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‘Tell Antonio about the car, Maria,’ Angie breathed unsteadily.
‘Sim, senhora. ‘ Too well-trained to argue, the maid dipped a stiff little curtsy and whipped out of the room, leaving Angie alone to field this last hard knock to her fragile composure without a witness to watch her do it.
Somehow—she did not remember how—she found herself standing outside the quinta’s front entrance. The sun was shining hotly down from an azure sky. Everything around her looked clear and sharp and picture-postcard-perfect—the greens of the gardens, the bright pinks and purples of the trailing bougainvillaea against the apricot walls of the house, and the shiny black bulk of the Range Rover awaiting her at the bottom of the front steps.
She did not recall climbing into it. She did not recall switching on the engine and driving away. She fixed all her concentration on finding her way to Sintra in a car she had never driven before, on roads as foreign to her as the husband to whom she had given all her faith.
Roque slowed down to take the turn in through the gates of the Quinta d’Agostinho then powered up again to shoot the car into the tunnel of leafy trees. Coming out into the bright sunlight a few minutes later, he saw his home standing sure and solid in its elegant spread of sweeping lawns, backed by a forest of trees.
He glanced up at the balcony situated directly above the swimming pool, envisaged Angie standing there listening to the conversation taking place below her, and felt as if his skin was peeling back from his flesh as he played out what had happened next.
But that weird feeling was nothing compared to the one he experienced when he drove down towards the garages and saw that his Range Rover was missing. Diving out of his car, he strode into the house and shouted for Zetta at the top of his voice. His housekeeper came hurrying into the grand hallway from the rear of the house.
‘Where is the Range Rover?’ he demanded, a shade unsteadily.
The housekeeper wrung her hands together. ‘The senhora take it out, Senhor Roque. Maria said she has gone into Sintra.’
Sintra? A wave of relief flooded through him. For a few minutes there he’d convinced himself that Angie had done a runner on him again, and was already on her way to the airport, meaning to disappear off the face of the earth.
‘Why has she gone to Sintra?’ He frowned, not seeing a link between the reason he had come rushing back here and their local town.
‘I do not think Maria asked,’ Zetta answered. ‘She was more concerned that the senhora insisted on driving herself when she has on these very high shoes—’
Roque’s tension levels shot up again. ‘Are you telling me that Antonio is not driving her?’
Still wringing her hands, Zetta nodded.
‘But she does not know the car. She does not know the roads. She hardly ever drives herself anywhere, and—Mãe de Deus.’ His voice broke down into a low hoarse husk. ‘She is—unwell …’
The moment Angie realised that she was completely and utterly lost came around two hours later. Pulling the car onto a clearing somewhere way up in the hills, overlooking the sea, she sat back with a sigh of defeat.
She’d found her way into Sintra by following the well-posted road signs. She’d even found a convenient car park, and her purchase now lay with her bag on the seat next to her. Everything up to that point had been so much easier than she’d expected it to be—but she’d soon learned that getting back to the Quinta d’Agostinho was a different matter altogether.
Roque’s private estate was not signposted. And the road out of Sintra had taken her a different way from the one on which she’d come in. It had seemed logical that so long as she kept on driving she would eventually notice something familiar to use as a guide.
‘Great logic, Angie,’ she mumbled.
Now the sun was high, and the car was already stifling. She’d only killed the air-conditioning two minutes ago, when she’d switched off the car engine.
Reaching up, she ran a hand around the back of her neck and lifted her hair away from her hot skin. On the seat beside her with her bag was the half-drunk bottle of water she’d had the sense to purchase before she got herself lost. And beside it lay her mobile phone, which she’d tried to use several times only to discover there was no signal. On an act of pure frustration she’d switched the stupid thing off.
Still… With little hope that it was going to be any different this time, she let her hair fall back down onto her nape, then reached for the phone and switched it on again.
The moment it had powered up the messages began downloading like flickering shouts. Most of them from Roque, she saw. A couple from Carla, and even one from her brother, who had been calling her twice a week since he’d gone to Brazil—duty calls, to reassure her that he was enjoying himself, Angie recognised with a grimace of a smile.
About to try calling Roque again, she felt the phone suddenly leap into life in her fingers.
‘Angie? Graças a Deus. Where the hell are you?’ Roque’s deep rasping voice raked into her ear.
‘Lost,’ she admitted. ‘Up in the hills somewhere.’
‘Lost? In the hills?’ he repeated, as if most of Portugal wasn’t covered in them. ‘Why didn’t you call to tell me so?’
‘No signal until now,’ she explained, feeling oddly as if she was having this conversation with a complete stranger rather than the husband she’d discovered was a lying cheat.
A stunning silence fell down between them for several seconds, then she heard Roque pull in a deep breath. ‘Okay, so you are lost,’ he murmured more calmly. ‘Be a good girl and activate the car’s satellite navigation system. It will pinpoint your position and then you can tell me what it says. I will come and get you.’
‘But I don’t want you to come and get me,’ Angie told him.
