The Man Behind the Scars

by Caitlin Crews

  And the truth was, she accepted reluctantly as the cold morning sun shone above her, making all the turmoil rolling around inside of her seem simple, finally—none of that would have mattered if she’d really wanted to leave. She didn’t. And that was the most terrifying part of it all.

  She heard movement behind her and, when she turned, it was to see Rafe stepping out from the woods. She should have been surprised by that, but she wasn’t. She doubted there was very much that slipped by this man in his own house, now that she considered it. Just as she wasn’t surprised by the way her heart leaped in her chest, and started to beat just that little bit too fast as she let her gaze move over his guarded expression, his long, rangy body.

  “I didn’t take you for the sort who enjoyed a morning constitutional,” Rafe said, his voice colder than the air around them as he moved toward her in that way of his that made her think of the word prowling. “As it involves the outdoors and the countryside.”

  He was even more closed off today than usual, Angel saw, shut down and remote, and she felt that deep sorrow for him reverberate within her chest, fusing with the want and the need and making a mockery of everything she’d told herself.

  The truth was that she wanted him far more than she wanted to protect herself. When had that happened? But there it was.

  “I’m opposed to it in principle and in fact,” she agreed. She searched those stony eyes, looking for the Rafe she knew, but he was a cold, watchful stranger once again, hidden securely away behind that stiff soldier’s stance and that grim mouth. And even so, he came close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye. Close enough that she could have reached out and touched him, if she dared. She raised her eyebrows. “I was running away, obviously.”

  “So soon?” His voice was bitter, his eyes dark. But he did not sound at all surprised, which rankled more than it should. “I thought you were a bit more stubborn than that.”

  Angel smiled, though it felt thin. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to reach out and slide her hands beneath the black coat he’d thrown on over his usual uniform of casual jumper and jeans, to feel the heat of him. Even after everything that had happened, she wanted him.

  Maybe, she thought in no little despair and as much panicked confusion, she always would. Maybe it had been too late for her from the start—from the moment she’d clapped eyes on him at that ball.

  “It’s lucky that you are possessed of a large estate,” she said casually, as if there was nothing between them but some sparkling conversation. “My urge to run away disappeared in the time it might have taken me to hail a taxi. But all you seem to have here are ten thousand trees and views of the loch, so here I am. Plan thwarted.”

  He didn’t respond to her lighter tone. He didn’t crack even his bare-bones version of a smile. If anything, his gaze only darkened as he looked at her, and she had the distinct impression of barely leashed ferocity, burning off of him in waves.

  “I can’t think what could have put you over the edge,” he bit out, his voice scathing, as if he could not manage to hold it back or keep it cool. “It must have been dire indeed, to launch you from your bed at so uncivilized an hour, and force you out into the depths of nature.”

  He was daring her, provoking her, and it made her hurt for him. For her. For this terrible situation between them—this cold-blooded marriage—that she knew, somehow, she could never fix. Could never, ever make right. Not really. Not for the first time, she wondered what might have become of them if she had never mentioned money when she’d met him. If he had never offered to be her savior. Where would they be now?

  But that was one more thing she’d never know.

  Something like a sob welled up within her, but she shoved it back down. She reached over and took his face in her hands before she could think better of it, letting her right palm caress the scars that swept over the left side of his gorgeous face, feeling it like a blow when he flinched. But she didn’t move her hands, not even when he covered them with his own, as if he meant to pull hers away. His gray eyes gleamed a shade of silver she’d never seen before—pain, she thought, that means he is in pain—and she didn’t look away.

  “I saw you first,” she said, knowing somehow that this was the greater vow, these quiet words in a chapel made of the woods and the water, with the watchful mountains in the distance. Whether he ever knew it or not. She did. “I saw your dark eyes and your quiet strength, and it took my breath away.”

  “You saw that I had the look of a wealthy man,” he said, his voice clipped and cold. But there was an arrested sort of look in those dark eyes now, and he did not pull away. He did not break the connection.

  “That too,” Angel agreed, and it was the sad truth, wasn’t it? She’d have to learn how to live with what that meant for them. And in any case, it didn’t matter here. Now. She gazed up at him. She let herself feel all those huge and terrible things she refused to name. And she smiled at him, a real smile, one that tried to do nothing at all but smile.

  No mask. Only the stark truth she had yet to admit to herself, written all over her face, whether he saw it or not. She could feel it. Transforming her. Leaving her more vulnerable to this man than she had ever been to anyone, and ever would.

  It was dizzying. It was terrifying. But she kept going, spurred on by something that felt far bigger than her own terrors, her own fears.

  “And it was only after that, Rafe,” she whispered, his scars warm beneath her hand, and his own palm hot above it, her eyes glued to his and her face, her heart, wide open, “that I noticed that you were scarred.”

  For a taut stretch of time, glittering and breathless, they only gazed at each other, and then his grim mouth moved, curving into something as sad as it was bitter. His hands were warm against hers, his eyes so very cold. Lonely, she thought. It made her ache.

  “Ah, Angel,” he said, his voice hoarse, scratchy with all that pain she was afraid she’d never understand. Not really. Not if he wouldn’t let her. “The scars are the least of it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THEY settled into a pattern in the weeks that followed that shattering morning.

  Rafe had only stared at her for a long while, the tension like a vice around them both, his hands clenching slightly around hers, as if he fought off demons she couldn’t see in the air between them while his eyes ran the gamut from a dark, stormy gray to liquid silver. They had eventually returned to the manor house, Angel far more confused by her own behavior than she wanted to admit. She’d accepted how very little she really wanted to go anywhere. She’d had her chance, hadn’t she? If Angel had been less practical, more sentimental, she might have been tempted to note that they seemed to be conducting a kind of courtship as the days slipped by and they danced their highly charged sort of attendance upon each other—on the wrong side of the altar, to be sure, but a kind of courtship all the same.

  But she didn’t think about that, and she certainly didn’t think about what it all might mean, because that, she told herself firmly, would be truly mad, and what she was doing was … something else. Something she could not let herself name.

  They ate together in the mornings in that same small dining room, which boasted tall, graceful windows overlooking the loch and the brooding mountains to the east, so that it filled with bright morning sunshine on fine mornings. Or, more properly, Rafe ate the sort of hearty breakfast Angel associated with farmers and laborers, while Angel tried not to think about the ungodliness of the hour as she fortified herself with huge, steaming mugs of the best coffee she’d ever tasted.

  She stopped asking herself why she got up so early in the morning, simply to sit with this man as he prepared for his day, quite as if theirs was a real marriage in every respect. She discovered that she never really liked her answer. It was no more and no less than the coffee, she decided. She preferred that explanation.

  “You look as if you have achieved some kind of religious ecstasy,” Rafe sa
id one morning in an odd voice, as if he was taken back. Angel started, and realized she’d let her eyes drift closed as she sipped at the aromatic, dark brew. She smiled at him, then directed her attention to the thick ceramic mug between her palms.

  “I believe I have,” she said with a happy sigh. “I think you must import this coffee directly from the heavens. There can be no other explanation.”

  “Kenya actually.” He sat back in his chair and was, she realized belatedly, studying her, a gleam in his dark eyes that struck her as particularly, decidedly male. It made that ever-present heat flame anew within her, making her skin seem to shrink against her bones. “My great-grandfather bought a small coffee plantation there at the start of the last century. I’ve always thought the coffee magnificent, but I’m aware I’m biased.”

  Angel stared into her mug, willing her body to relax, to fight that fire that only ever burned hotter between them, and never went out entirely.

  “It’s never simple with you, is it?” she asked. “You’ve never just nipped down to the local coffee shop for their special blend and thrown it in a carafe like a normal person. It has to be from the family coffee plantation, in Kenya of all places, to be suitably exotic.” But she smiled as she looked at him, her brows arching high. “Any other little details like that you’ve forgotten to tell me? A palace or two tucked away somewhere, hardly worth mentioning? A small chain of islands in the Caribbean? Anything?”

  He didn’t smile. Not this cold, hard man, not quite, but his grim mouth softened, and his dark eyes gleamed. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “And why would it?” Angel asked, rolling her eyes. “I suppose it’s all run of the mill to you. A plantation in Kenya, an estate in Scotland—all just a day in the life of Lord Pembroke. Very boring, I’m sure.”

  “I am never bored by my responsibilities,” Rafe said in a tone that should have been quelling, and might have been, had that same gleam not still been lighting up his gaze. “Someday, perhaps, you can use that quick mind of yours to help me rather than simply sitting about the place making clever remarks.”

  “Perhaps I will,” Angel said, not knowing how to take that. Not knowing what he meant. Did he have the same image she did then—of the two of them, working together toward a common purpose? As if this is all real after all, that irrepressible voice whispered inside of her.

  He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, presenting her with an unobstructed view of that lean, hard body of his in all its tough, masculine glory and making her forget anything and everything else.

  “I am partial to islands in the Caribbean,” he said. “Excellent suggestion. I’ll have to look into that.”

  Angel’s mouth went dry. She took another pull from her mug to keep from choking on what she suspected was pure, unadulterated lust. She assured herself that it was the prospect of whole Caribbean islands at her disposal, but she knew better.

  It was Rafe. It was always Rafe.

  He was wearing jeans, as usual, which hung low on his hips and clung to his perfect backside and meant he planned to labor alongside the construction team that came daily to work on the ruined wing of the house. Today he wore a rugged-looking button-down shirt, rolled up at the cuffs. There was absolutely nothing about this very casual, unremarkable ensemble that should have made Angel’s heart flutter wildly, and yet it did.

  Oh, it did.

  She meant to keep the easy, breezy chatter going, to continue in her unofficial role as ambassador of good cheer in this marriage, the better to balance his eternal grimness, but she couldn’t seem to manage it in that moment. Rafe took a last gulp of his own coffee, then set it back on the table, all seemingly casual—and yet his dark eyes seemed to be alive with that heat. That insidious, impossible heat. It burned away inside of her, eating her whole from within.

  She remembered her hands on his face in the woods, his skin so hot in the cold air, his scars under one palm and the rasp of his beard-roughened jaw beneath the other. That same look in his eyes as the world seemed to shatter all around them. He’d taken her breath away then. He was doing it now.

  His mouth crooked slightly in the corner. She wanted him to put his hands on her, his mouth—anything….

  “I told you I wouldn’t touch you again,” he said, his voice like silk, low and addictive. “Did I not?”

  “You did.” Angel hardly recognized her own voice, had to blink away the heat glazing over her eyes. “What was it? Ah, yes. A stated concern for my tender sensibilities, despite my clear indication that I have none that should concern you.”

  He had been so faultlessly polite, so relentlessly formal, that night after she’d failed so spectacularly to leave him, and they’d sat once more over a meal fraught with all the things neither one of them could say out loud. He’d apologized for what he’d called “the scene” between them, and then he’d assured her that it would not happen again.

  “Unless and until you want it to happen,” he’d said, his low, gruff voice promising her everything she wanted and yet was afraid to ask for. Sex. Heat. Her surrender. His command. And then more of the same.

  All with that same bright fire in his gaze. That challenge.

  “If that is so,” he replied now, his dark gray eyes nearly pewter, and polished to a high shine that made a kind of chill sneak over her skin, “then you need only say the word.”

  He was so deliciously male, so clearly, entrancingly dangerous. She could feel the force of him, the power, moving through her body, using it against her, making her want. Making her need. Making her think, in moments like this, that she might go mad if she didn’t taste him again. That it might kill her if she did.

  His voice dipped lower as his dark eyes moved over her the way she wished his hands would. “Any word.”

  They kept having this conversation.

  And Angel didn’t know why she didn’t do what every part of her body longed for her to do, and had wanted since that morning in the woods—since the night that had precipitated it, and even before that, if she was honest. She didn’t know why she didn’t simply rise from her seat and close the distance between them, letting the morning sun spill all around them as she put an end to this dangerous, torturous game. She already knew how those strong, tough hands would feel against her skin. She had spent long nights keeping herself awake and aching with memories of his talented, wicked mouth, so hard and commanding against hers.

  She knew exactly what she was missing.

  But still, she did nothing. One long, hot moment turned into another. She only returned that simmering, stirring gaze of his, and then, somehow, smiled. The way she always did, coward that it turned out she was.

  “Fair enough,” he said as if she’d amused him yet again, as if his patience was boundless—or he was just supremely, arrogantly certain about how this would end—and then he left the room. Just as he always did.

  It was only then that she let herself breathe.

  And admit the truth. She knew that it was only a matter of time before she surrendered to this wild heat between them. To him. She could feel that clock ticking with every beat of her heart. And she knew, somehow, that once she did she would never be the same again. It was foolish, perhaps, but there it was. Rafe was too potent, too overpowering. And her impossible, highly unsuitable feelings for him had already inspired her to act completely out of character, more than once. She was already too weak where he was concerned. Too fascinated. Too spellbound. Too in awe.

  Making love to him would be, she was sure, the worst mistake of a life already littered quite liberally with them. It would stand as a dividing line between before and after, and she had no way to know, now, what parts of herself she would give up in the process of crossing that line. She only knew that it would cost her to do it. No doubt dearly.

  Not that that would stop her, she thought then, her mouth twisting into something wry as she brought her coffee back to up to her lips and took another transformative sip, wishing
he were as easy to sink into as the coffee he served. As uncomplicated. But as long as she could make herself wait, she would—and pretend that she still had some tiny bit of control in this marriage, some tiny bit of power.

  Because she knew, deep inside, with a kind of feminine intuition that she’d never experienced before and which shook her to the bone with its own inexorable truth, that once she surrendered to her husband, she would not even have that.

  Rafe knew the moment she came outside that afternoon.

  Not because he was glancing over toward the front door to the still-usable part of the manor far too often, though he suspected he might be, as galling as that was. He could feel it. Her. It was as if she changed the very air with her presence, made the spring breeze blow warmer, or made the clear air smell that much sweeter.

  Or perhaps she simply inspires you to launch into dreadful poetry at the slightest provocation, he thought darkly. Which should be appalling enough.

  But he turned anyway, and she was there.

  He was supposed to be attending to the building supervisor’s long-winded thoughts on why some of the walls in the burned out east wing were proving so tricky to put up, but instead he found himself watching his wife as she picked her way across the lawn, looking as delightfully out of place as she always did.

  His wife. He let the words echo in him, liking them far more than he should. He couldn’t understand why he found her so compelling. She stood out in every possible way—deliberately, he thought. She was wildly inappropriate, rather endearingly disrespectful, entirely too clever for her own good, and he was, he realized, quite shockingly fond of her.

  He refused to allow himself to dwell on that. Or even to examine it in any detail.

  The working men knew better than to ogle the countess in front of the earl, for which, today, Rafe felt some sympathy. She had yet to get the message that women of her new rank, in the country no less, did not dress as if they were taking a stroll through the high-end shops in some desperately fashionable part of London. Angel wore a pair of jeans that looked as if she’d glued them to her tight curves, a pair of completely unsuitable shoes and one of those immensely complicated, profoundly feminine tops that looked fussy and strappy and yet made him want nothing more than to take the whole thing off with his teeth. The high shoes made her hips sway invitingly—a sweet rhythm that made him even harder than he usually was, just at the thought of her—and there was something about her oversize sunglasses and deliberately mussed and choppy blonde hair that made him want to use his teeth in other places too.