The Man Behind the Scars
“I believe I have,” she said with a happy sigh. “I think you must import this coffee directly from the heavens. There can be no other explanation.”
“Kenya actually.” He sat back in his chair and was, she realized belatedly, studying her, a gleam in his dark eyes that struck her as particularly, decidedly male. It made that ever-present heat flame anew within her, making her skin seem to shrink against her bones. “My great-grandfather bought a small coffee plantation there at the start of the last century. I’ve always thought the coffee magnificent, but I’m aware I’m biased.”
Angel stared into her mug, willing her body to relax, to fight that fire that only ever burned hotter between them, and never went out entirely.
“It’s never simple with you, is it?” she asked. “You’ve never just nipped down to the local coffee shop for their special blend and thrown it in a carafe like a normal person. It has to be from the family coffee plantation, in Kenya of all places, to be suitably exotic.” But she smiled as she looked at him, her brows arching high. “Any other little details like that you’ve forgotten to tell me? A palace or two tucked away somewhere, hardly worth mentioning? A small chain of islands in the Caribbean? Anything?”
He didn’t smile. Not this cold, hard man, not quite, but his grim mouth softened, and his dark eyes gleamed. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“And why would it?” Angel asked, rolling her eyes. “I suppose it’s all run of the mill to you. A plantation in Kenya, an estate in Scotland—all just a day in the life of Lord Pembroke. Very boring, I’m sure.”
“I am never bored by my responsibilities,” Rafe said in a tone that should have been quelling, and might have been, had that same gleam not still been lighting up his gaze. “Someday, perhaps, you can use that quick mind of yours to help me rather than simply sitting about the place making clever remarks.”
“Perhaps I will,” Angel said, not knowing how to take that. Not knowing what he meant. Did he have the same image she did then—of the two of them, working together toward a common purpose? As if this is all real after all, that irrepressible voice whispered inside of her.
He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, presenting her with an unobstructed view of that lean, hard body of his in all its tough, masculine glory and making her forget anything and everything else.
“I am partial to islands in the Caribbean,” he said. “Excellent suggestion. I’ll have to look into that.”
Angel’s mouth went dry. She took another pull from her mug to keep from choking on what she suspected was pure, unadulterated lust. She assured herself that it was the prospect of whole Caribbean islands at her disposal, but she knew better.
It was Rafe. It was always Rafe.
He was wearing jeans, as usual, which hung low on his hips and clung to his perfect backside and meant he planned to labor alongside the construction team that came daily to work on the ruined wing of the house. Today he wore a rugged-looking button-down shirt, rolled up at the cuffs. There was absolutely nothing about this very casual, unremarkable ensemble that should have made Angel’s heart flutter wildly, and yet it did.
Oh, it did.
She meant to keep the easy, breezy chatter going, to continue in her unofficial role as ambassador of good cheer in this marriage, the better to balance his eternal grimness, but she couldn’t seem to manage it in that moment. Rafe took a last gulp of his own coffee, then set it back on the table, all seemingly casual—and yet his dark eyes seemed to be alive with that heat. That insidious, impossible heat. It burned away inside of her, eating her whole from within.
She remembered her hands on his face in the woods, his skin so hot in the cold air, his scars under one palm and the rasp of his beard-roughened jaw beneath the other. That same look in his eyes as the world seemed to shatter all around them. He’d taken her breath away then. He was doing it now.
His mouth crooked slightly in the corner. She wanted him to put his hands on her, his mouth—anything….
“I told you I wouldn’t touch you again,” he said, his voice like silk, low and addictive. “Did I not?”
“You did.” Angel hardly recognized her own voice, had to blink away the heat glazing over her eyes. “What was it? Ah, yes. A stated concern for my tender sensibilities, despite my clear indication that I have none that should concern you.”
He had been so faultlessly polite, so relentlessly formal, that night after she’d failed so spectacularly to leave him, and they’d sat once more over a meal fraught with all the things neither one of them could say out loud. He’d apologized for what he’d called “the scene” between them, and then he’d assured her that it would not happen again.