The Man Behind the Scars

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.”

Why was he telling her this? And why not tell her the real truth—that had taken all these years and Oliver’s death for Rafe to accept? That there had to be a reason that Oliver treated Rafe the way he had, a reason that their mother had encouraged it. There had to be something in him that brought that kind of meanness out in them. He had been ruined even when he was a boy. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell Angel that. He couldn’t bear for her to know that particular truth.

“What did he do?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as she looked at him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Everyone likes to claim they were picked on by their older siblings, don’t they?” she asked in that deliberately offhand way of hers that made him feel lighter, no matter the subject. Even this one, which he had never found even remotely light. “Everyone loves to make themselves the martyr of their own story. And some people may be, of course. But there are others who think a single scuffle for the last biscuit one summer when they were eleven is more than enough justification for a lifetime of excuses.”

She eyed him then, as if she expected him to confess to exactly that, and once again he found himself fighting the urge to laugh. It was unexpected and as shocking to him as the fact he’d told her anything about Oliver in the first place.

“Sadly,” he said, his voice low, more to disguise his reaction to her than any indication of a matching mood, “Oliver was not the sort to scuffle for a biscuit. That would have been too straightforward. He preferred to mask his worst traits from any kind of parental eye and strike when least expected.”

Angel eased herself back down to the chair, this time to perch herself on the empty arm, giving Rafe ample opportunity to wonder what had come over him. He’d had fevers that had affected him less than this woman. Whole wars, in fact.

“That’s a bit like my mother then,” she said. A strange expression moved over her lovely features, obscuring them for a moment. It was not until it was gone that Rafe realized what it was, why he recognized it even before he identified it. Pain. He knew it all too well. “She’s always neck-deep in a scheme, and it’s never what you think she’ll do—never quite what she’s done before. Though, inevitably, it will cost you. It always does, one way or another.”