After Their Vows Read Free Page A

vindicated when Alex won a place at Cambridge. He hadn’t achieved that by spending every night out on the town. And he’d settled into university life over the last year without giving her very much grief.
    Then she shook her head—because Alex
hadn’t
settled down at all, had he? He’d just hidden it from her that he was still doing exactly what he wanted to do—even if that meant sneaking around her flat and stealing credit cards to pay for his excesses.
    ‘I hate him,’ Alex said, with no idea what his sister was thinking. ‘It would’ve served him right if I’d gone on a real bender and completely cleaned him out. I should’ve bought a yacht or two, or a private plane like his to fly myself around in, instead of sitting in my roomat uni spending his rotten money before he found out it was me doing the—’
    Alex snapped his mouth shut, leaving the rest of what he had been going to say to slam around the room like a clap of thunder.
    Angie shot to her feet.
    ‘Finish that,’ she shook out.
    Biting out a curse, her brother lifted a hand and grabbed the back of his neck. ‘Roque came to see me on campus today,’ he confessed. ‘He called me a weak, thieving wimp and threatened to break my neck if I didn’t—’ He stopped, clearly deciding to swallow down the rest of the insults Roque must have thrown at him. ‘The bottom line is,’ he went on huskily, ‘he wants his money back, and he told me that if I don’t give it to him he’s going to take the matter to the police.’
    The police—? Angie sat down again.
    ‘Now I’m scared, because I don’t think he was bluffing. In fact I know that he wasn’t.’
    So did Angie. Roque did not make threats unless he was prepared to carry them through—as she’d discovered in the hardest way there was.
    Bitterness suddenly grabbed at her insides, burning a hole in her ability to hold back from recalling that final showdown, when she and Roque had stood toe to toe like mortal enemies instead of loving husband and wife.
    ‘I am warning you, Angie, go chasing off to your brother’s aid this time and I will find someone else to take your place tonight. ‘
    She’d gone. He’d found Nadia. Marriage over.
    Pulling back from where those memories wanted to suck her, Angie sat back in the chair. ‘So, how does heexpect you to pay him back?’ she asked heavily, already suspecting what was coming before her brother loped over to the table and produced something from the back pocket of his jeans.
    ‘He said to give you this …’
    He was holding out a business card, which he set down on the table in front of Angie. Looking down at it, she saw
‘Roque Agostinho de Calvhos,’
printed in elegant black script below the de Calvhos family crest, which crowned just about everything in Roque’s world— from his high-end international investment empire to some of the finest vineyards in his native Portugal and vast tracts of inherited land in Brazil.
    ‘He wrote something on the back,’ her brother indicated awkwardly.
    Reaching out, Angie flipped the card over with a set of ice-cold fingers.
‘Eight o’clock. The apartment. Don’t be late,’
Roque had scrawled there.
    If she’d had it in her Angie would have scratched out a dry, mocking laugh.
    The underscored
don’t
was the ultimate command from a man who’d grown very intimate with her most besetting sin—an innate lack of good time-keeping. She’d kept him waiting at airports and restaurants. She’d kept him kicking his heels in their apartment while she rushed around like a headless chicken, getting ready to go out. She caught a sudden sharp glimpse of him waiting for her, looking tall, dark and fabulously turned out for a night at the theatre, lounging stretched out in a chair with his eyes closed, his silky black eyelashes resting against his high-sculpted cheekbones, his wide, full and sensual mouth wearing the look of long-suffering patience he could pull off with such excruciating