The Man Behind the Scars

He’d been more interested in the enticing view of her exquisite bottom, naked and lush, than in the same old art on the walls. Especially in this particular room. He’d tested her curves with his hand, making her stretch luxuriously against him.

“I don’t think I’ve paid attention to the paintings in this house in years,” he’d said. “They are simply part of the Pembroke Manor legacy. They fade into the woodwork after a while.”

But even as he’d said it, his gaze had moved across the countess’s chamber to find the one painting that he’d never managed to either ignore or remove, much as he’d tried. Much as he’d told himself he wanted to.

“Who is she?” Angel had asked.

He’d wondered what Angel saw as she’d looked at the painting. Not what he saw, he’d been sure of that. Angel had no way of knowing the truth. There was no sign of who she really was in those painted features. He’d been surprised to find that there was some part of him that had wanted to lie about it—wanted to refuse to claim the relationship, as if that could erase the painful truth of it too. But for some reason, he hadn’t lied.

“My mother,” he’d said finally, when the moment had gone on too long. Angel had turned those clever blue eyes on him then, looking at him as if she could read him like one of the books she loved. As if, he’d thought in something closer to panic than he’d been comfortable with, she’d been able to see everything he’d shoved away inside, so far down he’d spent years pretending there was nothing there at all.

“You must have loved her very much,” Angel had said quietly.

And he’d pulled her head down to his and kissed her, lazily and deliberately, stoking the fire between them, because the last thing he’d wanted to do was discuss his mother. Not with Angel, who, he’d suspected, would understand all too well the things he’d not wanted to say. Who would, he’d known, see all too clearly the great wealth of bitterness he carried inside, all these years later.

Now, alone, he stood before the same portrait and stared at it as if he was looking for clues. As if they would be buried there, in brushstrokes and oils. He saw the family resemblance. He shared her dark eyes, her high brows, the color of her hair. Oliver had had that same oval face and that same notoriously English peaches-and-cream complexion, while Rafe’s distinctive bone structure and his darker coloring were all from his father. Rafe had his father’s height and leanly muscled build, while Oliver had been shorter and stockier, just like her.

But more importantly than all of that, Oliver had shared her alcoholism.

Nine years older than Rafe, Oliver had encouraged it, participated in it and perpetuated it. Or maybe she had been the one to encourage Oliver to join her on that long, terrible path. What did it matter, when it all ended in the same ignoble way?

“I wanted to love her,” he said out loud, to the quiet room, to the memory of Angel and her wicked half smile as she’d moved to sit astride him, helping him forget. His voice sounded raw. Harsh. “But I couldn’t.”

He felt a sort of wave crash over him then, catapulting him straight into some kind of emotional undertow. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t fight. He saw all those terrible images from his childhood cascade through his mind, one after the next—all the jeering, the taunts, the vicious insults. The long nights he’d spent huddled alone in his grandfather’s library, listening to that razor-edged merriment elsewhere in the house, hoping that this time, this night, he would escape it unscathed. He saw himself, all of fourteen, begging his brother not to drink with his mother, and Oliver’s sneering derision in return. He saw Oliver and his mother huddled together in his father’s old study, long after the earl’s death, swaying slightly as they drank their poison and plotted. Always plotting. They’d fed off each other. They’d made each other that much sicker, that much nastier. And without the earl around to take them in hand, they’d simply spiraled into that great darkness together.

By the time he’d left at sixteen, Rafe had been desperate to escape. He’d hated them both equally and wholeheartedly. But never as much, and as totally, as they’d hated him.

As a grown man, he could look back and tell himself that it was Oliver’s influence that had so eroded any hint of maternal affection—but he knew that wasn’t entirely true. His mother was a woman who had fallen so head over heels in love with her firstborn child that there had been nothing left over, nothing left to share, nothing to give a second child. She should have stopped at one. But she hadn’t.