After Their Vows

‘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.

Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late.

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.

Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late …

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.

CHAPTER TWO

FRESH 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.’

He arrived at her side to settle the lean cut of his hips against the edge of the desk. ‘Are you telling me that you gave your brother permission to squander my money?’

Refusing to so much as glance at him, Angie returned to hunting through the assortment of things she kept in her bag while she fought a fierce battle with herself over giving him the honest answer or—

‘Yes,’ she forced out.

‘Liar.’ He sighed in disappointment. ‘We both know that you would rather pluck out your fingernails than hand over a credit card to your greedy brother.’ Reaching up, he gently brushed a twisting length of hair back from her smooth cheek. ‘You are one of those rare creations—an honest person, Angie,’ he murmured, grimacing when she flinched away from his touch. ‘I recall a time when you even made me drive you back into the centre of Lisbon because some shop assistant had overpaid you ten euros in your change. How many people do you think bother to do that, meu querida? Even honest people?’

Fingers closing around her chequebook, Angie drew it out of her bag, ‘You move in the wrong circles,’ she countered. ‘You want to try working in a shop—then you would know how that poor assistant would have had to make up the shortfall from her own purse if I hadn’t made the effort to take it back.’

‘However, as you informed me at the time, I am too rich to know how the real world works.’

‘Look …’ She turned her face to spear him a fierce look. ‘I was the one that played the stockmarkets, okay?’

Eyes of a disturbingly fathomless black held hers steady. ‘That makes it two lies you’ve told me.’

Angie tugged in a breath. ‘I decided it was time I made you pay for the months of hell I endured being your stupid blind wife.’

‘Blind? ‘ he echoed musingly, indecently long eyelashes lowering slightly. ‘Mmm,’ he confirmed, ‘very blind.’

Angie looked away from him, feeling hot suddenly, and agitated when she’d been so determined to feel nothing at all. Pushing her bag to one side, she spied Roque’s fountain pen lying on his blotter and reached for it. Aware that he was watching her every move, she opened the chequebook and bent over it to write.

What happened next threw her totally. In her own way she had been so fixed on what she intended to do that she had not given a thought as to how Roque might react. So his hand suddenly arriving to grasp her wrist, long brown fingers closing like a clamp and then tightening their grip, surprised her into uttering a sharp squeaking gasp.

‘Drop the pen,’ he gritted.

Angie’s fingers tightened in direct objection to his command. ‘I was just—’

‘I know what you were doing,’ he cut in thinly. ‘And I, as you see, am stopping you. So drop the pen, Angie.’

When she still refused to comply, the air left his lungs on a hiss. In a smooth snaking move he had completely surrounded her with his hard body as he rose up to swing in behind her, his other hand reaching out to snatch the pen from her, then tossing it away in contempt across the desk.

‘Y-you—’

‘Shut up,’ he growled.

Still holding her wrist imprisoned, he picked up her chequebook next, so he could read what she’d managed to write. Another hiss of anger shot from him, making Angie quiver, because his warm breath had seared across her already burning cheek.

She gave a yank of her wrist and managed to free it, then spun around to glare at him. ‘I’m not into cavemen!’

‘My apologies.’ He took a step back.

Her heart was thumping heavily and her breathing was clipped short. There was a terrible quiver going on inside her and— ‘Then what was all that about?’ she shook out.

Roque was still frowning at her hurried scribble, all hint of lazy humour wiped clean from his face. He threw out a few tart lucid curses, tossed the chequebook back down on the desk, then spun on his heel to pace away from her like a big prowling cat spoiling for a good fight.

Jerking up her hand to rub at her wrist where it still burned and tingled, Angie watched him warily, still feeling shaken and really uncertain of her ground now— because she had seen Roque angry before but never like this.

‘Twenty damn thousand,’ she heard him mutter, as if the sum was an insult.

‘It’s all I have right now!’ she cried out. ‘I mean to pay you the rest when—when I can. I just need—’