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‘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—’
‘I am not angry with you,’ Duarte growled like a leopard about to spring on an unwary prey. ‘But I cannot and will not trust you with the kind of freedom I gave you before.’
‘That…was freedom?’ A startled laugh empty of humour was wrenched from Emily’s working throat, for she had found her duties as a Monteiro wife as rigid a constraint to her days as a prison cell. Every daylight hour had been rigorously organised for her with a weighty yoke of responsibilities that took no account of her own personal wishes.
Hard dark colour scored the hard set of Duarte’s proud cheekbones. ‘So you find my former generosity a source of amusement?’
‘Oh, you mean your money…’ Emily very nearly let loose a second nervous laugh as comprehension finally sank in and her soft mouth tensed. ‘Well, it wasn’t much consolation when you were never around and I never did take to shopping, although I did try hard to like it. You see, I wasn’t the sort of woman you should have married and I still can’t really understand why you did…’
Duarte stared down at her with eyes as dark and fathomless and deep as the midnight witching hour. As he ensnared her fraught gaze afresh, she forgot what she was saying at the same time as she forgot to draw another breath. The atmosphere surged around her like a slow smouldering fire closing in, using up all the oxygen. But still she stood there, plunged without warning into a welter of physical sensations she had never been able to fight. As a wave of excitement as terrifying as it was thrilling washed over her, her heart thumped like a frantic bird trapped inside her, every tiny muscle tensing in reaction to the rush of liquid heat burning between her slim thighs.
‘Can’t you?’ he murmured huskily.
The very sound of that silken dark drawl sent a responsive shiver down her spine. She snatched in a stark audible breath to flood her depleted lungs. She was tormentingly aware of the stirring heaviness of her small breasts and the painful sensitivity of her swollen nipples pushing against the bra she wore beneath her top.
