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He would build it again, he vowed, not for the first time. He would make it right—he would make it what it should have been.
He supposed there was something wrong with him, that he could not mourn what surely ought to be considered the greater loss in that fire—his brother, Oliver. Perhaps he was more the monster than he’d imagined, but he looked at the blackened remains of the manor and felt…nothing. His brother had been drunk, as ever, and careless, as usual. The investigators assured Rafe that he had felt no pain, that he had been entirely insensate as the wing burned down around him, taking him with it and making Rafe lord of what remained. Rafe supposed that was some small mercy, but he could not seem to grieve over his brother’s wasted life as he thought he should.
Perhaps, he reflected as he looked at what was simply the most glaring example of his brother’s carelessness, it was because he’d been mourning the waste of Oliver’s life for as long as he could remember. He’d watched it all—the gradual decline, the increasingly erratic behavior. It had been like a particularly unpleasant echo of their mother’s own alcoholic spiral, which had ended in a similarly unnecessary fashion in an alcohol-induced stroke which had been, by that point, a kind of mercy. It was difficult to mourn at the end of that road when he’d fought so hard to prevent it ever having been taken at all, to no avail. When he had only ever been ignored—or jeered at—for his pains.
He thrust the unpleasant family memories aside, and pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his heavy coat. He started walking again, this time back toward the manor house and his own bed. His footsteps were loud in the quiet of the night all around him. His breath made clouds before his face, then disappeared.
Again, his gaze moved to that window, still lit against the dark.
Today, Angel had married him and then looked at him like he was the monster he knew himself to be as he dashed her hopes of a London life in that car. He found that, somehow, the former eased the blow of the latter, and imagined that very thought made him that much more of a bastard.
“I will go insane in the country,” she had said to him when they were aboard his private plane, winging their way toward the north. She had been sitting there so primly, her entire body rigid, as if she was holding back a tidal wave of reaction by sheer force of will. He had been impressed despite himself.
“You said you’ve spent your whole life in the city,” he’d replied, not sparing more than a glance from his newspaper. “The charms of the country may surprise you.”
“I don’t mean that in a conversational, descriptive sort of way,” she continued in that same very deliberate tone. “I don’t mean I will feel restless or bored, or cranky. I mean that all of that emptiness—broken up only by the occasional flock of sheep—will drive me over the edge. I mean I will literally descend into madness.”
He’d supposed he would have no one to blame but himself if that were true. But then, he had ample practice in that regard, didn’t he?
“The manor house has extensive attics,” he’d said instead, looking at her over the edge of his paper. “Ample room for all manner of psychotic breaks and raving madwomen, I should think. No need to worry.”
She’d been quiet for a very long time. When she’d spoken again, her voice was smooth. He’d wondered what that had cost her.
“How delightful,” she’d said, her voice arid. “You’ve truly thought of everything.”
Heaven help him, he thought now, staring up at her window like some moon-faced adolescent in one of those unbearable melodramas, but he wanted her.
He supposed he would pay for that too.
CHAPTER SIX
HE FOUND her in the library, of all places, his brand-new wife who had perhaps taken his talk of madwomen and attics far too much to heart. She’d become like a ghost in his house in the two weeks they’d been here—and Pembroke Manor already had more than its fair share. So did he.
She did not hear him enter. The library was a vast cavern, made bearable in the depths of the long northern winters only by its dual fireplaces, one at each end, and the bookshelves that lined the walls and seemed to wrest warmth from the cold stone. Rafe had spent innumerable hours here in his youth, lost in stories of lands far, far away from this place—and far away from what remained of his family after his father’s death when he’d been only ten.
Angel sat near the far fire in the old leather armchair that had always been Rafe’s favorite, her legs curled up beneath her, all her attention focused on the book she held open in her hands. Rafe took in the haphazard pile of books at her feet, and another two balanced precariously on the arm of the chair, with a feeling he could not quite place washing over him. It looked as if she’d been here for the whole of the two weeks they’d been in Scotland—two weeks in which he’d seen remarkably little of her.
