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—