After Their Vows

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.

‘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.