After Their Vows (9 page)

‘Sweet heaven,’ he breathed, ‘you have gained curves.’

He started moving towards her, the burning heat in his dark gaze putting Angie into a panic as she fought to pull on the robe—only to discover that the sleeves had somehow become twisted inside out.

‘It’s a bit late for that,
meu amante.’
Reaching out to take the tangled robe from her scrambling fingers, he dropped it back to the floor.

Angie squeezed her naked thighs together and wished every hair follicle down there wasn’t tingling like mad. He was standing so close to her she could feel the warm damp heat coming off him, smell the clean sharpness of his soap.

‘You—you said you wanted to talk,’ she reminded him, stretching out a hand towards the voluminous nightdress.

Roque caught the hand and brought it up to his mouth. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘W-well you did—and stop that.’ She pulled her hand free. ‘I n-need to …’

She lost track of what she had been going to say when he took a step closer. Instinct sent Angie falling back a step, and she came up against the drawer unit with a bump. Roque just continued to follow her, with the unremitting certainty of a man who knew exactly what was going to happen next. One of his hands lifted up, open-palmed, with long brown fingers aiming purposefully for the indentation of her waist. When he touched
her skin she quivered, and he smiled and just kept on coming, until his hips came to settle against hers.

‘Roque …’ she said, meaning to follow it up with a protest, but he got in first. Low, dark and somber.

‘Sim, minha dolce,
it is I.’

He sounded so grim again suddenly that Angie forgot to protest and frowned up at him instead. ‘You—you’re still angry with me,’ she murmured unevenly.

‘I am not angry with you.’

He showed her with the nudge of his hips exactly what he was. The towel folded around his hips was damp, but it did not detract from the burgeoning force Angie could feel making itself felt. Releasing a soft gasp was all she had time to do before he lowered his dark head and captured her mouth, beginning to explore it with a slow, deep, coaxing sensuality. His other hand arrived at her shoulder, gently urging her forward until their upper bodies met.

Trying to fight the kiss, the bold nudge of his erection, and now the feel of her breasts pressing against his warm skin, Angie pulled her head back and looked into the smouldering depths of his eyes. No matter what he’d said, he
was
still angry, she saw. Frowning, she parted her lips to say so, but he just drove his tongue between the gap, and followed it up with the hungry pressure of his mouth.

With a helpless groan she squirmed against him, trying to fight the helpless meltdown she could feel taking place inside. His long fingers spanned her narrow waistline. He used them to press her up against him. He kissed her until her lips were hot and swollen, and he felt her meltdown start to show itself in the slackening of her tension.

‘Tell me you want me,’ he instructed, seducing her heated lips with the words.

Angie folded her fingernails into the solid satin bulge of his biceps and pushed, trying to give herself some space.

‘I
will
make you say it,’ he warned, when she snapped her lips shut.

‘You won’t,’ she responded unsteadily, staring with defiance into the burning dark certainty blazing from his eyes.

Raising a hand to clasp her nape, he tilted her head back, then with a precision that set her gasping bent his dark head and closed his mouth over one small, firm pointed breast. A hot stab of pure sensation spun down the front of her body, and she released a wild choking gasp. Her fingernails dug deeper into his skin so she could maintain her balance as raw, unbridled pleasure lost her the will to put up more of a fight. Her defences crashed and burned on a swirling eddy of thick hot craving. She groaned out his name, then lifted her hips into fierce contact with his. She felt his heartbeat quicken, felt the intoxicating throb of pure male muscle swell and harden at the contact.

She wanted him. Angie finally admitted it. She wanted
this
—Roque standing over her, making her feel small and delicate and fragile with his all-encompassing superiority in height, his strength, his everything. Her fingers left his arms to graze over his taut satin shoulders, and eventually curled into his wet, clean-scented scalp so she could lift up his head.

Their eyes clashed for a split second—his lit by flames, hers alive with emerald lights. She was panting. He looked ferociously turned on.

‘Yes,’ she said, that was all, and he claimed her waiting mouth.

She kissed him back with the same heated urgency, clinging to him as he ran his hands down her body, shaping her ribcage, the indentation of her waist and the swell of her hips. When the towel disappeared she arched towards him with the instincts of a wanton, going in search of contact with the fierce glory of his erection. The breath left his mouth on a silken hiss and he clamped a hand around one of her thighs and lifted it, arrogant in the way he wrapped it around his waist.

He was going to take her right here up against the drawers, with no preliminaries, and she wanted him to. She didn’t need preliminaries. She was so ready for him, and it was like Roque had described it—an extra pulse beat through her blood. She wanted him to lose his head and sink himself into her to the hilt.

And he knew it too. She could see the knowledge in his eyes as he drew back from the kiss to look at her. He hovered, proud against her, hot and hard, looking down at her, allowing her to press soft, urgent, needy kisses to his lips and his face.

‘Say it.’

Angie released a strangled laugh, because it was crazy that he still needed to hear her say it when she was already close to coming in a shivering, quivering, static-spangled rush.

Tightening her grip on his head, she pulled his mouth down onto hers with a hungry and hot sensuous passion that should give him his answer.

Muttering something deep in his throat, he took charge of the kiss—and of Angie. He lifted her up and
wrapped her other leg around him, then carried her into the bedroom and to the bed.

Her hands became restless on his body—searching, greedy. When he started teasing her with slow moist kisses to her eyes, her nose, the sensitive hollows beneath her ears, she curled in closer in such a needy way that he uttered a mocking husky laugh.

Then he speared his fingers into her hair and bent his dark head to claim her mouth again, exalted by the grateful little whimper that rolled around her throat.
Mine,
he thought with simmering triumph, even if she did not want to be his. And with a long, smooth, possessive stroke of his hand along her body he made her quiver and writhe.

As if she knew what he’d been thinking, she said, ‘I hate it that you can do this to me!’

‘And I love it that I can do this to you,’ Roque came right back.

Then he transferred his kisses to her neck, the swelling slopes of her breasts, and Angie forgot what they were talking about because she knew what was coming. She just clung to him, and the wait was unbearable as he plied hot, moist, grazing kisses over every inch of her flesh. His hands caressed where his lips were not reaching, layering sensation over sensation with the clever use of his hands and his mouth. When he finally gave her what she was craving for and dipped a finger between her thighs she just went completely still.

Roque lifted his head to watch the glaze of desire swim across the sensual glow of her eyes and see her breathing slow right down. His own heated response flooded his bloodstream as her silken wetness enfolded his touch. He reached up to touch his lips to hers, and
she raised long and dusky eyelashes so she could look at him in trancelike sensuality.

‘You love this, hmm,
querida?’
he husked.

She could not find the voice to reply. She just lifted up her fingers to trace his exotic cheekbones, warmed by desire. He was so beautiful to look at her heart ached. The fingertip delicacy of his touch was so instinctively perfect she experienced its pleasure through every pore. When he lowered his head to kiss her again she melted into it in the same luxurious way she had melted elsewhere.

It didn’t stay like that for long, though. Like the beautiful calm before the raging storm, he wanted more— and he knew how to extract it. His kisses grew more demanding, his caressing fingers extracting a taut restlessness from her that set her panting and needing more. Her hands were moving all over him, touching, stroking, reclaiming each ripple of pleasure he experienced, each low, dark, husky groan. He bent to suck her tight aching breasts, and she closed the long thick power of his erection in both of her hands. It swelled for her, pulsing like a separate living thing, nudging her hip and demanding more from her—which she gave. And she felt the fluttering quickening in her body, felt her senses come alive in a vibrant rush that brought them tingling to the surface of her skin. Their mouths became a hot fuse of hunger again and again and again, until she could stand it no longer,

‘Roque,’ she breathed desperately. ‘Please …’

He reclaimed her mouth with the silken fire of his darting tongue, and continued to trace the hot, vulnerable flesh between her thighs, dipping inside her, then frustratingly out again, finding and stimulating the tiny
hidden nub and circling it until she flailed in a storm of excited frustration. He sucked her nipples with a ruthlessly determined urgency that had her fingers releasing him to clutch his hair, where they stayed, helpless and useless other than to cling, because her brain and her senses were being consumed in other places.

‘Please, Roque, please …’ she heard herself begging in a thick, tight, anxious little voice. Then, ‘Oh …’ She arched her spine at a streak of glorious pleasure. ‘Do that again …’

He did do it again, and again, driving her into that white-hot mindless place where only his touch mattered. The heat of his breath was on her skin, and the dark rasp of words muttered in his own language as he urged her towards that agonised peak and almost right over it. Then, with the timing of an absolute master, he came over her and took her flailing over that peak with his first long, driving stroke.

It was like coming alive after a year lost in limbo. Angie came all around him in tense, hot rippling waves that increased in power with each plunge. He was hot and hard and increasingly urgent. He kept kissing her mouth, then her throat, then her shoulder, driving her crazy, because each heated touch was like a torment that did not last long enough.

He pushed the hair back from her face and commanded, ‘Open your eyes.’

Angie obeyed without a single thought that he meant anything more than to add yet another dimension to what was happening between them. Breathless, panting, eyes dark green pools of desire, she looked into his deep dark gaze and saw the flickering flames of anger a split second before he rasped harshly, ‘Say farewell to your
fine moral principles, Angie.’ And with a final long, plundering stroke tossed her, shocked, confused, shatteringly bewildered, into the spinning world of ecstatic release.

Afterwards she felt as if she was dropping down from a very high place onto stony ground. Her body still throbbed all around him. The power of her release still sounded like a scream in her head. Roque was heavy on top of her, and the evidence that he was taking this long to find his breath was a small kind of comfort to the way he had just deliberately demolished her.

She wanted to move, but she did not want to prompt him into saying anything else.
Say farewell to your fine moral principles, Angie …
That had been a big enough bludgeon to beat her with. She’d vowed she wouldn’t have sex with him, now she’d done it, and Roque had wanted to make sure that she
knew
she had done it.

He moved finally, lifting himself up on his forearms and raising his head from the warm damp hollow of her throat. He looked at her. She looked at him. Nothing— not even a glimmer of emotion passed between the two of them.

Then, with a grimace, he slid off her—and the moment he did so Angie snaked off the bed. Tears were threatening, but she refused to give in to them. She tried her best to walk in a straight line towards the archway which led into her dressing room and bathroom, but she felt so light-headed and dizzy she was afraid her legs were going to buckle beneath her.

‘Retribuiç
ã
o,
‘ he fed after her impassively. ‘It means retribution,’ he enlightened.
‘My
retribution. I did not sleep with Nadia.’

A
NGIE
stilled like a frozen icicle topped by a flaming river of fire.

‘The tabloids misinterpreted what they saw,’ he extended in a cold, flat voice. ‘So you owe me, Angie, for twelve lousy months of being labelled a faithless playboy husband. Now you will never know what I’ve been doing and who I’ve been doing it with since you walked out on me.’

‘So that—just now—was your idea of revenge?’ she said without turning.

‘I felt I was due something.’

Angie nodded her flame-bright head. ‘Then I hope it gave you … satisfaction,’ she murmured, and started walking again.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ He sounded so sardonic she almost turned and ran back across the room to give him what he really should be getting—which was a slap across his heartless face! But she didn’t. She was too hurt and cold and—worse than both of those things— too revolted with herself for giving in to him in the first place.

‘As you said to me yesterday, this is a different time and a different set of issues. I thought we were trying
to rebuild something here—not trying to demolish it completely. Silly me.’ She even managed a laugh, albeit a bitter one. ‘I should have remembered your ruthless streak.’

‘Did you hear what I said?’ He sounded irritated now. ‘I did
not
sleep with Nadia.’

Angie breathed short and tensely. ‘Does
she
know that?’

She started walking again, and actually managed to reach the opening archway before he spoke. ‘You still don’t believe me about Nadia.’

It wasn’t a question. Reluctant though she was to do it, Angie turned to look at him, and was surprised to discover that he’d moved without her hearing him, and now stood in the opening to his own dressing room. It felt kind of ironic that they both stood naked, with the rumpled spread of the bed between them giving evidence of what they had just shared. For they might as well both be fully dressed and facing each other across a courtroom she felt so coldly indifferent to him now.

‘I liked you better when you did not resort to lying to shore up your bruised ego,’ she told him. ‘I saw you, you see—with my own eyes. So coming up with such a weak story now is just a bit sickening to me.’

She should have walked away then, because it had been such a good exit line, but she didn’t move. She stayed to watch the frown darken his hard, handsome face.

‘You cannot have seen what did not happen.’

Well, she had. ‘I came back that night,’ she enlightened him. ‘I got halfway to Alex’s school, then changed my mind. I realised you were right. I had to stop putting him first and start thinking about us. So I got my driver
to turn around and bring me back to London—to the club …’

She could still see it all, as if it had happened yesterday. Still feel the same clutch of anxiety as she’d stepped into the nightclub. It had been a friend of Roque’s birthday. He’d invited a whole group of them to help him celebrate it. Julian someone-or-other—she couldn’t recall the rest of his name right now. Not that it mattered.

‘I saw you with Nadia.’

He’d gone so still now Angie wondered if he had stopped breathing. She certainly had, but there was nothing unusual in that for her when she allowed herself to recall the scene that had murdered her marriage. And by his taut silence she knew Roque was right there with her, seeing what she must have seen then. The tiny lowlit dance floor. The slow smoochy dance. Nadia with her arms wrapped around his neck, swaying against him. Roque using his hands to hold her close.

‘She was all over you, and you were loving it.’

‘No.’ He denied that.

‘You were loving it, Roque! Do you think I can’t tell when you’re aroused?’

‘I was not aroused!’

‘You were kissing her! ‘ Angie was charged up like a stoked fire. ‘Your hands were clamped to her backside! I watched the pair of you sway to the music and I would have to be really stupid not to know you were
both
only half a step away from having sex on the bloody dance floor!’

‘Don’t swear,’ he growled, frowning fiercely now.

‘I saved myself the indignity of being noticed and got out of there as fast as I could!’ Angie careered on. ‘I went to Carla’s and stayed there the night. She woke
me the next morning with a stack of tabloids showing you and Nadia
still
wrapped around each other, entering her apartment block!’

‘She was drunk.’

Angie sucked in a fire-eating breath of air.

‘I did not have sex with her—’

‘Don’t lie!’ she yelled at the top of her voice.

‘She was drunk—high on something anyway!’ he fired right back at her. ‘I took her home and dumped her safely inside her apartment. Then—I—left!’ he punched out like a violent fist. ‘I went
home
and sat up all night, waiting for my
wife
to come home!’

If Angie thought
she
was angry fit to burst, Roque had now hit the same furious place.

‘But you did not come back. So I started ringing people! Your brother’s school had not seen you. Carla told me that
she
had not seen you!’ He threw out an arm in disgust. ‘How damn cruel was that? She knew we’d had a row because I told her! I was
worried
about you! Then the newspapers happened. But
still
I trusted you to come home to me, Angie. To give me a chance to explain myself! You denied me that right! You judged and condemned me without a damn hearing, then flounced off out of the firing line for months without anyone knowing where you had gone. So I deserved my moment of retribution,
minha esposa,’
he insisted harshly. ‘And you know what? The way you are standing there, willing to listen to me now, infuriates me even more—because it has come twelve months too late! ‘

On that final stinging volley he strode into his dressing room. Ten seconds later Angie blinked as she heard his bathroom door slam shut.

Pushing her tangled hair back from her face with
trembling fingers, she let a choky shrill laugh break free from her throat.

They’d just had their fiercest row yet while standing there stark naked. How crazily bizarre was that?

Reeling around, she walked into her own dressing room. Then, because anger was still fizzing around inside her, she walked into her bathroom and slammed
her
door shut.

Was he telling her the truth?
Could
he be telling the truth?

No, she refused to believe it—could not dare to believe it. Because it would make her hidden months of misery such a cruel, hard waste.

She was about to step beneath the shower when she realised she didn’t want one. Like someone struggling to stay riding on the crest of a storm tossed wave, she reeled around yet again and went back the way she had come.

The bed looked like a war zone, and for some hazy reason she set about remaking it while her thoughts and her feelings tumbled around her insides.

Then she stopped.

Well, where
were
your fine moral principles, Angie? she asked herself suddenly. You just let him make hot, passionate love to you in this very bed when you still believed that he’d cheated on you.

Her prowling restlessness sent her back into the dressing room, where she saw her bathrobe and Roque’s towel lying in a snowy-white heap on the polished wood floor. Stooping to pick them up, she straightened, hugging the towelling to her and instantly inhaling the scent of Roque’s soap. Tears started to push at the muscles in her throat.

If he’d been telling her the truth then he
had
deserved his moment of retribution, she forced herself to acknowledge.

And she’d deserved to be on the cruel end of it.

Twelve long, lonely months that need not have—

Then she suddenly remembered something that stopped that train of thought abruptly in its tracks.

Who the heck did he think he was trying to kid here?

Spinning around in a full circle, she scanned the room looking for where whoever had unpacked for her had placed her Harrods bag. She couldn’t see it. Frustration rose up to mix with the hurt and anger already foaming in her blood. Dropping the robe and towel, she made for the nearest hanging space and dragged a long black jumper off its hanger, yanked it on over her head.

Roque was just coming out of his bathroom when she arrived in the opening, a fresh towel wrapped around his hips. He saw her and froze.

‘I want to know where my bag is,’ she said.

The on the face of it harmless request made him blink. Roque stared at her for a couple of seconds—at the way she was standing there in a baggy black sweater that reached halfway down her fabulous long legs, at the way she’d folded her arms across her front—before lifting his eyes to view the way her eyes were sparking green ice at him. He was glad he was wearing a towel to hide what his reaction was.

‘I don’t have a clue,’ he answered indifferently.

‘Well, I couldn’t find it when I just looked for it, and I know it went into the back of the Range Rover because I saw it go in—a Harrods bag,’ she described. ‘It has my things in it. If you don’t have it, then—’ she flung out
a hand before folding it back beneath her breasts again ‘—ring someone and find out what’s been done with it.’

Intrigued, despite not wanting to be, Roque went for a dismissive shrug and strode across to his own wall of hanging space, picked a tee shirt at random and pulled it on over his head. ‘The staff will have gone off duty by now. It’s late. Go to bed. We will find it in the morning.’

‘I want my stuff now,’ Angie stated stubbornly.

‘Well, you can’t have it now!’ he fired back.

He dropped the towel and pulled on a pair of jeans. Angie got a brief glimpse of bronzed muscular flanks, and hated it that certain muscles stung and pulsed.

Without another word she turned and walked away again, back around the bed and into her own dressing room, where she began an angry, noisy search for the Harrods bag. A few minutes later he arrived in the opening, looking tall, dark and dangerous in jeans and a white tee shirt, with his hair still ruffled and a scowl on his too-handsome face.

Ignoring him, Angie continued with what she was doing.

‘Explain why you need the bag,’ he invited abruptly.

Rummaging through a drawer, she slammed it shut and opened the next one. ‘I want my phone.’

‘Leaving me again, Angie?’ Roque sighed out. ‘Hoping to call a cab? This is not London. Cabs don’t turn up in five minutes around here.’

‘If I was intending to leave you I would have just gone—walked back to Lisbon if I had to.’ Straightening up, she lanced him an icicle glance. ‘I can’t leave,’ she added, moving on to check out the bottom of the
wardrobes. ‘I have to consider my brother’s well-being. I want my phone so I can make you stop telling such big lies to me.’

Roque’s attention was truly caught now, and this time his frown was not angry but confused. ‘I do not understand.’

‘I know you don’t.’

She found the bag then, hidden behind a pair of long black winter boots, and bent to snatch it up. Crossing to the wall-to-wall dressing table, she tipped the contents out onto the top, found her mobile phone, and started hitting buttons as she walked over to where he stood.

‘Listen,’ she said, handing the phone to him, and then stood waiting for him to do as she’d said. She didn’t look at his face. She didn’t care what he was thinking or feeling or—anything. She just waited, with her lips sucked in at the corners to stop them from trembling, knowing exactly what he was listening to.

Nadia herself, confirming the truth about that night twelve months ago. Nadia taunting Angie with it via voicemail, describing all the other nights she and Roque had spent together while Angie had been out of the way.

She knew without looking up at him when the message had finished. She waited, without allowing herself the relief of swallowing the thick lump that had formed in her throat, for him to lower the phone from his ear.

‘I saved it as evidence,’ she told him. ‘In case I decided I could take the humiliation of letting my lawyers listen to it for use in evidence for our div— If you’re deleting it,’ she broke off to say, when his fingers started hitting buttons, ‘then I should tell you I’ve downloaded a copy elsewhere.’

‘Angie—’

‘As you said,’ she cut right across him. ‘We are doing this twelve months too late.’

Snatching the phone back, she turned and walked away from him.

‘She is lying,
meu querida,’
he insisted wearily. ‘It—none of what she said happened except inside her own twisted head.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters any more.’ She laid the phone down on the heap of other things she’d tipped from the bag. ‘If you’re telling me the truth then you’ve just had your payback. If Nadia is telling the truth I suppose I had mine when I kicked you out of my life.’

Wrapping her arms around the jumper, she turned and made herself look at him. He looked—stunned. Maybe even a bit shaken and pale. Crazy, she thought, how seeing him stripped of his usual arrogance made her insides start to shake.

‘Now you are back …’

Not liking the way he said that, Angie frowned. She had a feeling he was thinking out loud rather than speaking to her. He even blinked slowly, as if to refocus, and then she watched him take in a short breath.

‘You know something, Angie? I think I am ashamed of you,’ he said, so unexpectedly that he made her blink. He grimaced and went to turn away, then changed his mind and swung back again. ‘I am your husband!’ he launched at her. ‘Yet you preferred to believe that!’ He slashed a contemptuous glance at her mobile. ‘The ravings of a mean-minded bad loser out to cause trouble between us, rather than give me the right to defend myself!’

‘I saw the newspapers—’

‘And received a bitchy message—which, seemingly, you have hugged to yourself like a hair shirt ever since!’

She turned pale, because there was an indefensible slice of truth in that harsh statement. ‘Y-you’d already told me you were going to find someone else to take my place. You—’

‘And you,
querida,
still made the choice to go to your brother.’