Lynne Graham - Duarte's Child

As she stuck her car keys in the ignition and turned, intending to hitch up the caravan, she heard an angry shout and then another. It sounded like Alice. Frowning in dismay, Emily hurried past the caravan to see what was happening. At the rear entrance to the stables, she saw a sight that shook her. Alice Barker was standing with a shotgun trained on a man.

‘Just you tell me right now what you were doing!’ Alice was demanding furiously.

As Emily rushed automatically to support the older woman, she heard the man speak and she caught several words. Alice’s trespasser was striving to apologise in Portuguese. Emily froze in her tracks. Portuguese?

‘I caught this chappie trying to creep up on your caravan!’ Alice called to Emily with patent disgust. ‘One of the peeping Toms, one of those filthy perverts…that’s what I’ve caught. Just as well he doesn’t seem to speak a word of English. I shouldn’t think he’s saying anything any decent woman would want to hear! Reach into my pocket and get my phone, and we’ll ring the police!’

But Emily did not move an inch. Every scrap of colour draining from her slanting cheekbones, she stared at the stocky, well-built Portuguese male in his smart city suit. It was Mateus Santos, Duarte’s security chief. Her tummy churned, her brain refusing to move at speed. The older man was as white as his own shirtfront, evidently not having expected to be greeted by a very angry woman with a shotgun when he came snooping.

‘Emily!’ Alice barked impatiently.

Mateus’s strained gaze swerved to Emily’s stilled figure with perceptible relief. ‘Doña Emilia…’ he greeted her and followed that up with a hasty flood of Portuguese.

Emily understood a little more of the language than she could actually speak and she caught the gist of his appeal. Mateus was asking her to tell Alice that he was no danger to anybody. Only that wasn’t quite true, Emily decided in sudden total panic. If Mateus was at the stables, it meant that Duarte had tracked her down and that Duarte now knew where she was. ‘I know this man, Alice. He’s no threat, but please keep him here until I can get away—’

‘Emily…what on earth is going on?’ Alice demanded in bewilderment.

But Emily was already speeding back towards her car. Where Mateus was, Duarte would soon follow. She jumped into the driver’s seat and then realised that she had still to hitch up the caravan.

With a gasp of frustration, she began to reverse the car and then dashed out again to haul at the caravan with frantic hands. The task accomplished, she was in the act of swinging back into her car when she saw the bonnet of a big silver vehicle filter into the mouth of the lane she needed to go down to make her exit.

Heart thumping somewhere in the region of her convulsing throat, Emily stared in absolute horror at the limousine. Duarte! It could only be Duarte behind those tinted windows. Just as suddenly, she unfroze again and flung herself into her own car. The ground siding the lane was unfenced and reasonably level. She could drive around the limo! Firing the engine, she slammed the door. Within six feet of the long luxury vehicle seeking to block her escape, she turned the steering wheel and took her car off the lane on to the rough grass verge. The caravan bounced in protest and the vibrations shook the car but, within the space of thirty seconds, she was back on the concrete lane again, the caravan still in tow.

She would go to a lawyer, Emily told herself frantically. She would stop at the first legal firm she saw and beg for an appointment and advice. She was not going to risk facing Duarte alone in case he simply took Jamie from her and flew him out to Portugal. Hadn’t she read horror stories about disaffected foreign husbands taking that kind of action when their marriages to their British wives broke down?

And, worst of all, wouldn’t Duarte have grounds to argue that she had virtually pulled the same stunt on him? Jamie was six months old and his own father had yet to meet him. What right did she have to keep them apart? An agony of conflict and guilt in her gaze as she questioned what she was doing, Emily pulled out of the lane on to the twisting country road that lay beyond.

Duarte would attempt to follow her but she was at an advantage for she knew the area. How could she take the chance of trusting Duarte when he might take Jamie away from her? She would be lucky to ever see her child again. Where she was concerned, her estranged husband would not be feeling the slightest bit sympathetic or reasonable. Why, oh why, oh why had she waited this long before acknowledging that it was past time she sorted out the whole mess?

Rounding a corner on the road, Emily had to start immediately slackening speed. A shaken laugh shorn of any humour was torn from her tight throat. The railway crossing lay ahead. The warning lights were flashing and the automatic barriers were coming down signifying that a train was about to pass through. She was trapped for a good five minutes by the very train she had promised Jamie he would see as a treat. By the time the express finally thundered past the barriers, Emily was studying her driving mirror and watching the silver limo appear behind her on the road. Caught! Fate had not been on her side. In a gesture of frustrated defeat, Emily lifted one of her hands from the steering wheel and struck it down on the dash board.

She felt a prick like a sharp stinging needle in the side of her hand. Blinking, she glanced down and gaped in dawning horror at the big bee crawling away. It wasn’t the season, a little voice screamed inside her, it wasn’t the season yet for bees! She hadn’t replaced her allergy kit when she had mislaid it over the winter. She dropped her hand down to open the driver’s door. Already she felt like she was moving in slow motion; already she could feel the sensation of her heartbeat starting to race.

She lurched out of the car. She struggled to focus on the formidably tall and dark male striding towards her but she raised her hands to her face instead, feeling the tenderness and the heat there, knowing that her skin had probably begun to swell and redden. ‘Sting…bee!’ she framed jerkily.

‘Where’s your adrenaline kit?’ Duarte demanded, instantly grasping the crisis and reacting at speed.

With enormous effort she blinked and connected momentarily with stunning dark golden eyes that she would never have dared to meet had she been in full control of herself. ‘Lost…’

‘Meu Deus! The nearest doctor?’ Duarte caught hold of her as she doubled over with the pain piercing her abdomen and vented a startled gasp. ‘Emily…a hospital…a doctor?’ he raked down at her with raw urgency. ‘Where?’

It was such an effort for her to concentrate, to speak. ‘Village through the crossing,’ she wheezed.

She was conscious of movement as he carried her, the roar of car engines and raised voices in Portuguese but she was in too much pain to try to see what was happening. She opened her swollen eyes with a grimace of discomfort, for her whole body was hurting. She registered that she was lying in Duarte’s arms inside an unfamiliar car and was suddenly terrified that everyone had forgotten about her baby. ‘Jamie…?’

‘He will be OK…’

Even in the state she was in, the sense that she was now hearing his voice from the end of a long dark tunnel, she picked up on that stress. She might not be OK. She had been fifteen years old when it was impressed on her after an adverse reaction to a bee sting that she must go nowhere without her adrenaline kit. She had been too scared not to be sensible but, as the years passed without further incident, she had gradually become rather more careless. ‘If I die…’ she slurred with immense difficulty because the inside of her mouth and her tongue were swollen, ‘You get Jamie…only fair—’