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As usual.
Have found myself stranded in the middle of Scottish countryside, of all places, with only an earl (quite attractively wealthy) and a rambling old house (crumbling all around us as I type, sadly) for entertainment, she’d written, knowing it would make Allegra smile to imagine Angel in such circumstances, so far from her usual London stomping grounds, much less any hope of a quick Tube ride to somewhere more exciting. Would give you the address, but am slightly afraid I’ve been transported to medieval times and will at any moment be expected to don a corset or some other form of fancy dress. (A wimple? The mind boggles!) The good news is that I have yet to see a kilt, hear a bagpipe or taste anything too horrible like haggis, but suspect all of the above lurk in my near future. Kilts and bagpipes I might manage to survive but haggis? A fate worse than death! Hope all is well with Prince Charming. Xx
It might not have been what Angel had really wanted to write, but it helped for a while after she hit Send and closed her laptop back up. It was the reaching out, perhaps, that made her feel less alone, no matter the form it took. But it didn’t last.
The dawn was little more than a pale blue yearning outside her windows when Angel gave up, and swung her feet to the cold floor. There was a scooped-out, empty feeling inside of her, and it had only grown worse as the hours passed. She’d tortured herself with images of Rafe. His clever hands, his wicked fingers. His cruel, delicious mouth, so demanding against hers, so patient and knowing.
And that frozen look in his eyes when he’d thought she’d rejected him. Did he think it was his scars? She wished, with a part of herself she was not at all proud of, that it was that simple. That she was that shallow. She imagined that would be easier, somehow.
The truth was, Angel admitted to herself with a surge of that same old panic, she wasn’t cut out for this. Not any of it. She’d had no idea how difficult it would be to actually marry for money—to attempt to forge a relationship out of nothing but mercenary urges and a stack of signed contracts. She might be forced to consider Chantelle in a whole new light, as whatever her mother’s sins, she had somehow managed to maintain a marriage based on nothing more than a shared lust for Bobby’s fame and fortune for all these years. But Angel wasn’t her mother, no matter the surface similarities. She couldn’t be, because she knew all too well that Chantelle had never had a moment’s bit of trouble with her choices in life, and this was killing Angel a scant two weeks into it.
She wanted too much, for one thing. She wanted Rafe to talk to her, to smile at her. Why did she want that so badly—so very badly that it was rapidly becoming an obsession? She wanted him to think well of her, to share all those murky secrets she could sense swirling around inside of him like dark shadows. She wanted him to like her—how crazy was that? She wanted, and she did not need to consult the international handbook of appropriate behavior for trophy wives, should such a thing exist outside of certain deeply appalling American television programs, to understand that that was only likely to get her into trouble. To muddy things and confuse the issue.
What was wrong with maintaining a healthy, polite distance in her marriage of convenience? Why wasn’t that enough for her?
And that, of course, was all completely apart from the real issue, which was this deadly, sensual fascination with her husband, the man. This…driving need for him that she could hardly understand. Even now, hours later, she had only to think of him and her body shivered into readiness. Into sensual urgency. Her core melted. Her breasts grew heavy. And the impossible heat that swirled through her, coiling between her legs, made her want to scream. Cry. Something.
No, she ordered herself, horrified at how close she’d come to losing herself here. Already. No tears.
This was all a mistake. All of it. She should have listened to her own gut when she’d had the chance. Now she was embroiled in something she couldn’t understand, that made her feel the kinds of things she’d always vowed to herself she’d never be so foolish as to feel—out of control, off-balance, half-mad over some man. Over her husband.
She simply couldn’t take it.
It was easy enough to pull on her clothes—her favorite pair of jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a heavy jumper to ward off the cold, damp morning. She pulled on a pair of low-heeled boots, wrapped a bright scarf around her neck and stuck her wallet in her back pocket—more for identification purposes than any kind of access to funds. She didn’t need anything else. She didn’t need anything she’d had before, or anything that was his. What she needed most of all was to escape—to find something, somewhere, that could be hers and hers alone. As usual. As ever.
