The beginning of the end of her resistance to him, Angie thought now with a bitter wry smile. The breathtaking patience with which he’d dealt with her prickly hostility even as she’d let him drive her all the way to the hospital local to Alex’s school. The way he’d waited patiently while she’d checked that her brother was not at death’s door and dealt with his censorious headmaster because her brother had apparently started the brawl.
Limp as a rag by the time they’d started the journey back to London again, and in snappish mood, she’d reminded him that he’d left Nadia standing back in London.
‘Nadia and I have not been an item since I first saw you,’ he’d stated coolly. Then, with a deliberate change of subject, ‘Tell me about your parents. Why are they not here to deal with your brother? ‘
And that had been it. For some reason Angie still could not figure that quietly serious question had ended her objections to him. For the first time since she’d taken responsibility for Alex she’d found herself pouring it all out on that car journey back to London. By the time he’d seen her safely inside her Chelsea apartment she had already been halfway infatuated by his quiet manner and his seriously disturbing charm.
Angie sighed, narrow shoulders hunching inside her coat as she slumped down onto the edge of Roque’s desk and stared down her long legs at her flat-shoed feet. Within a week he had been her lover. Within three months he’d asked her to marry him. Within a year all her rose-tinted dreams had lain broken—more than broken—shattered by a sequence of nightmarish events she still found impossible to think about, though the hurt they’d inflicted refused to hide away with the thoughts.
‘Take off the coat.’
Lifting up her head, Angie was not quick enough to cover up those feelings her memories brought back. She hurt. She hurt. And he was lounging there, at ease in the doorway, arms folded across his shirt-front, eyes slightly narrowed, watching her steadily.
In charge.
She dragged her eyes away from him. ‘When I look at you I see Nadia,’ she told him bleakly.
‘When I look at you I see a blind, stubborn woman,’ he drawled back. ‘Stop fighting me, Angie,’ he then said flatly. ‘Your year-long sulking time is up. Accept it.’
Sulking? He dared to think she was merely sulking?
‘I just don’t want to be in your life any more! ‘ Hating that she was revealing even this one small glimpse of vulnerability to him, Angie shot away from the desk.
‘But you will be in my life again,’ Roque returned, smooth as glass, ‘because, meu querida, baby brother expects you to do whatever it is I want you to do.’
He was challenging her to deny it. To call his bluff. In one dark corner of her agonised feelings Angie even suspected that he wanted her to walk away.
Power games, she recognised. Not with her this time, but with Alex. He wanted her to leave her brother to face up to his crimes for himself.
‘I don’t even understand why you want me back.’ She was genuinely mystified by that. ‘It’s not as if you enjoyed living with me the first time around.’
His mouth gave a twitch. ‘You had your good moments.’
Ang
ie uttered a low husky laugh. ‘You can get good sex anywhere, Roque, and without having to put up with the hassle of a pain-in-the-neck wife breathing all over your guilty conscience.’
‘I don’t have a guilty conscience.’
‘Well, you should have!’ she flared. ‘You took Nadia to bed. You had great sex with her. The newspapers were full of how good it was. So don’t you dare stand there and admit to me that you don’t feel guilty about it when it was me they ridiculed because I could not keep my husband happy!’
‘Well, did you—keep me happy? ‘
Seeing the arched eyebrows which accompanied his calm counter-charge, Angie saw no hint—not even a glimpse of a hint—of regret in his hard, handsome face.
She pulled in a breath, feeling an unwanted pressure building up in her chest. No, she had not kept Roque happy. But when had he bothered to make an effort to make her happy?
He’d complained about her job commitments. He’d complained about Alex. Every decision she’d had to make about her brother he had opposed. When she’d tried to make him understand her point of view he’d grown impatient with her and walked off. Sometimes she’d felt so lonely and confused she’d hidden in the bathroom and wept.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Are you going or staying?’
He was thinking about food while she was killing herself with their miserable past? Angie folded her arms and did not answer. A burning resentment sizzled in her blood. The silence stretched—she stretched it—until Roque decided to make it snap.
‘Are you going or staying?’ he repeated.
‘Staying!’ Angie burst out with a whip-cracking fury that should have brought the walls tumbling down around them both.
Roque winced as he pushed away from the doorframe and strode further into the room. The air between them crackled and fizzed with the echoing effects of her burst of fury. Angie was actually breathing fast in the aftermath, but without saying another word Roque just reached for her arms, calmly unfolded them, then set about untying the belt on her coat.