After Their Vows

‘And Zetta is preparing a light supper,’ he pushed on, sounding like a super-polite hotel concierge. ‘As the hour is so late, I thought you might prefer to eat it up here.’

Angie nodded again, then added a courteous, ‘Thank you.’

The long hiss of his breath ran straight down her spine. ‘Angie—’

‘I’ll have a bath first, if that’s okay,’ she interrupted.

‘Of course it is okay.’ He’d started to sound irritated, but she didn’t react—didn’t want to react. She didn’t want to fight with him any more. She felt cold and empty, as if she’d lost something precious.

Which she had, she acknowledged bleakly. Her freedom of choice.

She could almost feel him biting back the desire to say something else, but instead he turned and strode back out of the suite, the door closing into its housing with such a numbing softness it made her flinch.

Turning around, she crossed the bedroom and stepped beneath one of the plaster archways which stood either side of the huge, deeply carved bed. The archway opened up into a spacious, custom-designed dressing room she could have fitted the whole of her London flat inside. She crossed the floor to where she remembered the bathroom was situated, and by the time she’d run a bath in the huge porcelain tub, and indulged herself by soaking in it for ages, she began to feel more human again.

Wrapped in the velvet-smooth white bathrobe she’d found hanging behind the door, Angie padded out of the bathroom—only to pull to a stop in surprise when she discovered that while she’d been soaking in the bath her things had been unpacked and put away. Her suits, her dresses, tops and blouses all hung in co-ordinated neatness in the open-plan-style wardrobe spaces. Her assortment of shoes lined up in rows. Toiletries, cosmetics, perfumes were all carefully arranged on the wall-to-wall mirrored dressing table, and everything else was either neatly folded away or placed discreetly in the central island bank of drawers.

I’ve well and truly been moved in, she noted ruefully. Then padded out into the bedroom to find the promised supper spread out on a table by one of the windows. She discovered fresh, warm crusty bread, a baby tureen filled with a light aromatic soup, and a pot of tea with the distinctive scent of her favoured Earl Grey.

Left alone to enjoy her supper, she eventually let her attention drift towards the bed. A bed she had carefully avoided looking at until now, because it was the place she had spent her wedding night.

A night of warm and gentle teasing, then wild and hot rising passion as their hunger for each other closed them in. She’d learnt right there in that bed that there was a difference between being a lover and being a wife, as if the vows they’d exchanged had cast aside the mere physical, opening them up to a new and deeper intimacy that had overwhelmed them both.

He had loved her then. Angie was sure of it. And she had so loved him. They’d told each other so over and over during the long, dark and deeply passionate night in that bed.

A bed she would share with Roque again tonight— and goodness alone knew what else he intended them to share. It had already been prepared, with the lemon and lime cover stripped away and left neatly folded on the ottoman at the end of the bed, the crisp white bedding turned down.

Well, hello, honeymoon, she thought with a mockery she did not like to hear at work in her head. But there it was, mocking her rather than the situation, because their real honeymoon had spanned only that one night before her mobile phone had started ringing and she’d been rushing out of here to catch a flight back to London. Her brother had got himself into trouble again.

It was a wonder Roque had put up with it, she thought now, almost eighteen months after the event. The thought made Angie rise up from the table, tense again suddenly, restless, not liking it that she was seeing how putting her brother’s needs before everything, even their honeymoon, must have felt to Roque.

Like an interloper in his own marriage. Angie winced as she recalled Roque saying that. It was no wonder they’d stopped loving and started fighting.

The suite door suddenly swung open and Roque strode in, still wearing the dark suit he had changed into before they’d left London, minus the jacket, of course, and now also minus his tie. Butterflies inside her stirred into life. He oozed streamlined grace and smooth, dark sophistication, exotic and earthy and unconditionally male. The bright white of his shirt highlighted the width of this shoulders and long lean torso. The absolute finest dark silk-wool mix draped his hips, his long, powerful thighs and legs.

But when she looked at his face she could see the polite shutters were still in place, joined now by a grim purpose that put Angie warily on her guard as he strode up to her, then held out his hand.

Her eyelashes flickering slightly, she studied his closed features for a second, then looked down to see he was holding out his mobile phone.

‘Take it,’ he instructed.

Not

understanding why she needed to, Angie moistened lips and did nothing.

‘It is your brother,’ he said. ‘I managed to catch him between stopovers.’

It was ironic that he should do this now, when the last person she wanted to think about was Alex.

‘Roque—’ she said with a husky jerk, wanting— needing—to say something to him but with no clue as to what the something was.

The grim set of Roque’s mouth moved in a tense twitch as he took hold of her hand and placed the phone in it, then turned and strode away again, crossing the room to disappear into the other dressing room. Angie followed his tall, straight, purposeful stride through slightly blurred and helplessly confused swimming eyes.

‘Are you there, Angie?’

It was only as her brother’s impatient voice arrived in her ear that she realised she’d lifted the phone to it. ‘Y-yes,’ she confirmed, blinking fast. ‘I’m here. Are you all right?’

‘Of course I’m all right,’ Alex responded. ‘What do you think I am—a baby? ‘