After Their Vows

‘Here it is. Sounds very elegant. The Palácio de Ribeiro. It’s—’

Angie cut the connection and tossed the phone away from her as if it burnt. The Palácio de Ribeiro was Roque’s city address. It took him just fifteen minutes to walk from there to his Lisbon office building, and … and …

Nadia was living in Roque’s Lisbon apartment.

Nothing could have been more black and white.

No wonder he’d spent three weeks avoiding taking her into Lisbon. He’d been scared she might come face to face with his lover before he’d worked out how he was going to convince Angie to accept his sordid little ménage à trois.

And a baby.

His baby?

Angie turned and ran for the bathroom. This time it physically hurt, because she was trying to throw up from an empty stomach. By the time she’d managed to make it back to the bedroom it was all she could do to sink down on the bed, where she sat with her eyes closed because the world was spinning.

It was only when she rested a hand against the sensitive wall of her stomach, because it was still throbbing, that a sudden and terrifying thought rushed into her head.

She stared down at the hand. What if Roque was right about—?

No—no, please not that, she thought pitifully. But she was already dragging herself to her feet to go and recover her phone. Her eyes were burning, her fingers trembling, as she flicked through the menu looking for her personal calendar. A minute later she was sinking down on the edge of the bed again, a limp and quivering wreck.

CHAPTER TEN

IT HIT Roque when he was halfway to Lisbon, and he almost caused a major pile-up behind him when he slammed his foot down on the brakes.

‘Mãe de Deus, ‘ he bit out.

Angie had overheard his telephone conversation with Nadia.

Cursing in every language he could think of, he checked the traffic, then took his chances, swinging the long luxury car into a sleek U-turn that would send him back the way he had come. Car horns sounded in protest—he barely registered them, or the angry shouts of abuse aimed at him as he accelerated away.

Maria had told him they’d been out on the balcony when Angie became ill. His wife—his unashamedly lazy in the morning wife—had decided to get up earlier than usual, and had been standing right above him when he took Nadia’s call.

His jawline fiercely clenched, he tried to remember what he’d said, but could recall hardly a damn word. Not that it mattered. He shook his grim head. He knew that he must have called Nadia by name. Just as he knew that Angie had heard him say it. And hearing him say it had made Angie sick to her stomach

. It had made her break apart.

Fingers tightening around the steering wheel, he put his foot down hard on the accelerator.

Entering the master suite as Angie strode out from the dressing room, Maria pulled to a breath-catching standstill.

‘You go out, senhora?’ Maria asked, in a voice laced with disbelief—which was not surprising when the last time she’d seen her Angie had been heaving into the toilet bowl.

Now she was dressed in a breathtakingly elegant white linen dress touched with stylised brushstrokes of emerald-green. The dress skimmed Angie’s long slender figure, and had couture sewed into every invisible seam. The neckline was square, the bodice cinched into the waist by a shiny green belt, and the skirt skimmed midway down her amazingly long thighs. And the shiny green shoes she was wearing elevated her height by an impossible five inches at least.

‘To Sintra,’ Angie confirmed. ‘Will you ask Antonio to bring the Range Rover around to the front steps for me, please?’

‘Sim, I will see to it.’ The little maid nodded. ‘You— wish Antonio to drive you? ‘

Angie shook her head. ‘I will drive myself,’ she said, for this was one errand she needed to do on her own. She was going to Sintra to find a chemist, so she could purchase a pregnancy testing kit. And she’d needed to pull on all this supermodel armour just to keep her functioning without falling into shattered little pieces.

Maria continued to hover like an anxious bird, not at all comfortable with this turn of events. ‘If—if you like, I could go to Sintra for you,’ she offered eagerly. ‘It will be no trouble, and Senhor Roque will be back from Lisbon soon—’

Lisbon? Angie frowned. ‘He’s gone to Paris, Maria,’ she informed the little maid.

‘No—no. He is gone to Lisbon,’ Maria insisted. ‘He said he had business there he must attend to this morning, but he will be back as quickly as he can because— because you are f-feeling unwell.’

So the Paris trip was yet another lie he’d told her …