Page 127 of Angel

The quiet words floated in the air long after her footsteps vanished down the hallway.

A massive surge of guilt hit me.

I was being a royal jackass, deflecting my own anxiety about Evangeline’s threats by taking it out on Roxy.

Why couldn’t I tell Roxy about her sister’s reappearance?

What was wrong with me?

‘Dammit all to hell,’ I growled, slamming my palm down onto the mixing table so hard that the sliders rattled.

Chapter 24

ROXY

Angel was hiding something.

He’d morphed into this short-tempered stranger, glued to his phone at every hour of the day.

The texts he got seemed to drive him up the wall, and he’d cooled on me, on us.

Three weeks after Cannes, our marriage was back to polite civility.

I returned to sleeping in the guest suite.

I don’t think Angel noticed, so wrapped was he in whatever the hell he was dealing with.

We traded ‘good mornings’ across the granite island, then later, ‘what’s for dinner?’ in the evening, and cold ‘good nights’ as we headed to our separate rooms.

All our playful banter, our intimacy and lovemaking in Cannes and Capri vanished into thin air.

Still, his phone kept vibrating and pinging at all odd hours, and it drove me batty.

To escape, one night I met up with three of my closest college friends, Mimi, Chloe, and Elena.

We booked a corner booth at a lush new cocktail lounge downtown, ordering tapas and flatbreads to share.

The moment the waiter poured Elena’s Pinot Noir, a wave of intense nausea hit my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut, almost gagging from the bouquet.

I brushed it off as a simple stomach bug.

When I walked through the front door at home after my night out, exhaustion hit.

I tumbled straight into bed and crashed for ten hours, a rare occurrence for me.

As I slept, I had wild, vivid dreams.

The next morning, I woke up with a tightness under my ribs.

I felt bloated as I stared at my reflection and tugged at my waistband.

Awesome, I was packing on extra pounds from all this stress.

In the evening, after work, I arrived at my local gym for a core conditioning class.

It took every single ounce of my remaining stamina to finish the warm-up.

My routine consisted of a full hour of high-intensity cardio, but today my lungs burned after scarcely fifteen minutes.