After Their Vows

The arrogant, over-sensitive kind, he thought, as he tried to finish the job in hand without taking any more nicks out of his chin.

And what kind of man was he that he was preparing to leave her at all while she was feeling as she did? He was bigger than this, he told himself grimly as he pulled on the trousers to a steel-grey suit and pushed his arms into a striped shirt. Taking offence because she’d landed the blame on him for feeling ill was juvenile. He should be ashamed of himself.

Well, he wasn’t going—not to Paris anyway, he decided as he knotted blue silk at his throat. He had this stuff with Nadia he needed to deal with in Lisbon. He’d been putting off facing it for too long because he had not wanted to risk Angie finding out.

His grim mouth twisted in derision at his uncharacteristic act of cowardice. One day she was going to have to know. And he was going to have to tell her before someone else did it for him.

Shrugging into his jacket, he took a deep breath and walked back into the bedroom with the intention of telling Angie that Paris was off the agenda. Only to pull to a stop when all he could see of her was the fiery top of her head.

The sight held him captive for a few seconds, a ruefully amused smile catching hold of his mouth. The last time he’d found Angie like this had been at their London apartment, when she’d foolishly believed he would leave her to sleep in a different bedroom. The rat in him then had taken the decision to haul her out of her blissful sleep. This time the loving husband in him would leave her sleeping and call her later from Lisbon, to let her know where he was.

He left the room as silently as a thief stealing away from a crime scene.

Angie sat up as the door drew shut. He hadn’t even bothered to say goodbye to her.

Hurt clambered all over her insides. She hoped his fancy private plane developed engine trouble and kept him imprisoned on the airport tarmac so he couldn’t keep his sleazy assignation. She hoped—

Hearing the throaty sound of a car engine, Angie slithered out of bed and walked over to the window to watch as his red Ferrari flashed up from the side of the house, then sped away down the drive with the sun glinting on its shiny bodywork. He had not been able to get away fast enough. Standing here watching him go, she felt as if he’d driven over her body without noticing in his eagerness to get to his lover.

Tears developed. She blinked them away. The rolling waves of shock and hurt still played with the muscles around her stomach. The name Nadia beat like a drum in her head.

Her mobile phone started ringing somewhere in the dressing room, and she turned in a daze and went to find it.

‘Good morning, sweetie.’ Carla’s light, slightly dry voice greeted her. ‘Do we have a deal? Are you ready to stop playing the pampered wife and start working on the Lisbon project?’

Angie blinked a couple of times before ‘the Lisbon project’ meant something. Trying to get her brain into gear was like crawling through mud.

‘I… yes,’ she answered, because saying no or that she didn’t know would make this conversation just too complicated right now. ‘I w-was thinking of researching suitable business premises today,’ Angie managed to say, with reasonable intelligence—mainly because it was the truth. She had been intending to look for suitable premises. ‘Do you have any specific ideas in mind as to what you want?’

‘Oh, you’re supposed to know Lisbon, Angie. I’ve hardly ever visited the place,’ Carla answered with a languid lack of interest. ‘Somewhere suitably elegant with the right postcode, I suppose. I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Roque, since this is his brainchild? All I had to do was agree to the concept.’

Angie’s head went back as if Carla had punched her. ‘You—you mean Roque set this up?’ Angie could barely get the words past her thick throat.

‘He still hasn’t told you?’ For once in her languid life, Carla’s voice sharpened.

‘No,’ Angie said abruptly. Not even when they’d discussed it the night before.

‘It appears I’ve let his surprise cat out of the bag, then,’ sighed Carla. ‘He needed to find something for you to do to keep you happy in Portugal, sweetie. And to tell the truth I didn’t want to lose you completely. So I thought, if he’s happy to shell out the money why not let him set me up in Lisbon? The exotic dark Latin look is very high-fashion right now. With you at the helm, scouting for new talent, we could even put ourselves a jump ahead of our competitors. And, talking about dark Latin models, now that you and Roque have resolved your differences about what happened a year ago, how would you feel about Nadia joining you in the venture?’

Nadia …? Angie suddenly felt as if she was eating glass. ‘Wh-why Nadia?’

‘Because she’s living in Lisbon, too,’ said Carla impatiently. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know that either, Angie? This is really very bad of Roque—to still be keeping you in the dark about all of this. I suppose he thought it wasn’t important. After all, you must believe he’s telling the truth when he insists the whole Nadia thing never happened, or you wouldn’t have gone back to him, would you?’

Roque knew that Nadia was living in Lisbon?

‘No,’ Angie breathed indistinctly, ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Well, then, have a good think about the Nadia thing. She will come in very useful since she speaks the lingo. And, like you, she’s at a loose end right now.’

‘She—she isn’t modelling any more?’ Angie tried her best to make the question sound casual.

‘I know you can be blind when you want to be, Angie, but you surely have not been so blinkered that you didn’t know Nadia has been out of the modelling game since she got pregnant last year? I think the baby is a couple of months old now.’

Angie was beginning to feel sick again. And she felt so cold suddenly that she didn’t think she was ever going to warm up again. ‘Do …?’ She had to stop to swallow the thick lump in her throat. ‘Do you have a contact address for her?’

‘Sure. Wait a second while I access it …’

Angie waited. Angie waited and didn’t breathe, and didn’t allow herself to think beyond waiting.