Read After Their Vows for Free Online

to defend him for doing that?’
    She’d winced all the way through his cold judgement of Alex, but still it did not change a thing she felt. ‘He’s my brother,’ she whispered.
    And there it was, Roque recognised, the unconditional love she had a right to expect her brother to return in equal measures. But somehow she did not seem to understand that.
    ‘I can pay you back the full amount he st … spent,’ she insisted, with only that small but telling fault in the middle. ‘I will just need a little time to get it.’
    ‘By selling your flat and making yourself homeless?’ Roque was not impressed.
    Neither was Angie. She flared him a scornful look, ‘My flat is worth more than fifty thousand pounds, Roque,’ she informed him. ‘And you already havetwenty thousand sitting in that chequebook you’ve just stolen from me and put in that drawer!’
    Fifty … Roque had stopped listening at
fifty.
His lean face carefully without expression, he added
lying wimp
to his brother-in-law’s steadily mounting list of sins.
    ‘I’ll—I’ll go back to modelling,’ she explained quickly. ‘I’m still in demand, and Carla keeps on trying to get me to change my mind, so I could earn the rest in—in—’
    The way Roque flung himself across to the plate glass window behind the desk and thrust his hands in his pockets made Angie’s voice slither to a strangled stop. It wasn’t so much that he’d turned his back on what she’d been saying but the way he had done it which filled her with dread.
    When he wanted to, Roque could become chillingly unreachable. And he felt no love for Alex at all. In his view her brother was the main reason why their marriage had fallen apart. He’d refused to understand that in taking on the parental mantle for her brother she had a duty to see her responsibilities to Alex through—even when they intruded an awful lot on their marriage.
    It was just the way things had to be. Teenagers by reputation were rebellious and pushy and difficult. And, okay, so Alex had played up to Roque’s often stinging criticism of him, she conceded, but even that did not change the unalterable fact that standing between the two of them had made her marriage a year-long exhausting fight.
    ‘Please listen to me …’ Angie lowered her stubborn guard because she knew that she had to, her voice trembling as she did so. ‘I can—’
    ‘No.’ He turned around again, and the moment shelooked into his face she felt a wave of sick apprehension riddle her stomach. ‘Not this time, Angie. This time you are going to listen to
me
.’
    He strode back to the desk and opened the drawer again. With a graceful flick of his long fingers he produced a folder which he set down on the desk.
‘Angie’,
it said, in his own sharp scrawl on the label. That was all—just
‘Angie’
—yet seeing her name written there made Angie feel slightly sick.
    Opening the dossier and flicking through the pages until he found what he was looking for, Roque then spun the whole thing round and sent it sliding across the desk, so it came to a neat stop in front of her.
    Mouth so dry now it felt as if she’d been eating sand, her eyelashes fluttered, and she looked down and began to read. Her heart started to thump as she tallied up the column of figures on the right hand side of a long list of transactions going back months and months. It was only when she saw confirmation of the horrifying total at the bottom of the third page that she finally—finally—blanched.
    Roque was silent. He just stood there and let her discover how deeply her brother had thrown her into debt to him. She could not even look at him. Horror and shame sent her trembling fingers flicking back and forth through the pages in the vague hope that she’d mis-tallied the figures—then it suddenly dawned on her.
    ‘Angie’ …
    She looked up. ‘You thought it was me, didn’t you? ‘ she breathed unsteadily.
    ‘At first.’ Roque nodded. ‘I thought you were