The Man Behind the Scars

“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.”

He doubted that too.

“Most importantly,” he said, hearing his voice move even lower, and feeling her shiver slightly, as if in reaction, as if she felt him deep inside of her, or perhaps that was only his own fervent wish, “I am not open-minded. At all. I will care, very much, if you take a lover.”

Again, that electricity, stretching between them, burning into him, making him forget where they were. Who they were. Who he was, most of all. She made him forget he was a monster, and he found he didn’t know how to handle it. Or what it meant. And he squashed down, ruthlessly, the seed of hope that threatened to plant itself inside of him. Hope was pointless. Damaging. Better by far to deal in reality, however bleak, and weather what came. Better to banish what if altogether. It never brought anything but pain.

“No seas of lovers then,” Angel replied, the faint huskiness in her voice the only indication that she was affected by this bloodless talk of sex. Perhaps she, too, was fighting off the same carnal images that flooded his brain. “And here I thought we would have a modern sort of marriage. I hear they’re fashionable these days, all adultery and ennui.”

There was a certain cynicism in her voice. He wondered what marriage she’d seen too closely and found so wanting. Not that it signified.

“They may be,” he said darkly. He stopped dancing then, pulling them over to the side of the great ballroom, though it took him longer than it should have to let go of her. He wanted her that badly. It should have horrified him. “But I should warn you, there are two things I will never be, Angel. Modern or fashionable. At all.”

He was warning her off, Angel realized, in a sudden flash of understanding. He had backed her into one of the grand pillars, and she felt it hard and smooth against her back with a sudden rush of sensation that was as much exhilaration as it was wariness. He was big and dark and entirely too dangerous, and she told herself it was reasonable nervousness that kicked to life in her veins, sending that wild shiver throughout her body. Nerves. Nothing more.

“Do we have a deal?” she asked softly. “Or will you keep growling at me until I run screaming into the crowd to find myself a more malleable rich man to proposition?”

His mouth softened, and she saw that flash of arrogance again, reminding her of how powerful he was. He was not, she could see, at all concerned that she might run anywhere. She would have found that somewhat offensive, had she had any intention of moving.

“Is that what I’m doing?” he asked, all aristocratic hauteur, eyebrow crooked high in amazement. “Growling?”

She reached over and laid her hand against the hard plane of his chest, carefully and deliberately. He was warm to the touch, and she had to fight back another shiver. Of nerves, she told herself again. This situation was extreme, even for her.

“We’re talking about a marriage of convenience,” she said. With some urgency, as if that might dispel the lingering darkness that she sensed hung between them. “Yours as well as mine. I don’t expect you to sweep me off my feet while quoting Wuthering Heights.”

His mouth crooked. It wasn’t a smile, not really, but it made her feel absurdly glad, even so.

“You are so reasonable,” he murmured. He reached up and took her hand, but kept it where it was, trapped tight against his chest. Was that his heart she felt thumping so hard, or was that her own pulse? “One is tempted to think you’ve had a run of convenient husbands.”

“You will be the first,” she assured him. “But who knows? If it works out, it could be the start of a long and profitable line of husbands. I can collect them, one by one, and live on their tireless support until I’m a doddering pensioner.”

“That is a lovely picture indeed,” he said in that low voice, and it licked at her, making her think about the begetting of heirs and all manner of other things he made seem far more enticing than they should be simply by talking about them in that voice of his. And the way he looked at her, a dark fire in those deep gray eyes, made her chest feel too tight, her skin too small for her bones. “But let’s concentrate on the one in front of you.”

“Yes,” she agreed, though something was happening to her. She couldn’t look away. The hand that he held, flat against his wide, distracting chest, wanted … wanted. She felt light-headed. “Does that mean we’re agreed? One perfectly convenient marriage, made to order right here in the middle of the Palazzo Santina?”

For a moment he only looked down at her, his scarred face harsh and his remote gray eyes cold, and she was suddenly much too aware that he was a stranger to her. A complete and total stranger, who she had asked to marry her in the middle of a crowded ballroom, in a country not her own, on what amounted to little more than a whim. How insane was she? How could this be anything but a disaster?

“Yes,” he said. “We are agreed. We can marry as soon as you like.”

Again, some sense of deep foreboding moved through her, shaking her. She would be far better off with some older, much less dangerous man, she thought in a sudden panic, someone she could manipulate with a smile and bend to her will. That would not be this man. That would not be Rafe. She knew it as well as she knew her own name. If she had any sense of self-preservation at all, she would call this off. Now.

But she didn’t move. She didn’t say a word. She had no idea why not.

“You look terrified.” That single brow rose, pointedly.

“Not at all,” she said, shoving the foreboding aside. Better to be practical, especially in her dire circumstances. She tilted her head back, invitingly, and gazed up at him. “But I feel the occasion calls for something, don’t you? Something to mark such a momentous decision. How about a kiss?”

“A kiss.” His voice was dark and disbelieving. Gruff. “This is no fairy tale, Angel.”

She felt her own eyebrows rise then, in cool challenge.

“Then you have no need to fear you’ll be turned into a frog,” she replied tartly. His mouth twisted, but his eyes burned hot.

“As you wish,” he murmured, mocking her—or perhaps both of them.

His hand moved from hers to hold her chin in an easy grip, as if her mouth was his already, before he’d even tasted it. And then he bent his head and captured her mouth with his.

It was a swift kiss, commanding and sure. Possessive and demanding, it seared into her like some kind of red-hot brand. She felt it storm through her limbs, lighting her up with that sweet and terrible electricity, making her lean closer to him, fascinated and captivated by the sure, carnal mastery of his kiss, the hint of more, of something dark and sweet and addictive—and then he pulled away.

Too soon. Much too soon—but then she remembered herself. Where they were. Who they were.

She felt herself flush with heat, and only just kept herself from squirming beneath that dark gray gaze. She felt out of control. Exposed. He let go of her chin and she staggered back against the pillar, unable to keep herself from raising a trembling hand to her lips like some kind of artless virgin.

Had that really just happened? Had he really just kissed her like that?

Was she really … shaking?

And looking at her, Rafe McFarland, Lord of All He Surveyed and soon to be her husband, finally smiled.

CHAPTER THREE

IT WAS the memory of that smile, so unexpected and curiously infectious, lighting up that scarred face and making it something new, that Angel found herself playing over and over in her head as she headed back home to London and reality.

That and the kiss that never failed, even in retrospect, to make her uncomfortably warm.

It was simple surprise, she told herself—at the depth of her own response. It was nothing more than surprise that he’d had so much passion in him, and that she’d met it. And how could it be anything else, when the only thing between them was money? His money. Her need of it.

And your body, a dark voice whispered inside of her. Isn’t that always the way this kind of arrangement goes?

“Here is my contact information,” Rafe had said, all distance and business, in the car he’d summoned to take them back to their respective hotels after Allegra’s engagement party had come to an end. He had jotted down a few quick lines on a card he’d pulled from somewhere. Angel had found herself admiring the bold, male handwriting, scrutinizing it as if it might give her some clue about the man. He’d handed the card to her when he was finished, his gaze once again dark and grim, no hint of that brief, flashing smile left anywhere on his ruthless face. As if she’d imagined it. She’d begun to wonder if she had.

He’d refused to take her details at all. Not even a mobile number.

“You may find that once you are back in London, and the royal Santina champagne has worn off, that you are less interested in going through with this after all.” His gaze had been level. Matter-of-fact. Somehow, that had made it worse.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” she’d said, stung. More offended, perhaps, than the situation warranted. After all, he was just being appropriately cautious—which perhaps she should have been herself. But in the dark, close confines of his car, she’d felt nothing but that current of reckless determination, driving her on, making this happen. Because it had to. Surely that was the only reason. Surely it was reason enough. “But I’m not drunk.”

“We’ll see,” he’d said, and his expression had been very nearly bleak then, and had made something turn over inside of her. “I wouldn’t hold it against you if, upon reflection, you decide that you must have been.”

She’d flushed, with something she’d told herself was temper. Simple temper, nothing more. “I’m not drunk,” she’d said again, distinctly. “But you can pretend I am, if that gives you the escape clause you clearly want.”

“Ring me when you arrive in London,” he’d said softly as the car glided to a stop outside her hotel. His gaze had challenged her. Dared her. And made her, somehow, unutterably sad. “Or don’t.”

Angel, naturally, had rung immediately, still fueled by that same temper. When the plane had landed in Heathrow and again when she’d reached her flat. To prove the point, she’d assured herself expansively, but to herself or to him?

“Oh, dear,” she’d said into his voice mail the second time, when she was safely home and just as determined, filled with something perilously close to righteous indignation. “It appears that two days later and without the champagne, I still want the marriage, just as I suspected I would. But I should tell you, Rafe—” and she admitted to herself, sitting there in her dark flat where no one could see her, least of all him, that she liked the way his name felt in her mouth “—that unlike you, I will hold it against you if you change your mind. Just to be clear.”

And she did want this. Him. Of course she did. He was the answer to all of her prayers, she reminded herself fiercely and repeatedly. She would be rich and a countess to boot! All of her problems would be solved! Not bad for a wild fantasy on a plane ride and a single dance at an engagement party, she told herself. Not bad at all.

And if there’d been a gaping sort of hole inside of her, far too black and bitter for her to look at directly, she’d ignored it. Fiercely and repeatedly.

“I’m afraid I have urgent business I must attend to for the rest of the week,” Rafe told her in that stern, aristocratic voice when he finally returned her calls, right when she was starting to believe that perhaps she’d fantasized the whole thing after all. Just made it up to take away the pain of Chantelle’s latest and greatest betrayal, the way she had when she was a little girl—telling herself stories to make her nights alone less frightening while Chantelle was out with “friends”. “I’m afraid I did not factor the possibility of a fiancée into my schedule.”

That word. Fiancée. It made a chill sneak down her back and she wasn’t sure why. What she was sure about was that she didn’t want to know.

“Are you sure this isn’t simply a test?” she asked, keeping her voice light.

She knew it was. She knew he was still making certain. Making absolutely sure that she’d meant every single word she’d said in that ballroom. Making her question herself and decide if this was what she wanted. If he was what she wanted.