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If it was, he didn’t sound very impressed by it.
‘It is late. I need a shower. Go to bed.’
Letting her go, he swung away from her to stride back across the bedroom, all arrogant distance and touch-me-not-with-your-concession cool.
‘You think you’re so perfect, don’t you, Roque?’ Angie flung after him shakily. ‘You think that because all your predictions about my brother have come true it gives you the right to take the lofty high ground. Well, I have news for you,’ she said as he stopped dead. ‘You were no better behaved than Alex was when it came to wanting your own way. Alex was jealous of you. What was your excuse for turning our marriage into a battle in which only one of you could make me dance to their tune? Which one of you was the adult?’
His shoulders flexed inside his white shirt as her final stab sank deep. ‘Poor Angie,’ he struck back. ‘Beaten into meek submission by her warring men.’
His derision washed angry colour into her cheeks, for she had never let anyone beat her into submission— especially not Roque. ‘I made mistakes,’ she admitted. How could she not admit it when she’d just stood here in the room and faced them? ‘I was a lousy wife to you—’
‘So you were,’ he agreed.
Angie sucked in a painful breath ‘Well, at least I didn’t go looking for comfort in another man’s bed!’ she hit back with shaking fervour.
Roque swung around to look at her. A sudden stark look Angie read as remorse had taken hold of his lean golden features, and her breath stalled in her throat when he opened his mouth to speak.
‘Don’t you dare apologise,’ she heaved out shakily.
Surprise made him blink. ‘I had no intention of apologising,’ he stated coolly. ‘Why would I, when you have just said that you were a lousy wife?’
Angie wanted to throw something at him. Instead she had to make do with clenching her hands into two tense fists, because he was already striding with laconic grace into his own dressing room, leaving her standing there feeling …
She didn’t know what she was feeling, she realised as she released her pent-up breath. He tied her in knots. He’d always tied her in knots. Was he expecting her to apologise for driving him into another woman’s bed?
A gentle knock sounding on the suite door made her hurriedly relax her taut posture before she called a polite, ‘Come in.’ The door opened and a little dark-haired maid dressed in pale blue stepped in. She smiled shyly at Angie and indicated she’d come to collect the supper things. Angie smiled back, managed to discover the maid’s name was Maria, and after thanking her wandered into the bathroom to use up some time cleaning her teeth and brushing the damp tangles out of her hair.
When she glanced into the mirror she saw a triangular face with wide-spaced green eyes, a thin little nose and a full, soft bow-shaped mouth. A mouth that was trembling pathetically, and eyes that had darkened with hurt.
Did he truly believe he could justify what he’d done by piling the blame on to her? Obviously he did, or he would not have said it—which did not bode well for the next scene they were about the share when they climbed into that bed out there.
She turned to slump back against the washbowl, staring down dully at her bare feet, because she knew that sleep was not on Roque’s agenda this time. He’d let her off the hook last night, but there was little chance he was going to do so again. And the default charge he’d laid on her this afternoon was still stinging—because, God help her, she knew she was in danger of defaulting again.
Walking back out into the dressing room, she started hunting through drawers, looking for her nightwear. Finding the right drawer in a wide column of them, she was about to pluck out a slip nightdress when she spied another nightdress folded beneath it, and a sudden light of defiance lit her up.
Throwing off her bathrobe, she let it
drop to the floor, then pulled the garment out of the drawer to shake out its voluminous folds. It was a real passion-killer—a long, loose thing that would cover her from neck to feet. It had been given to her by a lingerie company aiming to reproduce the pre-Raphaelite look for its ads. She even had a copy of the photograph in her portfolio. All the other models in the picture were wearing the very latest in sensationally sexy lingerie. However, as a contrast, she’d got to look the perfect picture of pre-Raphaelite virginal white modesty because of her flowing red hair and her ability to look pale and—
‘Angie, we need to talk—meu Dues.’
A sharp gasp of air left Angie’s lungs as she spun around, then froze. Roque was standing in the opening which led back into the bedroom, his full attention locked onto her with the stunning power of a magnetic force field. Angie lost the ability to breathe at all—for he might be looking at her as if she’d just popped naked out of a birthday cake, but she could not take her eyes off him.
He was wearing a towel wrapped like a sarong around his hips and nothing else. The towel might reach down to his calf muscles, but it didn’t stop him from looking mind-stoppingly physically gorgeous. His hair was still wet, and beads of moisture clung to his wide bronze muscled shoulders, the spread of hair on his chest. A slow, thick lethargy began creeping over her. There was no way to avoid admitting it. Looking at Roque meant looking at pure male perfection, with a horrendous amount of raw sexual promise thrown in. Her eyes felt glued to the long, sleek form of his very masculine torso, bearing the kind of muscular ridges that ignited a series of familiar stings and prickles which attacked low down in her abdomen and at the very tips of her breasts. It didn’t help that she knew him, every fabulous lean, dark, intimate inch of him, knew exactly what was hidden beneath the towel and what—
‘Meu Dues,’ he said again. ‘I am revisiting my perfect moment.’
Angie blinked, then jerked her eyes back to his face. Roque watched as a blush started crawling across her skin as his meaning struck home. Seeing her naked for the first time was a moment he would treasure for the rest of his life. Her shy blushing cheeks, the soft quiver of her mouth, the rippling waves of her hair falling around her face and her shoulders, the smooth flowing lines of all that amazing pearlescent skin. The way she’d stood in front of him, with her thighs pressed anxiously together and her arms crossed over her body in a manner supposed to be hiding her breasts from him. But the two perfect globes had pouted at him over the top of her inadequate cover-up.
Back then he’d felt like the rake in some costume melodrama, about to deflower the pale trembling virgin, and he’d loved it. His Portuguese blood had fired up centuries of alpha genes which he really should have been ashamed to acknowledge he had. If his great-great grandfather had been alive to witness such primitive rushes he would have been pleased. Drogo de Calvhos had been a sixty-four-year-old lech and a childless widower when he’d married the sixteen-year-old daughter of a duc, sold to him for the price of some disputed land bordering their two estates. Fable had it that his teenage bride had put a scar on his face, trying to fight him off on her wedding night, and his ancestor had had her whipped for her trouble. She’d given him three sons before she’d reached her twentieth birthday, and each conception had added another scar to Drogo’s face.
‘Go away,’ gasped Angie, casting the nightdress aside in favour of stooping down to snatch up her discarded bathrobe.
For some reason he could not fathom, Roque lifted a hand to lightly stroke the side of his cheek. Perhaps it was those genes at work again, warning him that he could receive the same treatment as his ancestor if he did not tread carefully around Angie right now. He might be only thirty-two years old, not sixty-four, and this woman a now very experienced twenty-three, but the vibes were still there—the touch me if you dare warning buzzing in the space separating them.
‘Sweet heaven,’ he breathed, ‘you have gained curves.’
He started moving towards her, the burning heat in his dark gaze putting Angie into a panic as she fought to pull on the robe—only to discover that the sleeves had somehow become twisted inside out.
