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He had not let that happen. He would not let that happen.
He would rebuild this house as a monument to the childhood he’d lost when his father died. To the boy he’d been so briefly back then. To what he might have been had he not become…this.
“Why do you love this place so much?” she asked, very much as if she could read his thoughts.
He should not have been surprised by another incisive question from her. He should have been used to it by now, surely. But he still found himself taken back, and frowned at the scaffolded ruin before him as if it would help him construct an answer.
“Do you mean that you do not?” he asked quietly. It wasn’t a fair question, loaded as it was with all of his own personal history, and that of his family, stretching back through the generations. But he didn’t rescind it.
“I can appreciate it, of course,” she said. Carefully, he thought. He could not see her marvelous, expressive eyes behind those dark glasses, and he did not care for it—for being shut out. It occurred to him to worry at how completely he wanted her—how comprehensively—but he shoved it aside. “I can see that it is very beautiful, and very old, and I have the normal level of admiration for stately houses and historic estates.” She shrugged, and tilted her head slightly as she regarded him. “But that is not what you feel, is it? For you, it goes much deeper.”
“This is my home,” he said simply. He crossed his arms over his chest because he wanted to put his hands on her, and that would not be wise, not out here in public. Not when he wanted it—her—far more than he should. “It was my father’s pride and joy, and his father’s before him, and so on, since the first small hall was built here sometime in the early fifteenth century. Though they say my branch of McFarlands have been living in this part of Scotland since the start of Scottish history, as far as anyone can tell. I want to honor all of that.”
It was his form of penance, too, for having played his part in the destruction of this place. For having contributed somehow to all that had gone on here. He could not help but think that if he’d been better, if he’d irritated his mother and brother less, perhaps none of this damage would have happened. He would never know. But he could rebuild.
“You never say you were happy here,” she pointed out, something almost wistful in her voice then, reaching parts of him he’d thought he’d excised long ago, the parts that still remembered, with such clarity, those long, quiet walks in the woods with his father. The childhood he wanted so desperately to honor somehow. “You never mention any happy memories at all. Only duty and your heritage and other such things. Have you ever noticed that?”
“I will be happy when the manor is restored,” he said after a moment, something large and unwieldy moving through him, despite his best efforts to clamp it back down.
“Will you?” she asked, and he could have sworn her voice was sad.
Temper cracked through him then. Or so he told himself. Temper was far easier to understand than this other thing that seemed to tie him up in knots, that forced him to feel any number of things he’d prefer to ignore completely. That he’d spent years ignoring, in fact.
“Do not waste your time making up sad stories about me to make me more palatable,” he told her, far harsher, perhaps, than was necessary. “I keep telling you that this is no fairy tale, Angel. No kiss will turn me into Prince Charming.”
“Clearly,” she replied pointedly, without seeming the least perturbed by his tone, which only served to irritate him further. As did her light little laugh. “Maybe we should talk about your obsession with fairy tales then. You bring them up a lot. Do you read them nightly? Should I be careful when eating shiny red apples in this house?”
Rafe was well aware that he was picking a fight with her—that he wanted an explosion—and he even knew why. If tempers flared, so, too, would this repressed, contained passion that was making his life a misery. He wanted it to explode. He wanted it to incinerate them both. He wanted to force her to put her damned hands on him and rescue them both from this interminable waiting.
It was not the first time in his life he’d wished he was slightly less self-aware.
“Thank you for coming out here to offer your support, Angel,” he gritted out, not sure who he was angrier with in that moment—her or him. Her, he decided, for being so constitutionally incapable of being properly scared off, properly cowed, properly any of the things she ought to be. Like being appalled at his monstrous appearance on that damned dance floor, so that none of this would have happened, and he could have simply rebuilt his house and marinated in his solitude, as planned. Without worrying that she would see the real ugliness within him. Without descending into sarcasm. “I’m sure it will speed along the restoration of the manor considerably.”
