After Their Vows

by Michelle Reid

  ‘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.

  Within hours she’d made herself forget all about him. So when he’d called her at her hotel that same evening and introduced himself it had taken her several seconds to connect with the name.

  ‘I would like to take you to dinner,’ he expressed, in a dark accented voice that oozed with the sensual self-confidence that she was about to jump on his neck with gratitude and delight.

  She told him bluntly where to stick his invitation and cut the connection. When the flowers arrived ten minutes later she returned them with a note.

  Let’s get a couple of things straight, Mr Calvhos. I don’t go out with love-rats and I don’t cheat on my colleagues. Take my name and number out of your little black book and don’t contact me again.

  ‘De Calvhos,’ he corrected lazily by telephone the next day. ‘And little black books became obsolete with the arrival of the BlackBerry.’

  ‘And I’m running late for my flight to New York,’ she responded, before cutting him off once more.

  She’d done the full fashion circuit and was right here in London before they met up again. She and Nadia had not crossed paths since the last London shoot, so when the other model arrived for London Fashion Week Angie was already on her guard, expecting Roque to appear at any moment. She spotted him front of house, sitting next to Carla, and she seethed all the way down the runway and back up it again—because she could feel his dark eyes lazily undressing her from the flimsy scrap of multi-coloured silk she was wearing as if he had the right. But what really disturbed her was the thought that she’d probably been undressed like that a thousand times before without ever noticing.

  Making the clothes look fabulously sexy and alluring was her job. Full-stop. She didn’t want to feel Roque’s eyes doing that to her. She didn’t want to know she could be susceptible to any man’s glance.

  After the show he arrived backstage with Carla on his arm. Smooth and sleek, and infuriatingly sure of himself, he used the only person Angie could call a friend to assure a formal introduction between the two of them. When he wanted them to, Roque’s charmingly polite manners could melt an iceberg. Shame it was spoiled by Nadia, who came to wind herself around his other arm like a slinky dark sex kitten with a hot siren’s smile.

  Angie was actually happy to have her mobile phone burst into life, with her brother’s headmaster on the other end of it informing her Alex had been taken to hospital after a brawl with another pupil had knocked him out. She made hurried excuses and rushed out of the reception, her attention fixed on finding a taxi that would take her to Hampshire.

  Roque appeared at her side as she was begging a black cab driver to make the journey. ‘Come on.’ He took hold of her arm. ‘My car is parked over here. I will take you.’

  The beginning of the end of her resistance to him, Angie thought now with a bitter wry smile. The breathtaking patience with which he’d dealt with her prickly hostility even as she’d let him drive her all the way to the hospital local to Alex’s school. The way he’d waited patiently while she’d checked that her brother was not at death’s door and dealt with his censorious headmaster because her brother had apparently started the brawl.

  Limp as a rag by the time they’d started the journey back to London again, and in snappish mood, she’d reminded him that he’d left Nadia standing back in London.

  ‘Nadia and I have not been an item since I first saw you,’ he’d stated coolly. Then, with a deliberate change of subject, ‘Tell me about your parents. Why are they not here to deal with your brother? ‘

  And that had been it. For some reason Angie still could not figure that quietly serious question had ended her objections to him. For the first time since she’d taken responsibility for Alex she’d found herself pouring it all out on that car journey back to London. By the time he’d seen her safely inside her Chelsea apartment she had already been halfway infatuated by his quiet manner and his seriously disturbing charm.

  Angie sighed, narrow shoulders hunching inside her coat as she slumped down onto the edge of Roque’s desk and stared down her long legs at her flat-shoed feet. Within a week he had been her lover. Within three months he’d asked her to marry him. Within a year all her rose-tinted dreams had lain broken—more than broken—shattered by a sequence of nightmarish events she still found impossible to think about, though the hurt they’d inflicted refused to hide away with the thoughts.

  ‘Take off the coat.’

  Lifting up her head, Angie was not quick enough to cover up those feelings her memories brought back. She hurt. She hurt. And he was lounging there, at ease in the doorway, arms folded across his shirt-front, eyes slightly narrowed, watching her steadily.

  In charge.

  She dragged her eyes away from him. ‘When I look at you I see Nadia,’ she told him bleakly.

  ‘When I look at you I see a blind, stubborn woman,’ he drawled back. ‘Stop fighting me, Angie,’ he then said flatly. ‘Your year-long sulking time is up. Accept it.’

  Sulking? He dared to think she was merely sulking?

  ‘I just don’t want to be in your life any more! ‘ Hating that she was revealing even this one small glimpse of vulnerability to him, Angie shot away from the desk.

  ‘But you will be in my life again,’ Roque returned, smooth as glass, ‘because, meu querida, baby brother expects you to do whatever it is I want you to do.’

  He was challenging her to deny it. To call his bluff. In one dark corner of her agonised feelings Angie even suspected that he wanted her to walk away.

  Power games, she recognised. Not with her this time, but with Alex. He wanted her to leave her brother to face up to his crimes for himself.

  ‘I don’t even understand why you want me back.’ She was genuinely mystified by that. ‘It’s not as if you enjoyed living with me the first time around.’

  His mouth gave a twitch. ‘You had your good moments.’

  Ang
ie uttered a low husky laugh. ‘You can get good sex anywhere, Roque, and without having to put up with the hassle of a pain-in-the-neck wife breathing all over your guilty conscience.’

  ‘I don’t have a guilty conscience.’

  ‘Well, you should have!’ she flared. ‘You took Nadia to bed. You had great sex with her. The newspapers were full of how good it was. So don’t you dare stand there and admit to me that you don’t feel guilty about it when it was me they ridiculed because I could not keep my husband happy!’

  ‘Well, did you—keep me happy? ‘

  Seeing the arched eyebrows which accompanied his calm counter-charge, Angie saw no hint—not even a glimpse of a hint—of regret in his hard, handsome face.

  She pulled in a breath, feeling an unwanted pressure building up in her chest. No, she had not kept Roque happy. But when had he bothered to make an effort to make her happy?

  He’d complained about her job commitments. He’d complained about Alex. Every decision she’d had to make about her brother he had opposed. When she’d tried to make him understand her point of view he’d grown impatient with her and walked off. Sometimes she’d felt so lonely and confused she’d hidden in the bathroom and wept.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Are you going or staying?’

  He was thinking about food while she was killing herself with their miserable past? Angie folded her arms and did not answer. A burning resentment sizzled in her blood. The silence stretched—she stretched it—until Roque decided to make it snap.

  ‘Are you going or staying?’ he repeated.

  ‘Staying!’ Angie burst out with a whip-cracking fury that should have brought the walls tumbling down around them both.

  Roque winced as he pushed away from the doorframe and strode further into the room. The air between them crackled and fizzed with the echoing effects of her burst of fury. Angie was actually breathing fast in the aftermath, but without saying another word Roque just reached for her arms, calmly unfolded them, then set about untying the belt on her coat.