Free After Their Vows by Michelle Reid

her from such a deep slumber.
    This rat, he answered his own question. There was no way he was going to ease up on Angie in this new order of things he had mapped out.
    Drawing his hands out of the pockets of his bathrobe, he bent down and gently scooped her and the duvet up into his arms. She stirred with a complaining sigh which sent him still for a second, his arms tensing in readiness for a fight. But she just settled more comfortably into his shoulder, and he got his first good look at her sleeping face. A rush of feeling sank down through his torso as he gazed at her softly parted lips. The urge to dip his head and claim that mouth almost got the better of him—until he grimly curbed the urge and turned instead to head out of the room.
    Angie felt as if she was floating. She felt warm and comfy and safe. She turned her head so she could nuzzle the pillow, and dreamed she was nuzzling Roque’s warm throat.
    That dream again, she thought with a sigh, and then dreamed up the soft hiss that Roque always used to let her know he was becoming aroused. One day, she vowed, she would find someone else to dream about who would wipe Roque de Calvhos clean out of her head.
    Then she shivered as her floating body touched down onto something cool and the duvet was summarily stripped away, bringing her awake with a start. Her eyes flew open, hot and gritty. She threw a sleepily confused glance down the length of the bed, where the duvet now lay neatly folded beneath her feet. Bewildered as to how it had got there, Angie stretched down to grab it. She had just managed to haul it up to her chin when a sound sent her head twisting on the pillow to discover that Roque was standing right there beside the bed, calmly stripping off a navy blue robe.
    Heart banging against her ribs, ‘What do you think you are doing in here?’ she tossed at him.

CHAPTER FIVE
    ‘C OMING to bed,’ Roque murmured impassively.
    Angie clutched the duvet all the tighter. ‘Not with me, you’re not!’
    His response was to cast the robe aside with the casual grace of silent intent. He was wearing nothing beneath it, not a single solitary stitch, and was so absolutely carelessly at home with his naked beauty he just stood there and let her look her fill.
    Angie’s mouth dried up. The helpless need to reacquaint herself with every familiar contour sent her eyes drinking in every glossy square inch. The satin bronze power in his wide shoulders. The sleek bulging biceps in his upper arms. She made a sweeping scan of the steel-plate formation of his hair-peppered torso down to the corded bowl of his narrow hips to where he didn’t even care that he was displaying the rampant fullness of his arousal. A fire lit down deep in her belly, and she wriggled her bottom and clutched more tightly on the duvet.
    ‘Y-you agreed,’ she whispered.
    ‘I agreed to nothing,’ he denied, flipping up the duvet with the clear intention of climbing beneath it.
    Angie whipped across to the other side of the bedlike a sidewinder. It was as she did so that she noticed the other duvet, lying in a fluffy mound of white on the floor, and belatedly took in her surroundings.
    ‘You moved me!’ she gasped.
    ‘You sleep where I sleep.’ Stretching out beside her, he yawned widely, then spread out an arm to douse the light. ‘Now, be quiet and go to sleep. I’m shattered.’
    He
was shattered? Angie had not been awake past ten o’clock for months, and her head was spinning with exhaustion. Throwing herself around to glare at him while he made himself comfortable, she considered climbing back out of the bed again, then changed her mind. She was so tired her legs felt as if they’d been pinned to the mattress by lead weights. She could barely keep her gritty eyes open, and she had a dull, aching thump happening in her head. And if she did get up she knew he would only bring her back again.
    On a sound of disgust, she yanked a pillow out from beneath her head and rammed it down the