She was driving him slowly insane. And the worst part was, on some level, he was actually enjoying it.
“I see you dressed to lend your hand to the ongoing construction,” he drawled when she drew near. “How thoughtful.”
“There are very few mirrors in this house,” she replied, seemingly unbothered by his ironic tone. “I am forced to toss things together and hope for the best. You have only yourself to blame if you do not care for the result.”
He had forgotten about the mirrors, he thought. He had the urge to look in one so rarely, he’d forgotten that he’d removed almost every last one of them from the house. Too many ghosts in the damned things, he’d found. He saw only the explosion and the terrible aftermath. He heard only the screams, not all of them his own.
“I hate mirrors,” he said, realizing only after he spoke that his tone was clipped and dark.
“This outfit is meant to be my form of encouragement and support,” Angel replied at once, merrily, smiling brightly at the building supervisor who reddened under the force of all that shine. As well he should, Rafe thought when she turned that same smile on him. It banished the dark, the ghosts. It made him want to lick her all over, as if she was made entirely of the sweetest, richest cream. “Are your spirits not lifted?”
“My spirits, certainly,” he murmured in a low voice when the supervisor stepped away, out of earshot. “And many other parts of me.”
“I’m sure I don’t understand your meaning,” she said demurely, with a quirk of her wicked mouth that indicated that, again, she was playing with him. Playing. With him. No matter how often she did it, it never failed to surprise him. He wondered why he found her so entertaining. He, who never found anything in the least bit entertaining, and hadn’t, really, since he’d left Pembroke Manor as a broken, unwanted boy of sixteen to join the military academy that had made him a man.
“Put your hands on me the way we both know you want to,” he suggested, not caring that he was standing out in public. That he was no doubt being watched, even now. She made him cease to care about everything except her—which should have given him pause. But it didn’t. “The meaning will come to you, I’m sure.”
But she only aimed that maddening smile at him, and then turned her attention to the clatter of the reconstruction going on in front of them. Rafe ordered himself to calm down, though he was starting to think that was well nigh impossible when in her presence. She slid her hands into the back pockets of those skintight jeans, which thrust her breasts forward against the delicate material of her top, and very nearly made him groan aloud.
“Is it going well?” she asked, utterly oblivious to the torture he was in. Or, perhaps, not quite as oblivious as she seemed, he thought, when she slid him a sideways look. He felt it like electricity, shuddering through him. Heaven help him, how he wanted her. “I’m afraid I can’t tell. All I see is the scaffolding, and a whole host of tired-looking men stamping to and fro with very loud tools.”
He bit back a smile, amazed, as usual, that one even attempted to appear.
“It is going well,” he told her. “The loud tools are a good sign. You’ll want to worry when it’s silent out here.”
He followed her gaze to the skeletal beginnings of the new east wing, the physical manifestation, he often thought, of his new beginning here. Of this new chapter in the history of the earldom and his dysfunctional family. One that might erase what had gone before—all those dark years he’d survived somehow while watching the rest of his family succumb to their demons, one after the other. One that had more to do with protecting and caring for the estates and all those who worked them, and less to do with bleeding those same estates for every penny, as Oliver had done with so much reckless entitlement. If it had not been for Rafe’s stern discipline and careful stewardship of the relatively small inheritance he’d received from his father, and the personal holdings from his grandmother that she’d signed over to him before her death, Pembroke Manor might well have had to have been sold off. Chopped up into pieces, no doubt, and ruthlessly developed, like everything else in the whole of the United Kingdom these days.
He had not let that happen. He would not let that happen.
He would rebuild this house as a monument to the childhood he’d lost when his father died. To the boy he’d been so briefly back then. To what he might have been had he not become … this.
“Why do you love this place so much?” she asked, very much as if she could read his thoughts.
He should not have been surprised by another incisive question from her. He should have been used to it by now, surely. But he still found himself taken back, and frowned at the scaffolded ruin before him as if it would help him construct an answer.
“Do you mean that you do not?” he asked quietly. It wasn’t a fair question, loaded as it was with all of his own personal history, and that of his family, stretching back through the generations. But he didn’t rescind it.
“I can appreciate it, of course,” she said. Carefully, he thought. He could not see her marvelous, expressive eyes behind those dark glasses, and he did not care for it—for being shut out. It occurred to him to worry at how completely he wanted her—how comprehensively—but he shoved it aside. “I can see that it is very beautiful, and very old, and I have the normal level of admiration for stately houses and historic estates.” She shrugged, and tilted her head slightly as she regarded him. “But that is not what you feel, is it? For you, it goes much deeper.”
“This is my home,” he said simply. He crossed his arms over his chest because he wanted to put his hands on her, and that would not be wise, not out here in public. Not when he wanted it—her—far more than he should. “It was my father’s pride and joy, and his father’s before him, and so on, since the first small hall was built here sometime in the early fifteenth century. Though they say my branch of McFarlands have been living in this part of Scotland since the start of Scottish history, as far as anyone can tell. I want to honor all of that.”
It was his form of penance, too, for having played his part in the destruction of this place. For having contributed somehow to all that had gone on here. He could not help but think that if he’d been better, if he’d irritated his mother and brother less, perhaps none of this damage would have happened. He would never know. But he could rebuild.
“You never say you were happy here,” she pointed out, something almost wistful in her voice then, reaching parts of him he’d thought he’d excised long ago, the parts that still remembered, with such clarity, those long, quiet walks in the woods with his father. The childhood he wanted so desperately to honor somehow. “You never mention any happy memories at all. Only duty and your heritage and other such things. Have you ever noticed that?”
“I will be happy when the manor is restored,” he said after a moment, something large and unwieldy moving through him, despite his best efforts to clamp it back down.
“Will you?” she asked, and he could have sworn her voice was sad.
Temper cracked through him then. Or so he told himself. Temper was far easier to understand than this other thing that seemed to tie him up in knots, that forced him to feel any number of things he’d prefer to ignore completely. That he’d spent years ignoring, in fact.
“Do not waste your time making up sad stories about me to make me more palatable,” he told her, far harsher, perhaps, than was necessary. “I keep telling you that this is no fairy tale, Angel. No kiss will turn me into Prince Charming.”
“Clearly,” she replied pointedly, without seeming the least perturbed by his tone, which only served to irritate him further. As did her light little laugh. “Maybe we should talk about your obsession with fairy tales then. You bring them up a lot. Do you read them nightly? Should I be careful when eating shiny red apples in this house?”
Rafe was well aware that he was picking a fight with her—that he wanted an explosion—and he even knew why. If tempers flared, so, too, would this rep
ressed, contained passion that was making his life a misery. He wanted it to explode. He wanted it to incinerate them both. He wanted to force her to put her damned hands on him and rescue them both from this interminable waiting.
It was not the first time in his life he’d wished he was slightly less self-aware.
“Thank you for coming out here to offer your support, Angel,” he gritted out, not sure who he was angrier with in that moment—her or him. Her, he decided, for being so constitutionally incapable of being properly scared off, properly cowed, properly any of the things she ought to be. Like being appalled at his monstrous appearance on that damned dance floor, so that none of this would have happened, and he could have simply rebuilt his house and marinated in his solitude, as planned. Without worrying that she would see the real ugliness within him. Without descending into sarcasm. “I’m sure it will speed along the restoration of the manor considerably.”
She slid her sunglasses from her eyes, securing them on the top of her head and fixing him with her frank blue gaze. It was as if Pembroke Manor disappeared, with all of the workmen and the power tools, the stone walls the fire had failed to topple, the glittering loch and the silent sentries of the mountains in the distance. It was as if there was nothing at all in the whole of the world but Angel, and he was rapidly losing his ability to keep his cool where this woman, his wife, was concerned.
“Do not speak,” he told her, his voice too dark, his patience too thin. “Unless you plan to invite me into your bed, right now. It is the only thing I want to hear from you at the moment.”
Something he might have called fear in someone else moved through her bright eyes then, clouding them. Making her look soft for a moment. Vulnerable. Not the Angel he knew at all.
“I can’t,” she said, and laughed slightly, as if the admission surprised her. “I don’t know why, but I can’t.”
His gaze bored into hers, daring her. Challenging her. He wished the power of his gaze alone could seduce her, somehow. Could make her want him enough to finally prove what she’d said to him that morning in the woods. Could make him believe that she truly saw all of him, and could accept it. Even if he knew better.
“What are you so afraid of?” he asked softly. Deliberately. “You already know I will make you come. Screaming my name, in fact.”
Her breath came out in an audible rush that was, in part, a kind of dazed laugh. He did not try to hide the force of his desire, the sweet torture of it, and he had the satisfaction of watching her eyes widen as she shivered slightly, then the exquisite pain of watching her pull her lush lower lip between her teeth and bite at it. He felt it as if she’d bitten him instead. But once again that look moved over her face, and she shook it away.
“I have to go,” she whispered, stepping back and breaking that odd enchantment that hovered between them and shut out the world. Rafe was aware, again, of the din around them, the crowd only a small distance away in the ruined wing of the house. He felt it as a loss.
She turned away. But her shoes were absurd and much too high for even the manicured sweep of lawn outside the manor, and she took only a step or two before she stumbled. Rafe didn’t think, he simply reached over and righted her with a hand on her arm. And then, because he could, he acquiesced to an urge he hardly understood and swept her up and into his arms.
She clutched at his shoulders, her blue eyes wide, though she made no sound of protest. Holding her high against his chest, Rafe began to walk toward the house. She was light in his arms, a sweet weight against his chest, and he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything. He could not seem to tear his gaze from hers as he shouldered his way through the great front door and into the grand entry hall. He was breathing too hard, as if he’d run up the side of one of the mountains, and he could only imagine the look that must have been stamped on his face. Arousal. Desire. As if he was some kind of wild animal, he thought in self-disgust, so desperate was he for her. And still she only stared back at him as if she was frozen in place, in his arms and in his gaze, as he carried her over his threshold.
The symbolism was not lost on him.
But this was a different sort of marriage, and she was a very different sort of wife, and he had no choice but to let her down from his arms. He did it slowly. So slowly. And if she slid a bit and rubbed against him on her way down, well, he could only do so much.
Her feet touched the ground and she took a shaky sort of step back, her eyes too wide, as if, finally, she was as frightened of him as she should have been from the start. Why should that surprise him so much?
“I will see you tonight,” he said then, which was not at all what he wanted to say. Nor was he sure he could survive another meal with all of this tension and flame drawn so tight between them. He might just snap, spread her out on the antique table and take her as he longed to do.
He didn’t know himself in that moment. His iron control seemed to have deserted him entirely. He could feel his hands clench as if they might simply reach for her, and his promises be damned—
But he could not be that man. He could not break his word. Not this time. He didn’t know why it felt so important to him, but it was. He knew that it was.
“Maybe,” he could not help but grit out, with passion and pain and something much deeper he refused to identify, “you will take the time to think more carefully about what it is you want, Angel. Because you continue to play with fire and it will burn us both.”
He forced himself to turn, to leave her standing there, to make for the door. And when he heard her say his name he ignored it, because he wanted it too badly. He knew it couldn’t be real.
“Rafe,” she said again, her voice husky. And definitely not in his head. “Please.”
He stopped walking, though he could not bring himself to turn around and face her again. He wasn’t sure he could keep walking away from her. He wasn’t sure he would, no matter his best intentions. No matter that it would be better for both of them if he did.
“I’m tired of these games,” he said quietly, even bitterly. “I promised you I would wait, and I will. But—”
“I don’t want to play games.” Her voice was still shaky, but there was a certain note in it that seemed to hum in him, like some kind of tuning fork. He turned to look at her. Her pretty face was clear, her eyes a hot flash of blue, and all he could see was hunger. A hunger deep and wild, to match his own.
He hardly dared let himself believe it.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice too quiet. As if he might startle her, and lose her, should he speak too loudly. “If not these endless games?”
Her eyes were so blue. Her face was so pretty, and flushed now with the force of this thing between them, this great wilderness of desire. She blinked, and he thought he’d lost her, but she only raised her chin slightly, as if fighting off attackers he couldn’t see, and met his gaze with that directness that he’d admired in her from the start.
“You,” she said, and he could see the enormity of this move over her, through her, as if she felt it too, these impossible currents that flowed around them. That threatened to suck them both under, and Rafe couldn’t even bring himself to care.
She stepped toward him, closing the distance between them. Rafe was not sure he breathed, and then he knew he did not when she reached over and put her hands on his chest, tilting her head back to gaze up at him, heating up the great hall until there was nothing at all but this shared hunger. This sweet fire.
Her. Angel.
“I want you,” she said, her voice a mere scratch of sound. “I do.”
And then she pushed herself up on her toes, closed the distance between them and kissed him.
CHAPTER NINE
FOR a moment he was still, too still, and Angel only pressed her mouth against the grim, sober line of his, as close as she’d ever come to begging. But it didn’t feel like begging—it felt like some kind of homecoming.
And then everything seemed
to burst into color and heat.
Rafe slid his hands into her hair, cradling her head between them even as he angled her mouth against his for a deeper, hotter fit. And just like that, he took control. He demanded. He possessed. He took. He tasted male and enticing and Rafe, and she could not seem to get enough. He kissed her as if they would both die if he stopped, and there was some part of her, Angel knew, that believed they would.
She didn’t care where they were. Some small voice in her head whispered that they were standing in the entry hall, that anyone could walk in and see them—but she shoved it aside. Sensation bloomed into new sensation, and she soaked each one in. The devastating perfection of his mouth on hers. The strength and command in the hands that held her there, while his mouth plundered hers. That lean, hard body of his that was all around her now, right in front of her. Hers to touch. To taste. At last.
She couldn’t seem to get close enough to him. Her clothes felt like impediments. Her breasts ached until she pressed them into the hard wall of his chest, and then they ached again, more, but in a way that made her whole body seem to hum. And melt. And glow.
“More,” she demanded, wrenching her mouth from his.
He made a low noise in the back of his throat, some kind of growl, and then he simply picked her up again, as if she weighed nothing at all. As if there was nothing more natural in the world. His hands were warm on her bottom, holding her steady as she wrapped her legs around his waist, her absurd wedge heels falling from her feet with a dull sort of clatter against the floor. He is so strong, she thought, with a kind of sensual shudder as she imagined what he would look like naked, that powerful body stretched out above her. In her. Claiming her. Changing her. She couldn’t help the small sigh of pleasure, of anticipation, that escaped her lips.
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