped.

  'Please what?' Duarte probed huskily, pushing her thighs further apart, letting his expert fingers linger within inches of the throbbing core of her shivering body.

  'You're torturing me!''

  Duarte let her slide down the wall on to her own feet again and one of her shoes had fallen off, making her blink in confusion at the lopsided effect of her own stance.

  'If I was a real bastard, I'd make you beg,' Duarte spelt out in a roughened undertone, spectacular golden eyes scorching over her as she struggled somewhat belatedly to haul her dress back down from her waist. 'But I'm far too excited to deny myself that long!'

  'What are you doing?' Emily squeaked as he swept her up into his arms with more haste than ceremony.

  'Emily...' Duarte groaned as he strode out of the drawing room and down the corridor towards the bedrooms. 'What do you think I'm doing?'

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  'BUT we were talking about getting a divorce!' Emily protested, sufficiently reanimated by the change of surroundings to say what she should have said five minutes sooner.

  'Correction, you were talking on that subject. When you can put up some convincing resistance to my advances, I'll consider talking about it,' Duarte proffered with a wolfish and very male downward glance of challenge.

  'I am not getting into bed with you again... It would be wrong!' Emily argued frantically as she shouldered open the door in a luxurious bedroom.

  'Wrong at this juncture would be playing die tease and why should you want to?' Duarte enquired, lowering her to the carpet, bending down to pluck off the remaining shoe she wore so that she could stand normally and then spinning her round to unzip her dress.

  As he spun her back like a doll and gave the sleeves of the garment a helpful tug to assist it on its downward journey, Emily stood as though transfixed. 'Duarte...I'm being serious—'

  'So am I,' he swore, watching the dress .slide down with satisfaction and shrugging out of his beautifully tailored jacket to let it fall on the carpet as well. 'I want you. Here. Now. Fast...'

  'But you haven't even told me yet what you brought me to tell me...' her voice faltered and trailed away altogether as she thought of mat 'here...now...fast' bit he had threatened and a truly unforgivable dart of liquid heat forced her to lock her knees together.

  'I've done all the talking I want to do for one day. I've apologised. I've owned up to gross insensitivity. You were as receptive as a rock-face but you didn't complain about anything I can't fix,' Duarte asserted on a very single-minded tack as he shed his tie and wrenched at his shirt with pronounced impatience.

  'All right, I was lying when I said I didn't want you to touch me,' Emily owned up in desperation. 'But please keep your shirt on. If you take it off, I'm lost.'

  Momentarily, Duarte paused and cast her a gleaming glance of vibrant amusement. He slid out of the shirt with the fluid grace of a matador in the bull ring. 'This is one battle you're destined to lose—'

  'But I can't... We can't. This...this is not the answer!' Emily surveyed .him with guilt-stricken intensity as he stood there poised, all hair-roughened bronzed skin and lean hard muscle. Him looking like a Greek god was not exactly the biggest help she'd ever received in her belief that she had to put a lid on what was happening between them.

  'Isn't it?' Duarte reached out and hauled her into his arms, smouldering dark gaze roaming over the rise and fall of her breasts. He undipped the bra, found a pouting swell of tormentingly sensitive flesh and rubbed his thumb over the throbbing tip. 'I want you so much I'm in agony...'

  She leant into him even though she tried to stop herself. She could feel the same want mounting like a hungry, conscience-free flood inside her. Last night might never have happened. She was shocked at the strength of her own yearning, shocked by the overpowering surge of excitement awakened by the sight of his lean hand cupping her breast. 'This is what we need now, minha esposa,' Duarte asserted, pulling into him and lifting her to bring her down on the side of the elegant sleigh bed. 'Talking is too dangerous. Talking when there is no solution is just stupid.'

  Hearing those sentiments pronounced with such unquenchable masculine conviction should have sent her leaping from his arms in angry frustration. But he was arranging her on the bed with the care of a male about to extract the utmost from the experience and she could not take her eyes from his. Dear heaven, those wonderful eyes. He just had to look at her and her own thoughts just dwindled and yet somehow she felt secure about that, safe. That was all wrong and she knew it was but when Duarte loomed over her like every fantasy she'd ever had, self-control was not an option her overheated body wanted to consider.

  'Talking is supposed to be the solution,' she murmured in a last attempt to place head over heart.

  'It put us in separate beds last night. It made me kick in a door. You think that's healthy?' Duarte challenged as he stripped down to a pair of black silk boxer shorts that were the very last word in sexy apparel. 'No, my way is better.'

  My way is better. Not exactly the last word in compromise, was he? But she gazed up at him and the most enormous swell of love surged through her and, all of a sudden, nothing else mattered.

  'Once, you used to look at me like that all the time.' Duarte came down on the bed like a predator, taking his time, and a helpless little shiver of anticipation rippled through her taut and restive limbs. 'I became accustomed to it...'

  Most men would be pretty content to be uncritically adored by their wives, Emily reflected. And the ironic truth was, while she'd remained content to settle for less on her own behalf, she had been happier. Whether he knew it or not, the wild card that had upset the balance had been the very unsettling discovery that he had loved Izabel. No, nobody had told her that; even at her worst, Victorine hadn't been that cruel. She had seen it in that wedding photograph of Izabel and Duarte together, the love, pride and satisfaction he had had in his acquisition of his beautiful bride.

  'I want it back,' Duarte said lazily and he pressed his wide, sensual mouth to the tiny pulse below her ear, a sensitive spot that seemed to overreact with blinding enthusiasm and sent her momentarily haywire with hunger.

  Gasping for breath and trying to sound cool, Emily looked up at him and trying to sound dry but actually sounding very stressed, she said, 'I don't do adoration any more. I grew up.'

  Duarte let a provocative hand roam over her distended nipples and her back arched as if he had burned her. 'But you can regress,' he murmured smooth as silk.

  Regressing felt so darned good, she thought helplessly. He pushed her flat again with a husky laugh of amusement and lowered his carnal mouth to her tingling breasts where he turned torment into a new art form. Control evaporated about there for Emily. Her body was all liquid burning heat powered by a hunger that was steadily overwhelming her.

  'You want me?' Duarte demanded, fierce control etched in his dark features.

  'Now...' she begged.

  He spread her thighs like a Viking invader set on sexual plunder and it still wasn't fast enough for her. He came over her, into her, in a shocking surge of primal male power and she almost passed out at the wave of intense pleasure.

  'You feel like hot silk,' he groaned with raw sensual appreciation, plunging deeper still.

  And from men 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 som
ewhere 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.

  Tin 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.

  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 ungiven 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 arid 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 arid 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.

  Eventua
lly 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.

  'Are you ready?' Duarte asked from the dining room doorway, making her jerk and return to the present

  Emily breathed in deep, steadying herself. She would make no comment; she would say nothing. There was probably nothing whatsoever in what she had seen. It was only her own insecurity playing tricks on her imagination. Crazily she pictured herself standing up at a divorce hearing and saying 'Duarte smiled at her...that's my evidence.'

  In the lift that took them down to the ground floor, Emily stole a glance that spread and lingered to encompass every visible inch of her tall, dark and absolutely gorgeous husband. She loved him. They were back together...weren't they? He was making an effort to repair the great yawning cracks in their marriage, wasn't he? So what if most of the effort he was putting in was bedroom-orientated? Did that matter? Did that make him less committed? Had he ever been committed to her?

  Engaged in such frantic and feverish thoughts, Emily tripped over a metal bin to the side of the exit, skidded across the floor and came down on her bottom.