The Man Behind the Scars

by Caitlin Crews

  From herself.

  He leaned down then and pressed his mouth, open and hot, to that exquisitely tender place just below her ear.

  And Angel went up in flames.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT WAS like lightning—jagged and bright, coursing through her, into her.

  Angel heard herself whimper, and then he was taking her mouth with his, still holding her so her back was to him, his kiss wild. Unmanageable. Impossible to resist.

  She didn’t try. She kissed him back with all of her uncertainty, her fascination. All of the want and need she’d been trying to pretend she didn’t feel. This was not the stamp of possession, brief and encompassing, that had marked the occasion of their marriage. This was not even that far more dangerous kiss they’d shared on the dance floor of the Palazzo Santina. This kiss was changing her, somehow. Making her his.

  Angel understood on some primal level that Rafe had been holding himself in check before. That he still was, even as his mouth moved against hers with a devastating thoroughness; even as he took her mouth again and again until she was frantic with the taste of him and desperate for more.

  His hands moved, tracing their way down her sides, following the artful fall of the shimmering crimson that sheathed her. Then back up again, until his hard palms found her breasts and tested their shape and fullness, making her writhe against him. She felt the heat of him behind her, the hard press of his powerful body, and then, more than that, she felt the unmistakable thrust of his arousal against her bottom.

  It made her feel weak. Wild. Capable of anything and everything to get even closer to him. She tried to turn, but he did not allow it, and she found her nails digging into the doorjamb again as his hands moved lower, pulling up the heavy skirt she wore and investigating beneath.

  “Rafe …” she managed to say when he pulled his mouth from hers, only to lick a path of wildfire down the length of her neck. “Rafe, I …”

  She didn’t know what she meant to say.

  “Hold on,” he said, his voice a dark and heavy magic behind her, as one hand smoothed its way along her leg, then onto her thigh, making her breath come too fast, her knees turn to water.

  “Hold on?” she echoed, not comprehending him, not capable of thought when he was touching her like this, his palm so hot against her skin, his hard fingers faintly rough, as if calloused—and then his clever fingers found the tiny thong she wore, in a matching, wicked red.

  Her fingers clutched at the door.

  “Hold on …” she breathed.

  She thought he laughed, which should have been impossible, and then he was moving beneath the tiny scrap of fabric and holding the heat of her in his hard palm. He traced a lazy pattern there, and Angel moaned, moving with him, her head falling back against him, her eyes drifting closed. Her hips moved of their own accord, chasing those teasing, tormenting fingers, until he shifted slightly and thrust into her slick heat.

  One long finger, then another, and Angel forgot how to breathe.

  He set the pace, and she met it. She rode his hand, chasing that wildfire, more and more desperate with each rolling thrust of his fingers. She was aware of the other arm that wrapped around her waist and held her tight against his body, and that hard, serious mouth that continued to taste her, drinking in the sounds she made, encouraging every sigh and whimper and moan. Sensation built on sensation until she was nothing at all but lost in the feel of him, the wild perfection of it, the agony and glory of this man and the way he played her body like an instrument made only for him, only for this—

  And then she shattered in his hands like glass.

  When she came back to herself he had let her skirt drop back down to the floor, though he continued to stand there, so still and strong behind her. Her legs were so shaky beneath her that she was not at all certain they would hold her. She shifted, dropping her hands and turning, sinking against the door as she finally faced him.

  It was like a punch in the gut, hard and sharp. He was too fierce, too focused. He could see far too much. Once again, she was aware of his scars only after she’d absorbed the impact of his cold gaze, his dangerous expression, and even then, they only seemed to underscore what she knew about him. What she’d just experienced. That he was entirely too powerful here. That he could make her do anything, and she would enjoy it.

  More than enjoy it.

  His dark eyes glittered in the shadows of the room, and she was sure she could hear the echoes of her cries rebounding from the high walls. She felt some emotion she couldn’t name move through her then, shaking her. She was afraid to name it—afraid to face it.

  He reached up a hand to touch her cheek, his face so very fierce, his gaze so hard, so relentless, and she could not handle the intensity. She could not allow herself to feel this way. She could not allow herself to feel. But the emotion seemed to swell in her, tightening and sharpening, and she balked at the feel of his hard palm against her skin, balked at the sheer possessiveness in even so small a gesture.

  It was slight—she hardly moved a muscle—but he froze.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, his voice harsh in the quiet of the room. Bitter condemnation and severe judgment warred on his grim face, while that flash of near silver in his dark eyes that looked too much like pain nearly made her weep. “It is so much less exciting when you must look the monster in the eye, isn’t it? Impossible to pretend it is someone else touching you—someone less hideous to look upon, for a start. My apologies. I lost my head.”

  She thought she said his name, but he didn’t look at her again.

  He moved past her in the doorway, and then disappeared into the darkness of the manor house, leaving Angel to cling to the door as if it might keep her from falling while her heart pounded out a sickening beat in her chest and she wondered what, exactly, she’d just lost.

  Angel could not sleep.

  She’d tried everything to get herself to drift off into slumber, and had failed. She’d counted sodding sheep, but that had only made her more agitated. She’d attempted to quiet her mind—with precious little success. She’d even started to write a long, detailed e-mail to Allegra, her princess bride of a stepsister, but she’d given up several long and twisted paragraphs into all the tortured back story that had led her to this night and everything that had happened.

  Sensible, play-it-safe Allegra was not likely to understand the things that had compelled Angel to marry Rafe, much less the things that Angel could hardly bear to express about what had passed between them without any words at all. So how could Angel possibly explain to her the potent mix of despair and deep, encompassing delight that coursed through her even hours later, marking her like some kind of internal tattoo, making her think she would die if Rafe put his hands on her again?

  Or worse, she thought in some moments, if he did not?

  That, Angel had decided, was far too much to dump in an email to her stepsister, who was probably carried aloft by doves and rainbows nightly with the force of her royal love, or something equally unimaginable and over-the-top, as suited the soon-to-be Princess of Santina. If she’d wanted Allegra’s counsel and input, she should have included her in this madness from the start, before things grew so wholly out of control. But she had not. She had—as ever—completely failed to imagine any circumstance in which she might need someone else, even as a friend to reach out to on a dark night when she suspected she’d acted terribly and foolishly, and so she was now forced to rely on only herself.

  As usual.

  Have found myself stranded in the middle of Scottish countryside, of all places, with only an earl (quite attractively wealthy) and a rambling old house (crumbling all around us as I type, sadly) for entertainment, she’d written, knowing it would make Allegra smile to imagine Angel in such circumstances, so far from her usual London stomping grounds, much less any hope of a quick Tube ride to somewhere more exciting. Would give you the address, but am slightly afraid I’ve been transported to mediev
al times and will at any moment be expected to don a corset or some other form of fancy dress. (A wimple? The mind boggles!) The good news is that I have yet to see a kilt, hear a bagpipe or taste anything too horrible like haggis, but suspect all of the above lurk in my near future. Kilts and bagpipes I might manage to survive but haggis? A fate worse than death! Hope all is well with Prince Charming. Xx It might not have been what Angel had really wanted to write, but it helped for a while after she hit Send and closed her laptop back up. It was the reaching out, perhaps, that made her feel less alone, no matter the form it took. But it didn’t last.

  The dawn was little more than a pale blue yearning outside her windows when Angel gave up, and swung her feet to the cold floor. There was a scooped-out, empty feeling inside of her, and it had only grown worse as the hours passed. She’d tortured herself with images of Rafe. His clever hands, his wicked fingers. His cruel, delicious mouth, so demanding against hers, so patient and knowing.

  And that frozen look in his eyes when he’d thought she’d rejected him. Did he think it was his scars? She wished, with a part of herself she was not at all proud of, that it was that simple. That she was that shallow. She imagined that would be easier, somehow.

  The truth was, Angel admitted to herself with a surge of that same old panic, she wasn’t cut out for this. Not any of it. She’d had no idea how difficult it would be to actually marry for money—to attempt to forge a relationship out of nothing but mercenary urges and a stack of signed contracts. She might be forced to consider Chantelle in a whole new light, as whatever her mother’s sins, she had somehow managed to maintain a marriage based on nothing more than a shared lust for Bobby’s fame and fortune for all these years. But Angel wasn’t her mother, no matter the surface similarities. She couldn’t be, because she knew all too well that Chantelle had never had a moment’s bit of trouble with her choices in life, and this was killing Angel a scant two weeks into it.

  She wanted too much, for one thing. She wanted Rafe to talk to her, to smile at her. Why did she want that so badly—so very badly that it was rapidly becoming an obsession? She wanted him to think well of her, to share all those murky secrets she could sense swirling around inside of him like dark shadows. She wanted him to like her—how crazy was that? She wanted, and she did not need to consult the international handbook of appropriate behavior for trophy wives, should such a thing exist outside of certain deeply appalling American television programs, to understand that that was only likely to get her into trouble. To muddy things and confuse the issue.

  What was wrong with maintaining a healthy, polite distance in her marriage of convenience? Why wasn’t that enough for her?

  And that, of course, was all completely apart from the real issue, which was this deadly, sensual fascination with her husband, the man. This … driving need for him that she could hardly understand. Even now, hours later, she had only to think of him and her body shivered into readiness. Into sensual urgency. Her core melted. Her breasts grew heavy. And the impossible heat that swirled through her, coiling between her legs, made her want to scream. Cry. Something.

  No, she ordered herself, horrified at how close she’d come to losing herself here. Already. No tears.

  This was all a mistake. All of it. She should have listened to her own gut when she’d had the chance. Now she was embroiled in something she couldn’t understand, that made her feel the kinds of things she’d always vowed to herself she’d never be so foolish as to feel—out of control, off-balance, half-mad over some man. Over her husband.

  She simply couldn’t take it.

  It was easy enough to pull on her clothes—her favorite pair of jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a heavy jumper to ward off the cold, damp morning. She pulled on a pair of low-heeled boots, wrapped a bright scarf around her neck and stuck her wallet in her back pocket—more for identification purposes than any kind of access to funds. She didn’t need anything else. She didn’t need anything she’d had before, or anything that was his. What she needed most of all was to escape—to find something, somewhere, that could be hers and hers alone. As usual. As ever.

  She crept out of the countess’s ornate chamber that felt no more like hers than it had when she’d arrived and headed for the front door, aware for the first time how the fine old manor creaked and settled around her, as if it really did house a fleet of madwomen-turned-ghosts in its drafty halls. She had no trouble believing it. It wasn’t even particularly difficult to imagine herself turning into one of them, creeping about in the shadows of Rafe’s manor, a phantom even to herself. The image made her shudder.

  It was lighter outside when she stepped out into the cold morning, the sky a gunmetal gray that lightened almost imperceptibly by the moment, heralding the approach of the sun.

  And she walked. And walked, taking deep breaths in the chilly dawn, pulling the sharp, cold air as far into her as it could go before blowing it out in big clouds.

  She was not running away, she told herself as her feet crunched through the glittering frost that spread across the long, winding, picturesque drive that she knew led to a road that in turn led to a village … eventually. She was regrouping. Rethinking.

  Because the only thing she could think of that was worse than being forever in Chantelle’s clutches, subject to her whims and schemes, was … this. This hollow, desperate feeling. This impossible, driving need. This wild, chaotic, out of control madness that she was entirely too afraid would take over her life, if she let it.

  She worried it already had.

  She knew where this kind of thing led. She was the walking, talking result of it, wasn’t she? Chantelle had never let Angel forget that in her long career of finding the right men to take her all the places she wanted to go, simply because she asked them to, Chantelle had truly fallen for one of them exactly once.

  “Lose your head, love, and you lose control,” her mother had told her more times than she could count, usually to the accompaniment of sloppy cigarette smoke circles blown in the air. “And then you lose everything, don’t you?”

  “I will never be you,” Angel had told her mother once, very seriously, when she couldn’t have been more than nine years old and Chantelle had been beating that familiar drum, as she liked to do when feeling maudlin—usually brought on by being a bit too far into her cups.

  Chantelle had only laughed that time. “That’s what they all say,” she’d retorted. “But none of us are so high and mighty that love can’t cut us down to size, Angel. Even me.” Angel could remember her derisive snort with perfect clarity. “Even you.”

  But Angel had been deadly serious.

  She’d never met her father. She never wanted to meet him. Any married man who got a teenaged girl pregnant and then promptly abandoned her was no one Angel needed to know, thank you very much. But it was the fact that Chantelle—street-smart and canny Chantelle, who had never met a man she couldn’t sweet talk into doing things her way—had lost her head over him in the first place that had truly scared her. She’d fallen hard for him, Chantelle had told Angel ruefully every time the subject had come up, and then he’d been the one calling all the shots. For the first and last time.

  If that was what that kind of heady, all-consuming passion did to you—made you that foolish, that gullible, that easily manipulated—then Angel wanted nothing to do with it. A personal mantra that had always served her well.

  Until Rafe.

  She was afraid of him, she realized as she made her lonely way down the long, rambling drive, dipping in and out of the dark woods and catching glimpses even she could admit were breathtaking of the loch with its glassy, still waters and the looming mountains beyond. She was afraid that this kind of shattering passion would ruin her, as surely as it had ruined her mother before her. She was afraid that if she truly succumbed to it, if she surrendered, she would never really be herself again.

  And she had no one but herself. She was the one person she couldn’t let herself lose.
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  She didn’t know why she stopped walking. The drive had brought her almost to the banks of the loch, and she stared out moodily over the clear water. The mountains rose inexorably in the distance, blue and purple, and even though she knew better, even though she told herself it was silly and sentimental, she turned to look back the way she’d come, toward Pembroke Manor, which she could see perched there at the top of the hill she’d been slowly making her way down all this time.

  She told herself she had no idea why that view, pretty though it might be, should make her whole body ache as if she’d suddenly caught some kind of virus. Bones, muscles, skin. It all hurt in a low, deep throb that she was afraid would never end.

  Or was she more afraid that it would?

  And now what? she asked herself, her eyes still fixed on the half-ruined manor, much like its master in that its ravaged wing in no way took away from its grace and beauty. The morning sun was just starting to shine upon it, making it glow slightly. Where will you go? What will you do?

  She had no friends, not really, because she never let anyone close. Ever. She hardly thought her actual family members—silly, self-involved Izzy and their mercenary mother—qualified for the term, and the non–blood relations who did, like Allegra and Ben, she would never dream of disturbing with her real troubles. She’d already told Allegra more than she’d told Ben, and what had she really told either of them? Nothing that mattered. She admitted to herself that she didn’t know how. Beyond that, she had no money—and would have even less should she once again owe that fifty thousand pounds. She had no useful qualifications, and was on the wrong end of her twenties to think that modeling gigs could continue to pay her rent. And thanks to Rafe and his efficient staff, she had no flat to return to anyway.