After Their Vows

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?

‘Why are you bothering to do this at all?’ she fed right back at him.

Roque lowered his dark head. ‘My family does not do divorce,’ he answered smoothly.

Angie had to suck in a long hard breath to control the ever-pressing need to tumble into the kind of wild weeping jag she had not allowed herself to vent since—

No… Swallowing tautly, she told herself she was just not going to go there, staring down at the things clutched in her fingers and refusing to let them blur out of focus.

‘So we must try harder to make a success of our marriage this time around …’

Still she made no response, but the telling sheen in her eyes held him captive. It was as if she was projecting an image of Nadia into the gap between them, and he let out a sigh.

‘I want to try,’ he added, in a roughened tone.

She blinked her long eyelashes and the sheen was gone—but not the hurt, he saw.

‘To your standards or mine?’ Without giving him a chance to answer that, she spun away from him. ‘Just be clear, Roque, that the moment I stop caring about my brother will be the same moment you will lose control over me.’

She closed the door softly on her way out, making Roque wince as if she’d slammed it, then grimace because what she had said was true.

The complicated paradox of having a relationship with Angie, he mused ruefully. Her brother was always going to come first.

He raked out a laugh, wondering why he was giving himself all of this hassle when there were lots of women out there he could be enjoying a perfectly contented relationship with.

The answer was in the question. He did not want any other woman. He did not want perfect contentment in his life. He wanted a red-hot-tempered, red-haired shrew, with a fierce ability to love unconditionally—so long as your name was Alex, not Roque.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ROQUE turned the Range Rover in through the gates of the Quinta d’Agostinho, and drove into a tunnel of trees. Darkness swallowed them up in a moment, the spread of the car’s headlights arcing eerily across the narrow strip of tarmac and into the surrounding undergrowth, washing the colour out of everything. The narrow driveway twisted and turned from there on, keeping them climbing steadily, as they had been doing since they’d left Lisbon behind.

For the quinta nestled in historic splendour on a lush green plateau near the peak of a forest-strewn hill. To see the house at all, unless from an eye-squinting far distance, you had to be in the air and flying over the top of his steep grey-tiled roofs.

As the tunnel of trees eventually thinned out, Angie shifted on her seat for the first time since they’d swapped Roque’s plane for his sturdy four-wheel drive. She had visited this place only once before, which felt oddly unnatural now, when this was after all her husband’s main home. Roque also owned an apartment in a beautifully converted sixteenth-century palace in the centre of Lisbon, which they’d used to use a lot. But this fabulous estate, with its rich dark forests and neatly tended formal gardens, was almost a stranger to her.

The last of the trees gave way to an elegant spread of sweeping lawns and flower-strewn shrubbery. Light suddenly bathed the car. As if inexorably drawn by it, Angie sat forward even further, to peer through the windscreen up at the house itself, standing within its own pool of welcoming warmth.

Lit for the master coming home, she thought, feeling breathless and vaguely threatened at the same time, though she did not understand why.

Great wealth, quintessential elegance and centuries of history stood right there, in the sugared apricot colour of its grand manor house walls. Angie glimpsed softly lit deep ground-floor terraces, and pretty arched upper balconies dressed in white-painted latticework, and the stone-built tower curving out from one corner as if stuck on as an afterthought. She caught a glimpse of the silky blue water in the swimming pool shimmering in its own beautifully tended bowl of a garden towards the far side of the house.

Then the car took a sweeping turn to the left, dipping them down and away from the front elevation towards the left-hand side of the house, where several open-arched, stone-columned garages came into view.

Roque stopped the car, switched off the engine and climbed out.

Angie stared balefully at his proud, handsome profile as he strode around the car bonnet on his way to open her door for her. He held out a hand to help her alight, which she accepted. They had been very polite to each other since they’d left London. Polite, distant, seemingly finally emptied of words.

She shivered as the cool evening air touched her skin, and still without saying a word Roque slid out of his jacket and dropped it onto her shoulders.