“Oh, Angel,” she said out loud, her voice shaky in the quiet room, and as rough to her own ears as if it was a stranger’s. “What the hell are you doing?”
It was much too late at night, and yet Rafe was awake, staring at the sheaf of photographs spread out across the wide expanse of the platform bed he sprawled across. The pictures chronicled Angel’s entire sporadic modeling career, in glossy color and intense black and white—one pouty-mouthed, mysterious-eyed, loose-limbed shot after the next, helpfully supplied by his legal team for his review.
“Your future countess,” Alistair, the lead solicitor, had intoned in his habitually contemptuous way when he’d handed Rafe the folder. With a derisive flourish.
He shouldn’t have liked the way that sounded. He shouldn’t have felt that fierce need move through him again, wanting her in all the ways he could not let himself want anything.
She was so distractingly beautiful. But, of course, that was irrelevant here. He of all people should know how little outside beauty had to do with anything. He’d been aware of that stark truth from a very young age. The scars on his face now were incidental at best. They paled in comparison to the ravaged remains of the rest of him, and well did he know it. He had the ghosts to prove it. His entire army unit. His whole family. He never forgot a single one of them. He felt them all like deep, black holes where his heart should have been. He wore them like regret and recrimination where others wore only bone and skin.
He knew exactly what kind of monster he was.
He rose from his bed and moved restlessly to the tall windows that looked out over London, a city he loathed deeply but hardly saw tonight. He saw only her face. That insouciant smile. The sharp intelligence in her gaze. The heat of her touch. Her delectable mouth.
He knew better than to want her—to want anything—this much.
A good man would not have let this happen, no matter how tempting she was. A decent man would have ended it the moment they were back in London, back to reality. He might not have been either one of those things, but he knew there was still a part of him that longed to be what he should have been, what he’d never been. There was still a part of him that dreamed, sometimes, that he could be better.
If he was any kind of man at all, if there was any shred of humanity in him, he would not let her chain herself to a ruined creature like him. She didn’t know any better—but he did. She saw only bank balances and some kind of savior, but he knew that was only the tiniest part of what she’d get—of what she’d have to endure. He carried the weight of every single person who had ever been close to him. Surely Angel deserved better than that. Better than him.
But he couldn’t seem to make himself do what he knew he should.
He told himself that she knew what she was getting into, or near enough. She was marrying a perfect stranger, for money. He told himself that only a woman with extremely low expectations could possibly consider such a course of action. He told himself that theirs would be a practical business arrangement, with possible side benefits, perhaps, but one that would never, could never, involve feelings of any kind.
It was important to make all of that clear from the start. He wanted a marriage that was shot through with the cold light of reality. He wanted duty and obligation, responsibilities and rules. That would keep the monster in him at bay. That would curtail the inevitable damage.
He was doing this because it was more honest, he told himself. He was not promising her anything. She was not pretending to be in love with him. They would both get exactly what they wanted out of this, and nothing more. Surely that would keep her safe, if nothing else.
He put his hand against the windowpane then, letting the cold glass seep into his skin, reminding him. Who he was. What he could do. What, in fact, he’d done. The cold turned to a numbing kind of pain, of punishment and penance, and still he held his palm there, determined.
This was not about hope. It was about need.
All he had to do was remember that.
It was Friday when Angel saw an unexpected picture of herself in one of the horrible tabloids, tucked up next to Rafe as they’d headed toward his car after the engagement party on Santina. It crystallized her thus far shaky resolve to finish this thing before it really started. To call it off, as she’d been closer to doing every day. That was, she’d decided, the only sane thing to do.
She stood staring at the grainy photograph for far too long in the aisle of her local off-license, as if she expected it to divulge the secrets of her own heart right then and there. As if it could.
The girl in the picture had her head tilted invitingly as she gazed up at the dark, dangerous face of the man next to her. Even in a cheap and sleazy tabloid, Rafe was impressive—too much so—and Angel looked, she was embarrassed even to think, entirely too much like her money-grubbing, social-climbing mother, a connection the tabloid was quick to make itself. It made her cringe in shame, and then redden with deep embarrassment. And it brought home the unpleasant reality of what she’d set out to do.
What she was, in fact, doing.
The entire world would know that she was marrying Rafe for his money, just as Chantelle had married Bobby for his money before her. And they would be right. They would call her all those terrible names, like opportunist and the far nastier gold digger. And they would be right. She might as well simply give in now and accept that she was her mother, after all these years desperate to be anything but.
And the truth was, she didn’t think she could live with that. With herself, if that was who she became, no matter her reasons. She pushed her way out of the shop, making her way back down the street toward her flat, blinking back the emotion that rushed through her so unevenly and threatened to spill out from behind her eyes. She was a mess—she could feel it in every cell of her body—but she still refused to let herself cry. She refused. How many ways could she betray herself before there was none of her left?
A phone call from Ben, her would-be big brother, only made it worse. Her steps slowed as she answered, and she forced herself to adopt her usual flippant tone. It was harder to do than it should have been, and she didn’t want to think about why that was.
“What are you doing with the Earl of Pembroke?” Ben asked directly, in that way of his that reminded Angel that he did, in fact, worry about her. And about all of the many Jacksons, as if worrying was his foremost occupation, in place of his usual world-conquering.
It made her stomach clench in shame, around another bitter surge of panic. What would she tell him? How could she face him again if she did this crazy thing? Ben had never wanted anything but the best for Angel, however unlikely that seemed, given the cards she’d been dealt and the choices she’d made. This would disappoint him, deeply, as he was one of the few people who Angel had ever let get somewhat close to her. Because he had, despite her best efforts, she opened her mouth to tell him what was really happening.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it, to tell him the truth. She realized she couldn’t quite bear to say it out loud. Not to Ben. Not to someone who would care, and would be so very sad for her. That made it all so squalid. So desperate and pathetic, somehow.
She mouthed something careless and shallow instead, hardly aware of what she was saying. What did it matter? When she got home, she would call Rafe and end this madness, and none of this would signify.
“Be careful, Angel,” Ben said. It made her throat feel tight. As if he could see. As if he knew. But he didn’t, she reminded herself. He couldn’t. He’d only seen that terrible photograph, which didn’t even show Rafe’s scars, and certainly didn’t show Angel’s true, mercenary colors. It was, in all the ways that mattered, a lie.
“I always am,” she replied lightly, and while that certainly wasn’t true, what was true was that she survived. She always, always survived. So what else really mattered, in the long run? It was better than the alternative. “He’s rich and titled, Ben,” she said then, interrupting him a
s he tried, yet again, to step up and fix things in a life that, she was afraid, could never be fixed, not really. And certainly not by Ben, dear though he was to her. It meant more to her than she could say that he still tried. “What more could I want?”
That question rang in her head after they’d talked for a few more moments, after she’d evaded his questions and waved away his concern, and after she’d slipped her mobile back into her pocket for the remainder of her walk home. The April day was cold and gray, with a blustery sort of wind that made Angel feel empty inside. Spring seemed like a fairy tale itself on the chilly London street, an unlikely story at best. She tucked her chin into her warm wool scarf, and had her head bent against the relentless slap of the cold, and that was why she didn’t see the slender, tousled-blonde-headed figure standing at the door to her building with a cigarette in one hand and a newspaper in the other until she was very nearly on top of her. When she did, her breath left her in a great whoosh, as surely as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. Hard.
Chantelle.
Of course.
“Aren’t you the dark horse,” Chantelle said in her insinuating, insulting way, lounging in one of the chairs in Angel’s tiny kitchen as if she was perfectly comfortable there, which, Angel reflected balefully, she undoubtedly was. Having no shame at all removed all manner of discomforts that others might feel in similar circumstances, she imagined. Chantelle had not bothered to put out her cigarette outside, and so still smoked it, even as she tapped the tabloid that she’d flung on the table between them with the restless, manicured fingers of her other hand. “An earl, no less! You’ve learned a little something from your mother after all.”
“Do you have a cheque for me, Chantelle?” Angel asked pointedly, unwinding her scarf and tossing it with far more force than necessary toward the empty chair. “Because I know this can’t be a social call. Not when you owe me fifty thousand quid with interest mounting by the day.”
Chantelle blew a stream of smoke into the air. “No wonder I didn’t lay eyes on you once in Santina,” she said, as if Angel hadn’t spoken. As if what she’d done wasn’t hanging between them like an ugly screen. “I thought you were avoiding me, but the whole time you were holed up with his lordship playing—”
“How could you?” Angel said tightly, cutting her off. “Fifty thousand pounds? What could you possibly have been thinking?”
She told herself that her mother looked abashed then, but she knew that was wishful thinking at best. Chantelle didn’t know the meaning of the word. Angel had learned the truth about her mother over the years, whether she’d wanted to or not. Over and over again.
“It was an accident,” Chantelle said now. Just as she always did, her voice slightly husky as if she was in the grip of strong emotions. Which, Angel reminded herself angrily, she was not. She had no emotions—only the ability to feign them. “You know I’ll pay you back, love. It was just a little bit of help to tide me over.”
“You won’t pay me back,” Angel said flatly. As much to herself as to her mother. “You never do.”
“It won’t matter, will it?” Chantelle replied without missing a beat. “You could be a countess soon enough, if you play this right, and what will you care about money then? You’ll have pots of it.”
She made no effort to disguise the tinge of bitterness in her tone, much less the avaricious gleam in her eyes—bright blue eyes that were identical to Angel’s. Angel hated the fact that she so greatly resembled this woman. It horrified her that anyone believed she was anything at all like her—and she knew they did. The whole wide world did.
Even she did, if she was honest. And hadn’t she walked up to Rafe at that party and proved it? Like mother, like daughter. It made her throat burn with something like acid.
“You can’t possibly imagine that after stealing my identity and sticking me with a huge bill, I’d be likely to give you any money should I marry into it, can you?” Angel made her voice incredulous when, really, she wasn’t at all surprised. Chantelle twitched herself up from the chair opposite and moved toward the sink to toss her cigarette butt away. Leaving a soggy mess for Angel to clean up, no doubt. Like everything else she ever touched.
“I raised you all on my own, Angel,” Chantelle said without turning back around. Her voice was wistful. Something like nostalgic. And was, Angel knew, no matter how much she wished otherwise, entirely fake. “I was only eighteen when I had you, and it wasn’t easy.”
She wished, for only a moment, that her mother was someone, anyone, else. Someone who might say the things Chantelle did and mean them. Even once.
“Does it count as ‘on your own’ when there was a parade of men in and out of the door at all times?” Angel asked musingly. “Some were simply your lovers, I suppose, but others were honest to goodness sugar daddies. Which I suspect is just another way of saying married, isn’t it? Just like my father?”
“Some daughters in your position would be a little bit more grateful,” Chantelle continued, only the hardening of her voice any indication that she’d heard Angel at all. “I made the best choices I could for you, when I was barely more than a child myself.”
“Chantelle, please.” Angel laughed, entirely without humor. “You were never a child.”
“Because I had no choice,” she retorted. “I had to make do, didn’t I? How else would you have been fed?”
Chantelle twisted around then, and Angel met her mother’s gaze. So blue, so bright, and so endlessly conniving.
“Why are you here?” she asked quietly. “I know you’re not going to pay me back. I even know you’re not going to apologize. So what can you possibly want?”
“Can’t a mother drop in to see her own daughter?” Chantelle asked, her blue gaze guileless. Which meant she could be up to anything at all. Anything and everything. “Especially when you haven’t answered your mobile in days?”
“I know how this goes,” Angel said, too weary even for bitterness. Too numb, she thought, and was grateful for it. It made everything easier. What hurt the most was when she actually believed that Chantelle could change—that she even wanted to try. How many times would she fall for that? After all these years? “You’ll keep at it until you say something that makes me feel guilty. Then you’ll work that until I end up making you feel better for what you’ve done. Until I’ve apologized for what you did to me.” She shook her head. “You do it every time. It’s like clockwork.”
“Such airs you put on,” Chantelle said, her gaze as hard as her voice. “You might as well be a flipping countess already. Don’t forget, I know the truth about you, Angel.” She nodded toward the newspaper on the table. “We’re no different, you and me. I’m just a little bit more honest about it.”
“You don’t know the meaning of the word honest,” Angel snapped. “You’ve never even brushed up against honesty in passing.”
Chantelle sniffed. “I can see you’re determined to make this hard,” she said loftily, as if she was rising above Angel’s childish behavior through sheer goodness, great martyr that she was. “I want you to remember this, Angel. You take such pleasure in making me the villain, but I’m the one who came round this time to sort things out, aren’t I? And you won’t even give me the time of day.”
“I gave you fifty thousand quid, Mum,” Angel retorted. “Without even knowing it. Without you even asking. I’m all out of things to give you, and I mean that literally. I have nothing left.”
She wasn’t surprised when Chantelle slammed out of the flat, but she was surprised that she didn’t find herself nearly as destroyed by one of her mother’s always upsetting and depressing little visits as she usually was. She pulled the newspaper toward her again, and stared down at that lie of a photo.
What wasn’t a lie was that Rafe was so solid, so surprisingly tough, and it was visible even in newsprint. That soldier’s way of holding himself, strong and unbendable, perhaps. She had the feeling that he was the kind of man—notably unlike
her stepfather, Bobby, and most of the population of London, including some of her own early boyfriends back when she’d been foolish enough to bring them into Chantelle’s lascivious orbit—who would see a woman like Chantelle coming from miles off and be singularly unimpressed. It made her feel warm again, imagining his complete imperviousness to a woman like Chantelle.
It would be like Chantelle didn’t even exist.
He wasn’t promising her happiness. He was promising her financial security. And it dawned on Angel as she sat there, the smell of Chantelle’s cigarette smoke still heavy in the air, that the only kind of happiness she was likely to get in this life would involve protecting herself from Chantelle and her games. And the only thing that could guarantee her that kind of protection was money. Pots of it, as her mother had said. If she was really, truly rich, it wouldn’t matter what Chantelle did. She could protect herself, and pay it off without blinking if somehow that protection failed. Chantelle would never again be in a position to ruin her life—she wouldn’t even have access to it.
The very idea made her feel freer than she had in years.
Maybe it was better to be alone as she’d always been, but nevertheless financially safe with someone who accepted her on the level they would arrange together, than plain old alone and prey to her mother’s endless schemes. That was why she hadn’t let herself ask Ben—himself no slouch in the money department—for help, because he would have helped her, but Chantelle would only have done it again. And again. And how many times did she think her stepbrother could step in? He could only have been a temporary fix. Marrying Rafe was a long-term solution. He was signing up in advance to pay her bills. And, unlike Ben, at least he was getting something in return.
The Man Behind the Scars Page 5