After Their Vows Read Free

couldn’t look around without seeing you plastered on a billboard or a magazine somewhere. You were famous—fabulous. My friends used to envy me for having such a gorgeous sister. They’d fight each other for a chance to meet you. Then Roque came along turned you inside out. You stopped modelling because
Roque didn’t like it—
‘
    ‘That’s not true—’
    ‘Yes, it is!’ His face was hot with anger now. ‘He was a selfish, arrogant, superior swine who wanted to rule over you like a tyrant. He didn’t like your job commitments—your commitment to
me.’
    There was a bit too much truth in that part for Angie to argue with it. Roque
had
demanded her exclusive attention. In fact Roque had been demanding all round— her attention, first call on her loyalty, the full extent of her desire for him focused on him between the sheets …
    ‘Now you work at a lousy reception job for the same modelling agency that used to roll out the red carpet every time you walked into it. And you struggle to make ends meet again while
he
flies the world in his private jet, and I daren’t ask you for an extra penny any more without feeling as guilty as sin. Roque owed me big-time for what he did to you, Angie, and you just let him get away with it—as if—’
    ‘He owes
me,
not you!’ Angie flared in response to all of that. ‘Roque was
my
mistake, not your mistake, Alex. He never did a single thing to you!’
    ‘Are you kidding?’ her brother flared back. ‘He robbed me of the sister I used to be proud of and left me with the empty shell I’m looking at now! Where’s your natural vibrancy gone, Angie? Your stylish sparkle?
He
took them.’ He answered his own bitter question. ‘If Roque had not married you and then cheated on you, you would not be floating through life looking like the stuffing has been knocked out of you. You would still be flying way up there at the top of your profession, raking in the money, and I would not have needed to use his credit card to play the markets because
you
would have financed me!’
    Of everything he had just thrown at her in that last bitter flood, the part making its biggest impact on Angie was seeing the truth about the brother she so totally adored staring her hard in the face. In her endless efforts to make his life as comfortable as she could possibly make it for him she had created a monster. A bone-selfish, petulant man-child who thought it was okay to steal someone else’s money if it got him what he wanted.
    What was it Roque had said during one of their fights about her brother? ‘You are in danger of creating a life-wasting lout if you don’t stop it.’
    Well, that damning prediction had come true with a vengeance, Angie saw—only to toss that aside again with a stubborn shake of her head. For what gave Roque the right to criticise the way she’d handled a rebellious teenager when his own privileged upbringing had given him everything he wanted at the nod of his handsome dark head?
    Alex had been only seventeen when she’d first met Roque, still attending boarding school and reliant on herfor everything. Falling in love had not been an option she could afford to let happen—yet she’d been unable to stop herself from falling for Roque. And what Roque wanted Roque got, by sheer single-minded force of will—which in Angie’s view put him and Alex in the same selfish club. Between the two of them they had demanded so much from her that sometimes she’d felt stretched so taut in two different directions she’d thought she might actually snap in two.
    On one side of her she’d had the brother who’d become such a handful to deal with, skipping lessons to go out on the town with his friends and constantly getting into scrapes, which meant she’d had to travel down to his school in Hampshire to deal with the inevitable fall-out. Then there’d been Roque on the other side, angry with her for pandering to her brother’s every whim.
    But at least she’d felt