‘Listen,’ she said, handing the phone to him, and then stood waiting for him to do as she’d said. She didn’t look at his face. She didn’t care what he was thinking or feeling or—anything. She just waited, with her lips sucked in at the corners to stop them from trembling, knowing exactly what he was listening to.
Nadia herself, confirming the truth about that night twelve months ago. Nadia taunting Angie with it via voicemail, describing all the other nights she and Roque had spent together while Angie had been out of the way.
She knew without looking up at him when the message had finished. She waited, without allowing herself the relief of swallowing the thick lump that had formed in her throat, for him to lower the phone from his ear.
‘I saved it as evidence,’ she told him. ‘In case I decided I could take the humiliation of letting my lawyers listen to it for use in evidence for our div— If you’re deleting it,’ she broke off to say, when his fingers started hitting buttons, ‘then I should tell you I’ve downloaded a copy elsewhere.’
‘Angie—’
‘As you said,’ she cut right across him. ‘We are doing this twelve months too late.’
Snatching the phone back, she turned and walked away from him.
‘She is lying, meu querida,’ he insisted wearily. ‘It—none of what she said happened except inside her own twisted head.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose it matters any more.’ She laid the phone down on the heap of other things she’d tipped from the bag. ‘If you’re telling me the truth then you’ve just had your payback. If Nadia is telling the truth I suppose I had mine when I kicked you out of my life.’
Wrapping her arms around the jumper, she turned and made herself look at him. He looked—stunned. Maybe even a bit shaken and pale. Crazy, she thought, how seeing him stripped of his usual arrogance made her insides start to shake.
‘Now you are back …’
Not liking the way he said that, Angie frowned. She had a feeling he was thinking out loud rather than speaking to her. He even blinked slowly, as if to refocus, and then she watched him take in a short breath.
‘You know something, Angie? I think I am ashamed of you,’ he said, so unexpectedly that he made her blink. He grimaced and went to turn away, then changed his mind and swung back again. ‘I am your husband!’ he launched at her. ‘Yet you preferred to believe that!’ He slashed a contemptuous glance at her mobile. ‘The ravings of a mean-minded bad loser out to cause trouble between us, rather than give me the right to defend myself!’
‘I saw the newspapers—’
‘And received a bitchy message—which, seemingly, you have hugged to yourself like a hair shirt ever since!’
She turned pale, because there was an indefensible slice of truth in that harsh statement. ‘Y-you’d already told me you were going to find someone else to take my place. You—’
‘And you, querida, still made the choice to go to your brother.’
‘I ch-changed my mind and came back—’
‘Exatamente,’ Roque said curtly. ‘You changed your mind—as was your right … As it was my right to change my mind about putting another woman in your place.’
‘Oh, very slick.’ Angie utterly derided that. ‘I saw you with my own eyes, kissing her!’
‘Sim. ‘ He revealed absolutely no crack in his superior attitude. ‘Guilty as charged. And you made it halfway to your brother’s school before you decided to turn back.’
The parallel lines he was drawing suddenly dovetailed so neatly Angie almost choked on her breath as the two merged together. He was saying he had taken his threat as far as kissing Nadia before he’d changed his mind.
Her lips trembled and parted. She dropped her arms to her sides. She was hunting her head for a line of defence but could not find one.
As if he knew that, Roque nodded his head, spun a swift final glance of glinting contempt at her mobile, then turned and walked off.
Angie couldn’t move a single muscle. The chilly wash of truth was sinking through her as she listened to the suite door open, then shut.
Could he be telling the truth?
She knew she was still hunting for a chink in his cold demolition of her totally self-righteous belief in her own version of what had happened. Face it, Angie, you need to find a chink or Roque is right!
He was certainly right about Nadia’s message—she had hugged it to her like some self-punishing hair shirt. Her skin was suddenly riddled with a prickly quiver. Spinning round, she snatched up the phone and deleted Nadia’s wretched message with tense taps of her finger, then tossed the phone away from her as if it had burned to touch it at all.
She heard the sound of another door closing, and swung around, her breath caught and her eyes glued to the archway, until it registered with her that the door she’d heard closing was the one that led out of the suite.
He’d left her alone to fester. He’d taken his bad temper off to another part of the house. The burning urge to go chasing after him almost got the better of her, but then common sense arrived, telling her to give him time to cool off.