His grim mouth twisted in derision at his uncharacteristic act of cowardice. One day she was going to have to know. And he was going to have to tell her before someone else did it for him.
Shrugging into his jacket, he took a deep breath and walked back into the bedroom with the intention of telling Angie that Paris was off the agenda. Only to pull to a stop when all he could see of her was the fiery top of her head.
The sight held him captive for a few seconds, a ruefully amused smile catching hold of his mouth. The last time he’d found Angie like this had been at their London apartment, when she’d foolishly believed he would leave her to sleep in a different bedroom. The rat in him then had taken the decision to haul her out of her blissful sleep. This time the loving husband in him would leave her sleeping and call her later from Lisbon, to let her know where he was.
He left the room as silently as a thief stealing away from a crime scene.
Angie sat up as the door drew shut. He hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye to her.
Hurt clambered all over her insides. She hoped his fancy private plane developed engine trouble and kept him imprisoned on the airport tarmac so he couldn’t keep his sleazy assignation. She hoped—
Hearing the throaty sound of a car engine, Angie slithered out of bed and walked over to the window to watch as his red Ferrari flashed up from the side of the house, then sped away down the drive with the sun glinting on its shiny bodywork. He had not been able to get away fast enough. Standing here watching him go, she felt as if he’d driven over her body without noticing in his eagerness to get to his lover.
Tears developed. She blinked them away. The rolling waves of shock and hurt still played with the muscles around her stomach. The name Nadia beat like a drum in her head.
Her mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the dressing room, and she turned in a daze and went to find it.
‘Good morning, sweetie.’ Carla’s light, slightly dry voice greeted her. ‘Do we have a deal? Are you ready to stop playing the pampered wife and start working on the Lisbon project?’
Angie blinked a couple of times before ‘the Lisbon project’ meant something. Trying to get her brain into gear was like crawling through mud.
‘I… yes,’ she answered, because saying no or that she didn’t know would make this conversation just too complicated right now. ‘I w-was thinking of researching suitable business premises today,’ Angie managed to say, with reasonable intelligence—mainly because it was the truth. She had been intending to look for suitable premises. ‘Do you have any specific ideas in mind as to what you want?’
‘Oh, you’re supposed to know Lisbon, Angie. I’ve hardly ever visited the place,’ Carla answered with a languid lack of interest. ‘Somewhere suitably elegant with the right postcode, I suppose. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Roque, since this is his brainchild? All I had to do was agree to the concept.’
Angie’s head went back as if Carla had punched her. ‘You—you mean Roque set this up?’ Angie could barely get the words past her thick throat.
‘He still hasn’t told you?’ For once in her languid life, Carla’s voice sharpened.
‘No,’ Angie said abruptly. Not even when they’d discussed it the night before.
‘It appears I’ve let his surprise cat out of the bag, then,’ sighed Carla. ‘He needed to find something for you to do to keep you happy in Portugal, sweetie. And to tell the truth I didn’t want to lose you completely. So I thought, if he’s happy to shell out the money why not let him set me up in Lisbon? The exotic dark Latin look is very high-fashion right now. With you at the helm, scouting for new talent, we could even put ourselves a jump ahead of our competitors. And, talking about dark Latin models, now that you and Roque have resolved your differences about what happened a year ago, how would you feel about Nadia joining you in the venture?’
Nadia …? Angie suddenly felt as if she was eating glass. ‘Wh-why Nadia?’
‘Because she’s living in Lisbon, too,’ said Carla impatiently. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know that either, Angie? This is really very bad of Roque—to still be keeping you in the dark about all of this. I suppose he thought it wasn’t important. After all, you must believe he’s telling the truth when he insists the whole Nadia thing never happened, or you wouldn’t have gone back to him, would you?’
Roque knew that Nadia was living in Lisbon?
‘No,’ Angie breathed indistinctly, ‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Well, then, have a good think about the Nadia thing. She will come in very useful since she speaks the lingo. And, like you, she’s at a loose end right now.’
‘She—she isn’t modelling any more?’ Angie tried her best to make the question sound casual.
‘I know you can be blind when you want to be, Angie, but you surely have not been so blinkered that you didn’t know Nadia has been out of the modelling game since she got pregnant last year? I think the baby is a couple of months old now.’
Angie was beginning to feel sick again. And she felt so cold suddenly that she didn’t think she was ever going to warm up again. ‘Do …?’ She had to stop to swallow the thick lump in her throat. ‘Do you have a contact address for her?’
‘Sure. Wait a second while I access it …’
Angie waited. Angie waited and didn’t breathe, and didn’t allow herself to think beyond waiting.
‘Here it is. Sounds very elegant. The Palácio de Ribeiro. It’s—’
Angie cut the connection and tossed the phone away from her as if it burnt. The Palácio de Ribeiro was Roque’s city address. It took him just fifteen minutes to walk from there to his Lisbon office building, and … and …
Nadia was living in Roque’s Lisbon apartment.
Nothing could have been more black and white.
No wonder he’d spent three weeks avoiding taking her into Lisbon. He’d been scared she might come face to face with his lover before he’d worked out how he was going to convince Angie to accept his sordid little ménage à trois.
And a baby.
His baby?
Angie turned and ran for the bathroom. This time it physically hurt, because she was trying to throw up from an empty stomach. By the time she’d managed to make it back to the bedroom it was all she could do to sink down on the bed, where she sat with her eyes closed because the world was spinning.
It was only when she rested a hand against the sensitive wall of her stomach, because it was still throbbing, that a sudden and terrifying thought rushed into her head.
She stared down at the hand. What if Roque was right about—?
No—no, please not that, she thought pitifully. But she was already dragging herself to her feet to go and recover her phone. Her eyes were burning, her fingers trembling, as she flicked through the menu looking for her personal calendar. A minute later she was sinking down on the edge of the bed again, a limp and quivering wreck.
CHAPTER TEN
IT HIT Roque when he was halfway to Lisbon, and he almost caused a major pile-up behind him when he slammed his foot down on the brakes.
‘Mãe de Deus, ‘ he bit out.
Angie had overheard his telephone conversation with Nadia.
Cursing in every language he could think of, he checked the traffic, then took his chances, swinging the long luxury car into a sleek U-turn that would send him back the way he had come. Car horns sounded in protest—he barely registered them, or the angry shouts of abuse aimed at him as he accelerated away.
Maria had told him they’d been out on the balcony when Angie became ill. His wife—his unashamedly lazy in the morning wife—had decided to get up earlier than usual, and had been standing right above him when he took Nadia’s call.
His jawline fiercely clenched, he tried to remember what he’d said, but could recall hardly a damn word. Not that it mattered. He shook his grim head. He knew that he must have called Nadia by name. Just as he knew that Angie had heard him say it. And hearing him say it had made Angie sick to her stomach
. It had made her break apart.
Fingers tightening around the steering wheel, he put his foot down hard on the accelerator.
Entering the master suite as Angie strode out from the dressing room, Maria pulled to a breath-catching standstill.
‘You go out, senhora?’ Maria asked, in a voice laced with disbelief—which was not surprising when the last time she’d seen her Angie had been heaving into the toilet bowl.
Now she was dressed in a breathtakingly elegant white linen dress touched with stylised brushstrokes of emerald-green. The dress skimmed Angie’s long slender figure, and had couture sewed into every invisible seam. The neckline was square, the bodice cinched into the waist by a shiny green belt, and the skirt skimmed midway down her amazingly long thighs. And the shiny green shoes she was wearing elevated her height by an impossible five inches at least.
‘To Sintra,’ Angie confirmed. ‘Will you ask Antonio to bring the Range Rover around to the front steps for me, please?’
‘Sim, I will see to it.’ The little maid nodded. ‘You— wish Antonio to drive you? ‘
Angie shook her head. ‘I will drive myself,’ she said, for this was one errand she needed to do on her own. She was going to Sintra to find a chemist, so she could purchase a pregnancy testing kit. And she’d needed to pull on all this supermodel armour just to keep her functioning without falling into shattered little pieces.
Maria continued to hover like an anxious bird, not at all comfortable with this turn of events. ‘If—if you like, I could go to Sintra for you,’ she offered eagerly. ‘It will be no trouble, and Senhor Roque will be back from Lisbon soon—’
Lisbon? Angie frowned. ‘He’s gone to Paris, Maria,’ she informed the little maid.
‘No—no. He is gone to Lisbon,’ Maria insisted. ‘He said he had business there he must attend to this morning, but he will be back as quickly as he can because— because you are f-feeling unwell.’
So the Paris trip was yet another lie he’d told her …
‘Tell Antonio about the car, Maria,’ Angie breathed unsteadily.
‘Sim, senhora. ‘ Too well-trained to argue, the maid dipped a stiff little curtsy and whipped out of the room, leaving Angie alone to field this last hard knock to her fragile composure without a witness to watch her do it.
Somehow—she did not remember how—she found herself standing outside the quinta’s front entrance. The sun was shining hotly down from an azure sky. Everything around her looked clear and sharp and picture-postcard-perfect—the greens of the gardens, the bright pinks and purples of the trailing bougainvillaea against the apricot walls of the house, and the shiny black bulk of the Range Rover awaiting her at the bottom of the front steps.
She did not recall climbing into it. She did not recall switching on the engine and driving away. She fixed all her concentration on finding her way to Sintra in a car she had never driven before, on roads as foreign to her as the husband to whom she had given all her faith.
Roque slowed down to take the turn in through the gates of the Quinta d’Agostinho then powered up again to shoot the car into the tunnel of leafy trees. Coming out into the bright sunlight a few minutes later, he saw his home standing sure and solid in its elegant spread of sweeping lawns, backed by a forest of trees.
He glanced up at the balcony situated directly above the swimming pool, envisaged Angie standing there listening to the conversation taking place below her, and felt as if his skin was peeling back from his flesh as he played out what had happened next.
But that weird feeling was nothing compared to the one he experienced when he drove down towards the garages and saw that his Range Rover was missing. Diving out of his car, he strode into the house and shouted for Zetta at the top of his voice. His housekeeper came hurrying into the grand hallway from the rear of the house.
‘Where is the Range Rover?’ he demanded, a shade unsteadily.
The housekeeper wrung her hands together. ‘The senhora take it out, Senhor Roque. Maria said she has gone into Sintra.’
Sintra? A wave of relief flooded through him. For a few minutes there he’d convinced himself that Angie had done a runner on him again, and was already on her way to the airport, meaning to disappear off the face of the earth.
‘Why has she gone to Sintra?’ He frowned, not seeing a link between the reason he had come rushing back here and their local town.
‘I do not think Maria asked,’ Zetta answered. ‘She was more concerned that the senhora insisted on driving herself when she has on these very high shoes—’
Roque’s tension levels shot up again. ‘Are you telling me that Antonio is not driving her?’
Still wringing her hands, Zetta nodded.
‘But she does not know the car. She does not know the roads. She hardly ever drives herself anywhere, and—Mãe de Deus.’ His voice broke down into a low hoarse husk. ‘She is—unwell …’
The moment Angie realised that she was completely and utterly lost came around two hours later. Pulling the car onto a clearing somewhere way up in the hills, overlooking the sea, she sat back with a sigh of defeat.
She’d found her way into Sintra by following the well-posted road signs. She’d even found a convenient car park, and her purchase now lay with her bag on the seat next to her. Everything up to that point had been so much easier than she’d expected it to be—but she’d soon learned that getting back to the Quinta d’Agostinho was a different matter altogether.
Roque’s private estate was not signposted. And the road out of Sintra had taken her a different way from the one on which she’d come in. It had seemed logical that so long as she kept on driving she would eventually notice something familiar to use as a guide.
‘Great logic, Angie,’ she mumbled.
Now the sun was high, and the car was already stifling. She’d only killed the air-conditioning two minutes ago, when she’d switched off the car engine.
Reaching up, she ran a hand around the back of her neck and lifted her hair away from her hot skin. On the seat beside her with her bag was the half-drunk bottle of water she’d had the sense to purchase before she got herself lost. And beside it lay her mobile phone, which she’d tried to use several times only to discover there was no signal. On an act of pure frustration she’d switched the stupid thing off.
Still… With little hope that it was going to be any different this time, she let her hair fall back down onto her nape, then reached for the phone and switched it on again.
The moment it had powered up the messages began downloading like flickering shouts. Most of them from Roque, she saw. A couple from Carla, and even one from her brother, who had been calling her twice a week since he’d gone to Brazil—duty calls, to reassure her that he was enjoying himself, Angie recognised with a grimace of a smile.
About to try calling Roque again, she felt the phone suddenly leap into life in her fingers.
‘Angie? Graças a Deus. Where the hell are you?’ Roque’s deep rasping voice raked into her ear.
‘Lost,’ she admitted. ‘Up in the hills somewhere.’
‘Lost? In the hills?’ he repeated, as if most of Portugal wasn’t covered in them. ‘Why didn’t you call to tell me so?’
‘No signal until now,’ she explained, feeling oddly as if she was having this conversation with a complete stranger rather than the husband she’d discovered was a lying cheat.
A stunning silence fell down between them for several seconds, then she heard Roque pull in a deep breath. ‘Okay, so you are lost,’ he murmured more calmly. ‘Be a good girl and activate the car’s satellite navigation system. It will pinpoint your position and then you can tell me what it says. I will come and get you.’
‘But I don’t want you to come and get me,’ Angie told him.
‘Yes, you do!’ Roque exploded all over again. ‘Have you any idea how much trouble you’ve caused by getting lost? Maria is weeping all over the place, and I was about half a minute away from calling the police. Only a madwoman drives off
into the hills without knowing where she is going, so do as I tell you, Angie, and switch on the damn—’
The line went dead. Roque bit out a string of filthy curses. Lost in the hills … He turned full circle, a set of long fingers scoring through his already dishevelled hair, then grabbed hold of the back of his neck. She’d been gone for hours, so she could be anywhere.
When did he get to be so stupid? How did she get to drive at all in the kind of shoes Maria had described?
He tried to connect to her phone again.
Angie ignored the phone’s ring while she touched buttons until she finally brought the satellite navigation screen to life, then she sat staring at the screen. It showed her a map with hardly anything on it except for a thin thread of road. All the information was in Portuguese. With no clue as to how she changed it to English, or even if she could change it, the map was, therefore, of absolutely no use.
She recovered her phone and allowed the connection. ‘I’ve got the satellite thing working, but—’
‘Angelina, I am about to lose my temper here.’ Roque’s grim voice cut across hers. ‘So do yourself a favour and don’t cut our connection again!’
‘It’s all in Portuguese,’ she continued as if he had not interrupted her. ‘You are going to have to tell me what to do so that I can understand it.’
She heard him suck in another deep breath. She felt him fighting to control his temper. Angie did not offer up any encouragement, just waited until he spoke again. ‘I will talk you through it, so concentrate …’
The drive back down through the forest-strewn hills was relatively simple now she had her own personal pilot to guide her, Angie discovered. Roque had instructed her on how to make the car’s computer recognise her mobile phone, and now the deep cool sound of his voice filled the car via its speakers, firing questions and directions at her as she drove. In a strange way Angie found it comforting to have him there with her, though she wasn’t sure why—because she had certainly shut down from feeling anything else right now.
After Their Vows Page 14