After Their Vows (4 page)

Making the clothes look fabulously sexy and alluring was her job. Full-stop. She didn’t want to feel Roque’s eyes doing that to her. She didn’t want to know she could be susceptible to any man’s glance.

After the show he arrived backstage with Carla on his arm. Smooth and sleek, and infuriatingly sure of himself, he used the only person Angie could call a friend to assure a formal introduction between the two of them. When he wanted them to, Roque’s charmingly polite manners could melt an iceberg. Shame it was spoiled by Nadia, who came to wind herself around his other arm like a slinky dark sex kitten with a hot siren’s smile.

Angie was actually happy to have her mobile phone burst into life, with her brother’s headmaster on the other end of it informing her Alex had been taken to hospital after a brawl with another pupil had knocked him out. She made hurried excuses and rushed out of
the reception, her attention fixed on finding a taxi that would take her to Hampshire.

Roque appeared at her side as she was begging a black cab driver to make the journey. ‘Come on.’ He took hold of her arm. ‘My car is parked over here. I will take you.’

The beginning of the end of her resistance to him, Angie thought now with a bitter wry smile. The breathtaking patience with which he’d dealt with her prickly hostility even as she’d let him drive her all the way to the hospital local to Alex’s school. The way he’d waited patiently while she’d checked that her brother was not at death’s door and dealt with his censorious headmaster because her brother had apparently started the brawl.

Limp as a rag by the time they’d started the journey back to London again, and in snappish mood, she’d reminded him that he’d left Nadia standing back in London.

‘Nadia and I have not been an item since I first saw you,’ he’d stated coolly. Then, with a deliberate change of subject, ‘Tell me about your parents. Why are they not here to deal with your brother? ‘

And that had been it. For some reason Angie still could not figure that quietly serious question had ended her objections to him. For the first time since she’d taken responsibility for Alex she’d found herself pouring it all out on that car journey back to London. By the time he’d seen her safely inside her Chelsea apartment she had already been halfway infatuated by his quiet manner and his seriously disturbing charm.

Angie sighed, narrow shoulders hunching inside her coat as she slumped down onto the edge of Roque’s desk and stared down her long legs at her flat-shoed
feet. Within a week he had been her lover. Within three months he’d asked her to marry him. Within a year all her rose-tinted dreams had lain broken—more than broken—
shattered
by a sequence of nightmarish events she still found impossible to think about, though the hurt they’d inflicted refused to hide away with the thoughts.

‘Take off the coat.’

Lifting up her head, Angie was not quick enough to cover up those feelings her memories brought back. She hurt. She
hurt.
And he was lounging there, at ease in the doorway, arms folded across his shirt-front, eyes slightly narrowed, watching her steadily.

In charge.

She dragged her eyes away from him. ‘When I look at you I see Nadia,’ she told him bleakly.

‘When I look at you I see a blind, stubborn woman,’ he drawled back. ‘Stop fighting me, Angie,’ he then said flatly. ‘Your year-long sulking time is up. Accept it.’

Sulking? He dared to think she was merely
sulking?

‘I just don’t want to be in your life any more! ‘ Hating that she was revealing even this one small glimpse of vulnerability to him, Angie shot away from the desk.

‘But you will be in my life again,’ Roque returned, smooth as glass, ‘because,
meu querida,
baby brother expects you to do whatever it is I want you to do.’

He was challenging her to deny it. To call his bluff. In one dark corner of her agonised feelings Angie even suspected that he wanted her to walk away.

Power games, she recognised. Not with her this time, but with Alex. He wanted her to leave her brother to face up to his crimes for himself.

‘I don’t even understand why you want me back.’ She was genuinely mystified by that. ‘It’s not as if you enjoyed living with me the first time around.’

His mouth gave a twitch. ‘You had your good moments.’

Angie uttered a low husky laugh. ‘You can get good sex anywhere, Roque, and without having to put up with the hassle of a pain-in-the-neck wife breathing all over your guilty conscience.’

‘I don’t have a guilty conscience.’

‘Well, you should have!’ she flared. ‘You took Nadia to bed. You had great sex with her. The newspapers were
full
of how good it was. So don’t you
dare
stand there and admit to me that you don’t feel guilty about it when it was me they ridiculed because I could not keep my husband happy!’

‘Well, did you—keep me happy? ‘

Seeing the arched eyebrows which accompanied his calm counter-charge, Angie saw no hint—not even a glimpse of a hint—of regret in his hard, handsome face.

She pulled in a breath, feeling an unwanted pressure building up in her chest. No, she had not kept Roque happy. But when had he bothered to make an effort to make
her
happy?

He’d complained about her job commitments. He’d complained about Alex. Every decision she’d had to make about her brother he had opposed. When she’d tried to make him understand her point of view he’d grown impatient with her and walked off. Sometimes she’d felt so lonely and confused she’d hidden in the bathroom and wept.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Are you going or staying?’

He was thinking about food while she was killing herself with their miserable past? Angie folded her arms and did not answer. A burning resentment sizzled in her blood. The silence stretched—she stretched it—until Roque decided to make it snap.

‘Are you going or staying?’ he repeated.

‘Staying!’ Angie burst out with a whip-cracking fury that should have brought the walls tumbling down around them both.

Roque winced as he pushed away from the doorframe and strode further into the room. The air between them crackled and fizzed with the echoing effects of her burst of fury. Angie was actually breathing fast in the aftermath, but without saying another word Roque just reached for her arms, calmly unfolded them, then set about untying the belt on her coat.

‘You would not become this agitated if you were not such a control freak,’ he opined, with all the diplomacy of a superior being talking down to a mulish child.

Raising her eyes to send him a swift acid glance she hoped would sear off a layer of his golden skin, she noticed the swelling in the centre of his lower lip and was suddenly overtaken by remorse. By the look of it she had a horrible feeling she had actually drawn blood.

‘I’m—sorry,’ she husked. ‘About the …’ She lifted a finger as if to touch his lip, then curled the projecting finger into her fist, dropped her hand again and made do with a shrug.

As if he wanted to make her suffer, he ran the tip of his tongue over the swelling with such lazy sensuality Angie felt as if she was suddenly drowning in static.

‘I
really
hate you,’ she choked, as if the declaration was going to make the feeling go away.

It didn’t.

Sliding a hand inside her coat, he laid the flat of his palm against the base of her long, supple spine, then used his long fingers to exert pressure to ease her up from the desk. She arrived a short whisper away from the hard-packed warmth of his body and her inner sizzle just got worse. Like a silly, breathless, tense little whippet she dropped her eyes from his mouth to stare at the triangle of tanned skin left exposed by the open collar of his shirt and let him ease her coat from her shoulders, then toss it across the desk. Tears were pressing at her. Her heart felt like a huge aching lump in her chest.

‘I won’t have sex with you.’ As if she was mesmerised by that golden-brown triangle of skin, her declaration had arrived on the back of her wanting to lean and press her lips against it then stretch up to do the same to his beautiful bruised lip.

He caught hold of her hand and said absolutely nothing. What Roque could do with silence should be bottled and sold, Angie decided, as she wimped out of fighting to get her hand back and let him lead her across the room.

He knew why she’d just blurted out her last comment. He knew she’d never been able to stand close to him without wanting to devour him alive. Roque was her one confessed weakness. Not his mind, not his wealth, not his gorgeous looks, nor even the warm and exciting charm he could turn on occasionally.

No, she lusted after his body, full-stop.

But she didn’t love him any more, she told herself.

She didn’t.

She let him trail her behind him across the wide open space that made up the seating area of soft black
leather sofas set around a black marble wall-fire, currently licking with flames behind a plate of glass. It was dark outside now. London was twinkling. He brought her into the spacious kitchen bay, where Angie picked up on the delicious aroma of something spicy for the first time.

She’d eaten nothing since a snatched lunch consisting of an apple and a yogurt, so her nostrils flared hungrily and her stomach gave a timely growl.

Propping her up against one of the shiny black kitchen units, Roque turned away to cross over to a giant-sized cooking range. Angie frowned, curious, because of all the things Roque was infuriatingly good at, cooking wasn’t one of them. He could manage to put together a grilled bacon sandwich if he absolutely had to, or throw some salad between two slices of bread, but cooking— real cooking, the likes of which was giving off the delicious aromas she was picking up—came under the heading of ‘Professional Chefs’ or an assortment of favoured good restaurants as far as Roque was concerned.

Had he changed his mind and brought staff in here to take care of him? Mrs Grant came in daily, to keep the apartment in order, but she had never been expected to cook. Still frowning, Angie watched the under-cupboard lighting reflect down onto his long brown fingers as he lifted the lid off a pan of what looked like simmering pasta.

‘You made that?’ She could not stop herself from asking the question.

‘From a packet,’ he admitted, ‘with precise instructions printed on it. The rest came ready-cooked in cartons from Gino’s.’ He named a local Italian bistro they’d
used to eat at often. ‘Gino refused to provide his fresh pasta for me to ruin.’

Flipping open the door to the microwave, he removed a sealed carton and almost burnt his fingers in the process. With a cursing
ouch,
he dropped the hot carton down on the granite counter. Fighting with herself not to do it, in the end Angie sighed and walked forward to pick up a teatowel, then silently shoved him out of the way.

A few minutes later Gino’s best savoury sauce had been blended with steaming pasta, and a mound of succulently spicy meatballs was heaped on the top. Refusing to glance at Roque, who now leant casually against the counter-top content to watch her finish what he had started, Angie picked up the serving dish and turned to transport it to the small dining table set in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows next to the kitchen. There was another table in the more formal dining area—a grand-looking antique imported from his native Portugal, like the desk, but it had rarely been used by them unless they’d had guests for dinner, which hadn’t been often because their time schedules always …

Angie stopped that train of thinking before it eroded this temporary calm they seemed to have reached without her knowing how they had done it.

The small table was already set for two, which almost—almost—brought a smile to her lips, because setting a table was one of the few domestic chores Roque could undertake. Or
would
undertake, she amended as she set the dish down in the middle of the table.

‘Exquisite,’ he murmured.

‘Of course it is. Gino made it,’ Angie said as she straightened up.

‘Meu Deus,
I was not referring to the food,’ he husked, bringing her gaze swinging round and up to his face.

A
NGIE
felt suddenly as if she was suffocating. A sizzle of self-awareness imprisoned her breath. He was looking at what she was wearing, his too-dark eyes coming alive with a glow which highlighted their true rich brown colour as he swept them down over her black mini-skirt splashed with emerald-green dots teamed with a flimsy black chiffon top.

A low drumbeat of tension began to throb between them as Roque followed the way the skirt clung to her tiny waist and fell in soft gathers three-quarters of the way up her lengthy thighs. Without the matt black tights the skirt would be indecent. With the tights what that tiny skirt did for the length of her legs was nothing short of sensational. What the flimsy top did for the high, firm rounded breasts he could see moving behind the gauzy fabric was, however, a different thing entirely, and his reaction was striking directly at the raw, macho and possessive heart of him.

He knew she worked on the front desk at CGM Management. He knew by the timing that she must have rushed like mad to get over here as quickly as she had. But the thought of his wife tripping around CGM’s vast white marble reception area all day wearing this outfit
ignited his primitive side. Her hair was a shiny mass of silky red spirals clinging to her narrow shoulders; her legs went on for ever inside those matt black tights. If she had walked in here stark naked she could not have turned him on as hard and as fast as this outfit was doing right now. He wanted to lift her up so she could wrap those long legs around him. His wanted to sink his head down and suck on those twin peaks he could see pressing invitingly against the lace outline of the top.

She was his. She belonged to him. His long, tall, sexy bride who’d almost got away from him. He wanted to haul her upstairs and stamp his claim on her so thoroughly she would never want to get away from him again.

‘Stop it,’ she choked.

‘Stop what?’ he growled in hungry response.

That,
Angie wanted to say as that hungry growl made itself felt in the stinging tips of her breasts and the clamouring juncture of her thighs.

‘Do you want to eat this food or not?’ She turned away again, and caught the sound of his exhaled breath.

‘At least the big green bag suddenly makes sense,’ he murmured, a trifle whimsically.

Refusing to take that whimsy on, she said, ‘It came with the outfit,’ pulling out a chair for herself and sitting down on it quickly when Roque made a move to do the polite thing and hold the chair for her. ‘And it’s an old one,’ she added—because it was the truth. ‘I bought it last year, after I …’

The rest of what she had been about to say just froze into a lump in her throat. Angie dipped her head down, appalled with herself for almost blurting out what she had.

A silence developed—a thick one, with aching undertones that contracted the walls of her chest. The lowest point of her life, she thought bleakly. Even lower than the moment she’d discovered that Roque had cheated on her.

‘Where did you go when you hid away from me? ‘ The quiet question arrived from across the table, and she looked up to find Roque had sat down at the table without her even realising it.

‘Nowhere.’ Dropping her eyes from his again, she attempted an indifferent shrug while making a play of smoothing the folds of her skirt.

‘I looked for you,’ he said almost roughly. ‘I looked for you everywhere, but you just seemed to disappear off the face of the earth.’

‘When—when you have a relatively well-known face you have to disappear off the face of the earth if you don’t want to be found,’ Angie pointed out, with what she hoped was a cool dryness aimed to cover up what she was really feeling.

Roque grimaced as he served food onto their plates. ‘A convent, perhaps?’ he suggested. Then, ‘No,’ he mused thoughtfully. ‘I had all the convents checked out. Same with the hotels … all holistic retreats. I began scraping the barrel when I started checking the hospitals—but I suppose that you find it highly satisfying to know you worried me like— What?’ he demanded sharply when Angie turned white.

Staring at the plate of steaming food sitting in front of her, Angie felt her stomach contract. Her legs were tingling with an urgent need to get up and run away from what he’d said. She did not want to remember
her three long months of self-imposed isolation—or the other month she’d spent confined to a hospital bed.

Across the table Roque was frowning, tracking back over what he had said that could have put that terrible expression on her face.

‘Angie—’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Reaching out blindly, she picked up her wine glass—only to find it was empty when she raised it to her lips.

Smothering an urge to growl in frustration, Roque picked up the wine bottle and stretched across the table to take her glass from her, so he could fill it up.

By then Angie had dared to look at him. She saw the controlled volcano he was grimly keeping banked down because she refused to open up to him, and wished, for a split second, that he wasn’t her enemy.

‘Thanks,’ she mumbled when he offered back the wine glass. A delicate sip or two later and the tense clutch of nausea had eased its grip on her stomach.

She picked up her knife and fork and made herself eat, taking tiny mouthfuls which tasted divine but were still difficult to swallow. Roque did the same. When, seemingly, they’d both had enough of pretending they were enjoying the meal, he sat back with a sigh, and Angie leapt on the moment by standing up and reaching across the table to pick up his plate.

Once again he took her by complete surprise, grabbing hold of her wrist.

‘What now?’ she demanded, watching another frown descend over his face.

‘Your rings,’ he said. ‘You are not wearing your rings.’

‘Of course I’m not.’ She snatched her wrist back. ‘I
took them off when you stopped being a faithful husband to me and …’

Her snappy voice trailed away to a strangled nothing when it suddenly hit her what they were actually talking about, and she just froze to a breathless effigy where she stood.

Her rings.

‘Oh, my God.’ Her mind went into total freefall.

Her rings!

If her brother could calmly lift a credit card from her bedside drawer and swan off to use it, then what about the other things she’d stuffed in the drawer with it?

Moving on legs which felt vaguely fluffy now, she stepped away from the table and ran across the apartment into Roque’s study. A few seconds later she was rushing back out again, with her bag swinging from her fingers while she struggled to drag on her coat.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Roque demanded.

Angie hovered halfway between the lobby and the table, where he now stood looking like an angry black cloud about to pour down on her head.

‘I … need to go back to my flat.’ Knowing she must look as white as a sheet, because she felt as if she did, she moistened her dry trembling mouth. ‘I think I l-left something on—the cooker. I …’

Lying didn’t come easy to her, and by his face Roque knew she was lying through her chattering white teeth. But she didn’t dare say out loud what she was thinking. She didn’t dare bring her brother’s name back into this.

‘I’ll come back,’ she promised, and started moving
again, quickly, like a prisoner trying for escape. ‘When—when I’ve—’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘No!’ Taut as a stretch of wire, the refusal almost scraped the lining off her throat. ‘I can grab a cab—’ She hit the lift’s call button. ‘You don’t have to—’

Roque’s hand on the base of her spine propelled into the lift carriage, ‘Stop taking me for a fool, Angie,’ he bit out as he sent them sinking down. ‘Whatever it is that just spooked you, I want to know about it.’

‘Nothing has spooked me! I just remembered I might have left a pan on the cooker!’

‘Liar,’ he rasped, and that was it as far as he was concerned.

The lift doors slid open onto the basement car park. He guided her to his midnight-blue Porsche and saw her inside it with such grim precision Angie had to scramble inelegantly to fold in her long legs.

She dared a swift glance up at his hard profile. ‘I might not have done.’ She decided she’d better cover herself, ready for the moment when her lie was exposed. ‘I’m just not sure. But I have to go and—’

‘Shut up.’ Roque shut the door.

By the time he joined her his temper was on such a fine trigger Angie decided to take his advice.

They drove across London in absolute silence, Angie growing more tense and anxious the closer they came to her flat. She was out of the car before Roque had even stopped it, scrambling in her bag for her keys while she hurried to get the door open before he arrived. In her tiny hallway it took only two strides for her to reach her bedroom. Trembling lips pressed together, she walked over to her bedside cabinet and slid open the drawer,
then just stood looking down at its contents through eyes that stung.

All kinds of small things were scattered in the drawer. She had not seen or thought about them in months. But it was a small box her fingers reached for, and with a heavy thump playing havoc with her heartbeat she pulled in a taut breath, then flipped open the lid.

Two rings winked back at her. One an intricately woven rich yellow gold wedding ring Roque had had to have altered to make it fit the narrowness of her finger. It was a family heirloom, passed down the line through the de Calvhos brides for too many centuries for her to dare to count. The same with the betrothal ring, with its fabulously rare pink diamond gleaming like a lustrous living thing from a bed of exquisite white diamonds.

She’d meant to return the rings to Roque when she’d returned to London, but she’d pushed them into this drawer along with the credit card and promptly forgotten about them.

Wanted to forget about them.

Needed to forget about them.

Though now, as she stared at these priceless and irreplaceable pieces from the de Calvhos jewellery stock, guilt made a fierce grab at her conscience for the way she had just tossed them into this drawer as if they were worth nothing.

Her brother had missed the jackpot when he’d left the rings behind, she thought helplessly, for the pink diamond alone would have paid off his debts, with an obscene amount left over for him to squander further.

A spike of hot bloody anger held Roque still in the doorway. It wasn’t because of the rings. The rings were still there—he could see them sparkling in the box
from here. It was having to witness Angie’s fear that her brother had taken them that was infuriating him.

Without saying a word, he walked forward, then bent to ease the ring box out of her grasp. She flinched when he snapped the box shut and closed it inside his clenched fist.

‘Okay.’ He sounded harsh, but couldn’t help it. ‘Now we are here, you can pack a bag before we leave again.’

‘He—he didn’t do it, Roque,’ Angie whispered.

‘What the hell difference does that make?’ he exploded, without knowing he was going to do that either. ‘You believed he was capable of stealing your rings from you, Angie! You are sitting there like that, fighting back the tears, because you are so relieved that he did not! Now, pack a damn bag!’

‘Don’t shout at me!’ Angie sprang to her feet and glared at him.

‘Do you need me to spell it out to you before you recognise what’s going on here?’ he rasped. ‘The rings do not matter. The credit card he took matters! If we let him get away with what he has done, what do you think he’s going to take next? Or, worse, who is he going to steal from to finance his gambling habit?’

‘It’s not gambling!’ Angie heard herself repeat Alex’s own defence from a hazy place filled with horror and self-disgust. ‘Y-you speculate on the markets all the time, Roque, and I’ve never heard you call it gambling.’

‘I do not steal from other people to do it. I do not drag my family down to a level where they are forced to defend me like you are doing now—just to save his face!’

Guilty as charged, Angie quivered out a pained, shaken breath. ‘He’s all I’ve got and I love him.’

It came out so bleak and so broken that Roque swung away in a lithe, angry movement to glare at the nearest wall with a burning desire to throw his clenched fist at it!

And he knew why he felt like that. Hell, did he know.

‘Where is his love for you, Angie?’ He swung back to her, grinding his teeth together when he watched her flinch. ‘He walks all over you—because you let him. How long do you think the rings would have remained in that drawer if what he’s been doing with the credit card had not been exposed? Do you think he did not notice the ring box?’ he pushed on relentlessly, even as she dropped weakly back onto the bed.

‘He resisted the rings because the credit card was easier. He has more nous than you,
meu querida,
because I think he worked it out that selling the famous de Calvhos diamond would bring him more trouble than it was worth. And what the
hell
were you doing, tossing such a valuable object into a drawer as if it was a cheap piece of junk?’

‘I know.’ On an agonised groan she lifted up a hand to cover her face. ‘I’m very sorry.’

Roque released a growl like an angry and frustrated snarling animal. The atmosphere in the room hit incendiary levels because he did not want her apology—he wanted—

Ramming the ring box into his pocket, he reached down and lifted her back to her feet. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘this is what is going to happen.’ He gave her a gentle
shake in case she wasn’t listening to him. ‘You are going to pack a bag and come back home with me.’

The
home
bit sent her lips parting and her chest rising on an intake of air, ready to object.

‘Then,’ he continued uncompromisingly, ‘there is going to be a new order of things in our marriage, where I take full control of your brother and you willingly hand that control over to me.’

‘If you hurt Alex in any way I will never forgive you!’ Angie instantly choked out.

‘I don’t want to hurt him. I want to teach him how to be a man before it’s too damn late!’

When she blinked, as if he’d shocked the hell out of her, Roque made himself tug in a controlling breath.