The Man Behind the Scars

She crept out of the countess’s ornate chamber that felt no more like hers than it had when she’d arrived and headed for the front door, aware for the first time how the fine old manor creaked and settled around her, as if it really did house a fleet of madwomen-turned-ghosts in its drafty halls. She had no trouble believing it. It wasn’t even particularly difficult to imagine herself turning into one of them, creeping about in the shadows of Rafe’s manor, a phantom even to herself. The image made her shudder.

It was lighter outside when she stepped out into the cold morning, the sky a gunmetal gray that lightened almost imperceptibly by the moment, heralding the approach of the sun.

And she walked. And walked, taking deep breaths in the chilly dawn, pulling the sharp, cold air as far into her as it could go before blowing it out in big clouds.

She was not running away, she told herself as her feet crunched through the glittering frost that spread across the long, winding, picturesque drive that she knew led to a road that in turn led to a village…eventually. She was regrouping. Rethinking.

Because the only thing she could think of that was worse than being forever in Chantelle’s clutches, subject to her whims and schemes, was…this. This hollow, desperate feeling. This impossible, driving need. This wild, chaotic, out of control madness that she was entirely too afraid would take over her life, if she let it.

She worried it already had.

She knew where this kind of thing led. She was the walking, talking result of it, wasn’t she? Chantelle had never let Angel forget that in her long career of finding the right men to take her all the places she wanted to go, simply because she asked them to, Chantelle had truly fallen for one of them exactly once.

“Lose your head, love, and you lose control,” her mother had told her more times than she could count, usually to the accompaniment of sloppy cigarette smoke circles blown in the air. “And then you lose everything, don’t you?”

“I will never be you,” Angel had told her mother once, very seriously, when she couldn’t have been more than nine years old and Chantelle had been beating that familiar drum, as she liked to do when feeling maudlin—usually brought on by being a bit too far into her cups.

Chantelle had only laughed that time. “That’s what they all say,” she’d retorted. “But none of us are so high and mighty that love can’t cut us down to size, Angel. Even me.” Angel could remember her derisive snort with perfect clarity. “Even you.”

But Angel had been deadly serious.

She’d never met her father. She never wanted to meet him. Any married man who got a teenaged girl pregnant and then promptly abandoned her was no one Angel needed to know, thank you very much. But it was the fact that Chantelle—street-smart and canny Chantelle, who had never met a man she couldn’t sweet talk into doing things her way—had lost her head over him in the first place that had truly scared her. She’d fallen hard for him, Chantelle had told Angel ruefully every time the subject had come up, and then he’d been the one calling all the shots. For the first and last time.

If that was what that kind of heady, all-consuming passion did to you—made you that foolish, that gullible, that easily manipulated—then Angel wanted nothing to do with it. A personal mantra that had always served her well.

Until Rafe.

She was afraid of him, she realized as she made her lonely way down the long, rambling drive, dipping in and out of the dark woods and catching glimpses even she could admit were breathtaking of the loch with its glassy, still waters and the looming mountains beyond. She was afraid that this kind of shattering passion would ruin her, as surely as it had ruined her mother before her. She was afraid that if she truly succumbed to it, if she surrendered, she would never really be herself again.

And she had no one but herself. She was the one person she couldn’t let herself lose.

She didn’t know why she stopped walking. The drive had brought her almost to the banks of the loch, and she stared out moodily over the clear water. The mountains rose inexorably in the distance, blue and purple, and even though she knew better, even though she told herself it was silly and sentimental, she turned to look back the way she’d come, toward Pembroke Manor, which she could see perched there at the top of the hill she’d been slowly making her way down all this time.

She told herself she had no idea why that view, pretty though it might be, should make her whole body ache as if she’d suddenly caught some kind of virus. Bones, muscles, skin. It all hurt in a low, deep throb that she was afraid would never end.