The Man Behind the Scars

by Caitlin Crews

  He did not want her by his side at all times because he was swept away in emotion, which might have been forgivable, no matter how confining. No, he demanded it for the oldest reason in the world—because he wanted to make sure that any heirs that might turn up were his, and he had no particular reason to take her word on that subject or any other subject, because they were total strangers to each other. And she had no right to complain about that, or even about the fact he was whisking them off to Scotland in the first place, because this was the deal. This was what she’d signed up for—literally. She got access to his money. He got to make the decisions.

  She hadn’t imagined how difficult it was going to be to swallow those decisions when he handed them down. You fool, she chastised herself with no small amount of bitterness. You pathetic fool—what did you expect?

  “And what if I can’t do it?” she asked, not surprised to hear that her voice sounded like a stranger’s. So far away. So thin. Desperate, she thought. She didn’t look at him, but then she didn’t have to. He still occupied twice the space that he should have done, all that power seeming now to pollute the air around them.

  “You can leave any time you like,” Rafe replied evenly. Angel noted that he did not sound unduly concerned about that possibility, though she thought she heard a faint undertone of challenge, even so. “But I feel compelled to remind you that should you choose to do so, you leave only with what you brought into the marriage. Your debt will remain intact, but instead of owing a credit card company fifty thousand pounds and any accrued interest, you will owe it to me.”

  He made that sound distinctly unappealing.

  “I think I’d prefer to take my chances with the institutionalized usury actually, when you put it that way,” Angel managed to say, with some remnant of her usual tone.

  “As you wish,” he replied, as he had once before, his tone very nearly mild. She hated him for it. “You need only speak up and we can end this arrangement right now.”

  She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to! But that would be cutting off her nose to spite her face, so Angel said nothing. Rafe, meanwhile, shrugged with utter unconcern, as only a wealthy man who would never have to make such decisions could, and then he pulled out his mobile again and began to scroll through his messages. Dismissing her that easily.

  Leaving Angel to fight a sudden war with herself, to keep those tears from spilling over her cheeks. To keep from flinging herself out of the car to appease the syrupy panic that kept growing ever tighter inside of her. To keep herself right there in her seat, beginning—too late, of course, she was always too late—to understand exactly what it was she’d done.

  It was long after midnight, and Rafe stood out on the small rise some distance above the manor house that nestled between the thick woods on one side and the loch on the other, separating the Pembroke estate from the mountains that dominated the land by day. He could only sense them now in the stillness of the night, great masses hovering high above the land, as only the faintest wind moved through the sky above him and shivered its way through the trees.

  He loved this land. He loved it with a desperation and a certainty that knew no equal, that allowed for no comparison. He felt that love like a fact, an organic truth as relevant to his existence as the air he pulled into his lungs, the hard-packed earth beneath his feet. He remembered well his early childhood in these woods, Pembroke land as far as the eye could see, backing up to national parkland along the northern border. He’d spent long hours with his beloved father as they walked this land together in those happy years before his father’s death, silently exulting in each pristine step they took into fresh snow in winter, or pausing to note the full burst of bright yellow gorse in spring.

  Those days had been the happiest of his life. They’d been before. Before he learned the truth about the rest of his family, and how little they had cared for him. Before he’d lost everything that had mattered to him in the army. Before he’d accepted the dark truth about himself.

  His gaze moved from the inky black woods around him and the night sky crowded with stars above to the manor house below him. For a moment he looked at the still-lit window of the countess’s chamber, once occupied by his own mother, as it had been by every Countess of Pembroke before her, and the wives of the lesser lords the family had boasted before they’d been elevated to the title. He wondered what she was doing, his reluctant wife, in that room he’d avoided for years now, ever since his mother had died. He wondered if Angel would ever forgive him for dragging her, so urbane and sophisticated, to a place she must consider the worst backwater imaginable. A thousand miles from nowhere.

  He wondered why he cared. He had not married her to please her. Quite the opposite, in fact—he’d married her to please himself. He was not at all comfortable with the notion that one might be dependant upon the other.

  He shoved the uncomfortable thoughts aside and focused instead on the east wing of the manor. Or what was left of it.

  “How amusing of you to fail to mention that when you spoke of your manor house,” Angel had said in that dry way of hers upon their arrival, stepping from the car to frown up at the house before her, appearing impervious to the Scottish chill with the force of her impertinence, “what you really meant was part of a manor house. You may wish to disclose that little tidbit to one of your future wives before you present them with the great ruin they are meant to call home.” Her smile had been touched with the faintest hint of acid. “Just a thought.”

  “I’m glad to see you’ve regained your spirit,” he’d replied in much the same tone. “And that sharp tongue along with it.”

  “I certainly hope the roof holds,” Angel had continued in that razor-sharp tone, magnificent in the cold light, her blue eyes piercing and the prettiest he’d ever seen. “I neglected to pack my carpentry kit.”

  It was not a ruin to him, he thought now as his mouth curved slightly at the memory of her words, and would not be until the last stone crumbled into dust. Nonetheless, he could not argue the point. Scaffolding had just been raised, but it couldn’t mask the fact that an entire wing of the manor house was a burned-out husk of what it had once been. All of those centuries, gone in an evening. Priceless art and objects, to say nothing of some of Rafe’s best memories—of lying in his father’s study on the thick rug near the fireplace, reading as his father worked at the wide desk that had dominated the far wall. All of it so much ash, scattered into the woods, the wind.

  He would build it again, he vowed, not for the first time. He would make it right—he would make it what it should have been.

  He supposed there was something wrong with him, that he could not mourn what surely ought to be considered the greater loss in that fire—his brother, Oliver. Perhaps he was more the monster than he’d imagined, but he looked at the blackened remains of the manor and felt … nothing. His brother had been drunk, as ever, and careless, as usual. The investigators assured Rafe that he had felt no pain, that he had been entirely insensate as the wing burned down around him, taking him with it and making Rafe lord of what remained. Rafe supposed that was some small mercy, but he could not seem to grieve over his brother’s wasted life as he thought he should.

  Perhaps, he reflected as he looked at what was simply the most glaring example of his brother’s carelessness, it was because he’d been mourning the waste of Oliver’s life for as long as he could remember. He’d watched it all—the gradual decline, the increasingly erratic behavior. It had been like a particularly unpleasant echo of their mother’s own alcoholic spiral, which had ended in a similarly unnecessary fashion in an alcohol-induced stroke which had been, by that point, a kind of mercy. It was difficult to mourn at the end of that road when he’d fought so hard to prevent it ever having been taken at all, to no avail. When he had only ever been ignored—or jeered at—for his pains.

  He thrust the unpleasant family memories aside, and pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his heavy coat. He started walking a
gain, this time back toward the manor house and his own bed. His footsteps were loud in the quiet of the night all around him. His breath made clouds before his face, then disappeared.

  Again, his gaze moved to that window, still lit against the dark.

  Today, Angel had married him and then looked at him like he was the monster he knew himself to be as he dashed her hopes of a London life in that car. He found that, somehow, the former eased the blow of the latter, and imagined that very thought made him that much more of a bastard.

  “I will go insane in the country,” she had said to him when they were aboard his private plane, winging their way toward the north. She had been sitting there so primly, her entire body rigid, as if she was holding back a tidal wave of reaction by sheer force of will. He had been impressed despite himself.

  “You said you’ve spent your whole life in the city,” he’d replied, not sparing more than a glance from his newspaper. “The charms of the country may surprise you.”

  “I don’t mean that in a conversational, descriptive sort of way,” she continued in that same very deliberate tone. “I don’t mean I will feel restless or bored, or cranky. I mean that all of that emptiness—broken up only by the occasional flock of sheep—will drive me over the edge. I mean I will literally descend into madness.”

  He’d supposed he would have no one to blame but himself if that were true. But then, he had ample practice in that regard, didn’t he?

  “The manor house has extensive attics,” he’d said instead, looking at her over the edge of his paper. “Ample room for all manner of psychotic breaks and raving madwomen, I should think. No need to worry.”

  She’d been quiet for a very long time. When she’d spoken again, her voice was smooth. He’d wondered what that had cost her.

  “How delightful,” she’d said, her voice arid. “You’ve truly thought of everything.”

  Heaven help him, he thought now, staring up at her window like some moon-faced adolescent in one of those unbearable melodramas, but he wanted her.

  He supposed he would pay for that too.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HE FOUND her in the library, of all places, his brand-new wife who had perhaps taken his talk of madwomen and attics far too much to heart. She’d become like a ghost in his house in the two weeks they’d been here—and Pembroke Manor already had more than its fair share. So did he.

  She did not hear him enter. The library was a vast cavern, made bearable in the depths of the long northern winters only by its dual fireplaces, one at each end, and the bookshelves that lined the walls and seemed to wrest warmth from the cold stone. Rafe had spent innumerable hours here in his youth, lost in stories of lands far, far away from this place—and far away from what remained of his family after his father’s death when he’d been only ten.

  Angel sat near the far fire in the old leather armchair that had always been Rafe’s favorite, her legs curled up beneath her, all her attention focused on the book she held open in her hands. Rafe took in the haphazard pile of books at her feet, and another two balanced precariously on the arm of the chair, with a feeling he could not quite place washing over him. It looked as if she’d been here for the whole of the two weeks they’d been in Scotland—two weeks in which he’d seen remarkably little of her.

  But it was the expression on her face that made him stand so still for a moment, as if he had never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn’t. She looked so … rapt. Engrossed. Unguarded. Filled with something he might have called wonder, if he still believed in such things. It made something deep within him stir to life, as if in recognition.

  It was as if, he thought, she was an entirely different person than the one she’d so far showed him.

  But then she looked up, and in that moment, that quickly, the Angel he knew slid into place across her face. That quick smile, those clever eyes, sizing him up in the space of a single breath. Weighing, measuring. She closed the book she was reading on a finger, and let that hand hang over the side of the chair, the book dangling. She met his gaze, her blue eyes clear. Open. He found he didn’t believe it any longer.

  “Is this where you’ve been hiding then?” he asked, his voice not nearly as calm as he would have preferred it. He expected her smile, but even so, the power of it moved through him like the wind. “For two weeks?”

  “Has it been that long?” Her tone was dry. “As promised, the pleasures of the country are vast indeed. I didn’t even notice.”

  “You have been nowhere to be found,” he pointed out, fascinated to hear something more than polite inquiry in his own voice. How novel. “Are you hiding, Angel?”

  “Of course not.” Her eyebrows arched, her blue eyes that unreadable, darker hue as they met his. “Do I have something to hide from?”

  Rafe moved further into the room, enjoying the way her gaze tracked his movements as if she couldn’t help herself, and taking far too much satisfaction in the convulsive little swallow that moved in the column of her throat. He stopped when he reached her chair, then bent down to pick up the book that lay nearest him on the wide leather arm. He glanced at the title—a selection of poems from the Elizabethan age—and set it back down, oddly disconcerted.

  “I did not realize you were such a great reader,” he said.

  It surprised him to find her here. It had been the last place he’d looked when, today, he’d finally decided to go searching through the rambling old house for some sign of her. He couldn’t say why he still felt as if it didn’t make sense that she should be here. Or why she looked entirely too bland and innocent, as if he’d caught her at something she shouldn’t have been doing.

  “I am attempting to figure out who you are through your library,” she said in her breezy way. She set down the book she’d been reading and waved lazily at the nearest wall, where shelves ran floor to ceiling and were packed with all kinds of books, of different shapes and sizes, a controlled chaos of words in, Rafe knew, at least six languages. He had vowed he would read them all, one day. By his reckoning he was very nearly halfway through.

  “By my books you will know me?” he asked quietly, his gaze moving over the familiar shelves, seeing the spines of books he had pored over, and others he was still waiting to discover.

  She smiled as she always did, but her eyes were wary when he looked at her again. “Something like that. Can you be found here, do you think? Are your secrets hidden between the pages somewhere?”

  Rafe thrust his hands into his pockets as that wild desire for her spiked inside of him, hard and hot. It was that or put them on her—sink his fingers into that wild, recalcitrant hair all choppy about her face, run his hands over the curves that were perfectly visible no matter that she sat curled around herself—and he was sure that if he started down that road, he would not stop. Perhaps not ever.

  “This library was a particular passion of my grandfather’s,” he said instead, frowning at the wall of books before him, where ragged paperback volumes stood next to extraordinary editions of books long out of print, with early editions of well-known classics on the other side. “He believed that reading was the point, not the collection itself, which was considered a fairly revolutionary viewpoint at the time.” He eyed her then. “If you locate any secrets in these books, I imagine they will be my grandfather’s.”

  “I just like to read,” she said in an odd sort of voice, as if, he realized slowly, she was offering her confession. “Anything and everything. I always have.”

  Angel unfolded herself from the chair, coming to her feet and then onto her toes, stretching in a way that made Rafe tense—and then harden even further as desire swamped him. As if she had been designed to test him she threw her arms over her head, her breasts jutting out, her back making a mouthwatering arc. She was dressed much like he was, in denim jeans and a jumper to keep off the chill of spring in this drafty old house, but the jumper she’d chosen seemed to lick over her curves, begging him to touch, to taste—

 
She was torturing him. And she wasn’t even trying.

  He knew better than to want. Especially like this. Especially this woman, who was not here for this, for him. Why couldn’t he remember that? Why had he spent these past two weeks fighting the urge to possess her as if she would ever really be his in that way? As if he would ever allow it?

  This was the wife he had bought, he reminded himself with a certain ruthless impatience. Even if—when—he did take her to his bed, how would he know which of her responses were real and which he’d purchased? He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. And instead of that sickening him as it should, Rafe found that the longer this woman was in his life—under his roof—the less he cared why or how she came to his bed. He only cared about when.

  He was such a fool.

  “What if this had all burned down with the rest?” she was asking, unaware of his thoughts, pivoting where she stood to take in the rest of the great room, his grandfather’s grand folly. The massive globe sat in the center of the library, requiring two hands to move it if one wished to peer at the map of a world that was no more, lost to time and the ravages of history, nations fallen and lands reclaimed, reconquered. A relic. A throwback. Not unlike its current owner. “I can’t imagine losing so many books. I have only a few, really, but I treasure them.”

  “Luckily, this room never held much appeal for my brother,” Rafe said dryly. It was an understatement—and it was why this had always been his refuge. Maybe that was why he felt unsettled by her presence here. It was, in many ways, his sanctuary. He felt her gaze on him, but when he turned to her, she was studying the books again. “He was the one who burned down the east wing,” he continued gruffly. “Had he done so deliberately, he might very well have used the books as kindling, but it was an accident.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said after a moment. Too long a moment. Rafe sighed.

  “Don’t be.” He couldn’t imagine why he was discussing this. But he kept going, for reasons he could not fathom. “Oliver was remarkably unpleasant, even when he was a boy. It was not enough that he was the heir, he wanted to be the only child as well. He went to particular lengths to right what he saw as the great wrong of my birth.” He let out a sound that even he knew was far too dark to be a laugh. “And that was when my father was still alive, and in control. And long before Oliver started drinking and became truly nasty.”