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He made that sound distinctly unappealing.
“I think I’d prefer to take my chances with the institutionalized usury actually, when you put it that way,” Angel managed to say, with some remnant of her usual tone.
“As you wish,” he replied, as he had once before, his tone very nearly mild. She hated him for it. “You need only speak up and we can end this arrangement right now.”
She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to! But that would be cutting off her nose to spite her face, so Angel said nothing. Rafe, meanwhile, shrugged with utter unconcern, as only a wealthy man who would never have to make such decisions could, and then he pulled out his mobile again and began to scroll through his messages. Dismissing her that easily.
Leaving Angel to fight a sudden war with herself, to keep those tears from spilling over her cheeks. To keep from flinging herself out of the car to appease the
syrupy panic that kept growing ever tighter inside of her. To keep herself right there in her seat, beginning—too late, of course, she was always too late—to understand exactly what it was she’d done.
* * *
It was long after midnight, and Rafe stood out on the small rise some distance above the manor house that nestled between the thick woods on one side and the loch on the other, separating the Pembroke estate from the mountains that dominated the land by day. He could only sense them now in the stillness of the night, great masses hovering high above the land, as only the faintest wind moved through the sky above him and shivered its way through the trees.
He loved this land. He loved it with a desperation and a certainty that knew no equal, that allowed for no comparison. He felt that love like a fact, an organic truth as relevant to his existence as the air he pulled into his lungs, the hard-packed earth beneath his feet. He remembered well his early childhood in these woods, Pembroke land as far as the eye could see, backing up to national parkland along the northern border. He’d spent long hours with his beloved father as they walked this land together in those happy years before his father’s death, silently exulting in each pristine step they took into fresh snow in winter, or pausing to note the full burst of bright yellow gorse in spring.
Those days had been the happiest of his life. They’d been before. Before he learned the truth about the rest of his family, and how little they had cared for him. Before he’d lost everything that had mattered to him in the army. Before he’d accepted the dark truth about himself.
His gaze moved from the inky black woods around him and the night sky crowded with stars above to the manor house below him. For a moment he looked at the still-lit window of the countess’s chamber, once occupied by his own mother, as it had been by every Countess of Pembroke before her, and the wives of the lesser lords the family had boasted before they’d been elevated to the title. He wondered what she was doing, his reluctant wife, in that room he’d avoided for years now, ever since his mother had died. He wondered if Angel would ever forgive him for dragging her, so urbane and sophisticated, to a place she must consider the worst backwater imaginable. A thousand miles from nowhere.
He wondered why he cared. He had not married her to please her. Quite the opposite, in fact—he’d married her to please himself. He was not at all comfortable with the notion that one might be dependant upon the other.
He shoved the uncomfortable thoughts aside and focused instead on the east wing of the manor. Or what was left of it.
“How amusing of you to fail to mention that when you spoke of your manor house,” Angel had said in that dry way of hers upon their arrival, stepping from the car to frown up at the house before her, appearing impervious to the Scottish chill with the force of her impertinence, “what you really meant was part of a manor house. You may wish to disclose that little tidbit to one of your future wives before you present them with the great ruin they are meant to call home.” Her smile had been touched with the faintest hint of acid. “Just a thought.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve regained your spirit,” he’d replied in much the same tone. “And that sharp tongue along with it.”
“I certainly hope the roof holds,” Angel had continued in that razor-sharp tone, magnificent in the cold light, her blue eyes piercing and the prettiest he’d ever seen. “I neglected to pack my carpentry kit.”
It was not a ruin to him, he thought now as his mouth curved slightly at the memory of her words, and would not be until the last stone crumbled into dust. Nonetheless, he could not argue the point. Scaffolding had just been raised, but it couldn’t mask the fact that an entire wing of the manor house was a burned-out husk of what it had once been. All of those centuries, gone in an evening. Priceless art and objects, to say nothing of some of Rafe’s best memories—of lying in his father’s study on the thick rug near the fireplace, reading as his father worked at the wide desk that had dominated the far wall. All of it so much ash, scattered into the woods, the wind.
