But she was Angel. She was so lovely. And she was so much more than that too. She teased him, as if there was nothing scary about him, nothing broken. And she looked at him as if he was simply a man. He didn’t know how he could possibly have resisted her.
He only knew he should have.
“I understand that it is not the scars on your skin that cripple you,” she said, facing him, looking more composed than he thought he would ever feel again. “It is this ugliness you carry around inside of you.” She reached over and put her hand on his chest, her palm against the place where his heart should have been, and he jerked back, but she did not drop her arm. “You might as well have died with the rest of them, Rafe, because all you are now is one of your ghosts. Haunting this place, haunting yourself.” She shook her head, a helpless look crossing her face. “You are poisoning yourself from the inside out.”
He thought he said her name, but he made no sound.
And then she walked away from him, without a backward glance from those bruised blue eyes, and he lied and told himself it was exactly what he’d wanted.
* * *
She didn’t think. She didn’t have to. There was no staying here. There was no more hoping. If there was one thing she’d learned over the course of her life it was that when a man told you who he was, what he wanted and what he could give, it was the wise woman who believed him and governed herself accordingly.
And she was finished, finally, with being so foolish.
She grabbed a small bag from her closet and threw in the most basic things. A change of clothes. A few key toiletries. Her laptop and mobile.
She didn’t sneak down the stairs or creep into the night. She walked into the kitchens, located Rafe’s driver and asked to be taken into town. She didn’t look back as the car took her down the long drive. She didn’t do anything but stare straight ahead, telling herself she was fine. Over and over again. Perfectly fine.
Or anyway, she thought, fighting off that deep, dark well of despair that threatened to pull her under, she would be fine, wouldn’t she? She had no other choice.
She would survive, she told herself as the car dropped her as directed in the sleepy little village that was the nearest thing to civilization in this remote bit of wilderness. She would survive.
She always did.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HE FOUND himself in her room, long after he heard the car make its way down the drive toward somewhere, anywhere else.
It was funny that he thought of it as her room now, when it had always been the countess’s room in his head before. As if he had been trying to distance her from the title. From him. Rafe did not doubt it.
He did not like that she’d left so many of her things behind. Most of them, in fact. That dark current of temper in him crackled to life, and he wondered, hotly, if she’d left the dress thrown across the bed and most of her clothes in the adjoining dressing room simply to taunt him with her absence. He wrenched the red wine-colored dress into his hand from the coverlet and then found himself lifting it to his nose, to catch the faint scent of her on the fabric. The temper subsided as quickly as it had come.
He knew it would all fade, in time. The scent. The memory. Angel.
He walked over to the large windows that looked out over the grounds of the estate, and from which he could see the new walls rising from the ruins of the burned-out east wing. Though it was dark outside, with no moon to light the way, he imagined he could still see the details of the ceiling joists that the workmen had just begun to lay over the top of the walls. It was coming together, just as he’d planned. Soon, Pembroke Manor would be whole again.
Rafe was increasingly less certain about himself.
He turned back around, unable to check a sigh, and looked across the elegant chamber to the large painting that dominated the far wall, staged to hang over one of the antique wardrobes that these days held linens. It was a formal portrait of a woman with long dark hair and deep, mysterious eyes, looking out from the canvas with a serious look on her elegant, oval face. She was, he supposed, an attractive woman. Perhaps even pretty. If he forced himself, he could look at the painting and see only the girl she must have been when it was commissioned—barely more than twenty, he thought. No hint of the future awaiting her in that calm gaze. No hint of the monster inside of her either.
“These walls are cluttered with your relatives,” Angel had said at one point in that flippant way of hers that had made his mouth curve against the crown of her head. She had lain sprawled across his chest, her choppy hair standing in spikes he could not stop toying with, both of them a little bit dazed and replete in the aftermath of their passion. “It’s like living in the center of a constant family reunion . How do you stand it?”