After Their Vows. Michelle Reid
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he fired at her.
Having found her dry lips had stuck together, Angie nodded.
‘Cash …’ Roque made a sound of disgust. ‘Only you would hand over that amount of money in cash!’
‘At least I did not go into debt, like most people do.’ She defended her strict principles.
Like a man unsure what he wanted to do next, Roque swung away again—only to swing straight back, catching Angie out so that she blinked.
‘No, you don’t have a clue what it is like to go into debt, do you? Which is why you believed you could stroll in here like a holier-than-thou prima donna and calmly hand me an instalment on your stupid brother’s debt and it would make everything all right!’
‘I am not playing the prima donna!’ Angie protested.
His expressive eyebrows rose to a sardonic arch. ‘Enter the betrayed wife, with her beautiful chin held up high and her sensational green eyes turned to ice. “I have nothing to say to you, Roque.’” He gave a wincingly good mimic of her cool boarding school accent, bringing an uncomfortable flush to Angie’s cheeks. ‘I was then treated to that fabulous supermodel walk through the apartment, the long sexy glide and the sizzling fire hair aimed to hook me into following you like a panting puppy dog—’
‘A puppy dog?’ She was glad to get her teeth into something. ‘You were never anyone’s panting puppy dog, Roque. You came into this world a fully grown, womanising wolf! ‘
In a totally unexpected turn of mood, a shaft of pure amusement spread across his face, and he bared his perfectly even flashing white teeth, then uttered a low, sexy growl in response.
Angie received that growl with a burst of indignant fury which set her eyes sparking and her slender body tensing away from the desk.
The sting Roque felt hit his loins was hot. She was going to launch a physical attack on him. He could read her like an open book. When he flipped the mood over between them like this she never could resist rising to the bait. Every muscle he possessed went on alert, ready to catch her when she attacked. The inside of his mouth moistened in anticipation, his lips filling with warm pulsing blood.
He watched her take a step towards him, sensational in anger, so beautiful to look at, and so much his woman he—
Then he saw her remember, watched her eyes darken and her flushed cheeks wash white. In an abrupt movement she spun back round to face the desk again.
Disappointment grabbed at every alerted instinct inside him and closed them all down into a single tight clench. Once, just once, he had called her bluff when she’d firmly put her brother between them. If he’d ever wondered what it was like to stumble into a deep black hole of his own damn making then he’d found out that long and miserable night.
Anger and guilt rolled around Roque’s chest in equal measures, followed by a bitterness that thankfully overshadowed the other two feelings—because the devil if he was going to apologise, he told himself harshly. The devil if he was going to explain himself or the motives of that foolish bitch Nadia now, when it was twelve months too late.
And this was about Angie’s brother, he reminded himself grimly. Alex—the spoiled, weak, thieving lout.
Stubborn to the last drop of her hot swirling blood, Angie opened up the chequebook, then stretched across the desk to recover the pen. With a firm scrawl she laid her signature in the appropriate place.
Angelina de Calvhos … She stared at it, vowing fiercely that it was going to be the very last time she would ever sign that name.
Then he was right there behind her again like some grim dark power force, reaching for the chequebook again, taking it from her resistant fingers yet again. This time he took it with him as he strode around the desk. With a finality that made Angie choke out a gasp, he opened a drawer and dropped the book into it, then closed the drawer again with a resolute snap.
Tall, dark, supremely in control of himself, he then lifted his proud dark head. ‘I think we will begin this again from a more formal perspective,’ he intoned coolly.
Angie snapped her arms across her body to contain the way it wanted to shiver in the sudden chill. ‘Please don’t hurt my brother,’ she begged.
CHAPTER THREE
LIKE a man hewn from stone, Roque showed no reaction whatsoever to her quivering climb-down.
‘He is a thief.’ He stated it brutally. ‘He stole your identity and committed credit card theft! And he did it with a complete disregard to the amount of money he was stealing from me. How can you, Angie, of all people, want to defend him for doing that?’
She’d winced all the way through his cold judgement of Alex, but still it did not change a thing she felt. ‘He’s my brother,’ she whispered.
And there it was, Roque recognised, the unconditional love she had a right to expect her brother to return in equal measures. But somehow she did not seem to understand that.
‘I can pay you back the full amount he st … spent,’ she insisted, with only that small but telling fault in the middle. ‘I will just need a little time to get it.’
‘By selling your flat and making yourself homeless?’ Roque was not impressed.
Neither was Angie. She flared him a scornful look, ‘My flat is worth more than fifty thousand pounds, Roque,’ she informed him. ‘And you already have twenty thousand sitting in that chequebook you’ve just stolen from me and put in that drawer!’
Fifty … Roque had stopped listening at fifty. His lean face carefully without expression, he added lying wimp to his brother-in-law’s steadily mounting list of sins.
‘I’ll—I’ll go back to modelling,’ she explained quickly. ‘I’m still in demand, and Carla keeps on trying to get me to change my mind, so I could earn the rest in—in—’
The way Roque flung himself across to the plate glass window behind the desk and thrust his hands in his pockets made Angie’s voice slither to a strangled stop. It wasn’t so much that he’d turned his back on what she’d been saying but the way he had done it which filled her with dread.
When he wanted to, Roque could become chillingly unreachable. And he felt no love for Alex at all. In his view her brother was the main reason why their marriage had fallen apart. He’d refused to understand that in taking on the parental mantle for her brother she had a duty to see her responsibilities to Alex through—even when they intruded an awful lot on their marriage.
It was just the way things had to be. Teenagers by reputation were rebellious and pushy and difficult. And, okay, so Alex had played up to Roque’s often stinging criticism of him, she conceded, but even that did not change the unalterable fact that standing between the two of them had made her marriage a year-long exhausting fight.
‘Please listen to me …’ Angie lowered her stubborn guard because she knew that she had to, her voice trembling as she did so. ‘I can—’
‘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