The Man Behind the Scars

His guard had dropped into place again, that quiet curve of his mouth no more than a memory—she could see it as plainly as if he’d pulled a helmet of hammered armor over his face. Once again, he stood stiff and ready, that cold bleakness in his gaze. It was the same way he’d looked at her as she’d approached him in the Palazzo Santina.

Waiting, she realized in dawning understanding, and something else that made her chest feel dangerously hollowed out from the inside. He was waiting. For the harsh rejection he must have learned to expect. For her to prove to him once again that he was the monster he believed himself to be—that he’d told her he was.

You will soon be trapped with little hope of escape, he’d said, because he thought that he was the thing that went bump in the night. That he was what she feared, instead of the trappings of this bargain they’d made, and what she knew it made her that she’d suggested it in the first place. And then taken it. And then, worse by far, gone and started to feel things she never should have let herself feel.

And Angel could not bear it. She could not add to this man’s pain. They were only scars, she thought, and yet he’d clearly been treated terribly because of them. And whatever else he was, or would be to her—and her mind skittered away from examining that too closely—she simply couldn’t be part of the great weight he carried around and wore like a badge of fierce pride, as if he expected nothing less.

She simply could not bear it, no matter the cost to herself.

So she smiled, and it was easy this time. Easy and bright, and she reached over and took his hand again, as if she had every right—which, she supposed, she did now. And would, for as long as this devil’s pact between them lasted. She ignored the darkness in his gaze. She ignored the rush of panic that threatened to tip her over where she stood, because none of this was what she’d wanted once, and she knew that what she did now would seal this marriage—would trap her just as he’d warned—more surely than any kiss ever could.

Even a kiss like his.

Beneath the panic there was something else, something hot and dark and his, and while she had no idea what would become of her, that part didn’t care. It only wanted more.

She smiled down at their signatures, then at him. And she laughed.

“Well, look at that,” she said, and she found she was carried away in her own merriment, suddenly. As if she’d made it real. As if it was true, this sudden light feeling that could, in other circumstances, have been some distant cousin to joy. Or perhaps not so distant after all. “I’m a bloody countess.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“YOUR belongings have been packed up and moved out of your flat,” Rafe said in his gruff way, breaking the silence that had grown thick between them. “As planned.”

The wide and plush back of the sleek silver sedan seemed significantly less roomy with Rafe in it. He sprawled on his side of the seat, his long legs eating up the space before them, the heft of his big body—that wide, hard chest and those strong arms—seeming to encroach upon her when Angel knew, rationally, that he wasn’t moving. He didn’t have to move to take up all the space, all the air. He simply did. As if he exuded too much power to be contained in his own body.

He watched her, those dark eyes moving over her face like a touch. Like the touch she could still feel, that set her heart racing and made her breath shorten in her throat.

The truth she didn’t want to face seemed to expand inside of her, making her feel as if she might explode.

“Wonderful,” she replied, forcing the appropriate smile, hoping it looked duly appreciative.

She made herself relax against the seat, then made herself look at him too—as if nothing irrevocable had happened, as if nothing was sealed or set in stone or any of the other overly dramatic and frightening things she’d told herself during the actual ceremony. Anyone might get carried away during a wedding. She wasn’t a machine, after all. Of course she had feelings—she’d married this man! She could wish that things were different between them—that they were different people, who had gone about this in a very different way—without acting upon that wish. Who knew what she would actually feel, once the wedding day itself was over? Once they made it through whatever their wedding night might hold? The intensity of the occasion had simply got into her head, she reasoned. That and the seriousness of it all, of what she’d agreed to as she’d said those words. Understandable, really, that the enormity of this—of the huge, extraordinary step she’d taken with this man—would take a bit of processing. With or without her inconvenient desire for him.