After Their Vows

Then he speared his fingers into her hair and bent his dark head to claim her mouth again, exalted by the grateful little whimper that rolled around her throat. Mine, he thought with simmering triumph, even if she did not want to be his. And with a long, smooth, possessive stroke of his hand along her body he made her quiver and writhe.

As if she knew what he’d been thinking, she said, ‘I hate it that you can do this to me!’

‘And I love it that I can do this to you,’ Roque came right back.

Then he transferred his kisses to her neck, the swelling slopes of her breasts, and Angie forgot what they were talking about because she knew what was coming. She just clung to him, and the wait was unbearable as he plied hot, moist, grazing kisses over every inch of her flesh. His hands caressed where his lips were not reaching, layering sensation over sensation with the clever use of his hands and his mouth. When he finally gave her what she was craving for and dipped a finger between her thighs she just went completely still.

Roque lifted his head to watch the glaze of desire swim across the sensual glow of her eyes and see her breathing slow right down. His own heated response flooded his bloodstream as her silken wetness enfolded his touch. He reached up to touch his lips to hers, and she raised long and dusky eyelashes so she could look at him in trancelike sensuality.

‘You love this, hmm, querida?’ he husked.

She could not find the voice to reply. She just lifted up her fingers to trace his exotic cheekbones, warmed by desire. He was so beautiful to look at her heart ached. The fingertip delicacy of his touch was so instinctively perfect she experienced its pleasure through every pore. When he lowered his head to kiss her again she melted into it in the same luxurious way she had melted elsewhere.

It didn’t stay like that for long, though. Like the beautiful calm before the raging storm, he wanted more— and he knew how to extract it. His kisses grew more demanding, his caressing fingers extracting a taut restlessness from her that set her panting and needing more. Her hands were moving all over him, touching, stroking, reclaiming each ripple of pleasure he experienced, each low, dark, husky groan. He bent to suck her tight aching breasts, and she closed the long thick power of his erection in both of her hands. It swelled for her, pulsing like a separate living thing, nudging her hip and demanding more from her—which she gave. And she felt the fluttering quickening in her body, felt her senses come alive in a vibrant rush that brought them tingling to the surface of her skin. Their mouths became a hot fuse of hunger again and again and again, until she could stand it no longer,

‘Roque,’ she breathed desperately. ‘Please …’

He reclaimed her mouth with the silken fire of his darting tongue, and continued to trace the hot, vulnerable flesh between her thighs, dipping inside her, then frustratingly out again, finding and stimulating the tiny hidden nub and circling it until she flailed in a storm of excited frustration. He sucked her nipples with a ruthlessly determined urgency that had her fingers releasing him to clutch his hair, where they stayed, helpless and useless other than to cling, because her brain and her senses were being consumed in other places.

‘Please, Roque, please …’ she heard herself begging in a thick, tight, anxious little voice. Then, ‘Oh …’ She arched her spine at a streak of glorious pleasure. ‘Do that again …’

He did do it again, and again, driving her into that white-hot mindless place where only his touch mattered. The heat of his breath was on her skin, and the dark rasp of words muttered in his own language as he urged her towards that agonised peak and almost right over it. Then, with the timing of an absolute master, he came over her and took her flailing over that peak with his first long, driving stroke.

It was like coming alive after a year lost in limbo. Angie came all around him in tense, hot rippling waves that increased in power with each plunge. He was hot and hard and increasingly urgent. He kept kissing her mouth, then her throat, then her shoulder, driving her crazy, because each heated touch was like a torment that did not last long enough.

He pushed the hair back from her face and commanded, ‘Open your eyes.’

Angie obeyed without a single thought that he meant anything more than to add yet another dimension to what was happening between them. Breathless, panting, eyes dark green pools of desire, she looked into his deep dark gaze and saw the flickering flames of anger a split second before he rasped harshly, ‘Say farewell to your fine moral principles, Angie.’ And with a final long, plundering stroke tossed her, shocked, confused, shatteringly bewildered, into the spinning world of ecstatic release.

Afterwards she felt as if she was dropping down from a very high place onto stony ground. Her body still throbbed all around him. The power of her release still sounded like a scream in her head. Roque was heavy on top of her, and the evidence that he was taking this long to find his breath was a small kind of comfort to the way he had just deliberately demolished her.

She wanted to move, but she did not want to prompt him into saying anything else. Say farewell to your fine moral principles, Angie … That had been a big enough bludgeon to beat her with. She’d vowed she wouldn’t have sex with him, now she’d done it, and Roque had wanted to make sure that she knew she had done it.

He moved finally, lifting himself up on his forearms and raising his head from the warm damp hollow of her throat. He looked at her. She looked at him. Nothing— not even a glimmer of emotion passed between the two of them.

Then, with a grimace, he slid off her—and the moment he did so Angie snaked off the bed. Tears were threatening, but she refused to give in to them. She tried her best to walk in a straight line towards the archway which led into her dressing room and bathroom, but she felt so light-headed and dizzy she was afraid her legs were going to buckle beneath her.

‘Retribuição, ‘ he fed after her impassively. ‘It means retribution,’ he enlightened. ‘My retribution. I did not sleep with Nadia.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

ANGIE stilled like a frozen icicle topped by a flaming river of fire.

‘The tabloids misinterpreted what they saw,’ he extended in a cold, flat voice. ‘So you owe me, Angie, for twelve lousy months of being labelled a faithless playboy husband. Now you will never know what I’ve been doing and who I’ve been doing it with since you walked out on me.’

‘So that—just now—was your idea of revenge?’ she said without turning.

‘I felt I was due something.’

Angie nodded her flame-bright head. ‘Then I hope it gave you … satisfaction,’ she murmured, and started walking again.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ He sounded so sardonic she almost turned and ran back across the room to give him what he really should be getting—which was a slap across his heartless face! But she didn’t. She was too hurt and cold and—worse than both of those things— too revolted with herself for giving in to him in the first place.

‘As you said to me yesterday, this is a different time and a different set of issues. I thought we were trying to rebuild something here—not trying to demolish it completely. Silly me.’ She even managed a laugh, albeit a bitter one. ‘I should have remembered your ruthless streak.’

‘Did you hear what I said?’ He sounded irritated now. ‘I did not sleep with Nadia.’

Angie breathed short and tensely. ‘Does she know that?’