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.
‘Retribuição, ‘ he fed after her impassively. ‘It means retribution,’ he enlightened. ‘My retribution. I did not sleep with Nadia.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ANGIE 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 w
hen 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.
<
br /> ‘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.’
After Their Vows Page 11