The Man Behind the Scars

She slid her sunglasses from her eyes, securing them on the top of her head and fixing him with her frank blue gaze. It was as if Pembroke Manor disappeared, with all of the workmen and the power tools, the stone walls the fire had failed to topple, the glittering loch and the silent sentries of the mountains in the distance. It was as if there was nothing at all in the whole of the world but Angel, and he was rapidly losing his ability to keep his cool where this woman, his wife, was concerned.

“Do not speak,” he told her, his voice too dark, his patience too thin. “Unless you plan to invite me into your bed, right now. It is the only thing I want to hear from you at the moment.”

Something he might have called fear in someone else moved through her bright eyes then, clouding them. Making her look soft for a moment. Vulnerable. Not the Angel he knew at all.

“I can’t,” she said, and laughed slightly, as if the admission surprised her. “I don’t know why, but I can’t.”

His gaze bored into hers, daring her. Challenging her. He wished the power of his gaze alone could seduce her, somehow. Could make her want him enough to finally prove what she’d said to him that morning in the woods. Could make him believe that she truly saw all of him, and could accept it. Even if he knew better.

“What are you so afraid of?” he asked softly. Deliberately. “You already know I will make you come. Screaming my name, in fact.”

Her breath came out in an audible rush that was, in part, a kind of dazed laugh. He did not try to hide the force of his desire, the sweet torture of it, and he had the satisfaction of watching her eyes widen as she shivered slightly, then the exquisite pain of watching her pull her lush lower lip between her teeth and bite at it. He felt it as if she’d bitten him instead. But once again that look moved over her face, and she shook it away.

“I have to go,” she whispered, stepping back and breaking that odd enchantment that hovered between them and shut out the world. Rafe was aware, again, of the din around them, the crowd only a small distance away in the ruined wing of the house. He felt it as a loss.

She turned away. But her shoes were absurd and much too high for even the manicured sweep of lawn outside the manor, and she took only a step or two before she stumbled. Rafe didn’t think, he simply reached over and righted her with a hand on her arm. And then, because he could, he acquiesced to an urge he hardly understood and swept her up and into his arms.

She clutched at his shoulders, her blue eyes wide, though she made no sound of protest. Holding her high against his chest, Rafe began to walk toward the house. She was light in his arms, a sweet weight against his chest, and he wanted her more than he had ever wanted anything. He could not seem to tear his gaze from hers as he shouldered his way through the great front door and into the grand entry hall. He was breathing too hard, as if he’d run up the side of one of the mountains, and he could only imagine the look that must have been stamped on his face. Arousal. Desire. As if he was some kind of wild animal, he thought in self-disgust, so desperate was he for her. And still she only stared back at him as if she was frozen in place, in his arms and in his gaze, as he carried her over his threshold.

The symbolism was not lost on him.

But this was a different sort of marriage, and she was a very different sort of wife, and he had no choice but to let her down from his arms. He did it slowly. So slowly. And if she slid a bit and rubbed against him on her way down, well, he could only do so much.

Her feet touched the ground and she took a shaky sort of step back, her eyes too wide, as if, finally, she was as frightened of him as she should have been from the start. Why should that surprise him so much?

“I will see you tonight,” he said then, which was not at all what he wanted to say. Nor was he sure he could survive another meal with all of this tension and flame drawn so tight between them. He might just snap, spread her out on the antique table and take her as he longed to do.

He didn’t know himself in that moment. His iron control seemed to have deserted him entirely. He could feel his hands clench as if they might simply reach for her, and his promises be damned—

But he could not be that man. He could not break his word. Not this time. He didn’t know why it felt so important to him, but it was. He knew that it was.

“Maybe,” he could not help but grit out, with passion and pain and something much deeper he refused to identify, “you will take the time to think more carefully about what it is you want, Angel. Because you continue to play with fire and it will burn us both.”