After Their Vows

Give them both time to cool off.

It seemed crazily fitting that when she opened the wrong drawer to look for her normal nightdress she found herself staring at a piece of white tissue paper folded carefully over something familiarly soft, with an oh-so neatly scripted label carefully pinned to it.

‘My Baby’s First Shawl by Angelina de Calvhos’ she read with a thick, sinking swoop of her heart. Silly, soppy, sentimental.

As her lips parted and started trembling she felt a different kind of tremor take control of her throat. Reaching out, even her fingers trembled as she slowly, carefully picked up the piece of tissue and placed it gently on the drawer-top. She did not want to look inside it. She had a horrible feeling her heart was going to crack wide open if she did. Yet, with her breath caught in her chest, she still drew back the folds of tissue, then stood, feeling an odd numbness spread up from her toes.

Barely half finished and very amateur-looking, the gossamer-fine snowy white shawl had been her very first attempt at crocheting. She’d spent hours, carefully threading the fine lacy pattern, only to constantly need to unpick half of it again when she realised she’d made a mistake.

Dry-eyed, she saw herself sitting curled up in a chintzy armchair in the tiny cottage deep in the Cotswolds Carla had sent her to when she’d needed to seek refuge from the press.

And from Roque, she added as she stroked her fingers across the soft fine wool. The cottage had belonged to a spinster aunt of Carla’s. She’d inherited it when the aunt died, but had rarely used it herself. ‘An investment’, her boss had called it. For Angie it had become her sanctuary, a place to hide away from the public eye while she nursed her wounds and nurtured the tiny life growing inside her womb. She’d found the hooks, wool and patterns languishing in a cupboard. It had just felt kind of fitting that she occupied some of her time taking on the challenge of teaching herself how to crochet.

‘Bad therapy, sweetie,’ Carla had drawled in her dry, mocking way, when she’d called in one day and caught her fumbling attempts to work with the hook and wool and demanded to know what she was doing. ‘Maternal instincts gone mad. You should come back into the real world before you turn into one of those awful mummy frumps. I’ve got loads of work for a pregnant model.’

Well, not for this model, Angie thought sadly. A week after that conversation with Carla she’d been taken into hospital and confined to complete bedrest in an attempt to stop a threatening miscarriage. A month later it had happened anyway, for no reason anyone could give except the old one about nature taking its course.

Roque had not even known she was pregnant. She had not known it herself until a couple of weeks after their marriage fell apart. She hadn’t told her brother. Only Carla knew, and the doctor she’d gone to see. After it was over she’d been glad she’d kept it to herself.

And she had no intention of telling Roque now, she thought as she folded the tiny shawl into its tissue wrapping and placed it back in the drawer. They had enough problems cluttering up their marriage without adding a lost baby to them. What would be gained from telling him now?

What was gone was gone.

Angie slid back into bed and curled up on her side. Closing her eyes, she listened to the steady pump of her own heartbeat and felt as if she was lying in the loneliest place on earth. Roque would not come back into this bed tonight—she just knew that he wouldn’t. There was too much angry bitterness bubbling between them, and if he had been telling her the truth then.

She caught the sound of a door opening and then closing with a quiet click into its housing. Her heart missed a beat as she lay there, listening to Roque’s quiet tread. The whole suite was shrouded in darkness because she’d switched off all the lights before she’d climbed into bed, so she lay listening to the rustle of clothing, then picked up the scent of brandy as he lifted the covers and slid into the bed.

‘You are awake,’ he said, and it was not a qu

estion.

Turning over, she peered at him through the darkness. He was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, the covers riding low across his chest. And he looked so very sombre Angie wanted to reach out and stroke her fingers along his unsmiling lips.

‘Okay, I have been thinking,’ he declared quietly. ‘We do not communicate about the right things. This must change.’

Angie thought about that for a couple of seconds, then gave a jerky nod of her head, engrossed in the dark resonance of his accent, which had deepened since they’d stood flinging accusations at each other.

‘I should not have brought my—bitterness about what has happened into this bed earlier. My retribuição crack was unforgivable in the circumstances, and I apologise for making it.’

‘I—’

‘Let me finish,’ he cut in, and like a naughty child chided for interrupting Angie was silenced. ‘The evidence of Nadia has always been stacked against me. I know that. When she lied to the press about our— involvement, I had no way of proving my innocence so I said nothing. That was also a mistake.’

‘I sh-should have let you say it, though,’ Angie dared to whisper.

‘After witnessing that kiss?’ He turned his dark head on the pillow and looked at her through the darkness. ‘No.’ He turned to stare at the ceiling again. ‘It was not a kiss a husband should give any other woman but his wife. It should not have happened and you were right to feel cheated. If I had caught you kissing another man like that I would have ripped him limb from limb, then thrown you out of my life without conscience.’

‘Not much love lost, then.’ Angie could not help throwing in the jibe.

‘I am Portuguese,’ he claimed, as if it made him different from the rest of the human race. ‘We are possessive of our women. We do not forgive infidelity. We don’t like to share.’

‘If that last bit was aimed at my brother, then I—’

‘And your career,’ Roque put in. ‘Which took you away in one direction while I went off in another … Your brother was an added intrusion I did not … enjoy.’

‘Alex was—’

‘Your responsibility. And he did not like to share.’