After Their Vows (2 page)

Angie stopped listening at
easy.
She was so sure that she was going to really faint away this time that she reached for a chair and sat down on it, lifting up a set of icy fingers to cover her trembling mouth.

Roque—dear God. Closing her eyes, she gave a helpless shake of her head. ‘I don’t want to believe you could do this to me,’ she whispered against her cold fingers.

‘What do you want me to say? ‘ her brother choked out. ‘I did a stupid thing, and now I’m sorry I did— but he was supposed to take care of you, Angie! You
deserved
to be taken care of for a change. Instead he cheated on you with Nadia Sanchez and—well, now look at you.’

She flicked her startled eyes open, ‘Wh-what’s wrong with me?’

Alex let loose with a short laugh, as if she’d made a stupid joke. ‘You used to have the kind of career most girls only dream about, Angie. I couldn’t look around without seeing you plastered on a billboard or a magazine somewhere. You were famous—fabulous. My friends used to envy me for having such a gorgeous sister. They’d fight each other for a chance to meet you. Then Roque came along turned you inside out. You stopped modelling because
Roque didn’t like it—
‘

‘That’s not true—’

‘Yes, it is!’ His face was hot with anger now. ‘He was a selfish, arrogant, superior swine who wanted to rule over you like a tyrant. He didn’t like your job commitments—your commitment to
me.’

There was a bit too much truth in that part for Angie to argue with it. Roque
had
demanded her exclusive attention. In fact Roque had been demanding all round— her attention, first call on her loyalty, the full extent of her desire for him focused on him between the sheets …

‘Now you work at a lousy reception job for the same modelling agency that used to roll out the red carpet every time you walked into it. And you struggle to make ends meet again while
he
flies the world in his private jet, and I daren’t ask you for an extra penny any more without feeling as guilty as sin. Roque owed me big-time for what he did to you, Angie, and you just let him get away with it—as if—’

‘He owes
me,
not you!’ Angie flared in response to all of that. ‘Roque was
my
mistake, not your mistake, Alex. He never did a single thing to you!’

‘Are you kidding?’ her brother flared back. ‘He robbed me of the sister I used to be proud of and left me with the empty shell I’m looking at now! Where’s your natural vibrancy gone, Angie? Your stylish sparkle?
He
took them.’ He answered his own bitter question. ‘If Roque had not married you and then cheated on you, you would not be floating through life looking like the stuffing has been knocked out of you. You would still be flying way up there at the top of your profession, raking in the money, and I would not have needed to use his credit card to play the markets because
you
would have financed me!’

Of everything he had just thrown at her in that last bitter flood, the part making its biggest impact on Angie was seeing the truth about the brother she so totally adored staring her hard in the face. In her endless efforts to make his life as comfortable as she could possibly make it for him she had created a monster. A bone-selfish, petulant man-child who thought it was okay to steal someone else’s money if it got him what he wanted.

What was it Roque had said during one of their fights about her brother? ‘You are in danger of creating a life-wasting lout if you don’t stop it.’

Well, that damning prediction had come true with a vengeance, Angie saw—only to toss that aside again with a stubborn shake of her head. For what gave Roque the right to criticise the way she’d handled a rebellious teenager when his own privileged upbringing had given him everything he wanted at the nod of his handsome dark head?

Alex had been only seventeen when she’d first met Roque, still attending boarding school and reliant on her
for everything. Falling in love had not been an option she could afford to let happen—yet she’d been unable to stop herself from falling for Roque. And what Roque wanted Roque got, by sheer single-minded force of will—which in Angie’s view put him and Alex in the same selfish club. Between the two of them they had demanded so much from her that sometimes she’d felt stretched so taut in two different directions she’d thought she might actually snap in two.

On one side of her she’d had the brother who’d become such a handful to deal with, skipping lessons to go out on the town with his friends and constantly getting into scrapes, which meant she’d had to travel down to his school in Hampshire to deal with the inevitable fall-out. Then there’d been Roque on the other side, angry with her for pandering to her brother’s every whim.

But at least she’d felt vindicated when Alex won a place at Cambridge. He hadn’t achieved that by spending every night out on the town. And he’d settled into university life over the last year without giving her very much grief.

Then she shook her head—because Alex
hadn’t
settled down at all, had he? He’d just hidden it from her that he was still doing exactly what he wanted to do—even if that meant sneaking around her flat and stealing credit cards to pay for his excesses.

‘I hate him,’ Alex said, with no idea what his sister was thinking. ‘It would’ve served him right if I’d gone on a real bender and completely cleaned him out. I should’ve bought a yacht or two, or a private plane like his to fly myself around in, instead of sitting in my room
at uni spending his rotten money before he found out it was me doing the—’

Alex snapped his mouth shut, leaving the rest of what he had been going to say to slam around the room like a clap of thunder.

Angie shot to her feet.

‘Finish that,’ she shook out.

Biting out a curse, her brother lifted a hand and grabbed the back of his neck. ‘Roque came to see me on campus today,’ he confessed. ‘He called me a weak, thieving wimp and threatened to break my neck if I didn’t—’ He stopped, clearly deciding to swallow down the rest of the insults Roque must have thrown at him. ‘The bottom line is,’ he went on huskily, ‘he wants his money back, and he told me that if I don’t give it to him he’s going to take the matter to the police.’

The police—? Angie sat down again.

‘Now I’m scared, because I don’t think he was bluffing. In fact I know that he wasn’t.’

So did Angie. Roque did not make threats unless he was prepared to carry them through—as she’d discovered in the hardest way there was.

Bitterness suddenly grabbed at her insides, burning a hole in her ability to hold back from recalling that final showdown, when she and Roque had stood toe to toe like mortal enemies instead of loving husband and wife.

‘I am warning you, Angie, go chasing off to your brother’s aid this time and I will find someone else to take your place tonight. ‘

She’d gone. He’d found Nadia. Marriage over.

Pulling back from where those memories wanted to suck her, Angie sat back in the chair. ‘So, how does he
expect you to pay him back?’ she asked heavily, already suspecting what was coming before her brother loped over to the table and produced something from the back pocket of his jeans.

‘He said to give you this …’

He was holding out a business card, which he set down on the table in front of Angie. Looking down at it, she saw
‘Roque Agostinho de Calvhos,’
printed in elegant black script below the de Calvhos family crest, which crowned just about everything in Roque’s world— from his high-end international investment empire to some of the finest vineyards in his native Portugal and vast tracts of inherited land in Brazil.

‘He wrote something on the back,’ her brother indicated awkwardly.

Reaching out, Angie flipped the card over with a set of ice-cold fingers.
‘Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late,’
Roque had scrawled there.

If she’d had it in her Angie would have scratched out a dry, mocking laugh.

The underscored
don’t
was the ultimate command from a man who’d grown very intimate with her most besetting sin—an innate lack of good time-keeping. She’d kept him waiting at airports and restaurants. She’d kept him kicking his heels in their apartment while she rushed around like a headless chicken, getting ready to go out. She caught a sudden sharp glimpse of him waiting for her, looking tall, dark and fabulously turned out for a night at the theatre, lounging stretched out in a chair with his eyes closed, his silky black eyelashes resting against his high-sculpted cheekbones, his wide, full and sensual mouth wearing the look of long-suffering patience he could pull off with such excruciating effect.

He’d lost all patience with her, and perhaps she’d deserved it, Angie acknowledged—but enough to send him into the arms of another woman?

And not just any woman, his
ex
woman.

‘Will you go and see him? ‘

Having to blink to bring herself back from where she had gone off to, Angie swallowed thickly and gave a nod of her head.

‘Thanks.’ Her brother heaved in a long breath. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’

So did Roque, thought Angie.

‘Look …’ Alex shuffled his feet. ‘It’s already seven o’clock, so I’ll go now, sh-shall I? So you can—get ready …’

Desperate to escape now he’d done what he’d come here to do, Alex was already heading for the door when Angie stopped him.

‘The credit card?’ she prompted. ‘Where is it?’

She watched his shoulders give a wincing twitch. ‘Roque took it.’

‘Good,’ Angie murmured, and watched him flinch again as her meaning struck home.

Alex now knew he had lost her trust in him. Her home had always been his home—he had his own bedroom here, his own key. He’d had the same things at the apartment she’d shared with Roque. He was family. You should be able to trust family.

As if he knew what she was thinking, Alex twisted round to aim her a glancing look of remorse. ‘I really— really am sorry, Angie,’ he husked out painfully. ‘I’m sorry for all of it—but especially for dropping this part on to you.’

He’d done that because he had no other option. He’d
done it because she’d always been there to fight his battles for him.

‘I promise you on my life I won’t ever do anything like this again.’

Looking up at him, Angie saw their father’s hair and nose and their mother’s eyes and mouth. The aching urge to just get up and go over there to hug him, reassure him that everything was going to be okay, almost got the better of her. But for the first time since she’d taken responsibility for him she controlled the urge.

‘I’ll call you later,’ was all she said, and after a few more seconds of helpless hovering he turned and slunk away, leaving her alone with Roque’s business card and that oh-so brief message to stare at.

Angie felt a pang of wry appreciation for his slick, short way of getting his message across. She wasn’t a fool. She knew the divorce papers would have landed on Mark Lander’s desk today, and this was Roque’s response to them—with her brother sent along to deliver it and add a bit of clout.

A lot of clout, she extended.

Angie drew in a deep, fortifying breath. Well, she could do that, she told herself, aware that she really didn’t have a choice. However, she would not be turning up in the role of a wimpy victim Roque was expecting to see, she determined grimly as she rose to her feet. Her brother might see her as a pathetic creature with
all the stuffing knocked out of her, but she was not and would never be that feeble! She’d spent too many years fighting her own battles to let fear of what Roque could do to Alex grind her to a quivering pulp now.

On that bracing reminder, Angie tossed her hair back over her narrow shoulders and stepped across the kitchen to catch up her bag. A minute later she was standing in her hall, dragging on her coat as she followed her brother out of the door.

F
RESH
from the shower, Roque took a call from the lobby informing him that his wife had arrived in the building with a flicker of surprise.

She was half an hour early.

A deliberate ploy on her part aimed to back-foot him, or was she just running scared? he mused curiously as he rubbed his wet hair with a towel. He was under no illusion that she had rushed over here because she was eager to see him. Only two things fired up Angie enough to make her expose any hint of weakness like this—her brother and money.

If he left out the other thing she always fired up for, which was him. His hands and his mouth on her body, her complete lack of self-control when it came to the pleasure he could inflict on her smooth silken flesh. She knew it too, which was why she had spent the last twelve months avoiding all contact with him.

Or it was one of the reasons, he amended with a frown as he strode into his dressing room and came out again a minute later, still flipping shut the last few buttons on a pale blue shirt across the deeply tanned contours of his taut stomach.

He heard the warning ping telling him that the lift
was arriving as he put a comb through his still damp hair. He headed out of the bedroom onto the elegant spread of the mezzanine landing which looked down on the spacious luxury of open-plan living backed by panoramic views of London’s skyline and his long, graceful stride took him down the stairway and across an expanse of rich dark teak wood flooring to the squared opening that led to the inner foyer which housed his private lift.

His confidence that he had Angie exactly where he wanted her was absolute. He did not even question that belief. Angie might prefer to run in the opposite direction but she could not, because the chains of loyalty to her brother were too heavy and too tight. In a few seconds she was going to step out of the lift into his waiting clutches, having dragged herself and those chains across London to get here. An hour after that she would be back in his bed, where she belonged, chains and all, he promised himself.

With that very satisfying moment to look forward to, Roque propped a shoulder up against the wall beside him, slid his hands into the pockets of his black silk trousers and watched as the lift doors slid open, revealing to him the wife he had not set eyes on in almost a year.

Slender and tall, dressed from neck to feet in dramatically unrelieved black, with her flame-bright hair spun in fiery tendrils around her once famous, extraordinarily beautiful, green-eyed, passionate-mouthed face.

Sensation shot across the gap towards him, generated by the highly charged mix of burning acrimony, icy defensiveness and a transparent spark of sexual alertness
that hit Roque with a hot stab of tingling provocation low down in his pelvis.

Angie just froze for a second, momentarily stunned by the shock of actually looking at him in the flesh.

She had spent the time it had taken the lift to bring her up twenty floors of luxury living charging up her defences in preparation for this moment, but as she stood staring across the gap separating them she was discovering she had no control whatsoever over the sudden accelerated punch of her heartbeat or the aching thickness that had taken a stranglehold on her throat.

And she knew the reason why she was suffering like this. For almost twelve long months she’d blocked Roque out as if he wasn’t a real person. If she’d thought about him at all it had been from within a thick fog. She was good at blocking out things she did not want to look at—had been doing it for most of her adult life. But this was bad, she recognised as her breathing stalled altogether. She had to fight hard to stop her feelings from showing on her face. She’d expected to feel nothing. She’d wanted him to leave her cold. It was almost grotesque to discover that far from feeling nothing she was feeling everything. The old fierce, unstoppable attraction, the sexual excitement stirring up her blood. Even the desperate, aching clutch of hurt was a feeling. It just wasn’t fair.

He was so tall he was intimidating, and that was saying something when she was no small thing herself. And the way he was standing across the lobby, backed by warm accent colours of brick-red and aubergine, framed by the soft lighting, he could have easily passed for a brooding, dark male model posing for a glossy photo shoot. His raven-black hair was wearing
a luxurious damp sheen to it, and the smooth gloss of his olive-toned skin highlighted the kind of cheekbones any male model would pay with their souls to possess.

As if someone was working her by remote control, she just couldn’t stop her eyes from drifting down his supremely elegant stance. His wide shoulders and long, powerful torso were encased in fine pale blue shirting, the top two buttons left undone to reveal a tantalising hint of the warm brown skin lurking beneath. Her mouth ran dry as she looked at that dark golden triangle. She tried not to give in and moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue. Dragging her gaze lower, she saw his hands were lost inside the silk lined pockets of his smooth black trousers—trousers that lovingly skimmed his taut narrow hips and his long, long powerful legs.

As her senses came alive like crazed vandals she knew what she was experiencing was all her own stupid fault.

She should not have blocked him out so thoroughly. Familiarity bred contempt. She should have made herself remember him in fine detail at least twice a day. She should have listed his assets—and he had a lot of them—then eventually she would have started finding a million faults. She’d witnessed this happen so many times in her line of business. One day you were right up there with the best of them, the next you’d suddenly grown a bigger nose, or your smile was no longer as alluring as they’d thought it was and your legs were too fat.

So where did she look to hunt down Roque’s physical faults? she asked herself.

‘Well, is everything still where it should be?’

The soft, slightly husky accented prompt brought
her eyes flickering back to his face. His half-hidden eyes were as black as midnight; a half-smile curved his wide, passionate mouth. The same half-smile she had been drawn towards from the first time she’d looked at him. The same hot, breathless sensation filled her now as powerfully as it had done back then.

Only this time it hurt to feel like that. This time she saw that beautiful mouth giving pleasure to another woman’s mouth. She saw those deep, dark long-lashed eyes warming for someone else.

Roque watched as she stiffened up like a slender column of concrete. He watched the darkened shimmer in her beautiful eyes fade to hurt, then chill to ice.

Something grabbed hold of his loins like a strongly clenched fist and anger flared deep in his chest. He wanted to go over there and grab hold of her by her tension-packed narrow shoulders and give her a damn good shake.

As if she knew what he was thinking defiance sparked—always that sharp, stinging sizzle of defiance came shooting back at him from this woman, if they were in the middle of a fight or making love. He watched her cute, almost pointed chin lift upwards, the way she pinched in the delicate corners of the beautiful mouth. Even the way she tossed her head back, sending the glorious weight of loose silky red spirals trembling back from her face, was a form of defiance.

‘I have absolutely nothing to say to you, Roque,’ she told him.

Roque allowed his lips to twist out a mocking smile, ‘No, I could sense that talking was not in your mind when you looked me over,
meu querida.’

Annoyed with herself for giving him the weapons to
fire off that taunting shot, Angie stepped out of the lift and into the lobby, which fed all those extra services this vast-sized apartment enjoyed—like the full-size swimming pool and the all-purpose gym, the glass-covered garden that had always reminded her of an exotic hothouse where she’d once done a shoot at Kew.

Angie walked towards him, glazing him out of focus and determined to keep him like that. He did not move a single muscle as she approached. Angie gauged the gap in the arch to one side of him to make sure she had enough room to pass through it without needing him to move out of her path.

She knew exactly where she was heading, so she made the long lines of dark teak flooring her runway. It was like falling off a bike, she discovered. Once you got back on the rest came naturally—even down to blocking her audience out.

Roque followed the long graceful glide of her body as she walked towards him. He knew what she was doing. He’d been handed this kind of treatment before. Angie could be irritatingly focused when she wanted to be, infuriatingly stubborn and tough. Once he had dared to believe he was marrying a sweet and innocently naive lost creature. A lonely child trapped inside a woman’s body because she’d never given herself the chance to properly grow up and taste life. He’d soon learnt that the stubborn child in Angie had a grip of steel. The simple truth of it was she didn’t want to be anything other than what she was.

Except in his bed, he reminded himself. In his bed, in his arms, she lost the will to fight him on every level—and so fast it was like watching driftwood catching light.

On that grim reminder as to where he intended this evening to end up, Roque allowed his gaze to drift over her again. She was wearing a short black raincoat, tightly cinched to her waist, and her amazing long legs were sheathed in matt black. She had on a pair of flat black ballet shoes that did nothing to diminish her elegant height, and a bright green bag he had not noticed before swung from one shoulder—one of those extravagantly sized bags that were the fashion right now, which she kept crushed to her side with a taut elbow as she walked.

The temptation to reach out and take it from her as she levelled with him curled his fingers into a light fist. The urge to pull her to a stop by placing his hands on her shoulders and then spin her around to make her acknowledge him properly stung like an itch he could not scratch. But he was curious as to what she thought she was up to, arriving early and then just walking past him as if she was the one of them in control here.

So, instead of spoiling her frankly impressive entrance, he turned to follow in her wake.

Angie cut a weaving line through the different cleverly designed living areas. She did not glance at the fabulous view to be enjoyed through the wall-to-wall windows. She did not glance up at the mezzanine gallery where the bedroom suites were situated. She was heading for the only room down here to have a solid door guarding it.

Roque’s study.

Her soft mouth set like a clamp as she turned the handle and pushed the door open, then felt an aching squeeze of emotion challenge her composure as she took
the first step into what she’d always thought of as his domain.

Everything in this room was as tastefully designed as the rest of this vast place, but in here was Roque’s personal stamp. A telltale glimpse at the deeply serious side to his complex personality displayed in the rows of lovingly collected first edition books lining the rows of shelving, and the heavy black leather recliner on which he liked to stretch out to read.

The only television set in the whole apartment rested wafer-thin and flat against a wall of burnt orange. Beneath it spread all the technology required to make it and his complex music system feed sound throughout the whole apartment. Then, of course, the usual computer and communication equipment had a place, as you would expect of a man as internationally structured as him.

But the desk—the big, hand-carved antique desk made of rich dark colonial rosewood he’d had shipped here from his family estate—stood dead centre of everything, making a major statement about his proud Portuguese roots. He could spend hours sitting at that desk, working with a concentration Angie had used to find unfathomably sexy. The cut of his wide shoulders as he leant forward, the sheen of light across his bent head, and his strong, handsome features etched by a depth of concentration that she.

Angie sucked in a breath, not wanting to go there. Not wanting to recall anything intimate about their time spent here together or the fact that there were times when they’d actually existed here in peace.

Yet, right on the back of that desire not to remember, she saw herself, curled up in his recliner with her cheek
supported on a cushion she’d filched from a living room sofa, slender white fingers idly twirling a ringlet of hair while she read one of her own meagre assortment of books.

Contentment … Her throat began to hurt. Bare pink toes curling and uncurling in time with the music playing softly in the background. A glass of wine and a snack within lazy reaching distance and her handsome dark man pooled in the desk light only a couple of metres away.

Her eyes dared to glaze with moisture for a second. Then she winked it away, drew in a breath, and made herself walk over to the desk.

She heard Roque pause in the doorway. The silence between them buzzed. He was curious, she knew that, waiting to discover what had brought her in here before he made any kind of comment.

But that was Roque—a master of strategic timing, Angie thought dryly as she set her bag down on the top of his desk, then began rummaging inside its capacious depths with a frowning ferocity that helped to keep her focused.

‘Okay, I will bite,’ he drawled lazily. ‘What are you doing?’

‘You should have known to lay off my brother,’ Angie responded. ‘You know you don’t have a single leg to stand on by threatening him with the police, because that credit card was mine.’

‘Linked to my personal bank account,’ he confirmed, moving closer.

‘Then you only have yourself to blame if you don’t like what I did with it. A wiser man would have cancelled it the same day I walked out.’

‘Strange,’ Roque said, ‘but I had this rather touching image of you cutting it into little pieces and then depositing the bits—ceremonially, of course—into some fiery hot furnace.’

Angie paused over what she was doing to wonder why she hadn’t thought of doing exactly that, instead of shutting the card away in a drawer.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ she said, ‘and now you know why I didn’t.’