After Their Vows

‘Speculating.’

‘That’s just gambling by another name, Alex! ‘ Angie instantly fired back, ‘Stop trying to pretty it up.’

‘I wasn’t!’ he denied. ‘Everyone else at uni is doing it! You can make a fortune right now if you know how to play it right.’

‘I don’t give a damn what everyone else is doing. I only care about you and what you’ve been doing,’ Angie fed back. ‘And if you’ve been making your fortune speculating on the markets, why are you sitting there telling me that you’re in debt?’

Like a cornered young stag, her nineteen-year-old brother reared upright. Six feet of long, lanky male, with spiky brown hair and vivid green eyes shot through with burning defence. He threw himself across the room to go and stand glaring out of the window, his hands pushed into the pockets of his zipped-up grey fleece.

The tension in him buzzed. Wrapping her arms around her middle, Angie gave him a minute to get a hold of himself before she pressed quietly, ‘I think it’s time you told me just how bad it is.’

‘You’re not going to like it.’

She’d just bet that she wasn’t. Angie abhorred debt. She was scared of it. Had been that way from the tender age of seventeen, when their parents had been killed in a car accident, leaving her and her then thirteen-year-old brother to find out the hard way how their privileged lifestyle had been mortgaged to the hilt. What bit was left after probate had finished liquidating their few assets had been barely enough to pay her brother’s boarding school fees for the next year. She’d been forced to walk away from her own private education and take two jobs a day in an effort to survive. And she’d worked and scrimped and carefully hoarded every spare penny she’d earned so that she did not fall into debt. If it had not been for a chance meeting with the owner of a top modelling agency she dreaded to think where she and Alex would have ended up.

By then she’d been burning both ends of the candle for twelve long, miserable months, serving behind one of the beauty counters in a London department store by day, and serving tables in a busy City restaurant by night, before going home to her miserable bedsit to sleep like one exhausted and then getting up to repeat the same routine again the next day.

Then Carla Gail happened to come to her counter to buy perfume. Carla had spotted something marketable in Angie’s reed-thin figure—exaggerated in those days because she hadn’t been getting enough to eat— her emerald-green eyes, and the bright auburn hair set against her dramatically pale skin. Without really knowing how it had happened she’d found herself propelled into the unnatural world of high fashion, earning the kind of money that could still catch her breath when she thought about it.

Within months she was the model everyone wanted on their catwalk or on the front cover of their magazines. She’d spent the next three years following the fashion drum around the world. She’d stood for hours while designers fitted their creations to her long slender figure, or posed in front of cameras for glossy fashion shoots— and she had willingly accepted every single second of it, coveting the money she earned so she could keep Alex safe in his boarding school environment.

Her proudest achievement, in Angie’s view, had been ensuring that Alex never missed out on a single thing his more privileged schoolfriends enjoyed doing. When he’d won a place at Cambridge she’d felt as pleased and as proud as any parent could, and she’d done it all without once being tempted to take on debt.

‘It’s all right for you.’ Her brother broke into her reverie. ‘You’re used to having money to play with, but I’ve never had any for myself.’

‘I give you an allowance, Alex, and I’ve never denied you a single thing you’ve asked for over and above that!’

‘It was the asking that stuck in my throat.’

Tightening her arms across her body in an effort to crush the pangs of hurt she experienced at that totally unfair response, it took Angie a few seconds before she could dare let herself speak.

‘Come on,’ she urged heavily then. ‘Just get it over with and spit out how much it is we’re discussing, here.’

With a growling husk of reluctance Alex quoted a figure which blanched the colour out of Angie’s face.

‘You’re joking,’ she whispered.

‘I wish.’ He laughed thickly.

‘Fifty—did you just say fifty thousand?’

Turning around, Alex flushed. ‘You don’t have to beat me over the head with it.’

Oh, but she did! ‘How the heck did you get the credit to spend fifty thousand on speculation, for goodness’ sake?’

Silence came charging back at her as they stood with the width of the kitchen between them, Angie taut as a bowstring now, with her arms rod-straight at her sides, and her brother with his chin resting on his chest.

‘Answer me, Alex,’ she breathed unsteadily.

‘Roque,’ he growled.

Roque—?

For a horrible second Angie felt so light-headed she thought she was actually going to faint. She tried for a breath and didn’t quite make it. ‘Are—are you telling me that—Roque has been encouraging you to play the stockmarkets?’

‘Of course he hasn’t!’ her brother flung back in disgust. ‘I wouldn’t take his advice if he did. I hate him— you know that. After what he did to you, I—’

‘Then what are you saying?’ Angie sliced through what he wanted to say, ‘Because I’m really confused here as to why you’ve even brought his name into this!’

Alex scuffed a floor tile with a trainer-shod foot. ‘I used one of your credit cards.’

‘But I don’t use credit cards! ‘

She had the usual cash debit cards everyone needed to survive these days, but never, ever had Angie dared to own a credit card—because a credit card tempted you to go into debt, and debt was …

‘The one that Roque gave to you.’

Angie blinked. The one that Roque gave to her … The credit card attached to Roque’s bottomless financial resources that she had never used, though the card still languished in this apartment somewhere, like a—

‘I came across it in your bedside drawer last time I was here and …’

She sucked in a painfully sharp breath. ‘You went through my private things?’

‘Oh, hell,’ her brother groaned, shifting his long body in a squirm of regret. ‘I’m sorry! ‘ he cried. ‘I don’t know what came over me! I just—needed some money, and I didn’t want to have to ask you for it, so I went looking to see if you’d any spare cash hanging around the flat. I saw the card lying there in your bedside drawer, and before I knew what I was doing I’d picked it up! It had his fancy name splashed all over it—the great and glorious De Calvhos Bank!’ he rasped out, revealing the depth of his dislike for a man he had never tried to get along with. ‘At first I meant to cut it into little pieces and post them back to him with a – message. Then I thought, why not see if I can use it to hit him where it will hurt him the most? It was really easy …’

Angie stopped listening at easy. She was so sure that she was going to really faint away this time that she reached for a chair and sat down on it, lifting up a set of icy fingers to cover her trembling mouth.

Roque—dear God. Closing her eyes, she gave a helpless shake of her head. ‘I don’t want to believe you could do this to me,’ she whispered against her cold fingers.

‘What do you want me to say? ‘ her brother choked out. ‘I did a stupid thing, and now I’m sorry I did— but he was supposed to take care of you, Angie! You deserved to be taken care of for a change. Instead he cheated on you with Nadia Sanchez and—well, now look at you.’

She flicked her startled eyes open, ‘Wh-what’s wrong with me?’

Alex let loose with a short laugh, as if she’d made a stupid joke. ‘You used to have the kind of career most girls only dream about, Angie. I couldn’t look around without seeing you plastered on a billboard or a magazine somewhere. You were famous—fabulous. My friends used to envy me for having such a gorgeous sister. They’d fight each other for a chance to meet you. Then Roque came along turned you inside out. You stopped modelling because Roque didn’t like it—‘

‘That’s not true—’

‘Yes, it is!’ His face was hot with anger now. ‘He was a selfish, arrogant, superior swine who wanted to rule over you like a tyrant. He didn’t like your job commitments—your commitment to me.’

There was a bit too much truth in that part for Angie to argue with it. Roque had demanded her exclusive attention. In fact Roque had been demanding all round— her attention, first call on her loyalty, the full extent of her desire for him focused on him between the sheets …

‘Now you work at a lousy reception job for the same modelling agency that used to roll out the red carpet every time you walked into it. And you struggle to make ends meet again while he flies the world in his private jet, and I daren’t ask you for an extra penny any more without feeling as guilty as sin. Roque owed me big-time for what he did to you, Angie, and you just let him get away with it—as if—’

‘He owes me, not you!’ Angie flared in response to all of that. ‘Roque was my mistake, not your mistake, Alex. He never did a single thing to you!’

‘Are you kidding?’ her brother flared back. ‘He robbed me of the sister I used to be proud of and left me with the empty shell I’m looking at now! Where’s your natural vibrancy gone, Angie? Your stylish sparkle? He took them.’ He answered his own bitter question. ‘If Roque had not married you and then cheated on you, you would not be floating through life looking like the stuffing has been knocked out of you. You would still be flying way up there at the top of your profession, raking in the money, and I would not have needed to use his credit card to play the markets because you would have financed me!’

Of everything he had just thrown at her in that last bitter flood, the part making its biggest impact on Angie was seeing the truth about the brother she so totally adored staring her hard in the face. In her endless efforts to make his life as comfortable as she could possibly make it for him she had created a monster. A bone-selfish, petulant man-child who thought it was okay to steal someone else’s money if it got him what he wanted.