After Their Vows by Michelle Reid Read Free Book Online Page B

make
her
happy?
    He’d complained about her job commitments. He’d complained about Alex. Every decision she’d had to make about her brother he had opposed. When she’d tried to make him understand her point of view he’d grown impatient with her and walked off. Sometimes she’d felt so lonely and confused she’d hidden in the bathroom and wept.
    ‘I’m hungry,’ he said. ‘Are you going or staying?’
    He was thinking about food while she was killing herself with their miserable past? Angie folded her arms and did not answer. A burning resentment sizzled in her blood. The silence stretched—she stretched it—until Roque decided to make it snap.
    ‘Are you going or staying?’ he repeated.
    ‘Staying!’ Angie burst out with a whip-cracking fury that should have brought the walls tumbling down around them both.
    Roque winced as he pushed away from the doorframe and strode further into the room. The air between them crackled and fizzed with the echoing effects of her burst of fury. Angie was actually breathing fast in the aftermath, but without saying another word Roque just reached for her arms, calmly unfolded them, then set about untying the belt on her coat.
    ‘You would not become this agitated if you were not such a control freak,’ he opined, with all the diplomacy of a superior being talking down to a mulish child.
    Raising her eyes to send him a swift acid glance she hoped would sear off a layer of his golden skin, she noticed the swelling in the centre of his lower lip and was suddenly overtaken by remorse. By the look of it she had a horrible feeling she had actually drawn blood.
    ‘I’m—sorry,’ she husked. ‘About the …’ She lifted a finger as if to touch his lip, then curled the projecting finger into her fist, dropped her hand again and made do with a shrug.
    As if he wanted to make her suffer, he ran the tip of his tongue over the swelling with such lazy sensuality Angie felt as if she was suddenly drowning in static.
    ‘I
really
hate you,’ she choked, as if the declaration was going to make the feeling go away.
    It didn’t.
    Sliding a hand inside her coat, he laid the flat of his palm against the base of her long, supple spine, then used his long fingers to exert pressure to ease her up from the desk. She arrived a short whisper away from the hard-packed warmth of his body and her inner sizzle just got worse. Like a silly, breathless, tense little whippet she dropped her eyes from his mouth to stare at the triangle of tanned skin left exposed by the open collar of his shirt and let him ease her coat from her shoulders, then toss it across the desk. Tears were pressing at her. Her heart felt like a huge aching lump in her chest.
    ‘I won’t have sex with you.’ As if she was mesmerised by that golden-brown triangle of skin, her declaration had arrived on the back of her wanting to lean and press her lips against it then stretch up to do the same to his beautiful bruised lip.
    He caught hold of her hand and said absolutely nothing. What Roque could do with silence should be bottled and sold, Angie decided, as she wimped out of fighting to get her hand back and let him lead her across the room.
    He knew why she’d just blurted out her last comment. He knew she’d never been able to stand close to him without wanting to devour him alive. Roque was her one confessed weakness. Not his mind, not his wealth, not his gorgeous looks, nor even the warm and exciting charm he could turn on occasionally.
    No, she lusted after his body, full-stop.
    But she didn’t love him any more, she told herself.
    She didn’t.
    She let him trail her behind him across the wide open space that made up the seating area of soft blackleather sofas set around a black marble wall-fire, currently licking with flames behind a plate of glass. It was dark outside now. London was twinkling. He brought her into the spacious kitchen bay, where Angie picked up on the delicious aroma of something spicy for the first