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This woman, however, in her tiny black dress that licked over her tight, perfect curves, with her short and choppy blonde hair that seemed as bold and demanding as her sharp, too-clear blue eyes, had kept right on coming—even after he’d presented her with his face. With a full view of the scars that marked him as the monster he’d always known he was, since long before he’d had to wear the evidence on his face.
And then she’d actually asked him a direct question about those scars.
In all the years since his injury, this had never happened. Which alone would have made it interesting. The fact that she was so beautiful it made him ache in ways he’d thought he never would again—well, that was just an added bonus.
“No one ever asks me that,” he heard himself say, almost as if he was used to conversations with strangers. Or anyone he did not employ. “Certainly not directly. It is the elephant in the room. Or perhaps the Elephant Man in the room, to be more precise.”
If possible, she looked even more closely at his scars, tracing the sweep of them with her bright blue gaze. Rafe hardly looked at them himself anymore, except to note that they remained right where he’d last seen them, no longer red and furious, perhaps, but certainly nothing like unnoticeable either. They did not blend. They did not, as a wildly optimistic plastic surgeon had once suggested they might, fade. Not enough to matter. And anyway, he preferred them to stay right where they were. There was less possibility of confusion if he wore the truth about himself right there on his face. He didn’t know how he felt about this strange woman looking so intently at them, really looking at them, but he didn’t do anything to stop her, and eventually her clever eyes moved back to his.
A kind of thunderclap reverberated through him. It took a moment to realize it was pure desire, punching into his gut.
“It’s only a bit of scarring,” she replied, that same smile on her mouth, her tone light. Airy. Teasing him, he realized in some kind of amazement. She was actually teasing him. “You’re hardly the Phantom of the Opera, are you?”
Rafe couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled at a society event, even before he’d had this face of his to bear stoically and pretend didn’t bother him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled at all, come to that. But something closer to a smile than he’d felt in ages threatened the corners of his mouth, and more surprising than that, for a moment he considered giving in to it.
“I was in the army,” he said. He watched her absorb that with a small nod and a narrowing of her lovely eyes, as if she was fitting him into some category in her head. He wondered which one. Then he wondered why on earth he should care. “There was an ambush and an explosion.”
He hated himself for that—for such a stripped-down description of something that should never be explained away in an easy little sentence. As if two throwaway words did any justice to the horror, the pain. The sudden bright light, the deafening noise. His friends, gone in an instant if they had been lucky. Others, much less lucky. And Rafe, the least lucky of all, with his long, nightmare-ridden, scarred agony of survival.
It was no wonder he never looked in the mirror anymore. There were too many ghosts.
He didn’t intend to give her any further details, so he should not have felt slightly disappointed that she didn’t ask. But she also hadn’t turned away, and he found that contrary to all of his usual instincts where beautiful women at tedious, drink-sodden society events were concerned, however few he’d attended in recent years, he didn’t want her to.
“I’m Angel Tilson,” she said, and offered him her hand, still smiling, as easily as if she spoke to monsters every day and found it—him—completely unremarkable. But then, he reminded himself sharply, she could only see the surface. She had no idea what lurked beneath. “Stepsister to Allegra, the beautiful bride-to-be.”
Angel, he repeated in his head, in a manner he might have found appallingly close to sentimental had she not been standing there in front of him, that teasing smile still crooking her lips, her blue eyes daring him. Daring him.
He had the strangest sensation then—as if, despite everything, he might just be alive after all, just like everybody else. And that same intense desire seemed to move through him then, setting him on fire.
“Rafe McFarland,” he said, and then, more formally, “Lord Pembroke. Distant cousin to the Santinas, through some exalted ancestor or another.”
