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But that was one more thing she’d never know.
Something like a sob welled up within her, but she shoved it back down. She reached over and took his face in her hands before she could think better of it, letting her right palm caress the scars that swept over the left side of his gorgeous face, feeling it like a blow when he flinched. But she didn’t move her hands, not even when he covered them with his own, as if he meant to pull hers away. His gray eyes gleamed a shade of silver she’d never seen before—pain, she thought, that means he is in pain—and she didn’t look away.
“I saw you first,” she said, knowing somehow that this was the greater vow, these quiet words in a chapel made of the woods and the water, with the watchful mountains in the distance. Whether he ever knew it or not. She did. “I saw your dark eyes and your quiet strength, and it took my breath away.”
“You saw that I had the look of a wealthy man,” he said, his voice clipped and cold. But there was an arrested sort of look in those dark eyes now, and he did not pull away. He did not break the connection.
“That too,” Angel agreed, and it was the sad truth, wasn’t it? She’d have to learn how to live with what that meant for them. And in any case, it didn’t matter here. Now. She gazed up at him. She let herself feel all those huge and terrible things she refused to name. And she smiled at him, a real smile, one that tried to do nothing at all but smile.
No mask. Only the stark truth she had yet to admit to herself, written all over her face, whether he saw it or not. She could feel it. Transforming her. Leaving her more vulnerable to this man than she had ever been to anyone, and ever would.
It was dizzying. It was terrifying. But she kept going, spurred on by something that felt far bigger than her own terrors, her own fears.
“And it was only after that, Rafe,” she whispered, his scars warm beneath her hand, and his own palm hot above it, her eyes glued to his and her face, her heart, wide open, “that I noticed that you were scarred.”
For a taut stretch of time, glittering and breathless, they only gazed at each other, and then his grim mouth moved, curving into something as sad as it was bitter. His hands were warm against hers, his eyes so very cold. Lonely, she thought. It made her ache.
“Ah, Angel,” he said, his voice hoarse, scratchy with all that pain she was afraid she’d never understand. Not really. Not if he wouldn’t let her. “The scars are the least of it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY settled into a pattern in the weeks that followed that shattering morning.
Rafe had only stared at her for a long while, the tension like a vice around them both, his hands clenching slightly around hers, as if he fought off demons she couldn’t see in the air between them while his eyes ran the gamut from a dark, stormy gray to liquid silver. They had eventually returned to the manor house, Angel far more confused by her own behavior than she wanted to admit. She’d accepted how very little she really wanted to go anywhere. She’d had her chance, hadn’t she? If Angel had been less practical, more sentimental, she might have been tempted to note that they seemed to be conducting a kind of courtship as the days slipped by and they danced their highly charged sort of attendance upon each other—on the wrong side of the altar, to be sure, but a kind of courtship all the same.
But she didn’t think about that, and she certainly didn’t think about what it all might mean, because that, she told herself firmly, would be truly mad, and what she was doing was…something else. Something she could not let herself name.
They ate together in the mornings in that same small dining room, which boasted tall, graceful windows overlooking the loch and the brooding mountains to the east, so that it filled with bright morning sunshine on fine mornings. Or, more properly, Rafe ate the sort of hearty breakfast Angel associated with farmers and laborers, while Angel tried not to think about the ungodliness of the hour as she fortified herself with huge, steaming mugs of the best coffee she’d ever tasted.
She stopped asking herself why she got up so early in the morning, simply to sit with this man as he prepared for his day, quite as if theirs was a real marriage in every respect. She discovered that she never really liked her answer. It was no more and no less than the coffee, she decided. She preferred that explanation.
“You look as if you have achieved some kind of religious ecstasy,” Rafe said one morning in an odd voice, as if he was taken back. Angel started, and realized she’d let her eyes drift closed as she sipped at the aromatic, dark brew. She smiled at him, then directed her attention to the thick ceramic mug between her palms.
