The Man Behind the Scars

by Caitlin Crews

  “Congratulations,” she said in a thick voice. “I think you have finally managed to make me detest you.”

  “That matters about as much as love,” he threw back at her. He laughed shortly when she shook her head. “If you don’t like it, Angel, you know where the front door is. You’ve walked out before. I told you—you’re always free to go. I won’t do anything to stop you.”

  She stood so straight, so proud, with only her head slightly bent, as if that was all the grief she would allow herself to show. She pulled in a breath, as if to steady herself. He couldn’t tell if he wanted to comfort her or if that was simply his own guilt, growing deeper by the second. He would allow neither one to influence him. She had to understand. She had to see. What kind of man he was, had always been. What kind of monster.

  The moment dragged on, and still she did nothing more than stand there, as if he’d finally rendered her speechless. He told himself that was some kind of victory. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to reach out to her. He wanted to comfort her again, soothe her and hold her, and keep her from saying those terrible, destructive words. He wanted to go back to where they’d been before she’d said them. But look what his wants had done so far. He knew better than to trust the things he wanted. He knew better than to trust himself.

  He turned away from her abruptly, making his way toward the door at the far end of the long room.

  “I finally understand what you’ve been trying to tell me all along,” she said from behind him. He didn’t turn. He understood that if he did, he would not be able to turn away again. He was that weak.

  “Good,” he growled out. “It’s about time.”

  He heard the rustle of her gown, and briefly squeezed his eyes shut as if that could fortify him as she walked to him and then drew up beside him. Her eyes were large, dark and haunted, and he regretted the things he’d said to her almost as much as he regretted succumbing to the urge to marry her in the first place. What had he expected? That he would cart her away to his little castle and make some kind of fairy tale out of this mercenary piece of business between them? Had he really been so stupid?

  But she was Angel. She was so lovely. And she was so much more than that too. She teased him, as if there was nothing scary about him, nothing broken. And she looked at him as if he was simply a man. He didn’t know how he could possibly have resisted her.

  He only knew he should have.

  “I understand that it is not the scars on your skin that cripple you,” she said, facing him, looking more composed than he thought he would ever feel again. “It is this ugliness you carry around inside of you.” She reached over and put her hand on his chest, her palm against the place where his heart should have been, and he jerked back, but she did not drop her arm. “You might as well have died with the rest of them, Rafe, because all you are now is one of your ghosts. Haunting this place, haunting yourself.” She shook her head, a helpless look crossing her face. “You are poisoning yourself from the inside out.”

  He thought he said her name, but he made no sound.

  And then she walked away from him, without a backward glance from those bruised blue eyes, and he lied and told himself it was exactly what he’d wanted.

  She didn’t think. She didn’t have to. There was no staying here. There was no more hoping. If there was one thing she’d learned over the course of her life it was that when a man told you who he was, what he wanted and what he could give, it was the wise woman who believed him and governed herself accordingly.

  And she was finished, finally, with being so foolish.

  She grabbed a small bag from her closet and threw in the most basic things. A change of clothes. A few key toiletries. Her laptop and mobile.

  She didn’t sneak down the stairs or creep into the night. She walked into the kitchens, located Rafe’s driver and asked to be taken into town. She didn’t look back as the car took her down the long drive. She didn’t do anything but stare straight ahead, telling herself she was fine. Over and over again. Perfectly fine.

  Or anyway, she thought, fighting off that deep, dark well of despair that threatened to pull her under, she would be fine, wouldn’t she? She had no other choice.

  She would survive, she told herself as the car dropped her as directed in the sleepy little village that was the nearest thing to civilization in this remote bit of wilderness. She would survive.

  She always did.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HE FOUND himself in her room, long after he heard the car make its way down the drive toward somewhere, anywhere else.

  It was funny that he thought of it as her room now, when it had always been the countess’s room in his head before. As if he had been trying to distance her from the title. From him. Rafe did not doubt it.

  He did not like that she’d left so many of her things behind. Most of them, in fact. That dark current of temper in him crackled to life, and he wondered, hotly, if she’d left the dress thrown across the bed and most of her clothes in the adjoining dressing room simply to taunt him with her absence. He wrenched the red wine-colored dress into his hand from the coverlet and then found himself lifting it to his nose, to catch the faint scent of her on the fabric. The temper subsided as quickly as it had come.

  He knew it would all fade, in time. The scent. The memory. Angel.

  He walked over to the large windows that looked out over the grounds of the estate, and from which he could see the new walls rising from the ruins of the burned-out east wing. Though it was dark outside, with no moon to light the way, he imagined he could still see the details of the ceiling joists that the workmen had just begun to lay over the top of the walls. It was coming together, just as he’d planned. Soon, Pembroke Manor would be whole again.

  Rafe was increasingly less certain about himself.

  He turned back around, unable to check a sigh, and looked across the elegant chamber to the large painting that dominated the far wall, staged to hang over one of the antique wardrobes that these days held linens. It was a formal portrait of a woman with long dark hair and deep, mysterious eyes, looking out from the canvas with a serious look on her elegant, oval face. She was, he supposed, an attractive woman. Perhaps even pretty. If he forced himself, he could look at the painting and see only the girl she must have been when it was commissioned—barely more than twenty, he thought. No hint of the future awaiting her in that calm gaze. No hint of the monster inside of her either.

  “These walls are cluttered with your relatives,” Angel had said at one point in that flippant way of hers that had made his mouth curve against the crown of her head. She had lain sprawled across his chest, her choppy hair standing in spikes he could not stop toying with, both of them a little bit dazed and replete in the aftermath of their passion. “It’s like living in the center of a constant family reunion. How do you stand it?”

  He’d been more interested in the enticing view of her exquisite bottom, naked and lush, than in the same old art on the walls. Especially in this particular room. He’d tested her curves with his hand, making her stretch luxuriously against him.

  “I don’t think I’ve paid attention to the paintings in this house in years,” he’d said. “They are simply part of the Pembroke Manor legacy. They fade into the woodwork after a while.”

  But even as he’d said it, his gaze had moved across the countess’s chamber to find the one painting that he’d never managed to either ignore or remove, much as he’d tried. Much as he’d told himself he wanted to.

  “Who is she?” Angel had asked.

  He’d wondered what Angel saw as she’d looked at the painting. Not what he saw, he’d been sure of that. Angel had no way of knowing the truth. There was no sign of who she really was in those painted features. He’d been surprised to find that there was some part of him that had wanted to lie about it—wanted to refuse to claim the relationship, as if that could erase the painful truth of it too. But for some reason, he hadn’t lied.


  “My mother,” he’d said finally, when the moment had gone on too long. Angel had turned those clever blue eyes on him then, looking at him as if she could read him like one of the books she loved. As if, he’d thought in something closer to panic than he’d been comfortable with, she’d been able to see everything he’d shoved away inside, so far down he’d spent years pretending there was nothing there at all.

  “You must have loved her very much,” Angel had said quietly.

  And he’d pulled her head down to his and kissed her, lazily and deliberately, stoking the fire between them, because the last thing he’d wanted to do was discuss his mother. Not with Angel, who, he’d suspected, would understand all too well the things he’d not wanted to say. Who would, he’d known, see all too clearly the great wealth of bitterness he carried inside, all these years later.

  Now, alone, he stood before the same portrait and stared at it as if he was looking for clues. As if they would be buried there, in brushstrokes and oils. He saw the family resemblance. He shared her dark eyes, her high brows, the color of her hair. Oliver had had that same oval face and that same notoriously English peaches-and-cream complexion, while Rafe’s distinctive bone structure and his darker coloring were all from his father. Rafe had his father’s height and leanly muscled build, while Oliver had been shorter and stockier, just like her.

  But more importantly than all of that, Oliver had shared her alcoholism.

  Nine years older than Rafe, Oliver had encouraged it, participated in it and perpetuated it. Or maybe she had been the one to encourage Oliver to join her on that long, terrible path. What did it matter, when it all ended in the same ignoble way?

  “I wanted to love her,” he said out loud, to the quiet room, to the memory of Angel and her wicked half smile as she’d moved to sit astride him, helping him forget. His voice sounded raw. Harsh. “But I couldn’t.”

  He felt a sort of wave crash over him then, catapulting him straight into some kind of emotional undertow. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t fight. He saw all those terrible images from his childhood cascade through his mind, one after the next—all the jeering, the taunts, the vicious insults. The long nights he’d spent huddled alone in his grandfather’s library, listening to that razor-edged merriment elsewhere in the house, hoping that this time, this night, he would escape it unscathed. He saw himself, all of fourteen, begging his brother not to drink with his mother, and Oliver’s sneering derision in return. He saw Oliver and his mother huddled together in his father’s old study, long after the earl’s death, swaying slightly as they drank their poison and plotted. Always plotting. They’d fed off each other. They’d made each other that much sicker, that much nastier. And without the earl around to take them in hand, they’d simply spiraled into that great darkness together.

  By the time he’d left at sixteen, Rafe had been desperate to escape. He’d hated them both equally and wholeheartedly. But never as much, and as totally, as they’d hated him.

  As a grown man, he could look back and tell himself that it was Oliver’s influence that had so eroded any hint of maternal affection—but he knew that wasn’t entirely true. His mother was a woman who had fallen so head over heels in love with her firstborn child that there had been nothing left over, nothing left to share, nothing to give a second child. She should have stopped at one. But she hadn’t.

  She’d enjoyed his scars, he remembered now, the memories of his terrible initial recovery period after the explosion washing over him. He had been mourning so much—his friends, his face, the life he’d planned far away from his family—and she and Oliver had taken such pleasure in calling him those terrible names. Quasimodo. Frankenstein’s monster. How they’d laughed! How they’d enjoyed their own sharp wit! He had been twenty-five and barely able to imagine life at all without the army, without his friends, much less with a ravaged, destroyed face.

  They’d told him he was a monster. And he’d believed them.

  He still believed them.

  Rafe found himself moving before he knew what he meant to do. He reached up and jerked the painting in its heavy frame from the wall. Enough. He didn’t have to look at her, and the parts of Oliver that came from her either. He didn’t have to keep her hanging here, like a hair shirt, reminding him that the person who should have loved him most in the world had not managed to love him at all. Enough.

  He moved to the fireplace on the opposite wall and he didn’t let himself think. He cracked the painting over his knee, exulting in the loud sound it made as it broke in two. He should have done this years ago, he thought. And then he fed her to the fire. And watched her burn.

  It was as if some kind of spell was broken. Something hot and unbearably heavy moved through him, then, abruptly, was gone. His chest heaved as if he’d been running up the sides of the mountains outside. He thought of Angel’s warm, sweet mouth as she’d explored each one of the scars on his face and across his torso, tracing them from start to finish, licking and kissing her way across them, until he suspected she knew them better than he did. Until he’d half believed that she had healed them with her touch alone, believed her capable of that. He thought of her first, arch comment on his disfigurement in that long-ago ballroom, her blue eyes sparkling with life, with merriment.

  Not exactly the Phantom of the Opera, are you? she’d asked.

  The manor house was so empty. He was so empty. Was that the McFarland family legacy? Would he molder away in this place? Both his mother and Oliver had died here, bitter and alone and incapacitatingly drunk. Was that his future too? Would he painstakingly reconstruct the manor house so it could stand as the perfect mausoleum to hold him as he slowly turned to dust?

  He was already made of stone, he thought bitterly, staring at the painting as it blackened and curled. Who was to say he would even notice his own, slow decline?

  You might as well have died, she’d told him, her blue eyes dark and haunted with the pain he’d caused her, because all you are now is a ghost.

  And he understood then. It fell through him like light, like her smile, burning him alive from the inside out. Making him realize exactly what kind of life he was living here, and what it meant. What he would become if he continued along this path. If he continued to listen to the drunken jeers of the departed instead of the living, breathing woman who had dared to stand in front of him. And see him. She had truly seen him.

  He could not repair the past; he could only restore the destroyed wing of a grand old house. He could not build his way back to a happy childhood or a loving mother. He could not make this house perfect enough to prove, somehow, to all of his lost family that he was worth the love they’d denied him.

  He finally understood.

  Rafe had been a ghost for most of his life, and Angel was the only person who had ever seen him. All of him.

  And he had thrown her away.

  It took most of the long night in a remarkably uncomfortable and frigidly cold village with a mystifying Gaelic name and then three separate trains to make it to Glasgow.

  So far, Angel thought dully as she bought herself a much-needed coffee in the busy rush of the cavernous Glasgow central station, survival was not going particularly well. She had been cold and uncomfortable and awake for hours. Her return to civilization in the form of the Glasgow rush hour was overwhelming. She’d expected to feel safe, finally, away from all of that oppressive natural glory. She’d expected to feel right at home when she finally reached Glasgow. But instead, she missed the quiet of Pembroke Manor. She missed the desolate beauty of the loch and the far mountains. She missed the clear, fresh air in the cold mornings.

  She missed him.

  She took the first long sip of her coffee and almost burst into tears when the flavor flooded her mouth, stale and insipid in comparison to Rafe’s personal family blend. She choked it down anyway, and was abruptly furious with herself. She’d lived for twenty-eight years without Rafe or his damned perfect coffee, and only a handful of
months with him. She would get on just fine without both. She would.

  Pull yourself together, Angel, she ordered herself sternly. She jabbed impatiently at the eyes that were damper than she felt they ought to be, and started across the vast concourse toward the immense Departures board to look for the next train to London. She hadn’t thought about what she would do when she got there. There was time enough on the train ride south to think it through, she reasoned. She knew only that she had to get out of Scotland. She had to put as much distance between them as possible. Up above her, rain drummed down on the famous glass roof that stretched for acres. She drained her coffee and then set off for the appropriate platform.

  She had the impression of him first, from a distance, standing halfway down the platform—a tall, dark figure dressed all in black in the center of the walkway, standing perfectly still as hordes of commuters streamed around him. Some of them did double takes to look more closely at his face, his scars, and it took her longer than it should have to accept the fact that it was Rafe standing there, grim and quiet, waiting.

  For her.

  Her stomach dropped. And then flipped.

  She should have turned and run. Anyone with any pride would have done, but Angel couldn’t seem to help the masochistic streak that ran through her and kept her walking toward him. She wanted this to mean something, his being here. She wanted things she knew better than to name. She wanted him—still—to her great and abiding shame. But this was Rafe, and she knew better than to hope. Look where that had led her so far!

  “Are you here to pick up your property?” she asked coldly. “Your not-quite brood mare? Because I’ve quit that position. You’ll have to buy another one.”

  She came to a stop in front of him, rocking back on her heels and tilting her head to look him in the eye. She couldn’t read anything in all of that chilly gray. She didn’t know what she thought she wanted to see. She shifted her bag on her shoulder, feeling something suddenly that was surprisingly close to shy. Awkward. A complicated rush of emotion worked through her, making her sway slightly on her feet. She told herself it was only exhaustion.