Duarte's Child

Emily saw the truth of that censure in Jamie’s anxious air and her strained eyes stung, forcing her to blink rapidly. She compressed her lips on all the words that wanted to spill out of her but which Duarte did not want to hear. And could she really blame him? She was making excuses again. Right at that moment, Duarte’s sole interest was in his son. She was just an adjunct, along for the ride because Jamie needed her. However, it was painfully obvious to Emily that Duarte was barely tolerating her presence.

From the instant they entered the crowded bustling airport, Emily became conscious of her scuffed shoes, faded jodhpurs and ancient sweater. The outfit had been practical for the long drive she had expected to have but she felt like a tramp beside Duarte, immaculate in a charcoal grey suit exquisitely tailored to his tall athletic physique.

‘I could have done with getting changed,’ she said uneasily. ‘But I don’t really have anything suitable.’

She had left all her expensive clothes behind in Portugal. Not that that much mattered, she conceded ruefully, for that wardrobe had rejoiced most in fashion accidents. If she got the colour right, she invariably got the style wrong. Growing up, she had been a tomboy, living in jeans and riding gear. Her attempt to experiment with a more feminine look had been squashed in her sensitive teens by her sisters’ scorn. It had been poor preparation for marriage to a rich man and entry into a daunting world in which her appearance really seemed to matter.

‘You can buy an outfit here and change,’ Duarte pointed out.

To Emily those words were confirmation that she looked an embarrassing mess. Her throat thickened and her eyes stung and she reddened fiercely for she had no money either. She hovered over Jamie’s buggy with a downbent head.

Through swimming eyes, Emily focused on the gold credit card extended in silence by her husband. The most enormous bitterness and pain seemingly rose out of nowhere inside her and she whispered helplessly, ‘You should’ve married some fancy model, a real fashion plate…not someone like me!’

‘It is a little late now.’ Duarte’s deflating tone was more than equal to capping even the most emotional outburst. ‘And this is not the place to stage an argument.’

Emily swallowed hard. When had she ever had the nerve to argue with him? Yet it was odd how much she now wanted to argue but she was far too conscious of being in public where angry words would be overheard. Accepting the credit card without looking at him, she released her hold on the buggy and headed for the closest dress shop. There she scanned the packed displays. Choose really bright colours, Bliss had once advised Emily, saying that such shades flattered Emily’s pale skin tone and balanced her red hair. Emily sped over to a rack of cerise dresses but they were way too plain in design to conceal a figure that Bliss had gently pointed out was more boyish than lush. Browsing at speed, she picked a jazzy orange handkerchief top with bell sleeves and a big glittery lime green motif on the front. Nobody was likely to notice her lack in the bosom department under that, Emily thought gratefully. She teamed the top with a long orange skirt that had the same fancy hem.

Both garments matched in colour and style, she reflected with relief, thinking that that should definitely ensure a presentable appearance. She picked up a pair of high-heeled leopard-print mules because she knew they were the height of fashion. Her purchases made, she made harried use of a changing cubicle. Emerging from the shop again, hot and breathless, she saw Duarte and his security men standing around Jamie’s buggy in the centre of the wide concourse.

Mateus and the rest of his team focused on her and momentarily stared before lowering their heads. Then Duarte glanced in her direction and froze. Not a single betraying expression appeared on his darkly handsome features but he seemed to breathe in very deep and slow. And she knew right then that she had got it wrong again. Her heart sank right down to the toes of her horribly uncomfortable mules and she despised herself for her own weakness, her pathetic attempt to please and win his approval in even the smallest way.

‘Sorry I took so long,’ she mumbled, reclaiming the buggy without glancing back up at him but conscious of his brooding presence with every fibre of her wretched being.

‘No…problem,’ Duarte sighed.

In the VIP lounge, she caught an involuntary glimpse of herself in a mirror and she was startled. She looked like a fluorescent carrot, she decided in stricken recoil. Flinching, she turned away from that mortifying reflection. Sitting down, she tried to disappear into herself and her own thoughts in the manner she had begun to practise within months of marrying Duarte. He never had been any great fan of idle chatter. She just wanted to sink into the woodwork, sitting there in an outfit that he most probably thought was ghastly. So why did she care? Why did she still care?

Emily had always been conscious that she was neither pretty nor beautiful. Her mother and both her sisters were tall shapely blondes with classic bone structures. Even in appearance, she had not fitted her family. At the age of ten, she had asked her mother where her own red hair came from in the family tree as even her father was fair. Her mother had dealt her a angry look as if even asking such a question was offensive and had told her that she owed her ‘unfortunate’ carroty curls to the genetic legacy of her late grandmother.

Seeing no point in bemoaning what could not be altered, Emily hadn’t ever really minded being short, red-haired and small in the chest and hip department. But the same moment that she first saw Duarte Avila de Monteiro, she had started minding very much that she would never have what it would take to attract him. Of course, it had not once occurred to her that a male of his calibre and wealth would look twice at her anyway but she still remembered her own foolish feelings of intense sadness and hurt that it should be that way. That Duarte should be so utterly detached from her when her own senses thrilled to even his presence a hundred feet away.

And she still recalled the very first moment she had laid eyes on Duarte and very much doubted that he did…

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.