After Their Vows

Angie moved a narrow shoulder. ‘I b-bought my f-flat—’

‘Cash?’ he fired at her.

Having found her dry lips had stuck together, Angie nodded.

‘Cash …’ Roque made a sound of disgust. ‘Only you would hand over that amount of money in cash!’

‘At least I did not go into debt, like most people do.’ She defended her strict principles.

Like a man unsure what he wanted to do next, Roque swung away again—only to swing straight back, catching Angie out so that she blinked.

‘No, you don’t have a clue what it is like to go into debt, do you? Which is why you believed you could stroll in here like a holier-than-thou prima donna and calmly hand me an instalment on your stupid brother’s debt and it would make everything all right!’

‘I am not playing the prima donna!’ Angie protested.

His expressive eyebrows rose to a sardonic arch. ‘Enter the betrayed wife, with her beautiful chin held up high and her sensational green eyes turned to ice. “I have nothing to say to you, Roque.’” He gave a wincingly good mimic of her cool boarding school accent, bringing an uncomfortable flush to Angie’s cheeks. ‘I was then treated to that fabulous supermodel walk through the apartment, the long sexy glide and the sizzling fire hair aimed to hook me into following you like a panting puppy dog—’

‘A puppy dog?’ She was glad to get her teeth into something. ‘You were never anyone’s panting puppy dog, Roque. You came into this world a fully grown, womanising wolf! ‘

In a totally unexpected turn of mood, a shaft of pure amusement spread across his face, and he bared his perfectly even flashing white teeth, then uttered a low, sexy growl in response.

Angie received that growl with a burst of indignant fury which set her eyes sparking and her slender body tensing away from the desk.

The sting Roque felt hit his loins was hot. She was going to launch a physical attack on him. He could read her like an open book. When he flipped the mood over between them like this she never could resist rising to the bait. Every muscle he possessed went on alert, ready to catch her when she attacked. The inside of his mouth moistened in anticipation, his lips filling with warm pulsing blood.

He watched her take a step towards him, sensational in anger, so beautiful to look at, and so much his woman he—

Then he saw her remember, watched her eyes darken and her flushed cheeks wash white. In an abrupt movement she spun back round to face the desk again.

Disappointment grabbed at every alerted instinct inside him and closed them all down into a single tight clench. Once, just once, he had called her bluff when she’d firmly put her brother between them. If he’d ever wondered what it was like to stumble into a deep black hole of his own damn making then he’d found out that long and miserable night.

Anger and guilt rolled around Roque’s chest in equal measures, followed by a bitterness that thankfully overshadowed the other two feelings—because the devil if he was going to apologise, he told himself harshly. The devil if he was going to explain himself or the motives of that foolish bitch Nadia now, when it was twelve months too late.

And this was about Angie’s brother, he reminded himself grimly. Alex—the spoiled, weak, thieving lout.

Stubborn to the last drop of her hot swirling blood, Angie opened up the chequebook, then stretched across the desk to recover the pen. With a firm scrawl she laid her signature in the appropriate place.

Angelina de Calvhos … She stared at it, vowing fiercely that it was going to be the very last time she would ever sign that name.

Then he was right there behind her again like some grim dark power force, reaching for the chequebook again, taking it from her resistant fingers yet again. This time he took it with him as he strode around the desk. With a finality that made Angie choke out a gasp, he opened a drawer and dropped the book into it, then closed the drawer again with a resolute snap.

Tall, dark, supremely in control of himself, he then lifted his proud dark head. ‘I think we will begin this again from a more formal perspective,’ he intoned coolly.

Angie snapped her arms across her body to contain the way it wanted to shiver in the sudden chill. ‘Please don’t hurt my brother,’ she begged.

CHAPTER THREE

LIKE a man hewn from stone, Roque showed no reaction whatsoever to her quivering climb-down.

‘He is a thief.’ He stated it brutally. ‘He stole your identity and committed credit card theft! And he did it with a complete disregard to the amount of money he was stealing from me. How can you, Angie, of all people, want to defend him for doing that?’

She’d winced all the way through his cold judgement of Alex, but still it did not change a thing she felt. ‘He’s my brother,’ she whispered.

And there it was, Roque recognised, the unconditional love she had a right to expect her brother to return in equal measures. But somehow she did not seem to understand that.

‘I can pay you back the full amount he st … spent,’ she insisted, with only that small but telling fault in the middle. ‘I will just need a little time to get it.’

‘By selling your flat and making yourself homeless?’ Roque was not impressed.

Neither was Angie. She flared him a scornful look, ‘My flat is worth more than fifty thousand pounds, Roque,’ she informed him. ‘And you already have twenty thousand sitting in that chequebook you’ve just stolen from me and put in that drawer!’

Fifty … Roque had stopped listening at fifty. His lean face carefully without expression, he added lying wimp to his brother-in-law’s steadily mounting list of sins.

‘I’ll—I’ll go back to modelling,’ she explained quickly. ‘I’m still in demand, and Carla keeps on trying to get me to change my mind, so I could earn the rest in—in—’

The way Roque flung himself across to the plate glass window behind the desk and thrust his hands in his pockets made Angie’s voice slither to a strangled stop. It wasn’t so much that he’d turned his back on what she’d been saying but the way he had done it which filled her with dread.

When he wanted to, Roque could become chillingly unreachable. And he felt no love for Alex at all. In his view her brother was the main reason why their marriage had fallen apart. He’d refused to understand that in taking on the parental mantle for her brother she had a duty to see her responsibilities to Alex through—even when they intruded an awful lot on their marriage.

It was just the way things had to be. Teenagers by reputation were rebellious and pushy and difficult. And, okay, so Alex had played up to Roque’s often stinging criticism of him, she conceded, but even that did not change the unalterable fact that standing between the two of them had made her marriage a year-long exhausting fight.

‘Please listen to me …’ Angie lowered her stubborn guard because she knew that she had to, her voice trembling as she did so. ‘I can—’

‘No.’ He turned around again, and the moment she looked into his face she felt a wave of sick apprehension riddle her stomach. ‘Not this time, Angie. This time you are going to listen to me.’

He strode back to the desk and opened the drawer again. With a graceful flick of his long fingers he produced a folder which he set down on the desk. ‘Angie’, it said, in his own sharp scrawl on the label. That was all—just ‘Angie’—yet seeing her name written there made Angie feel slightly sick.

Opening the dossier and flicking through the pages until he found what he was looking for, Roque then spun the whole thing round and sent it sliding across the desk, so it came to a neat stop in front of her.

Mouth so dry now it felt as if she’d been eating sand, her eyelashes fluttered, and she looked down and began to read. Her heart started to thump as she tallied up the column of figures on the right hand side of a long list of transactions going back months and months. It was only when she saw confirmation of the horrifying total at the bottom of the third page that she finally—finally—blanched.

Roque was silent. He just stood there and let her discover how deeply her brother had thrown her into debt to him. She could not even look at him. Horror and shame sent her trembling fingers flicking back and forth through the pages in the vague hope that she’d mis-tallied the figures—then it suddenly dawned on her.

‘Angie’ …

She looked up. ‘You thought it was me, didn’t you? ‘ she breathed unsteadily.

‘At first.’ Roque nodded. ‘I thought you were trying to force a response out of me, so I decided to play along and see how far …’

His voice tailed off to an expressive grimace, leaving Angie to fill in the bit he’d left out. Forever the strategist, she thought bleakly.

‘So you could have nipped Alex’s stupidity in the bud a whole lot sooner?’ Angie concluded thickly. ‘Thanks for nothing, Roque.’

‘It was not mere stupidity, Angie. It was theft!’ Roque thrust out the hard distinction. ‘And when did you ever allow me any say over what your brother did?’ he added harshly. ‘I was the interloper in my own marriage. If I uttered a complaint you went off the deep end. If I offered advice you threw it back in my face. Well, this time it will be different.’ Reaching over, he drew the dossier back to his side of the desk. ‘This time I will have control of what this represents, Angie, and you are going to have to swallow your frankly annoying stubbornness and deal with that.’

The way he stabbed a long finger at the damning bank statements made Angie blink and her eyes started to sting. ‘But—but you know I will get you the money,’ she choked in confusion. ‘Why are you making such a meal out of this?’

‘Because,’ Roque stated, ‘it is not your debt.’

‘But it is!’ she insisted. ‘My credit card! My name on the bills! I know you can’t have a leg to stand on. I just need time to check that out with a lawyer or something, but—’

‘Or we could bring in the police and let them decide.’

‘Or I could change my divorce plea.’ Angie went in for the kill, because she had nothing else left to fight him with. ‘And go for half of everything you own, citing your adultery with Nadia!’

Roque heaved in a breath.

‘Go for it,’ he invited, his fabulous bone structure hard as nails now, ‘and I will have your brother arrested. Make no mistake about it. This is called a stalemate, Angie, in case you have not yet worked it out.’

What it was, Angie thought, was Roque throwing down the gauntlet between them. He might as well have slapped her with it, hard in the face!

Dropping the pen, she stepped back from the desk with a jerk. ‘So why have you brought me here if you are not prepared to negotiate with me?’ she demanded in a hurt, bewildered voice.

Her long, slender frame so taut that it trembled, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists at her sides, she might sound bewildered and hurt, but she still had enough spirit left in her to fling back her head, Roque noted dryly as, within the circle of light from the overhead desk light, he watched her shimmer like a firecracker about to go off.

Without needing to think about his answer, he went with his instincts and strode around that light pool until he was standing directly in front of her—towering over her as intimidating as hell.

‘I brought you here for this,’ he murmured ever so succinctly, lifting up one of his long-fingered hands to rest it warm against her throat.

‘Don’t you dare!’ she seethed, knowing what was coming.

Oh, he dared. Angie tried to push him away, but Roque had that covered. He planted his other hand on the base of her spine and drew her inexorably against him. Anticipation as to what was about to happen sent fiery sparks showering down over Angie’s flesh. Everything about him was big and hard and familiar, like making contact with something precious she’d lost.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered in a last ditch attempt to save herself.

He just hit her with one of his mocking smiles because he knew—oh, how well he knew—what she was really fighting.

Then he wasn’t smiling. He was parting his lips and bringing them down into burning contact with hers. She stiffened her whole body and trembled in her determination to feel nothing. She tried—tried not to give any kind of response. But then he made that slow, sensuous glide with his tongue across her lips, and on the back of an unforgivable shiver of pleasure she surrendered. She surrendered like a fool with no brain and let her lips fall apart in an invitation he accepted with the hot, stabbing thrust of his tongue.

She drowned in that kiss for a full thirty seconds. She let him drive her wild as the natural firecracker living inside her went off with passionate force. It spun her back into a world she had tried so hard not to remember—the feel of him, the glorious taste, the urgent trampling heat of desire he could create inside her so quickly, which flung her from icy with hatred to hot with desire without a gap in between. Her fingers clawed up his shirt-front, making him shudder as her nails raked flesh covered only by the thinness of his shirt, then wince when they dug like talons into the back of his neck.

Roque jerked his head up. ‘Gatinho,’ he muttered.

The little cat inside Angie purred with angry triumph, then went for the kill with a lethal precision he really should have been ready for. She sank her teeth into his full and pulsing sexy lower lip. With a grinding growl of reaction he bent her into such an acute arch that she cried out. The next thing she knew he was kissing her so deeply she lost the ability to do anything else but cling. Her heart went crazy, another anxious, helpless moan sounded deep in her throat, and her breasts were crushed against his chest now, their dusky pink tips stirring and tightening to sensitive pinpricks. If it hadn’t been for her coat he would have felt them. As it was he just kissed her until she gave back with a melting urgency she was thoroughly ashamed of even while she couldn’t stop herself from doing it.

Roque drew back his head and looked down into the dazed shimmer of her eyes, then at her full, hot, pulsing mouth. With a sensual arrogance he lowered his head again to slide his tongue across its quivering width. Angie released a helpless little whimper. He repeated the stroke and finished it with a deeply erotic tangling with her tongue before he lifted up his head again.

Smouldering dark eyes burned a cruelly implacable look down at her, ‘This,’ he said, ever so softly, ‘is your only negotiating chip, minha doce. Take it or leave it.’

Then, with a coolness that stunned Angie into a deep freeze, he put her away from him, stepped around her, and strode for the door.

Reeling around to watch him go, every inch of his long, powerful body in such perfect harmony, Angie cringed inside with the flaming heat of her own humiliation for being so weak as to let him do this to her.

‘To listen to you anyone would think you were lily-white and perfect,’ she flung after him shakily. ‘But you were unfaithful to me, Roque. Does that count for anything with you?’

Roque stilled on the threshold, the breadth of his shoulders revealing only the slightest hint of a tense twitch. ‘It counted for something twelve months ago, when you deserved an explanation and redress from me but refused both. Now it is too late. I will give you neither. So take my advice and get over it, Angie. This is a different time, with different issues. Get a grip and move on.’

Get a grip and move on …?

Angie released a strangled little laugh that made those shoulders hunch a second time as he continued out of the room.

‘Get a grip and move on’ from the sight of the man you loved heart and soul wrapped in the arms of another woman? Not in this lifetime—or even in the next life, come to that. He’d broken her heart. He’d wrecked her ability to believe in herself.

The first time she’d met Roque had been at a London fashion shoot. Tall, dark, just too gorgeous to be real. She’d automatically assumed he was one of the brooding male models turning up for the shoot. It was a few minutes later when Nadia Sanchez, an exotic dark Brazilian model, went to wind herself around him and she realised that he must be the latest lover Nadia had been going on about like a fluttery love-sick bird.

‘Don’t you know who he is?’ another model had whispered. ‘That’s Roque de Calvhos, the most gorgeous, sexiest, richest playboy bachelor out there!’

And he’d been staring directly at Angie as if Nadia wasn’t standing there, showering his handsome face with kisses. Roque had lost his chance to make an impact on her right there and then. She had no time for smooth, self-obsessed love-rats who thought nothing of eyeing up other women while his current lover poured adoration over him with an enthusiasm he obviously believed he deserved. And anyway, she’d already had too many other things to think about without adding the unexpected problem of the swift, unwanted hot flare of attraction she’d suffered as her eyes had made contact with his.

So she’d turned her back on him and hadn’t let herself glance that way again until she was sure he had left, with Nadia still clinging to him, blissfully unaware that she’d just been insulted by the very man she was no doubt about to go to bed with.

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