After Their Vows

‘You would not become this agitated if you were not such a control freak,’ he opined, with all the diplomacy of a superior being talking down to a mulish child.

Raising her eyes to send him a swift acid glance she hoped would sear off a layer of his golden skin, she noticed the swelling in the centre of his lower lip and was suddenly overtaken by remorse. By the look of it she had a horrible feeling she had actually drawn blood.

‘I’m—sorry,’ she husked. ‘About the …’ She lifted a finger as if to touch his lip, then curled the projecting finger into her fist, dropped her hand again and made do with a shrug.

As if he wanted to make her suffer, he ran the tip of his tongue over the swelling with such lazy sensuality Angie felt as if she was suddenly drowning in static.

‘I really hate you,’ she choked, as if the declaration was going to make the feeling go away.

It didn’t.

Sliding a hand inside her coat, he laid the flat of his palm against the base of her long, supple spine, then used his long fingers to exert pressure to ease her up from the desk. She arrived a short whisper away from the hard-packed warmth of his body and her inner sizzle just got worse. Like a silly, breathless, tense little whippet she dropped her eyes from his mouth to stare at the triangle of tanned skin left exposed by the open collar of his shirt and let him ease her coat from her shoulders, then toss it across the desk. Tears were pressing at her. Her heart felt like a huge aching lump in her chest.

‘I won’t have sex with you.’ As if she was mesmerised by that golden-brown triangle of skin, her declaration had arrived on the back of her wanting to lean and press her lips against it then stretch up to do the same to his beautiful bruised lip.

He caught hold of her hand and said absolutely nothing. What Roque could do with silence should be bottled and sold, Angie decided, as she wimped out of fighting to get her hand back and let him lead her across the room.

He knew why she’d just blurted out her last comment. He knew she’d never been able to stand close to him without wanting to devour him alive. Roque was her one confessed weakness. Not his mind, not his wealth, not his gorgeous looks, nor even the warm and exciting charm he could turn on occasionally.

No, she lusted after his body, full-stop.

But she didn’t love him any more, she told herself.

She didn’t.

She let him trail her behind him across the wide open space that made up the seating area of soft black leather sofas set around a black marble wall-fire, currently licking with flames behind a plate of glass. It was dark outside now. London was twinkling. He brought her into the spacious kitchen bay, where Angie picked up on the delicious aroma of something spicy for the first time.

She’d eaten nothing since a snatched lunch consisting of an apple and a yogurt, so her nostrils flared hungrily and her stomach gave a timely growl.

Propping her up against one of the shiny black kitchen units, Roque turned away to cross over to a giant-sized cooking range. Angie frowned, curious, because of all the things Roque was infuriatingly good at, cooking wasn’t one of them. He could manage to put together a grilled bacon sandwich if he absolutely had to, or throw some salad between two slices of bread, but cooking— real cooking, the likes of which was giving off the delicious aromas she was picking up—came under the heading of ‘Professional Chefs’ or an assortment of favoured good restaurants as far as Roque was concerned.

Had he changed his mind and brought staff in here to take care of him? Mrs Grant came in daily, to keep the apartment in order, but she had never been expected to cook. Still frowning, Angie watched the under-cupboard lighting reflect down onto his long brown fingers as he lifted the lid off a pan of what looked like simmering pasta.

‘You made that?’ She could not stop herself from asking the question.

‘From a packet,’ he admitted, ‘with precise instructions printed on it. The rest came ready-cooked in cartons from Gino’s.’ He named a local Italian bistro they’d used to eat at often. ‘Gino refused to provide his fresh pasta for me to ruin.’

Flipping open the door to the microwave, he removed a sealed carton and almost burnt his fingers in the process. With a cursing ouch, he dropped the hot carton down on the granite counter. Fighting with herself not to do it, in the end Angie sighed and walked forward to pick up a teatowel, then silently shoved him out of the way.

A few minutes later Gino’s best savoury sauce had been blended with steaming pasta, and a mound of succulently spicy meatballs was heaped on the top. Refusing to glance at Roque, who now leant casually against the counter-top content to watch her finish what he had started, Angie picked up the serving dish and turned to transport it to the small dining table set in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows next to the kitchen. There was another table in the more formal dining area—a grand-looking antique imported from his native Portugal, like the desk, but it had rarely been used by them unless they’d had guests for dinner, which hadn’t been often because their time schedules always …

Angie stopped that train of thinking before it eroded this temporary calm they seemed to have reached without her knowing how they had done it.

The small table was already set for two, which almost—almost—brought a smile to her lips, because setting a table was one of the few domestic chores Roque could undertake. Or would undertake, she amended as she set the dish down in the middle of the table.

‘Exquisite,’ he murmured.

‘Of course it is. Gino made it,’ Angie said as she straightened up.

‘Meu Deus, I was not referring to the food,’ he husked, bringing her gaze swinging round and up to his face.

CHAPTER FOUR

ANGIE felt suddenly as if she was suffocating. A sizzle of self-awareness imprisoned her breath. He was looking at what she was wearing, his too-dark eyes coming alive with a glow which highlighted their true rich brown colour as he swept them down over her black mini-skirt splashed with emerald-green dots teamed with a flimsy black chiffon top.

A low drumbeat of tension began to throb between them as Roque followed the way the skirt clung to her tiny waist and fell in soft gathers three-quarters of the way up her lengthy thighs. Without the matt black tights the skirt would be indecent. With the tights what that tiny skirt did for the length of her legs was nothing short of sensational. What the flimsy top did for the high, firm rounded breasts he could see moving behind the gauzy fabric was, however, a different thing entirely, and his reaction was striking directly at the raw, macho and possessive heart of him.

He knew she worked on the front desk at CGM Management. He knew by the timing that she must have rushed like mad to get over here as quickly as she had. But the thought of his wife tripping around CGM’s vast white marble reception area all day wearing this outfit ignited his primitive side. Her hair was a shiny mass of silky red spirals clinging to her narrow shoulders; her legs went on for ever inside those matt black tights. If she had walked in here stark naked she could not have turned him on as hard and as fast as this outfit was doing right now. He wanted to lift her up so she could wrap those long legs around him. His wanted to sink his head down and suck on those twin peaks he could see pressing invitingly against the lace outline of the top.