Kitabı oku: «The Man Behind The Scars», sayfa 2

If possible, she looked even more closely at his scars, tracing the sweep of them with her bright blue gaze. Rafe hardly looked at them himself anymore, except to note that they remained right where he’d last seen them, no longer red and furious, perhaps, but certainly nothing like unnoticeable either. They did not blend. They did not, as a wildly optimistic plastic surgeon had once suggested they might, fade. Not enough to matter. And anyway, he preferred them to stay right where they were. There was less possibility of confusion if he wore the truth about himself right there on his face. He didn’t know how he felt about this strange woman looking so intently at them, really looking at them, but he didn’t do anything to stop her, and eventually her clever eyes moved back to his.

A kind of thunderclap reverberated through him. It took a moment to realize it was pure desire, punching into his gut.

“It’s only a bit of scarring,” she replied, that same smile on her mouth, her tone light. Airy. Teasing him, he realized in some kind of amazement. She was actually teasing him. “You’re hardly the Phantom of the Opera, are you?”

Rafe couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled at a society event, even before he’d had this face of his to bear stoically and pretend didn’t bother him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled at all, come to that. But something closer to a smile than he’d felt in ages threatened the corners of his mouth, and more surprising than that, for a moment he considered giving in to it.

“I was in the army,” he said. He watched her absorb that with a small nod and a narrowing of her lovely eyes, as if she was fitting him into some category in her head. He wondered which one. Then he wondered why on earth he should care. “There was an ambush and an explosion.”

He hated himself for that—for such a stripped-down description of something that should never be explained away in an easy little sentence. As if two throwaway words did any justice to the horror, the pain. The sudden bright light, the deafening noise. His friends, gone in an instant if they had been lucky. Others, much less lucky. And Rafe, the least lucky of all, with his long, nightmare-ridden, scarred agony of survival.

It was no wonder he never looked in the mirror anymore. There were too many ghosts.

He didn’t intend to give her any further details, so he should not have felt slightly disappointed that she didn’t ask. But she also hadn’t turned away, and he found that contrary to all of his usual instincts where beautiful women at tedious, drink-sodden society events were concerned, however few he’d attended in recent years, he didn’t want her to.

“I’m Angel Tilson,” she said, and offered him her hand, still smiling, as easily as if she spoke to monsters every day and found it—him—completely unremarkable. But then, he reminded himself sharply, she could only see the surface. She had no idea what lurked beneath. “Stepsister to Allegra, the beautiful bride-to-be.”

Angel, he repeated in his head, in a manner he might have found appallingly close to sentimental had she not been standing there in front of him, that teasing smile still crooking her lips, her blue eyes daring him. Daring him.

He had the strangest sensation then—as if, despite everything, he might just be alive after all, just like everybody else. And that same intense desire seemed to move through him then, setting him on fire.

“Rafe McFarland,” he said, and then, more formally, “Lord Pembroke. Distant cousin to the Santinas, through some exalted ancestor or another.”

He took her hand and, obeying an urge he did not care to examine and could not quite understand, lifted it to his lips. Something arced between them when their skin met, his mouth against the soft back of her hand, something white-hot and wild, and for a moment it was as if the Palazzo Santina fell away, as if there was no well-blooded crowd playing the usual drunken games all around them, no strains of soothing music wafting through the air, nothing at all but this.

Heat. Light. Sex.

Impossible, Rafe thought abruptly.

He let go, because that was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do. Her smile seemed brighter than the gleaming chandeliers high above them, and he couldn’t seem to look away. She was much too pretty to be looking at him like this, as if he was the man he should have been. The man he’d pretended to be, before the accident.

As if he wasn’t ruined.

Perhaps, he thought darkly, she was blind.

“Lord Pembroke,” she repeated, as if she was tasting the title with her lush little mouth. He felt a flash of appreciation for the earldom in an area he had never before associated with it. “What does that mean, exactly? Besides the fancy title and all the forelock tugging I assume goes with it? A stately home and an Oxbridge education, with guest appearances in Tatler to whet the appetite of the commoners from time to time?”

He liked her. It was revolutionary, but there it was. He hardly knew what to make of it.

“It means I am an earl,” he said, with rather too much pompous emphasis, he thought, suddenly deeply tired of himself. But it was who he was. It had been all that he was for longer than he cared to admit, even to himself, even before he’d inherited the title—when he’d had only the sense of its import and the abiding respect for it that his wretched older brother had sorely lacked. He shook off the ghost of Oliver, Seventh Earl of Pembroke and drunken disgrace to the title. He wished he could shake off Oliver’s legacy of debts and disasters, cruelty and sheer viciousness, as easily. “I have responsibilities, and little time for the tabloids, I’m afraid.”

“That would be a yes then, on the grand old estate and Oxbridge and all the rest,” Angel said, still teasing him, not appearing in the least bit cowed by his dark tone. “And I suppose you’re also filthy rich. Doesn’t that usually go hand in hand with nobility? A bit of compensation for the heavy load of the peerage and generations of privilege and so on?”

He didn’t deny it, and she laughed as if he’d said something delightful. He almost felt as if he had.

“I don’t know about filthy rich.” He considered. He wondered why he didn’t find this entire topic distasteful, as he should. As he imagined he would under any other circumstances. But he didn’t, and he knew the reason he didn’t was looking at him with far too blue and direct a gaze. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to see if she was real. Among, he admitted in some grudging surprise, other things. “But there are several centuries’ worth of grime, I’d say. Certainly dirty enough for anyone.”

She laughed again, and he became a stranger to himself in that moment, as he actually contemplated joining in. Impossible, he thought again.

“It’s your lucky day, Lord Pembroke,” she confided, leaning in closer and tapping her champagne flute against his chest. He felt it like a caress. She looked at him, and something dark moved across her pretty face, something too like grief there and then gone in her expressive eyes. “I happen to be interviewing candidates for the position of wealthy husband, and you fit the bill.”

And suddenly it all made sense.

This, Rafe thought, everything going very still inside of him, he understood perfectly.

CHAPTER TWO

“YOU want to marry into money,” he said, his voice cold, as if she had confirmed something he’d already suspected about her.

Angel wished she could tell what he thought of that—or even of her unapologetic way of presenting it. But his dark expression was impossible to read, and she wondered if her stomach could twist any further, and harder, and if it did … would she simply be sick? Right here?

She couldn’t believe she’d actually said that. So baldly. So brashly.

But this was the plan. The only one she had, and so what if it had sounded much better in her head? She had no choice but to follow it—because no matter how humiliating this moment was and no matter how much she hated herself and would, she thought, loathe herself forevermore, she could not currently pay her mother’s debts. There was no way. So this was what she’d come to. This terrible game while this affecting, compelling man only looked at her, his gray eyes cold and stern, and she wanted to be someone else—anyone else—more than she’d ever wanted anything.

Good luck with that, she thought darkly, and kept going.

“I do,” she said, and shoved aside the part of her that wanted to drown in the shame, the tidal wave of embarrassment. That kind of second-guessing was for other women, perhaps, but not for her.

“Bold as brass, you are,” her mother had always said, pretending to compliment Angel when she had really meant to compliment herself, because Angel so greatly resembled her. And now more than ever, Angel thought viciously.

She waved her champagne glass languidly, indicating the ballroom all around them and the party that carried on, all appropriate voices and hushed royal splendor behind them, though she never dropped his gaze. “I will.”

Angel watched some kind of quiet storm move through his dark gray eyes then, and discovered she was barely breathing. But she was still smiling, damn it. She was afraid that if she stopped, she might have to investigate the self-loathing and the sheer, dizzying whirl of something too close to terror beneath it. This man was not at all what she’d imagined when she’d comforted herself with visions of a wealthy husband to solve all my problems, just like Allegra on the plane ride to Santina. Just as she hadn’t imagined that she would feel something like that jolting, electric thrill that had sizzled through her when he’d touched her. What was that?

“Ah,” he said, his voice even lower than before, but still with that same effect on her. And, she thought, faintly condemning. Or perhaps she was only hearing the echo of her own, now-buried shame. “And why do you need a wealthy husband?”

“I thought about simply asking for charitable donations,” Angel said with a little smirk. He waited. She shrugged expansively. “A better question is, who doesn’t need a wealthy husband? Given the choice.”

“You appear to be making the choice yourself, rather than waiting for it to be presented to you,” Rafe said in that dry way of his that seemed to move through her like heat. “Very enterprising.”

“I’m extremely practical,” she told him, as if confiding in him. As if his words had been in any way approving.

“You’d have to be,” he agreed, “if you mean to choose a spouse in so cold and calculating a manner.”

“Is that meant to chastise me?” she asked lightly, as if she hardly noticed one way or the other. As if it would be nothing to her if, in fact, he did mean to do exactly that. A lie, she realized in some surprise —but she shrugged carelessly anyway. “I know what I want and am prepared to go after it. I believe that when a man exhibits this kind of single-minded determination, whole nations rise up and applaud his focus and drive. Sometimes grateful kings bestow earldoms upon such men, if I remember my history.” She smiled, though it was a bit more pointed than was strictly necessary. “Though it’s been a while.”

His grim, hard mouth entertained the faintest ghost of what she told herself was a smile. Or could have been, had he allowed it. His dark eyes gleamed. In appreciation, she was sure of it.

“You are a very beautiful woman,” he said, and the way he said it, so matter-of-factly and without the slightest whiff of flattery, prevented her from the folly of imagining it was a compliment. “You are obviously well aware of it, as you’ve dressed to showcase and emphasize your many charms. A man would have to be dead to fail to notice that you are quite spectacular.”

“Thank you,” she said, her own voice dry this time. “This must be what it feels like to be a show horse. Or so I assume. There weren’t too many thoroughbreds littered about the streets of Brixton the last time I left my flat.”

Her flat was smack in a scruffy bit of Brixton, south London, that was considered edgy and unpretentious, she knew, having read that exact claim in the guidebooks—which she imagined was another way of saying a bit dodgy. Still, it was the home she’d carved out for herself—the only one that had ever really been hers.

“It seems to me you could simply captivate the man of your choosing in the usual way, without having to make crass pronouncements about marrying for money.” His dark eyebrow rose then, challenging and faintly wicked. It was the left one, sliced through with a scar, making him seem vaguely menacing, and entirely too lofty, all at once. But not, she noted after a moment, menacing in a way that actually frightened her, as perhaps it should have done. “I think you’ll find that your sort of beauty, used with a certain clarity of purpose, is the currency upon which many marriages rest—though the participants do not generally speak of it.”

This time, there was no pretending he wasn’t chastising her. He was—in that excruciatingly polite, excessively wordy aristocratic way, complete with the expected backhanded compliment to remind her of her place. Her sort of beauty. How patronizing. Angel rolled her eyes.

“I am many things, my lord,” she said, unable to keep the faint note of mockery from her voice as she addressed him formally, but equally unable to keep that smile from her face, as if she was, somehow, enjoying this. Was she? Surely not. “Crass, for example. As common as muck, certainly. But never a liar.”

She didn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to look away from this man, and his ravaged, ruined face. Why she kept forgetting to look at the scars and found herself lost in the remote coldness of his gaze instead. Why the ballroom around them seemed like a bright blur, and he was the only thing in focus. The only thing at all.

“So what are your specifications then?” he asked after a stretch of time, highly charged and breathless, that could have been a moment or an hour. “For the perfect husband?”

“He must be very, very wealthy, and happy to share it,” Angel said at once. “That’s the main thing, and is, of course, nonnegotiable.” She bit her lip as if ticking off items in a list in her head. “And it would be lovely if he were good-looking, too.”

“A pity,” he said softly, that menace in his tone again, and written across his destroyed face, though his eyes seemed darker then, and his gaze sharper. Her stomach clenched in reaction. “You’re wasting your time with me. Or have you blocked out my scars from the sheer horror of looking at them too long?”

“It was the talk of your grimy, dirty money, of course,” she replied at once, finding her way back into the light, teasing tone she’d been using so carelessly before. Because she had the sudden sense that what she said now could make all the difference, somehow. That it mattered. She felt it deep in her gut. “I haven’t seen straight since you mentioned it. And depending on how much we’re talking about, I may never see straight again.”

“I am remarkably rich,” he said, that deep, aristocratic voice a posh drawl now, pure male confidence in every syllable. It was a dare, she thought, though she could not have said, looking at that deliberately expressionless, dangerous face of his, why she thought so.

“Is that an offer?” she asked, flirting with him. With this whole crazy idea that seemed less and less impossible by the second. A fairy tale by design, on demand. Why not? She was already standing in a palace, wasn’t she?

Again, that suggestion of a smile that, still, was not one.

“Why do you need money so badly that you would marry a stranger for it rather than simply finding yourself a well-paying career?” His eyes moved over her face as if searching for her intentions. As if he could read them there, if he looked hard enough. She feared he could. That he could see her cobbled-together history of temporary gigs that led nowhere, built nothing and depended entirely on her looks. What career was there for the likes of her? “What do you imagine you’ll do with it?”

“Count the great big piles of it,” she retorted easily, flippantly, as if she hadn’t a single serious thought in her head. “Naturally. Isn’t that what rich people do?”

“Only part of the time,” he said. Was that a joke? It was interesting how very much she wanted it to be. “But it is a finite exercise.”

“How finite?” she asked, a smile tugging at her lips. She tilted her head slightly to one side. “Five years? Ten?”

“Thirty at most,” he said gravely, but she saw the gleam in those gunmetal-gray depths, and imagined this was his version of laughing. She felt an answering sort of tightness in her chest. As if they were connected, or ought to be. “What will you do with the rest of your time?”

She considered him for a moment, and then decided she might as well go for it. No false advertising, she reminded herself. Bold as brass. Start as you mean to go on.

“As a matter of fact,” she confessed, leaning in closer as if what she had to say was salacious gossip instead of simply embarrassing. And of course he would draw the worst conclusions—who wouldn’t? “I am in some debt.”

“Some?” His brow arched again, while his gaze seemed to pry into her. Any further, she thought in a mixture of that same dizziness and something far darker and more dangerous, and he’d be able to see the number itself like a tattoo inside her head.

“A great deal of debt,” she amended. He only looked at her, and she smiled, though it felt strained. “A vast, impossible sum, as a matter of fact. Do they still have debtor’s prison in England?”

“Not since the nineteenth century,” Rafe said in that dry, not-quite-amused voice. “I think you’re safe.”

“From debtor’s prison, perhaps,” Angel said sadly. She was only partially faking the sadness. “But not from the appalling interest rates.”

His gaze moved over her again, testing. Measuring. Once again, she felt like a show horse. She had the insane urge to show him her teeth, as must surely be expected in cases like these, but refrained at the last second.

“How do you imagine a marriage based on a transaction like this would work?” he asked then, as if, she thought in a potent mix of excitement and terror, he was actually considering it. Was he considering it? “For example, what do you have to bring to the table?”

“My spectacular beauty, of course,” she said in very nearly the same matter-of-fact tone he’d used before. She might have been discussing show horses herself, she thought. Teeth to hooves. “I’d be an excellent trophy. And as we all know, rich men do love their trophies.”

“Indeed.” Again, that wicked brow. Arrogant. Powerful. He was not, she thought belatedly, a man to be trifled with. “But as we all also know, even the greatest beauty fades in time while wise investments only multiply and grow. What then?”

Angel had not anticipated actually having this conversation, she realized then. She certainly had not imagined being quizzed on her potential contribution to the marriage of convenience that was meant to save her. Possibly because she hadn’t really expected that her brilliant plan, dreamed up in coach class over an insipid plastic cup of vodka orange, would go this far, she admitted to herself. Had she been kidding herself all along?

But no, she thought firmly. What, exactly, were her options? She might be enjoying this conversation with Rafe McFarland, Lord Pembroke, Earl of Great Wealth, far more than she’d imagined she might when she’d first seen him—but whatever the outcome, she was fifty thousand pounds in debt. And while her unreliable mother was the one who had got her into this, Chantelle was unlikely to be any help in getting her out. Sadly, she knew Chantelle entirely too well.

This was up to her to solve. On her own. Like everything else in her life.

“I am delightful company,” she continued then, emboldened by her own panic.

She forced herself to smile as if she was perfectly at ease—as if she routinely rattled off her résumé to strange men as if she was up for auction. Which she supposed she was, actually. Not a cheering thought.

“I’m very open-minded and won’t care at all if you have a sea of mistresses,” she told him.

She meant it. She’d seen that in action with Bobby and her own mother, hadn’t she? And it certainly seemed to work for them, as they’d been married for years now. Who was Angel to judge the way they conducted themselves and that marriage if they themselves professed to be happy?

“In fact,” she continued, trying to pretend her mother’s marriage didn’t make her feel dirty by association, somehow, “I’d expect it. Rich man’s prerogative and all that. I have very little family, so there will be no tedious holiday functions to suffer through and you won’t have to lay eyes on them at all, should that be your preference.”

She thought of the great, raucous Christmases with loving if careless Bobby and all the Jacksons with a sharp twinge of guilt. She thought of her stepbrother Ben’s quiet concern and determination to be there for her whether she liked it or not, just as a brother would, she imagined, with another searing pang. Allegra’s unobtrusive but steadfast support. Even Izzy. But she cast it all aside.

“I have a great many opinions and enjoy a good debate,” she said, trying to think of the things an earl might want in a wife, and able only to picture those endless period dramas on the BBC, all petticoats and bodices and everyone falling all over their titles in and out of horse-drawn carriages, none of which seemed to apply to this situation. “But I’m also perfectly happy to keep my own counsel if that’s what you’d like. I can be endlessly agreeable.”

“You make yourself sound like some kind of marionette,” Rafe observed. Not particularly kindly.

“If by that you mean the perfect companion and wife,” Angel replied sweetly, “then I agree. I am.”

She searched his face again, but saw nothing new. Nothing that told her if she was swaying him one way or another. Nothing that explained why she was suddenly so very determined that she should succeed in this. Only that strange, curiously him mixture of violent ruin and male beauty, so striking and imposing and impossible to look away from. Only that cool, measuring gleam in his dark gray eyes. She pulled in a breath, prepared to launch into another list of all she had to offer, whatever that might be, but he reached over and put a finger on her lips.

Bold. Hot. Shocking.

Something kicked deep inside of her, hot and low. She felt his touch like flame. Like a blazing light that seared through the darkness and made her shine too. Her head spun around and around, even after he dropped his hand back to his side.

“You can stop,” he said mildly. Almost casually. “I’ll marry you.”

He didn’t know what he expected her to do. Squeal with joy? Weep with gratitude? Naturally, Angel did neither. She only watched him for a beat, then another, and he had the distinct impression that she was shocked. Stunned?

While he simply wanted her. Any way he could have her. If it would take a healthy application of his money, well, he had plenty of it, and he needed a wife besides. He told himself it was purely practical. And yet that want pulsed in him.

Still she gazed at him, as if trying to work something out.

Perhaps, he thought darkly, his money was not quite dirty enough to ensure her blindness to his scars after all. It hadn’t yet prevented him from seeing the truth of himself either, and he knew more of that truth than she ever would. He could hardly blame her.

“Come,” she said then, surrendering her empty champagne glass to a passing waiter and then holding out her hands. She did not smile, though her too-blue eyes began to gleam. “Dance with me.”

Rafe did not dance. But then, he also did not propose marriage, however offhandedly, in crowded ballrooms to perfect strangers, much less those who had just shamelessly announced they were in the market for a rich husband—any rich husband, presumably. When he thought about it in those terms, he couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t sweep this odd, arresting woman into his arms as if they were lovers and perform the steps to a waltz he hadn’t executed since the lessons his mother had insisted upon a lifetime ago.

But he would take any excuse he could get to touch her, wouldn’t he? What, he wondered, did that make him?

She was graceful, warm and deliciously curvy in his arms. The small of her back curved enticingly beneath his palm, the fingers of her other hand were delicate in his, and she smelled of fresh flowers with a kick of spices he couldn’t identify. She tilted back her head to look at him, and for a moment he only gazed at her. So pretty, he thought. And so surprising, when nothing had surprised him in far too long. It made her dangerous, he knew, dangerous to him, but he shoved the thought away with his customary ruthlessness.

“Out of curiosity,” he asked, need and desire making him hard, making him fierce, “how many other men have you asked to marry you tonight?” He studied her face as he guided them across the floor. “I only ask in case there is some kind of battle for your affections I should prepare myself to fight.”

“Not at all.” Her expression was very nearly demure—and therefore wicked by implication. He felt the impact of it move through him, making him burn. Want. “You are my one and only.” He was fascinated by her. And by his reaction to her. “But aside from my obvious charms, which, let’s face it, no man could possibly resist, why do you want to do this?”

He let himself look at her for a long moment. The sharp blue eyes. The pretty face. The lush mouth so at odds with the quick, disarmingly honest words that came out of it. And her short, choppy blonde hair that, he realized, he wanted to drag his hands through as he angled that mouth of hers to fit his. He wanted that with an intensity that surprised him anew. He wanted it all.

He hadn’t let himself want anything in years. But he wanted her.

And best of all, there was nothing hidden. No artifice. No murky agenda. No great pretense. She was in debt. She needed money and, he suspected, the security of knowing that there would always be more. Meanwhile, he needed a wife he did not have to woo. A wife who would not want things from him that he was unable to give—things that most wives would expect from a husband, but not this one, not if he bought her. She might see the monster in him, over the course of their time together, but she would be paid well to ignore it.

It was anything but romantic—and that was precisely why he liked it. And her.

He told himself it was just that simple.

“You are the first woman in years who has approached me as a man, instead of a desperate charity case before whom they might martyr themselves for an evening,” he said quietly. He might know there was no man beneath his monstrous face, but she did not. And still she treated him like one. How could he resist it? “More often, they do not approach me at all. And I must marry after all. It might as well be a woman with no expectations.”

She cleared her throat. “Oh, I have expectations,” she said, and he wondered if it cost her to keep her voice so even, her gaze so light on his that he felt an echoing brightness inside of him. “But I feel certain you can meet them. You need do nothing more than sign the cheques to win my eternal devotion.”

In Rafe’s experience, few things were ever so easy.

“Since you have been so forthright, let me share my expectations with you,” he replied then. He held her close, so close she could do nothing but stare directly at the scars that told the world who he was—the scars she would spend a lifetime staring at, should this odd, very nearly absurd conversation turn into some kind of reality. “You understand that I must have heirs.”

“You great men always do,” she said knowledgeably, her eyes bright with some kind of amusement. Then she laughed. “Or so I’ve heard. And seen in films.”

He pulled the hand of hers he held to his chest, and understood, in that moment, how much he wanted this. Wanted her. More than he could remember wanting anything—anyone—ever. Because this is so convenient, he told himself. I need do nothing at all but accept. He told himself he believed it.

But he knew the truth. It beat in him like a drum, thick like desire and as damaging, making him think he could have a woman like this, that what lived in him would not destroy her as it had destroyed everyone else he’d ever loved or wanted to love. That her need for his money would protect her, somehow, from his need for her.

She should be so lucky, he thought grimly, but he did not let her go.

“You are a beautiful woman, as we’ve agreed,” he said in a low voice, his eyes hard on hers. “I imagine begetting the next generation will be no hardship at all for me—but you may have more difficulty with it.” He let that sink in, and when he spoke again, his voice was gruff to his own ears. “I will try to be sensitive to your revulsion, but I am, sadly, only a man.”

Was that a faint hint of color he saw, moving across the golden skin at her neck, her cheeks? Another quick shadow chased through the blue of her eyes.

“You are too kind.” He felt himself stiffen as her gaze traced over the path of his scars again, sweeping across his face, impossible to ignore. He couldn’t decipher what he saw in those marvelous eyes then, darker than before, and continued on.

“I don’t like anything fake.” He shrugged. “Thanks to my scars, I am unable to hide from the world. I dislike it, intensely, when others do.”

“I’ve never been very good at hiding anything,” she said after a moment. That smile spread over her mouth then, as tempting as it was challenging. It made him want to know her—to figure out what went on inside that head, behind that pretty face. You play a dangerous game, he warned himself. “What you see is what you get.”