After Their Vows

Silence folded around her like a huge stifling blanket. She didn’t know what to do or to think. One part of her brain was throwing up all kinds of excuses—there had to be more than one Nadia out there, and maybe Nadia meant something else in Portuguese.

Or was Nadia right here in Portugal? Was she ringing Roque to arrange where they were to meet?

Are you crazy, Angie? she asked herself. You know that Nadia returned to live in her native Brazil last year, after she’d spilled her kiss and tell to the press, and you believe Roque’s insistence that it was all just a pack of lies anyway.

‘You are awake, senhora …’

Eyelashes fluttering, Angie turned to find Maria standing in the open doors which led into the bedroom, holding a breakfast tray in her hands. The little maid sounded surprised to find her out here, because she knew all about Angie’s preference for lazing in bed each morning while Roque did his macho thing with the gym and the pool.

‘Sim, ‘ she replied, without knowing she’d said it. A dizzy sensation was beginning to spin in her head.

‘You eat out here in the sun this morning, then?’ Maria smiled as she stepped forward to place the tray down on the small table. ‘It is such a beautiful day, no?’

‘Beautiful,’ Angie repeated like a dim echo, and pushed a set of icy cold fingers up to cover her mouth. It was trembling, she noticed, and the inside of her mouth and throat felt like dry sand.

Maria busied herself pouring out Angie’s first cup of tea for her. As the fragrant scent of

Earl Grey wafted towards her she felt her stomach churn.

Next thing she knew she was reeling around to face the doors, and heading towards them as a swirling clutch of nausea suddenly took hold. In her unsteady rush to get to the bathroom she bumped into a chair and knocked it over.

Maria straightened up with a jolt, then spun to stare at her. ‘Oh, senhora, you are ill!’ She heard the little maid gasp.

Angie forced herself to keep moving. Runway training, she kept telling herself over and over. You can make it to the bathroom before you throw up.

She was halfway across the bedroom when the suite door suddenly flew open, halting her mid-step. Turning her head, she saw Roque standing there, still wearing his swimming shorts with a towel looped around his neck. He was frowning as if he was in a bad temper.

‘I have to fly to Paris this afternoon,’ he growled out when he saw her.

Was Nadia in Paris?

With a muffled choke, Angie took flight on legs that felt like fragile spindles. The archway ahead kept swimming in and out. She heard Roque say something sharp, and Maria answer him, and then the little maid’s arm arrived around her waist to help support her—she had never felt so grateful for anything in her entire life.

Feeling too tall and gangly, and as weak as a rag doll, she let Maria guide her towards the bathroom. She threw up in the toilet bowl with Maria holding her hair back just as Roque arrived in the doorway. She could hear the concern in his voice as he spoke with Maria, then felt his closeness as he took over from the maid until it was over. His strong hands gently lifted her into his arms.

Angie wanted to fight him. She wanted to tell him to get off her. She wanted to scream at him to get out. But she found she couldn’t raise the energy, and the dizzying sickness was already trying to pull her back down again.

Maria was still there. She could hear the two of them talking in low voices, but couldn’t understand a word that they said.

Well, what did she expect? She’d married a foreigner. She was living in a foreign country and the language was still foreign to her. It wasn’t to Nadia. Nadia’s native Brazilian was almost an exact match to Roque’s Portuguese. She was dark, like him—exotic, like him, and.

He laid her down on the bed, then stretched out to bring the rumpled sheet fluttering over her. Angie huddled beneath it, so cold she was shivering like mad.

‘I’m calling the doctor,’ he said harshly.

‘Don’t you dare call a doctor!’ Angie shrieked out, then groaned when it made her head feel as if it was splitting apart.

She flinched when she felt the warmth of Roque’s palm on her brow. For some reason it brought her eyes flickering open. He was squatting down beside the bed, so close to her she could see tiny golden-brown shards of concern in his eyes.

‘Go away,’ she whispered, and squeezed her eyes shut again. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to blurt out the question stinging on the tip of her dry, acrid-tasting tongue.

Roque viewed her pinched pallor from the taut position of a man who was recalling the times he had cut it too fine with the use of a condom. He might not have any previous experience with morning sickness to draw upon, but his instincts had been yelling the cause at him from the moment he saw her standing there, looking pale as death, with a hand clamped to her mouth.

What else could be wrong with her? Maria had told him the smell of the tea had turned Angie’s stomach. The maid insisted she’d been perfectly fine a minute before, enjoying the sunshine on the balcony.

‘Angie …’

‘No doctor,’ she mumbled, completely misreading what he had been about to say.