The Man Behind the Scars

by Caitlin Crews

  Whatever else this man was, she thought then, anticipation and adrenaline coursing through her, making her whole body seem to hum into alertness, he was a candidate. She moved toward him, pleased to note that the closer she got, the more impressive he was. There was a certain watchful stillness to him that she felt like an echo beneath her ribs. She wasn’t at all surprised when he turned his head to pin her with a cold, dark stare while she was still several feet away—and she got the sudden and distinct impression that he’d sensed her approach from the start, from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. As if he was preternaturally aware of everything that happened around him.

  For a moment, she saw nothing but that stare. Cold gray eyes, the most remote she’d ever seen, and darker than anyone’s ought to be. He seemed to see into her, through her, as if she was entirely transparent. As if she was made of some insubstantial bit of glass. As if he could read her desperation, her dreams, her plans and her flimsy hopes, in a single, searing glance. She felt it, him, everywhere.

  She blinked—and then she saw his scars.

  A wide, devastating set of once angry, now simply brutal scars swiped across the whole left side of his face, raking him from temple to chin, sparing his eye but ravaging the rest of the side of his face and carrying on to loop under his hard, masculine chin. She sucked in a shocked breath, but she didn’t stop walking. She couldn’t, somehow, as if he compelled her. As if he had already pulled her in and she was only bowing to the inevitable.

  What a shame, she thought, because the part of his face not damaged by the scars was undeniably handsome. She could see the thrust of his cheekbones, that tough line of his jaw. And that untouched mouth, entirely too hard and male, with that stamp of darkness—but inarguably attractive. More than attractive. As magnetic, somehow, as it was grim.

  But there was another part of her—the practical part, she told herself, forged at her callous and cold mother’s knee—that whispered, The scars make it all the better. As if he was some kind of an easy target because of them. As if they made him as desperate as she was.

  She hated herself for thinking it. Deeply and profoundly. Like acid in her veins. But she kept walking.

  His eyes grew colder the closer she came, and were very nearly glacial and intimidatingly stern when she came to a stop in front of him. He held himself silent and still, with the thrust and heft of his clearly evident power all but glowing beneath what had to be superb self-control. She told herself it was only nerves that made her mouth so dry, and sipped at her champagne to wet it. And to brace herself.

  The woman in her liked that he was an inch or so taller than she was in her wicked four-inch heels. And the mercenary part of her liked the fact that he practically exuded wealth and consequence. He might as well wave it like a banner over his dark head. It was glaringly obvious in the elegant simplicity of everything he wore—all of it boasting the kind of stark, simple lines that came only with exorbitant price tags from the foremost ateliers. She knew. She’d worn that sort of clothing when she’d modeled—the kind of high couture that she could never have dreamed of buying herself. But she’d studied it all from an envious distance. She knew it when she saw it.

  “You appear to be lost,” he said, in a low, stirring sort of voice, for all that it was noticeably unfriendly. Or anyway, as remote as his gaze. As uninviting. Luckily, Angel was not easily fazed. “The party is behind you.”

  His voice seemed to curl into her, around her, like the touch of a hard, calloused hand. It was also very, very posh. Angel smiled, and then tilted her head slightly to one side, considering him. If possible, his dark eyes grew even colder than before, the line of his mouth grimmer.

  She knew then, with a sudden flash of something too like foreboding for her peace of mind, that nothing about this man would ever be easy, whether he was target—a candidate for this game of hers—or not. And more, perhaps even more importantly, that a man like this was unlikely to be impressed with a woman like her. But she shook that off almost as soon as she thought it. It was the challenge of it, she decided in that moment. She wasn’t one to back down. She preferred to jump in feet first, and sort it all out later. She might have cooked up this make-your-own-fairy-tale plan in a wild panic on her flight across Europe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good one. There was surely no point in changing her plan or even her wicked ways now. No point in false advertising, either. She was who she was, take it or leave it.

  Most left it, of course, or ran up exorbitant debts in her name, but she told herself she was better for the things she’d lived through. Stronger anyway. Tougher.

  She didn’t know why she suspected that, with this man, she’d have to be. Or why that suspicion didn’t send her running for the pretty green hills she’d seen as her plane came in to land on this magical little island.

  “What happened to your face?” she asked, simple and direct, and waited to see what he’d do.

  Rafe McFarland, who loathed the fact that he was currently dressed in fine and uncomfortable clothes for the express purpose of trumpeting his eminence as the Eighth Earl of Pembroke to all of his royal Santina cousins, as duty demanded, stared at the woman before him in the closest he’d come to shock in a long, long time.

  He could not have heard her correctly.

  But her perfectly arched eyebrows rose inquiringly over her sky-blue eyes, making her remarkably pretty face seem clever, and she regarded him with the kind of amused patience that suggested he had, in fact, heard her perfectly.

  Rafe was well-used to women like this one catching sight of him from afar and heading toward him with that swing in their hips and that purpose in their eyes. He knew exactly how irresistible he’d once been to women—he had only to look at the remnants of what he’d once taken for granted in the mirror. He knew the whole, sad dance by heart. They advanced on him, delicious curves poured into dresses like the one this woman wore, that made her body look like a fantasy come to life—until he showed them the whole of his face.

  Which he always did. Deliberately. Even cruelly.

  It was, he knew all too well, a face that no one could bear to look at for long, least of all himself. It was the face of a monster all dressed up in a five-thousand-pound bespoke Italian suit, and Rafe lived with the bitter knowledge that the scars were not the half of it—not compared to the monster within. He took his terrible face out into public less and less these days, because he found the dance more and more difficult to bear with anything approaching equanimity. It always ended the same way. The more polite ones abruptly fixed their attention to a point just beyond him and walked on by, never sparing him another glance. The less polite gasped in horror as if they’d seen the very devil himself and then turned back around in a hurry. He had seen it all a hundred times. He couldn’t even say the specific reactions bothered him anymore. He told himself they were, at the very least, honest. The sad truth was that he was grateful, on some level, for the scars that so helpfully advertised how deeply unsuited he was to human interaction of any kind. Better they should all be warned off in advance.

  This woman, however, in her tiny black dress that licked over her tight, perfect curves, with her short and choppy blonde hair that seemed as bold and demanding as her sharp, too-clear blue eyes, had kept right on coming—even after he’d presented her with his face. With a full view of the scars that marked him as the monster he’d always known he was, since long before he’d had to wear the evidence on his face.

  And then she’d actually asked him a direct question about those scars.

  In all the years since his injury, this had never happened. Which alone would have made it interesting. The fact that she was so beautiful it made him ache in ways he’d thought he never would again—well, that was just an added bonus.

  “No one ever asks me that,” he heard himself say, almost as if he was used to conversations with strangers. Or anyone he did not employ. “Certainly not directly. It is the elephant in the room. Or perhaps the Ele
phant Man in the room, to be more precise.”

  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.”