After Their Vows

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.’