After Their Vows (12 page)

‘You m-mentioned going to Paris?’ she mumbled, attempting to throw him off the scent.

He nodded his dark head. ‘I received a call this morning about some business I need to attend to—but that no longer counts.’ He waved a long-fingered hand in a gesture of indifference to Paris. ‘Have you considered that you might be pregnant? ‘

It was like a shot to her blindside. Angie’s chin shot up, her green eyes standing out like emerald pools of shock against the stark white colour of her pinched, strained face. It was the last thing she’d expected him to say—the
last
thing!

‘Of course I’m not pregnant!’ she choked out. ‘I have not—no way—missed a single pill!’

She was taking the contraceptive pill? Why hadn’t he known that? Roque asked himself, and tension grabbed a hold of his chest muscles as he had to control the need to release a sigh of relief.

‘What gave you such a c-crazy idea in the first place?’ Angie demanded, managing to turn an ever paler shade of white.

‘It just came into my head,’ he responded rather dryly. ‘You don’t have to snap at me.’

Oh, yes she did! The idea of another pregnancy would scare her witless. She didn’t ever want to go through that heartbreaking trauma again!

‘Well, I’m not,’ she snapped, reaching out to set the glass aside before her trembling fingers dropped it. ‘And if you need a reason why I’m feeling like this, then look to yourself,’ she told him waspishly, fighting fear and hurt and a million other scary emotions. ‘If you let me have two hours’ sleep straight without wanting sex with me I feel like I’m on a winning streak—and don’t look at me as if I’ve just stuck a knife in your ribs!’

As he rose up to his full height, Roque’s chin went up, two lines of heat streaking high across his taut cheeks. ‘Well, then, perhaps my trip to Paris is well timed,’ he countered stiffly. ‘It will allow you to sleep as many hours as you like for the next couple of nights.’

Was that where Nadia was waiting for him?

Angie threw herself back down against the bed and rolled over. ‘Don’t wake me up as you leave,’ she flipped out, and shut her eyes tight.

A thunderous silence bounced off the walls while he continued to stand there. Angie felt as if her insides were collapsing. A baby … Didn’t they have enough problems without him bringing a baby into the mix?

Tears burned like fire in her eyes, ‘Will you just—go away?’ she breathed thickly. ‘I’m—sleepy.’

‘Of course. My apologies,’ he offered. ‘Excuse me for delaying your much needed rest.’

Angie shivered as that crushingly impassive cool he could pull off with such chilling effect washed over her.
She listened to him striding away and pulled the covers up over her head.

She should just ask him outright about Nadia. She knew she should. She should just get it over with and spit the poisoned woman’s name out of her mouth! But she couldn’t. She was too scared. What if he admitted that he still had a thing going with Nadia? What if she’d misheard and made a horrible fool of herself? What if he was glad of the excuse she’d just handed him to get out of here and meet up with his on-off love in romantic Paris?

Roque cut himself with his wet razor and ripped out a curse. What kind of husband was he that he couldn’t take Angie’s lippy backlash when she was feeling unwell?

The arrogant, over-sensitive kind, he thought, as he tried to finish the job in hand without taking any more nicks out of his chin.

And what kind of man was he that he was preparing to leave her at all while she was feeling as she did? He was bigger than this, he told himself grimly as he pulled on the trousers to a steel-grey suit and pushed his arms into a striped shirt. Taking offence because she’d landed the blame on him for feeling ill was juvenile. He should be ashamed of himself.

Well, he wasn’t going—not to Paris anyway, he decided as he knotted blue silk at his throat. He had this stuff with Nadia he needed to deal with in Lisbon. He’d been putting off facing it for too long because he had not wanted to risk Angie finding out.

His grim mouth twisted in derision at his uncharacteristic act of cowardice. One day she was going to have to know. And he was going to have to tell her before someone else did it for him.

Shrugging into his jacket, he took a deep breath and walked back into the bedroom with the intention of telling Angie that Paris was off the agenda. Only to pull to a stop when all he could see of her was the fiery top of her head.

The sight held him captive for a few seconds, a ruefully amused smile catching hold of his mouth. The last time he’d found Angie like this had been at their London apartment, when she’d foolishly believed he would leave her to sleep in a different bedroom. The rat in him then had taken the decision to haul her out of her blissful sleep. This time the loving husband in him would leave her sleeping and call her later from Lisbon, to let her know where he was.

He left the room as silently as a thief stealing away from a crime scene.

Angie sat up as the door drew shut. He hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye to her.

Hurt clambered all over her insides. She hoped his fancy private plane developed engine trouble and kept him imprisoned on the airport tarmac so he couldn’t keep his sleazy assignation. She hoped—

Hearing the throaty sound of a car engine, Angie slithered out of bed and walked over to the window to watch as his red Ferrari flashed up from the side of the house, then sped away down the drive with the sun glinting on its shiny bodywork. He had not been able to get away fast enough. Standing here watching him go, she felt as if he’d driven over her body without noticing in his eagerness to get to his lover.

Tears developed. She blinked them away. The rolling waves of shock and hurt still played with the muscles
around her stomach. The name Nadia beat like a drum in her head.

Her mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the dressing room, and she turned in a daze and went to find it.

‘Good morning, sweetie.’ Carla’s light, slightly dry voice greeted her. ‘Do we have a deal? Are you ready to stop playing the pampered wife and start working on the Lisbon project?’

Angie blinked a couple of times before ‘the Lisbon project’ meant something. Trying to get her brain into gear was like crawling through mud.

‘I… yes,’ she answered, because saying no or that she didn’t know would make this conversation just too complicated right now. ‘I w-was thinking of researching suitable business premises today,’ Angie managed to say, with reasonable intelligence—mainly because it was the truth. She
had
been intending to look for suitable premises. ‘Do you have any specific ideas in mind as to what you want?’

‘Oh,
you’re
supposed to know Lisbon, Angie. I’ve hardly ever visited the place,’ Carla answered with a languid lack of interest. ‘Somewhere suitably elegant with the right postcode, I suppose. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Roque, since this is his brainchild? All I had to do was agree to the concept.’

Angie’s head went back as if Carla had punched her. ‘You—you mean
Roque
set this up?’ Angie could barely get the words past her thick throat.

‘He still hasn’t told you?’ For once in her languid life, Carla’s voice sharpened.

‘No,’ Angie said abruptly. Not even when they’d discussed it the night before.

‘It appears I’ve let his surprise cat out of the bag, then,’ sighed Carla. ‘He needed to find something for you to do to keep you happy in Portugal, sweetie. And to tell the truth I didn’t want to lose you completely. So I thought, if he’s happy to shell out the money why not let him set me up in Lisbon? The exotic dark Latin look is very high-fashion right now. With you at the helm, scouting for new talent, we could even put ourselves a jump ahead of our competitors. And, talking about dark Latin models, now that you and Roque have resolved your differences about what happened a year ago, how would you feel about Nadia joining you in the venture?’

Nadia …? Angie suddenly felt as if she was eating glass. ‘Wh-why Nadia?’

‘Because she’s living in Lisbon, too,’ said Carla impatiently. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know that either, Angie? This is really very bad of Roque—to still be keeping you in the dark about all of this. I suppose he thought it wasn’t important. After all, you must believe he’s telling the truth when he insists the whole Nadia thing never happened, or you wouldn’t have gone back to him, would you?’

Roque
knew
that Nadia was living in Lisbon?

‘No,’ Angie breathed indistinctly, ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Well, then, have a good think about the Nadia thing. She will come in very useful since she speaks the lingo. And, like you, she’s at a loose end right now.’

‘She—she isn’t modelling any more?’ Angie tried her best to make the question sound casual.

‘I know you can be blind when you want to be, Angie, but you surely have not been so blinkered that you didn’t know Nadia has been out of the modelling game since
she got pregnant last year? I think the baby is a couple of months old now.’

Angie was beginning to feel sick again. And she felt so cold suddenly that she didn’t think she was ever going to warm up again. ‘Do …?’ She had to stop to swallow the thick lump in her throat. ‘Do you have a contact address for her?’

‘Sure. Wait a second while I access it …’

Angie waited. Angie waited and didn’t breathe, and didn’t allow herself to think beyond waiting.

‘Here it is. Sounds very elegant. The Palácio de Ribeiro. It’s—’

Angie cut the connection and tossed the phone away from her as if it burnt. The Palácio de Ribeiro was Roque’s city address. It took him just fifteen minutes to walk from there to his Lisbon office building, and … and …

Nadia was living in Roque’s Lisbon apartment.

Nothing could have been more black and white.

No wonder he’d spent three weeks avoiding taking her into Lisbon. He’d been scared she might come face to face with his lover before he’d worked out how he was going to convince Angie to accept his sordid little
ménage à trois.

And a baby.

His
baby?

Angie turned and ran for the bathroom. This time it physically hurt, because she was trying to throw up from an empty stomach. By the time she’d managed to make it back to the bedroom it was all she could do to sink down on the bed, where she sat with her eyes closed because the world was spinning.

It was only when she rested a hand against the
sensitive wall of her stomach, because it was still throbbing, that a sudden and terrifying thought rushed into her head.

She stared down at the hand. What if Roque was right about—?

No—no, please not that, she thought pitifully. But she was already dragging herself to her feet to go and recover her phone. Her eyes were burning, her fingers trembling, as she flicked through the menu looking for her personal calendar. A minute later she was sinking down on the edge of the bed again, a limp and quivering wreck.

I
T HIT
Roque when he was halfway to Lisbon, and he almost caused a major pile-up behind him when he slammed his foot down on the brakes.

‘Mãe de Deus,
‘ he bit out.

Angie had overheard his telephone conversation with Nadia.

Cursing in every language he could think of, he checked the traffic, then took his chances, swinging the long luxury car into a sleek U-turn that would send him back the way he had come. Car horns sounded in protest—he barely registered them, or the angry shouts of abuse aimed at him as he accelerated away.

Maria had told him they’d been out on the balcony when Angie became ill. His wife—his unashamedly lazy in the morning wife—had decided to get up earlier than usual, and had been standing right above him when he took Nadia’s call.

His jawline fiercely clenched, he tried to remember what he’d said, but could recall hardly a damn word. Not that it mattered. He shook his grim head. He knew that he must have called Nadia by name. Just as he knew that Angie had heard him say it. And hearing him say
it had made Angie sick to her stomach. It had made her break apart.

Fingers tightening around the steering wheel, he put his foot down hard on the accelerator.

Entering the master suite as Angie strode out from the dressing room, Maria pulled to a breath-catching standstill.

‘You go out,
senhora?’
Maria asked, in a voice laced with disbelief—which was not surprising when the last time she’d seen her Angie had been heaving into the toilet bowl.

Now she was dressed in a breathtakingly elegant white linen dress touched with stylised brushstrokes of emerald-green. The dress skimmed Angie’s long slender figure, and had
couture
sewed into every invisible seam. The neckline was square, the bodice cinched into the waist by a shiny green belt, and the skirt skimmed midway down her amazingly long thighs. And the shiny green shoes she was wearing elevated her height by an impossible five inches at least.

‘To Sintra,’ Angie confirmed. ‘Will you ask Antonio to bring the Range Rover around to the front steps for me, please?’

‘Sim,
I will see to it.’ The little maid nodded. ‘You— wish Antonio to drive you? ‘

Angie shook her head. ‘I will drive myself,’ she said, for this was one errand she needed to do on her own. She was going to Sintra to find a chemist, so she could purchase a pregnancy testing kit. And she’d needed to pull on all this supermodel armour just to keep her functioning without falling into shattered little pieces.

Maria continued to hover like an anxious bird, not
at all comfortable with this turn of events. ‘If—if you like, I could go to Sintra for you,’ she offered eagerly. ‘It will be no trouble, and Senhor Roque will be back from Lisbon soon—’

Lisbon? Angie frowned. ‘He’s gone to Paris, Maria,’ she informed the little maid.

‘No—no. He is gone to Lisbon,’ Maria insisted. ‘He said he had business there he must attend to this morning, but he will be back as quickly as he can because— because you are f-feeling unwell.’

So the Paris trip was yet another lie he’d told her …

‘Tell Antonio about the car, Maria,’ Angie breathed unsteadily.

‘Sim, senhora.
‘ Too well-trained to argue, the maid dipped a stiff little curtsy and whipped out of the room, leaving Angie alone to field this last hard knock to her fragile composure without a witness to watch her do it.

Somehow—she did not remember how—she found herself standing outside the
quinta’s
front entrance. The sun was shining hotly down from an azure sky. Everything around her looked clear and sharp and picture-postcard-perfect—the greens of the gardens, the bright pinks and purples of the trailing bougainvillaea against the apricot walls of the house, and the shiny black bulk of the Range Rover awaiting her at the bottom of the front steps.

She did not recall climbing into it. She did not recall switching on the engine and driving away. She fixed all her concentration on finding her way to Sintra in a car she had never driven before, on roads as foreign to her as the husband to whom she had given all her faith.

Roque slowed down to take the turn in through the gates of the Quinta d’Agostinho then powered up again to
shoot the car into the tunnel of leafy trees. Coming out into the bright sunlight a few minutes later, he saw his home standing sure and solid in its elegant spread of sweeping lawns, backed by a forest of trees.

He glanced up at the balcony situated directly above the swimming pool, envisaged Angie standing there listening to the conversation taking place below her, and felt as if his skin was peeling back from his flesh as he played out what had happened next.

But that weird feeling was nothing compared to the one he experienced when he drove down towards the garages and saw that his Range Rover was missing. Diving out of his car, he strode into the house and shouted for Zetta at the top of his voice. His housekeeper came hurrying into the grand hallway from the rear of the house.

‘Where is the Range Rover?’ he demanded, a shade unsteadily.

The housekeeper wrung her hands together. ‘The
senhora
take it out, Senhor Roque. Maria said she has gone into Sintra.’

Sintra? A wave of relief flooded through him. For a few minutes there he’d convinced himself that Angie had done a runner on him again, and was already on her way to the airport, meaning to disappear off the face of the earth.

‘Why has she gone to Sintra?’ He frowned, not seeing a link between the reason he had come rushing back here and their local town.

‘I do not think Maria asked,’ Zetta answered. ‘She was more concerned that the
senhora
insisted on driving herself when she has on these very high shoes—’

Roque’s tension levels shot up again. ‘Are you telling me that Antonio is not driving her?’

Still wringing her hands, Zetta nodded.

‘But she does not know the car. She does not know the roads. She hardly ever drives herself anywhere, and—
M
ã
e de Deus.’
His voice broke down into a low hoarse husk. ‘She is—unwell …’

The moment Angie realised that she was completely and utterly lost came around two hours later. Pulling the car onto a clearing somewhere way up in the hills, overlooking the sea, she sat back with a sigh of defeat.

She’d found her way into Sintra by following the well-posted road signs. She’d even found a convenient car park, and her purchase now lay with her bag on the seat next to her. Everything up to that point had been so much easier than she’d expected it to be—but she’d soon learned that getting back to the Quinta d’Agostinho was a different matter altogether.

Roque’s private estate was not signposted. And the road out of Sintra had taken her a different way from the one on which she’d come in. It had seemed logical that so long as she kept on driving she would eventually notice something familiar to use as a guide.

‘Great logic, Angie,’ she mumbled.

Now the sun was high, and the car was already stifling. She’d only killed the air-conditioning two minutes ago, when she’d switched off the car engine.

Reaching up, she ran a hand around the back of her neck and lifted her hair away from her hot skin. On the seat beside her with her bag was the half-drunk bottle of water she’d had the sense to purchase before she got herself lost. And beside it lay her mobile phone,
which she’d tried to use several times only to discover there was no signal. On an act of pure frustration she’d switched the stupid thing off.

Still… With little hope that it was going to be any different this time, she let her hair fall back down onto her nape, then reached for the phone and switched it on again.

The moment it had powered up the messages began downloading like flickering shouts. Most of them from Roque, she saw. A couple from Carla, and even one from her brother, who had been calling her twice a week since he’d gone to Brazil—duty calls, to reassure her that he was enjoying himself, Angie recognised with a grimace of a smile.

About to try calling Roque again, she felt the phone suddenly leap into life in her fingers.

‘Angie?
Graças a Deus.
Where the hell are you?’ Roque’s deep rasping voice raked into her ear.

‘Lost,’ she admitted. ‘Up in the hills somewhere.’

‘Lost? In the hills?’ he repeated, as if most of Portugal wasn’t covered in them. ‘Why didn’t you call to tell me so?’

‘No signal until now,’ she explained, feeling oddly as if she was having this conversation with a complete stranger rather than the husband she’d discovered was a lying cheat.

A stunning silence fell down between them for several seconds, then she heard Roque pull in a deep breath. ‘Okay, so you are lost,’ he murmured more calmly. ‘Be a good girl and activate the car’s satellite navigation system. It will pinpoint your position and then you can tell me what it says. I will come and get you.’

‘But I don’t want you to come and get me,’ Angie told him.

‘Yes, you do!’ Roque exploded all over again. ‘Have you any idea how much trouble you’ve caused by getting lost? Maria is weeping all over the place, and I was about half a minute away from calling the police. Only a madwoman drives off into the hills without knowing where she is going, so do as I tell you, Angie, and switch on the damn—’

The line went dead. Roque bit out a string of filthy curses. Lost in the hills … He turned full circle, a set of long fingers scoring through his already dishevelled hair, then grabbed hold of the back of his neck. She’d been gone for hours, so she could be anywhere.

When did he get to be so stupid? How did
she
get to drive at all in the kind of shoes Maria had described?

He tried to connect to her phone again.

Angie ignored the phone’s ring while she touched buttons until she finally brought the satellite navigation screen to life, then she sat staring at the screen. It showed her a map with hardly anything on it except for a thin thread of road. All the information was in Portuguese. With no clue as to how she changed it to English, or even if she could change it, the map was, therefore, of absolutely no use.

She recovered her phone and allowed the connection. ‘I’ve got the satellite thing working, but—’

‘Angelina, I am about to lose my temper here.’ Roque’s grim voice cut across hers. ‘So do yourself a favour and don’t cut our connection again!’

‘It’s all in Portuguese,’ she continued as if he had not interrupted her. ‘You are going to have to tell me what to do so that I can understand it.’

She heard him suck in another deep breath. She felt him fighting to control his temper. Angie did not offer up any encouragement, just waited until he spoke again. ‘I will talk you through it, so concentrate …’

The drive back down through the forest-strewn hills was relatively simple now she had her own personal pilot to guide her, Angie discovered. Roque had instructed her on how to make the car’s computer recognise her mobile phone, and now the deep cool sound of his voice filled the car via its speakers, firing questions and directions at her as she drove. In a strange way Angie found it comforting to have him there with her, though she wasn’t sure why—because she had certainly shut down from
feeling
anything else right now.

Self-preservation kicking in, she assumed, as she glimpsed signs of civilisation appearing in front of her, and only a few minutes later she was joining the main highway. Relief was a feeling, she acknowledged as she heaved out another sigh.

It was only a short second later that a red Ferrari flashed up beside her, then shot past, only to pull in front of her two metres away from her front bumper.

‘Is that you?’ she gasped in surprise.

‘Sim,
it is me,’ Roque responded.

‘But—what are you doing here? ‘

‘I am here to make sure that you don’t get lost again before I have had a chance to throttle you,
meu querida,’
he explained, so smoothly Angie almost missed the threat threading through his silken tone.

‘Just—go to hell,
meu querido
,’ Angie said, and switched the phone off, preferring to finish the rest of the journey following his car without having to listen to him at the same time.

She hated him, she remembered. He was a lying, cheating, self-seeking playboy. The minute she got back to the house she was going to pack her things and
leave.
Her head was aching. She hadn’t eaten anything all day. She had a stupid pregnancy test lying on the seat beside her, and
he
had his mistress waiting for him not far away.

The first strangled sob tore from her as she followed him through the
quinta
gates, then into the tunnel of trees. By the time she came out again into hot bright sunlight the tears were trickling down her cheeks.

She stopped the car behind his at the front steps, then reached up to wipe the tears away with one hand while the other fumbled to unlock her seat belt. Reaching for her things from the seat beside her, she was about to open the car door when it suddenly flew open, and Roque stood there, looking less than his usual immaculate self.

Angie allowed herself a brief flickering glance at him. His hard-edged face was marblelike, the golden skin across the curving sweep of his cheekbones pulled tight. He stuck out a long-fingered hand in a grimly silent offer to assist her to alight from the car, but she ignored it, preferring to slide her long legs out over the high sill to land on slender heels the length of five-inch spikes.

The hand stretched out again, as if to steady her just in case the slender heels would not support her, and Angie quivered. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she whispered, then brushed around him and ran up the steps to the house.

Ramming his rejected hand into a fist, Roque watched her almost twist off one of the ridiculous shoes in her
rush to get away from him, and bit back a colourful oath. ‘For God’s sake, Angie, be careful—’

For God’s sake, Angie
turned into
For God’s sake, Nadia
in her head, and her spine shot erect with a jerk as she strode as fast as she dared into the house