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She’d enjoyed his scars, he remembered now, the memories of his terrible initial recovery period after the explosion washing over him. He had been mourning so much—his friends, his face, the life he’d planned far away from his family—and she and Oliver had taken such pleasure in calling him those terrible names. Quasimodo. Frankenstein’s monster. How they’d laughed! How they’d enjoyed their own sharp wit! He had been twenty-five and barely able to imagine life at all without the army, without his friends, much less with a ravaged, destroyed face.
They’d told him he was a monster. And he’d believed them.
He still believed them.
Rafe found himself moving before he knew what he meant to do. He reached up and jerked the painting in its heavy frame from the wall. Enough. He didn’t have to look at her, and the parts of Oliver that came from her
either. He didn’t have to keep her hanging here, like a hair shirt, reminding him that the person who should have loved him most in the world had not managed to love him at all. Enough.
He moved to the fireplace on the opposite wall and he didn’t let himself think. He cracked the painting over his knee, exulting in the loud sound it made as it broke in two. He should have done this years ago, he thought. And then he fed her to the fire. And watched her burn.
It was as if some kind of spell was broken. Something hot and unbearably heavy moved through him, then, abruptly, was gone. His chest heaved as if he’d been running up the sides of the mountains outside. He thought of Angel’s warm, sweet mouth as she’d explored each one of the scars on his face and across his torso, tracing them from start to finish, licking and kissing her way across them, until he suspected she knew them better than he did. Until he’d half believed that she had healed them with her touch alone, believed her capable of that. He thought of her first, arch comment on his disfigurement in that long-ago ballroom, her blue eyes sparkling with life, with merriment.
Not exactly the Phantom of the Opera, are you? she’d asked.
The manor house was so empty. He was so empty. Was that the McFarland family legacy? Would he molder away in this place? Both his mother and Oliver had died here, bitter and alone and incapacitatingly drunk. Was that his future too? Would he painstakingly reconstruct the manor house so it could stand as the perfect mausoleum to hold him as he slowly turned to dust?
He was already made of stone, he thought bitterly, staring at the painting as it blackened and curled. Who was to say he would even notice his own, slow decline?
You might as well have died, she’d told him, her blue eyes dark and haunted with the pain he’d caused her, because all you are now is a ghost.
And he understood then. It fell through him like light, like her smile, burning him alive from the inside out. Making him realize exactly what kind of life he was living here, and what it meant. What he would become if he continued along this path. If he continued to listen to the drunken jeers of the departed instead of the living, breathing woman who had dared to stand in front of him. And see him. She had truly seen him.
He could not repair the past; he could only restore the destroyed wing of a grand old house. He could not build his way back to a happy childhood or a loving mother. He could not make this house perfect enough to prove, somehow, to all of his lost family that he was worth the love they’d denied him.
He finally understood.
Rafe had been a ghost for most of his life, and Angel was the only person who had ever seen him. All of him.
And he had thrown her away.
* * *
It took most of the long night in a remarkably uncomfortable and frigidly cold village with a mystifying Gaelic name and then three separate trains to make it to Glasgow.
So far, Angel thought dully as she bought herself a much-needed coffee in the busy rush of the cavernous Glasgow central station, survival was not going particularly well. She had been cold and uncomfortable and awake for hours. Her return to civilization in the form of the Glasgow rush hour was overwhelming. She’d expected to feel safe, finally, away from all of that oppressive natural glory. She’d expected to feel right at home when she finally reached Glasgow. But instead, she missed the quiet of Pembroke Manor. She missed the desolate beauty of the loch and the far mountains. She missed the clear, fresh air in the cold mornings.
She missed him.
She took the first long sip of her coffee and almost burst into tears when the flavor flooded her mouth, stale and insipid in comparison to Rafe’s personal family blend. She choked it down anyway, and was abruptly furious with herself. She’d lived for twenty-eight years without Rafe or his damned perfect coffee, and only a handful of months with him. She would get on just fine without both. She would.
