After Their Vows

CHAPTER FIVE

‘COMING to bed,’ Roque murmured impassively.

Angie clutched the duvet all the tighter. ‘Not with me, you’re not!’

His response was to cast the robe aside with the casual grace of silent intent. He was wearing nothing beneath it, not a single solitary stitch, and was so absolutely carelessly at home with his naked beauty he just stood there and let her look her fill.

Angie’s mouth dried up. The helpless need to reacquaint herself with every familiar contour sent her eyes drinking in every glossy square inch. The satin bronze power in his wide shoulders. The sleek bulging biceps in his upper arms. She made a sweeping scan of the steel-plate formation of his hair-peppered torso down to the corded bowl of his narrow hips to where he didn’t even care that he was displaying the rampant fullness of his arousal. A fire lit down deep in her belly, and she wriggled her bottom and clutched more tightly on the duvet.

‘Y-you agreed,’ she whispered.

‘I agreed to nothing,’ he denied, flipping up the duvet with the clear intention of climbing beneath it.

Angie whipped across to the other side of the bed like a sidewinder. It was as she did so that she noticed the other duvet, lying in a fluffy mound of white on the floor, and belatedly took in her surroundings.

‘You moved me!’ she gasped.

‘You sleep where I sleep.’ Stretching out beside her, he yawned widely, then spread out an arm to douse the light. ‘Now, be quiet and go to sleep. I’m shattered.’

He was shattered? Angie had not been awake past ten o’clock for months, and her head was spinning with exhaustion. Throwing herself around to glare at him while he made himself comfortable, she considered climbing back out of the bed again, then changed her mind. She was so tired her legs felt as if they’d been pinned to the mattress by lead weights. She could barely keep her gritty eyes open, and she had a dull, aching thump happening in her head. And if she did get up she knew he would only bring her back again.

On a sound of disgust, she yanked a pillow out from beneath her head and rammed it down the middle of the bed. ‘If your skin so much as touches my skin, even accidentally while you sleep, I will give you another thick lip,’ she threatened, thumping her remaining pillow before dropping her head down on it.

A stunning silence followed that declaration. Angie shut her eyes tight and built fabulous images behind her closed eyelids of her suddenly gaining super-human strength and knocking out the over-muscled, over-endowed brute. It was such a very satisfying fantasy that she kept it running over and over, in the hopes that she would dream about it all night.

Then Roque dared to laugh. ‘One touch from me and you would break up into hot little pieces.’ His taunting drawl came across the pillow.

‘In your dreams,’ Angie mumbled.

‘You never could resist me,’ he insisted. ‘You are like this iced-in little flame on the outside, but on the inside you’ve always been so hot for me it’s like an extra pulse-beat, throbbing incessantly in your blood. I only have to look at you and you’re dead meat, Angie. I am your sexual master—always have been.’

That self-promoting statement brought her lurching into a sitting position, pushing her tangled hair back from her face. ‘Well, you conceited swine,’ she heaved out. ‘Do you really believe that you are the only man to ever make me feel like that? ‘ She turned her head to look down at him through the darkness. ‘You do, don’t you?’ She caught the mocking glint in his eyes. ‘You genuinely believe that because you were my first lover I couldn’t possibly want to make love with any other man. Well, I have news for you, Roque. I moved on—just like you did.’

The glinting eyes took on a dangerous aspect. Lying through her teeth had never come easy to Angie, but, gosh, it was worth it to see that glint.

‘And you can quit looking at me like that,’ she told him.

‘Like what?’ he questioned softly.

Angie felt a sudden need to anchor the duvet tight around her chest. ‘Like I’m talking dirty,’ she enlightened him, then added a scornful little laugh. ‘Yet you’re the one with the serial sexual record. No wonder you have such a bad playboy image. You earned it recording notches on your bedpost of which I was only one.’

‘Is that so?’ he breathed, barely distinctly.

In full aggrieved flow now, Angie nodded her tumbled head before throwing herself back against the pillow. ‘Exclusive you are not.’

‘So you decided to follow my example and take a few lovers or your own? Is that what you are telling me? ‘

Even through the darkness Angie could read the level of threat contained in his tone well enough to fling herself onto her side, as far away from him as she could get.

‘I would need to be taking sex-enhancing drugs to follow your example.’ She thumped her remaining pillow again and then resettled her head. ‘All I’m saying is don’t put yourself on a sexual pedestal of my making. I’ve been around now. I’ve known better and worse lovers than you, so—’

He moved so fast that even though she had been half expecting it he still drew a choky cry from her at the speed with which she found herself pinned flat on her back.

‘Better than me?’ he scythed out.

‘Well … hello, Mr Ego,’ Angie drawled as his angry breath warmed her face.

His glinting eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me you are lying to me.’