The Man Behind the Scars

“Listen to me,” he said, and that was the Rafe she knew, autocratic and demanding, his hard mouth set in that granite line. She told herself it only made her angrier.

“I don’t want to listen to you,” she retorted. “I’ve done nothing but listen to you for months. You can listen to me for a change. I’m going back to London. I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t even want your money. I don’t know how I’ll pay off that fifty thousand pounds, but I’ll manage it.” Her mouth twisted. “After all, as you so kindly pointed out, there’s always money in prostitution, isn’t there?”

He didn’t answer, as the train that had been sitting next to them on the track lurched into motion and started rolling out of the station. Angel stared at it, anger pounding in her veins, too close to tears again and far too off-balance. The train leaving was the last straw, somehow, even though some part of her knew that there would be another one. There always was.

But she wanted away from him. From the whole of Scotland. From manor houses in the wilderness and Georgian townhomes in the heart of London, countesses and earls and weeks of insulting contracts. From these past months of her life, this crazy idea that should never have been made real—this marriage. She wanted to pretend that none of this had ever happened. That it hadn’t touched her. That she was perfectly, happily whole.

She wanted to be on that train.

“This is pointless,” she muttered, turning on her heel and heading back toward the concourse. She had no particular destination in mind, she just wanted to get away from him, so she could clear her head. So she could think.

“I love you,” he said.

He didn’t shout it. He simply said it, and still it slammed into her like bullets. One, two, three. Angel jerked to a halt, dimly aware that she was lucky the platform was now empty. There was no one left to watch her bleed.

Her heart pounded. Hard and then harder. Something ugly and powerful rolled through her, nearly flattening her, too big for her to contain. Too much to tamp down, to hide. She turned around to look at him. Those cold eyes, that dark, ruined face. How she loved him, to her detriment.

And she would never forgive him for this. Never.

“You would say anything, wouldn’t you?” she threw at him, her voice shaking. Rage and pain, mixed into something toxic. She thought she might be crying again when he started to blur in front of her, and she no longer cared. “You would tell any lie you had to tell. You don’t care about anything except that house of yours, and the heirs you want to fill it with. You couldn’t love me if your life depended on it. You wouldn’t know where to start.”

“And what if my life does depend on it?” His voice was urgent, and there was something in that gray gaze—but she couldn’t fall for that anymore. She couldn’t let herself care. “I think it does.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to tell you I loved you in the first place?” she demanded. “I cried, Rafe—and I never cry. The one thing I always promised myself was that I’d never fall in love, that I’d never give someone that much power over me—”

“Angel,” he said in a low voice that seemed to reach into her, finding her most vulnerable places and wrapping around them and demand, “don’t you understand? All I’ve ever had are those ghosts, that poison. You terrify me too.”

She didn’t want to understand. She wanted to disappear. She wanted things to be easy again. She wanted to be anywhere but in the middle of all this painful truth telling. Anywhere but near this man, the only person alive who had ever seen her like this. No mask. No pretty words. Not even showing off her body to distract him. Nothing at all but Angel.

She couldn’t take it.

“Go to hell,” she raged at him, and then she turned around again, mindless and panicked, and simply ran. She dropped her bag at some point, and she didn’t care. She dodged through the crowds in the concourse, weaving her way around them, running as if it was her life that depended on it now. She knew without a doubt that it did, and she didn’t even know why.

She burst through the grand doors of the station and out into the street. Only then, in the pouring rain, did she come to a stop. She simply stood there and let the rain fall all over her, soaking her, while she gasped for breath. And somehow she was not at all surprised to find Rafe standing next to her, holding her bag, not even breathing hard.

“Run wherever you like,” he said, his voice tight, his eyes intense. “As long as you feel you must. It doesn’t matter. I will always find you.”