After Their Vows

by Michelle Reid

  ‘Bom dia, my beautiful green-eyed shrew,’ he greeted her softly. ‘May I advise you to keep your fight with me under wraps until we do not have an audience? ‘

  The shrew part hit its mark, and Angie flushed. He was right. She was turning into a terrible shrew, all bitter and twisted and— ‘You—’

  He kissed her into silence. He just leant further across the width of her shiny black desktop and claimed her shrewish mouth.

  A skitter of appreciatively amused gasps ran along the row of wannabes. Feeling the helpless softening of her lips, for a second Angie feared that she was going to start gasping too. By the time he drew away again her lips were warm and pulsing and her cheeks were on fire, and Roque was looking grimly satisfied because he’d felt her respond to him.

  ‘Well, if this doesn’t answer a lot of questions …’ a cool voice drawled from somewhere just beyond Angie’s hazy vision.

  It was Carla, being as sardonic as she possibly could be.

  ‘Bom dia, Carlina.’ Straightening away from the desk, Roque greeted her smoothly, using Carla’s full name even though he knew she disliked it. ‘You look atordoar, as always.’

  ‘I do hope that was a compliment, Roque,’ Carla responded.

  ‘What else?’ Roque sent her one of his charismatic smiles.

  Walking forward, Carla aimed a brief glance at the row of onlookers, which sent their heads dipping as if they’d been struck by a whip. Then Angie watched her boss hold out a hand for Roque to take.

  It was only when Carla said, ‘Shall we leave Angie to—cool down, and go through to my office?’ that Angie realised with a start there was something happening here that she wasn’t privy to.

  ‘What—?’

  ‘Ask Izzy to hold my calls, Angie,’ the boss side of Carla interrupted what Angie had been about to say.

  The two of them strode off, leaving Angie gaping after them. Roque didn’t even spare her a second glance. It was obvious that Carla had been expecting him. More obvious now that the call Carla had taken here in the foyer a few minutes earlier must have been from Roque. She recalled the strange glance Carla had sent her before she’d walked back the way she had come.

  And, whatever it was that Roque was up to now, Angie began to feel cornered. Was he sweet-talking Carla into sacking her? Was she about to become jobless as well as his reluctant wife again?

  And what about her brother?

  Making a quick decision which was really a surrender to something she’d been trying to stop herself from doing all morning, Angie picked up the desk phone and called her brother’s mobile phone.

  There was no answer. It didn’t even go to voicemail. By the time Roque reappeared the wannabes had been led away into CGM’s hallowed inner sanctum and Angie had turned from shrew into anxious-eyed mouse.

  ‘Where is he, Roque?’ She almost fell on him in her urgency to know the answer.

  He caught her by her elbows. ‘You called him?’

  Angie nodded. ‘He didn’t answer.’

  Something very close to grim satisfaction honed the naturally sensual curve of his mouth and Angie leapt on it. ‘What have you done? Why isn’t he answering his phone? Did you—?’

  ‘Calm down,’ Roque said, turning slightly, so she could see Carla standing just behind him, viewing their interaction through curious eyes. The last thing Roque needed right now was for Carla to jump back onto Angie’s side of the fence after the work he’d just put in bringing her down on his side.

  ‘Adeus, Carlina,’ he bade her coolly, barely giving Angie time to snatch up her bag before he was ushering her towards the exit as fast as he could.

  ‘I will expect to hear from you, Roque,’ Carla fed after him like a threat.

  ‘Sim. Soon,’ he promised over his shoulder.

  Outside the building, instead of his Porsche, a sleek chauffer-driven silver limo idled on double yellow lines five strides away. Even with her long legs Angie struggled to keep up with him as he covered the distance in three. Handing her into the rear seat, he joined her and closed the door. A second later they were slipping smoothly into London’s nose-to-nose traffic.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Angie twisted on the seat to spear a taut look at him. ‘What have you been discussing with Carla? Have you just lost me my job? And where is my brother? You had better come clean fast, Roque, because you won’t enjoy watching me fall into a screaming rage!’

  ‘You are already there.’ Turning his dark head, he scanned her taut features and bright eyes. ‘If you had invested this much emotional energy into trying to make our marriage work we would not be in this present situation,’ he clipped out in contempt.

  ‘Well, that’s great, coming from the man who took other women to bed,’ Angie flung back.

  He removed his eyes from her and said not a single word in his defence, and Angie slumped back against the soft leather upholstery. ‘You’re such a hypocrite.’

  ‘Your brother still has his head attached to his neck,’ he drawled, as cool as ice. ‘He is not languishing in a police cell or cowering in a dark corner somewhere, scared that I have set a band of hitmen onto him.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Angie murmured, with excruciatingly well-mannered ill grace.

  Then she glanced back at him, to find he was looking at her again. The skin banding her throat started to prickle, because the way he was looking at her somehow relayed his resentment for needing to look. Sparks flew between them—they always did. Hot sparks, angry sparks, sexually stimulating, breath-catching sparks.

  ‘What was all that with Carla?’ Angie mulishly persisted when his mood told her she should not.

  ‘Business.’

  And that was it? The dark glint in his eyes dared her to continue. The need to constantly take him on fizzed like a fever in her blood. It had something to do with not letting him claim the upper hand over her, for he was the kind of man who would eat her alive if she gave him the chance.

  The car pulled up outside his apartment block. Angie frowned when Roque instructed the driver that they would need him again in a couple of hours.

  ‘Why? Where are you going?’ Having to rush to keep up with him again, Angie was forced to ask the questions to his back.

  He stabbed the lift button and leant back against the casing like a surly boy in a very bad mood. ‘Just shut up for two minutes, Angie,’ he growled at her. ‘I am still too angry with you to want to play fair right now.’

  Widening her eyes, ‘What have I done?’ she cried out.

  He didn’t bother to answer. He just strode out of the lift like a man in search of escape.

  Angie followed at a slower pace, confused, really unsure of her ground now, for she did not understand his mood. Molly the cleaner was no longer in evidence, she noticed. Everywhere looked polished and neat. Sliding her bag off her shoulder and depositing it on one of the sofas, she followed Roque as he made directly for his study. The way he threw the door open wide made her blink in anticipation of it hitting the cabinet she knew stood just behind it.

  It didn’t hit the cabinet, but she was still left with a wincing sensation as if it had. This was crazy, she thought. She didn’t even know what he was angry about! And what had he been discussing with Carla? Why had her boss let her go with him without putting up an objection?

  Tugging in a deep breath, she followed him, determined to get some answers even if it felt as if she was about to enter the lion’s den. And her heart was hammering at the prospect of taking him on yet again, she noticed.

  He was standing behind the desk with his dark head lowered as he flipped through the small stack of mail Molly must have placed there. Angie could not see his face, but she could feel the circle of grim reserve he had drawn around himself like an invisible line he was silently warning her not to cross.

  Pressing her teeth down into her bottom lip, she made herself walk forward. ‘Roque—’

  ‘Smile for me, Angie,’ he said.

  ‘Wh-what?’ She pulled to a nerve-crunching standsti
ll.

  ‘Smile for me.’ He lifted his head up and speared her with a grim, cynical look. ‘I smiled for you when I came to collect you this lunchtime. So—smile for me. You owe me one. Smile for me and say something pleasant.’

  This was a joke. It had to be a joke. ‘You’re angry with me because I didn’t return your smile? ‘

  ‘It is called interacting,’ Roque provided. ‘You know—man to woman—woman to man. I smile; you smile back. I say bom dia, Angie, you say hello, Roque.’

  ‘This is mad.’ She threw her hands up. ‘All I’m trying to do is—’

  ‘If you ask about your brother just one more time …’ he exploded, with quite spectacular force.

  ‘I wasn’t going to!’ she lied, only to blush and spoil it. ‘What’s got into you, for goodness’ sake? ‘

  He responded with an action that stalled Angie’s ability to draw air into her lungs. He opened the drawer and withdrew her chequebook, then tossed it down on the desk. As she watched in blank silence her mobile phone arrived next, which he dropped onto the chequebook, followed by her keys, which he withdrew from his trouser pocket.

  ‘Take them,’ he invited, then slammed the drawer shut.

  Angie couldn’t move. A deep chill of foreboding was settling over her. He was going to give up on her. He’d changed his mind because he was already fed up with her shrewish attitude. She could feel the change of heart bouncing off the grim hardness of his long, elegant stance.

  ‘Roque … please …’ She didn’t even care that she sounded pleading.

  ‘Please, Angie?’ he quizzed cynically. ‘Now, there is a word I don’t often hear you speak. Tell me, are you begging for your brother’s sake or for your own sake?’

  ‘I just don’t understand what’s the matter with you! ‘ she cried. ‘I thought we had an—an agreement, but the way you’re giving off so many confusing signals I no longer know what I’m supposed to think!’

  His dark eyes flared on a snap of anger. ‘You remind me that we have an agreement, yet you’ve already defaulted on your side of it by taking yourself off to a different bedroom to sleep, then sticking a pillow down the middle of the bed when I carried you back to ours!’

  Angie stared at him in gaping disbelief. ‘You’re in this mood because I refused to give you sex?’

  ‘I could have had the sex if I’d been inclined to take it, Angie,’ he drawled in grim derision, reminding her that she had not been the one who’d wanted to stop last night. ‘I am not that big a slave to my libido,’ he denied, implying that maybe she was. ‘I accept that we both need time to—adjust to being together again.’

  ‘Really?’ Angie folded her arms and speared a look at him. ‘Perhaps the blonde bombshell I met in the kitchen this morning keeps your libido less slavelike these days?’ she struck back. ‘Because all I recall from the last time we lived together is you wanting it wherever and whenever you could get it, and turning into a growling nasty bear when I said no—like you’re doing now.’

  ‘You never said no,’ he countered. ‘You grabbed with both hands and whatever other greedy part of your anatomy you could grab me with. When I mentioned the bed thing—’ he rolled a long-fingered hand ‘—I was merely trying to point out that you have been defaulting on our agreement from the moment we agreed it. And who is the blonde bombshell?’ he demanded curiously.

  Feeling slightly ashamed that she’d brought Molly Stewart into this just to score points—though she was still uncertain as to whether the new cleaner did have other special duties—Angie stepped up to the desk.

  ‘Thanks for my stuff.’ She gathered up keys, phone and chequebook, then turned to leave.

  ‘Where do you think you are going?’ he sighed out.

  ‘To make myself scarce while you decide what the heck it is we’re supposed to be fighting about.’

  ‘Well, don’t make yourself too scarce. We are due to fly to Portugal in a couple of hours.’

  Angie froze, then swung back round again. ‘Portugal? ‘ she echoed, as if he’d named a different planet.

  ‘I live there,’ Roque reminded her.

  ‘Yes, but …’ The ground suddenly felt shaky beneath Angie’s feet.

  ‘My London offices usually see me only one week a month.’

  ‘Yes.’ She knew that too. ‘But …’

  Roque looked at her and waited, drawing her hesitation out as if it was stretched on wires while her mind ran through the string of objections she wanted to utter before she discarded them one by one in case she fed his weird mood.

  ‘I thought …’ She stopped yet again, and her lips quivered on a shaky intake of air. ‘There’s my job—’

  ‘Already sorted. Carlina has given you an extended leave of absence.’

  So that was what their cosy meeting for two had been all about. Roque had convinced Carla to let her go, probably using the ‘giving their marriage a second chance’ excuse, and Carla had let him convince her without asking Angie what she wanted to do.

  ‘You are not my mistress, Angie,’ he inserted into the steadily thickening silence, so coolly she almost missed the relevance of the prod. ‘In general mistresses stay put in one place while wives travel.’

  Nadia suddenly stood between them like a raven-haired apparition, with a very smug smile on her beautiful face. Nadia was as exotically Brazilian as Roque was hot-blooded Portuguese. They even spoke the same language, which meant they could converse with each without anyone around them knowing what they said.

  And Nadia travelled … As Angie had once travelled … Nadia followed the fashion drum wherever it led her, and if that happened to be the same port of call Roque was in then so much the better—did he think she was dumb?

  ‘Well, I don’t travel any more,’ she said.

  ‘You will go where I say you will go.’ Roque flatly countered that. ‘I let you off the hook too much the last time we were together. I let you dictate where and when I was allowed to be with my own wife. This time you will do the compromising, querida—and remember, please, before you start yelling at me, that your brother’s present situation is depending on your absolute acceptance of that.’

  A ragged laugh was torn from Angie. ‘I don’t even know what his situation is, since you haven’t bothered to tell me.’

  Roque flicked out a grimace in acknowledgement of that.

  ‘But if you think I’m going to just fly off to Portugal and leave Alex here alone to get into—’ Belatedly realising what she’d been going to say, Angie choked the rest of that sentence back.

  Too late, though, to stop Roque from finishing it. ‘Alex will not be left alone here in England to get into more trouble for the simple reason he will not be in England at all.’

  She was staring at him now, in the grip of total stillness, so concentrated on what he was saying that she couldn’t even draw in a breath.

  ‘We went together to speak to his college dean this morning,’ he went on to explain. ‘Alex is taking a gap year from his studies, effective as of now.’

  ‘S-so where is he going?’ Angie breathed almost indistinctly.

  ‘Brazil,’ Roque relayed. ‘To my ranch near Sao Paulo, to be exact.’

  ‘Brazil …?’ she whispered, as if he had not added the other details.

  ‘He is going to learn all about ranching, cattle farming, living off the land—’

  ‘Brazil? ‘ Angie repeated one more time, her voice rising to a shrill pitch. ‘You are sending my nineteen-year-old brother to the other end of the world for a whole year without my say-so?’

  ‘Alex is over eighteen. He is allowed to make these decisions for himself.’

  That wasn’t the point. ‘You mean it was your decision! What were his options—Brazil or a prison cell?’

  ‘Sim,’ he confirmed, without flickering a glossy black eyelash. ‘He chose to work the next year, helping to pay back what he stole from me.’

  The blunt use of the word stole had its effect on Angie, paling her face even further and closi
ng up her throat. ‘S-so where is he now?’ she only just managed to utter.

  ‘As of right now—?’ With a smooth flick of a bright white shirt-cuff he exposed his gold wristwatch and gave his attention to it. ‘Experiencing the comforts of first-class air travel somewhere over the Atlantic,’ he answered. ‘On his way to Sao Paulo …’

  For a whole thirty seconds Angie couldn’t seem to find a reaction. Pure shock was holding fast. She just stared at Roque, still standing there behind his desk like some lofty, unreachable lord and master, dark as the devil and cool as a long drink of iced water. He watched the emerald glow in her eyes slowly, slowly disappear, until the colour had turned pure bottomless black. Then she lowered her head to look down at her hands, still clutching her recovered possessions.

  ‘You took my phone,’ she mumbled.

  Not understanding the relevance of the comment, Roque drew his eyebrows together in a frown.

  She said it again, this time lifting those darkened eyes back to his. ‘You took away my phone so I couldn’t call him. You sent him away without allowing me to speak to him before he left … Why would you do that? ‘

  For the first time since this had begun Roque’s voice revealed a hint of roughness. ‘I felt it would be easier on you if you had no input—’ ‘Easier on you, you mean.’

  ‘Alex needs to face up to his responsibilities,’ he persisted doggedly. ‘He did this a lot faster believing that you were out of the loop.’

  ‘You—you let him think I’ve turned my back on him?’

  Roque released a sigh. ‘Angie—we agreed that I would take control of your brother—’

  ‘Just shut up about our stupid agreement! ‘ She would have screeched all of that at him if her voice hadn’t become muffled by the strangling blockage currently in control of her aching throat.

  ‘We need a breathing space to work on our marriage without your brother constantly tossing a spanner in the works!’

  ‘But I don’t want to work on our marriage!’

  ‘Then why are you standing here?’

  The hard challenge shimmered over the full length of her taut figure. He dared to stand there, seemingly expecting her to turn into the perfect amiable wife because he had taken control of her brother and her life?