After Their Vows (5 page)

‘I will tell you something, Angie,’ he continued, less harshly. ‘I think Alex craves to be taught that lesson. I saw the need burning in his eyes when we faced up to each other today. He hates me, but he would love to be me—why do you think he chose to gamble on the stockmarkets in this current financial climate, when only the hardy dare touch it? I am his role model. The only successful male role model he’s had any real contact with. He would have loved to have thrown the credit card and a stack of profited money at me and then told me to go to hell today.’

‘Instead you sent him to m-me, with his tail between his legs.’

‘Exactly where his tail deserved to be,’ Roque delivered without a hint of regret. ‘It was his first lesson in facing up to his actions.’

To her own surprise, Angie let out a strangled snatch of a laugh. ‘You would not be saying that if you’d heard what he had to say about you.’

‘I’m a big boy. I can take his insults.’

‘At a price.’ Angie slipped out of his grasp and moved away from him.

As if someone had cued the precise moment it was to happen, her phone starting ringing. Turning back to the bed, where she’d dropped her bag when she’d come in here, Angie hunted through it and came out with her mobile phone.

‘It’s Alex.’ She knew that it would be. ‘I promised to—’

‘Don’t answer it.’

About to connect with the call, Angie lifted her head up in shock. ‘But he—’

‘Let him stew.’

There was a stony cool in the way Roque said that which sent a chill chasing down Angie’s back. Her fingertip hovered over the appropriate button on the phone, but her gaze clung to Roque’s grim, hard and inflexible expression while she battled with a desire to defy his instruction and the helpless knowledge that he was right.

As if Roque had planned this whole wretched scene, a police car’s siren whined past her bedroom window as it sped down the street. In her hand her phone sang out its insistent melody, and her mouth began to tremble, her eyes began to sting.

On a hiss of impatience, as if he wasn’t happy at all about what he was going to do next, Roque reached out and took the phone from her. ‘I will talk to him.’

Was that supposed to make her feel better? ‘Please, Roque.’ Angie burst into speech. ‘Don’t—’

‘Pack that bag.’ He turned with her phone and strode out of her bedroom.

Left standing there, Angie listened as the ringing stopped, then Roque’s deep, smooth-accented voice murmured with excruciating casualness,
‘Boa tarde,
Alex. Your sister is busy right now. Can I be of help?’ before the bedroom door swung shut.

She packed an overnight bag with the mindless inefficiency of someone who did not care what she packed. She did not pack more than she needed for an overnight stay—refused to. Refused to think beyond this one horrible night.

By the time she’d hauled the holdall strap over her shoulder and scooped up her green bag, Roque was striding back into the bedroom again with the long, loose-limbed grace of a man in control of everything—even his body. Angie sizzled with the desire to take a swing at him with the heaviest bag and knock the over-confident devil off his self-assured plinth.

‘Ready to leave?’

Pressing her lips together, she said nothing, knowing if she opened her mouth at all she would be begging him to tell her what he’d said to her brother—and she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing how completely she felt she was dancing to his tune.

He reached out to lift her holdall off her shoulder, then really surprised her by offering her back her mobile phone.

‘Don’t you want to put it in your desk drawer alongside my chequebook?’ she asked him tartly.

‘Don’t put ideas in my head.’

Angie snatched the phone from him and plunged it to the bottom of the green bag. Roque did not bother to tell her he had switched it off before handing it back. Switched-off phones did not hand out temptation to use
them, and he wasn’t comfortably sure he had eased her brother’s panic.

He offered up information. ‘I have set up a meeting with Alex for tomorrow.’

Bright head tilted down, Angie cinched the belt even tighter to her tiny waist, as if the coat was a piece of armour she could use to protect herself from him.

No chance, Roque thought. ‘What happens at the meeting depends entirely on you,’ he added, soft and goading as a sharp fingernail being drawn down the skin of her back.

Shoving past him, she walked into the hallway, leaving him to grimace as he followed her outside. They drove back to his apartment in sizzling silence and entered it in silence. By then the time had gone way beyond midnight, and Angie felt as if she was about to drop where she stood. Turning around and almost bumping into Roque, because he was so close behind her, she kept her eyes firmly lowered from his hard, handsome face while she took her holdall from him.

‘Goodnight,’ she said, then walked off towards the stairs.

Once again Roque said nothing, and she dragged that nothing with her all the way up the staircase onto the mezzanine above. She’d already said her piece about their sleeping arrangements, she reminded herself stubbornly. It did not need repeating.

She did not look down to where she knew he stood, watching her every single step of the way. She refused to give the ever-present tears she could feel pushing at the back of her throat room to vent. She chose a bedroom as far away from their old shared bedroom as she could possibly put herself. Dropping her bags down on the
chaise at the end of the bed, she unzipped the holdall, fished out a set of hastily packed pink silk pyjamas and her soap bag, then headed for the bathroom.

Ten minutes later she was crawling beneath a fluffy white duvet with her mind turned into a stubborn blank.

Ten minutes after that Roque trod silently into the same bedroom and came to stand looking down at her, a wry, slightly regretful expression on his face.

She was just a curled-up mound beneath the duvet, topped by a glossy mass of copper curls spread out behind her on the pillow, and she was well and truly out for the count. Watching the gentle rise and fall of her breathing, he wondered what kind of rat would want to disturb her from such a deep slumber.

This rat, he answered his own question. There was no way he was going to ease up on Angie in this new order of things he had mapped out.

Drawing his hands out of the pockets of his bathrobe, he bent down and gently scooped her and the duvet up into his arms. She stirred with a complaining sigh which sent him still for a second, his arms tensing in readiness for a fight. But she just settled more comfortably into his shoulder, and he got his first good look at her sleeping face. A rush of feeling sank down through his torso as he gazed at her softly parted lips. The urge to dip his head and claim that mouth almost got the better of him—until he grimly curbed the urge and turned instead to head out of the room.

Angie felt as if she was floating. She felt warm and comfy and safe. She turned her head so she could nuzzle the pillow, and dreamed she was nuzzling Roque’s warm throat.

That dream again, she thought with a sigh, and then dreamed up the soft hiss that Roque always used to let her know he was becoming aroused. One day, she vowed, she would find someone else to dream about who would wipe Roque de Calvhos clean out of her head.

Then she shivered as her floating body touched down onto something cool and the duvet was summarily stripped away, bringing her awake with a start. Her eyes flew open, hot and gritty. She threw a sleepily confused glance down the length of the bed, where the duvet now lay neatly folded beneath her feet. Bewildered as to how it had got there, Angie stretched down to grab it. She had just managed to haul it up to her chin when a sound sent her head twisting on the pillow to discover that Roque was standing right there beside the bed, calmly stripping off a navy blue robe.

Heart banging against her ribs, ‘What do you think you are doing in here?’ she tossed at him.

‘C
OMING
to bed,’ Roque murmured impassively.

Angie clutched the duvet all the tighter. ‘Not with me, you’re not!’

His response was to cast the robe aside with the casual grace of silent intent. He was wearing nothing beneath it, not a single solitary stitch, and was so absolutely carelessly at home with his naked beauty he just stood there and let her look her fill.

Angie’s mouth dried up. The helpless need to reacquaint herself with every familiar contour sent her eyes drinking in every glossy square inch. The satin bronze power in his wide shoulders. The sleek bulging biceps in his upper arms. She made a sweeping scan of the steel-plate formation of his hair-peppered torso down to the corded bowl of his narrow hips to where he didn’t even care that he was displaying the rampant fullness of his arousal. A fire lit down deep in her belly, and she wriggled her bottom and clutched more tightly on the duvet.

‘Y-you agreed,’ she whispered.

‘I agreed to nothing,’ he denied, flipping up the duvet with the clear intention of climbing beneath it.

Angie whipped across to the other side of the bed
like a sidewinder. It was as she did so that she noticed the other duvet, lying in a fluffy mound of white on the floor, and belatedly took in her surroundings.

‘You moved me!’ she gasped.

‘You sleep where I sleep.’ Stretching out beside her, he yawned widely, then spread out an arm to douse the light. ‘Now, be quiet and go to sleep. I’m shattered.’

He
was shattered? Angie had not been awake past ten o’clock for months, and her head was spinning with exhaustion. Throwing herself around to glare at him while he made himself comfortable, she considered climbing back out of the bed again, then changed her mind. She was so tired her legs felt as if they’d been pinned to the mattress by lead weights. She could barely keep her gritty eyes open, and she had a dull, aching thump happening in her head. And if she did get up she knew he would only bring her back again.

On a sound of disgust, she yanked a pillow out from beneath her head and rammed it down the middle of the bed. ‘If your skin so much as touches my skin, even accidentally while you sleep, I will give you another thick lip,’ she threatened, thumping her remaining pillow before dropping her head down on it.

A stunning silence followed that declaration. Angie shut her eyes tight and built fabulous images behind her closed eyelids of her suddenly gaining super-human strength and knocking out the over-muscled, over-endowed brute. It was such a very satisfying fantasy that she kept it running over and over, in the hopes that she would dream about it all night.

Then Roque dared to laugh. ‘One touch from me and you would break up into hot little pieces.’ His taunting drawl came across the pillow.

‘In your dreams,’ Angie mumbled.

‘You never could resist me,’ he insisted. ‘You are like this iced-in little flame on the outside, but on the inside you’ve always been so hot for me it’s like an extra pulse-beat, throbbing incessantly in your blood. I only have to look at you and you’re dead meat, Angie. I am your sexual master—always have been.’

That self-promoting statement brought her lurching into a sitting position, pushing her tangled hair back from her face. ‘Well, you conceited swine,’ she heaved out. ‘Do you really believe that you are the only man to ever make me feel like that? ‘ She turned her head to look down at him through the darkness. ‘You do, don’t you?’ She caught the mocking glint in his eyes. ‘You genuinely believe that because you were my first lover I couldn’t possibly want to make love with any other man. Well, I have news for you, Roque. I moved on—just like you did.’

The glinting eyes took on a dangerous aspect. Lying through her teeth had never come easy to Angie, but, gosh, it was worth it to see that glint.

‘And you can quit looking at me like that,’ she told him.

‘Like what?’ he questioned softly.

Angie felt a sudden need to anchor the duvet tight around her chest. ‘Like I’m talking dirty,’ she enlightened him, then added a scornful little laugh. ‘Yet you’re the one with the serial sexual record. No wonder you have such a bad playboy image. You earned it recording notches on your bedpost of which I was only one.’

‘Is that so?’ he breathed, barely distinctly.

In full aggrieved flow now, Angie nodded her tumbled
head before throwing herself back against the pillow. ‘Exclusive you are
not.’

‘So you decided to follow my example and take a few lovers or your own? Is that what you are telling me? ‘

Even through the darkness Angie could read the level of threat contained in his tone well enough to fling herself onto her side, as far away from him as she could get.

‘I would need to be taking sex-enhancing drugs to follow
your
example.’ She thumped her remaining pillow again and then resettled her head. ‘All I’m saying is don’t put yourself on a sexual pedestal of my making. I’ve been around now. I’ve known better and worse lovers than you, so—’

He moved so fast that even though she had been half expecting it he still drew a choky cry from her at the speed with which she found herself pinned flat on her back.

‘Better than me?’ he scythed out.

‘Well … hello, Mr Ego,’ Angie drawled as his angry breath warmed her face.

His glinting eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me you are lying to me.’

Angie arched perfectly formed dusky brown eyebrows and said nothing.

‘You are out for revenge. You are trying to score points.’

‘Not finding it nice to have your prowess compared with others,
querido?’

Roque shifted against her, and somehow managed to make her legs part enough to accommodate the pressure of his hips.

It was okay, Angie assured herself. The duvet was
between them. He still wasn’t touching her skin. His warmth seeped through the barrier, though, as did the lurking evidence of his hard male potency pressing against the soft apex of her legs. He was supporting his weight on his forearms. Hard-muscled biceps shone in the dimness, displaying a physical strength that echoed the power built into his chest. And his long fingers hovered a small centimetre away from her cheeks, teasing her with the threat of capturing her face, so the skin there prickled and tingled in readiness.

And she was hot, feeling stifled by the duvet and by the heat coming from him. Eyes as black as jet held onto her defiant green ones, showing enough of a glitter to tell her he was not at all happy with the way this particular battle had taken shape. Now he was waiting for her to say something else foolish, so he could react.

But what he really wanted her to do was to confess that she’d been lying.

‘You’re heavy,’ she told him.

‘You love to feel my weight bearing down on you,’ he came back, soft as air. ‘You like to feel overwhelmed by me so you can have an excuse to let go of everything. Did your other lovers not recognise this?’

Angie moistened her lips, dried by his warm breath, and didn’t answer.

‘Frustrating for you, was it,
minha doce,
not having your special needs catered for?’ he goaded, shifting that oh-so sexy mouth even closer to hers. ‘In your desire to knock me off my pedestal were you driven to closing your eyes and opening your legs for these many new lovers?’

‘Don’t be so disgusting,’ she mumbled absently, engrossed in watching his lips move.

That wide, passionate mouth stretched. ‘I could have you crawling all over me in seconds,’ Roque taunted. ‘Before you could draw in a single breath you would be making those soft, anxious whimpers of pleasure while you tasted me. Ice-cool Angie you were
not
in my bed,
querida.
You were a sexy, slinky, greedy little wanton with only one goal in mind: having me deep inside you and driving you out of your head.’

Angie’s eyes were almost closed. She was trying so hard not to let his huskily delivered taunts spark a response from her. But her body was not playing. Her body was stirring up every sense she possessed.

As if he knew it, Roque shifted on her slightly, and the tips of her breasts stung as they sprang into tight, tingling pinpricks of feeling against the tautly stretched duvet. Gently but surely he pressed his hips downwards, and the greater contact with her thighs made them start to pulse. And still his fingers continued to hover a hair’s breadth from her cheeks. Still his mouth maintained that tiny tantalising gap above hers.

‘Come on, Angie, say something,’ he encouraged. ‘Describe how these many lovers matched up to me.’

Mutely, Angie shook her head.

Roque sucked some air.
‘Were
there any other lovers?’

‘You deserve there to have been a thousand other lovers!’ she burst out, without knowing she was going to say it.

And that was it—the moment she lost it. The anguished force of her response sent her lips brushing against his, and sparks flew as the volcano of feeling burning inside her just blew its top. She dragged an arm free of the duvet so she could punch him. Roque
muttered something as he ducked his head, then captured her mouth with a full-on, hot, driving kiss. With a whimper like those he had just described, Angie hit out at him again, and kept on hitting him—and kissed him back like a wild, reckless wanton.

But she was sobbing while she kissed him. She was writhing and gasping and still hating him. He crushed her into the mattress and scorched her with the ferocity of his own burning passion, until her hands went from punching him to clutching at his hair instead, her hot angry tongue spearing urgently between his lips.

Shattered by her own surrender, Angie found she could not contain what she’d let loose. It was as if twelve long months of grievous hurt just tumbled out of her. She felt wild with pleasure, and furiously angry at the same time. Hot, needle-sharp pricks of excitement set her fingers anxiously kneading his scalp. She could feel the heavy beat of his heart through the duvet and her limbs were melting. The thickness of his arousal was a blatant pleasure force he used to encourage her thighs even wider apart.

When he raised his head she found she was panting like a sprinter. His ridiculously dark eyes leapt with burning flames, his deep chest heaving, his teeth gleaming white in the darkness between his hot pulsing lips.

‘Were there any other lovers?’ he repeated the question.

Wanting that mouth back on her mouth—needing it there— ‘No,’ she squeezed out.

He threw himself away from her, rolling back across to the other side of the bed. Angie just lay there in a state of shocked numbness, stunned that he could just stop
like that, but more appalled at how easily he had turned her into this shivering, quivering sensual wreck.

Then he really deepened her humiliation by picking up the pillow she’d shoved between them and repositioning her pathetic barrier as if it was himself he was trying protect now.

‘Go to sleep,’ he rasped, before he slid onto his side with his back towards her.

Angie rolled onto her side too, opening a gap between the two of them that made the silly barrier superfluous in a bed as big as this. Her eyes were burning with unshed tears, and she wondered if this was the point where she finally let them escape. She knew deep inside she had asked for everything Roque had just dealt out to her. She’d challenged his ego, poured scorn on his masculinity, and derided his prowess as a lover. Having satisfactorily reclaimed all three of those things, he was now content to fall asleep.

Taut as coiled wire, curled up in a ball, she pushed a hand up against her quivering lips and closed her eyes tightly, working very hard to make sure he did not feel the tremors shaking the bed. She would get up in a minute, she told herself. She would wait until the rotten, faithless, cruel brute had fallen asleep, then she would go back to the other bedroom and this time lock the door so he couldn’t get in …

She dreamed of locked doors and the helpless constraints of imprisonment as if someone had locked her in. Anxious, restless, she had no idea that she was whispering little pleas into the darkness, begging to be set free. When she uttered a small sob, Roque gave up on lying there watching her, removed the pillow from between them, and gently drew her into the middle of
the bed. She curled into him as if she was hunting for safety, and whispered his name against his throat.

Angie slept straight through until morning, when she came awake with a jittery start as if something or someone had woken her up. Remembering exactly where she was arrived half a second later, launching her into a sitting position as full recall of the night’s events flooded into her head.

Pushing her hair back from her face, she swivelled a wary glance at the other side of the bed. It was empty. Relief quivered through her—followed by a burst of fury aimed entirely at herself, for falling asleep here when she’d meant to hot-foot it out of this bedroom and lock herself into the other one.

What time was it?

A glance at her watch sent her diving out of bed. She should have been walking into work as of now! Rushing out of the room and down the mezzanine landing to the other bedroom, she headed directly for the bathroom, and only thought about Roque’s meeting with her brother when she was standing beneath the shower.

Had he already left?

Quickly drying herself, she grabbed the bathrobe hanging up behind the door and dragged it on as her bare feet took her back out onto the landing and down the stairs. Last night’s dinner things had been cleared away, she saw as she crossed to the kitchen—then came to a thoroughly disconcerted halt.

A complete stranger stood elbow-deep in washing up suds—a long, tall, curvy-shaped stranger, with short floppy blonde hair, wearing jeans and bright pink sneakers to match her bright pink tight, stretchy top. When
she turned around Angie saw she had big baby blue eyes and a lush heart-shaped mouth.

‘Oh, good morning, Mrs de Calvhos.’ The lush mouth broke into a melting smile. ‘I’m Molly Stewart,’ she introduced herself. ‘I come in here each day to clean up.’

Roque employed a blonde bombshell as a daily cleaner? Suspicion as to Molly’s real role here slunk like poison through Angie’s blood. What had happened to old Mrs Grant?