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This time, there was no pretending he wasn’t chastising her. He was—in that excruciatingly polite, excessively wordy aristocratic way, complete with the expected backhanded compliment to remind her of her place. Her sort of beauty. How patronizing. Angel rolled her eyes.
“I am many things, my lord,” she said, unable to keep the faint note of mockery from her voice as she addressed him formally, but equally unable to keep that smile from her face, as if she was, somehow, enjoying this. Was she? Surely not. “Crass, for example. As common as muck, certainly. But never a liar.”
She didn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to look away from this man, and his ravaged, ruined face. Why she kept forgetting to look at the scars and found herself lost in the remote coldness of his gaze instead. Why the ballroom around them seemed like a bright blur, and he was the only thing in focus. The only thing at all.
“So what are your specifications then?” he asked after a stretch of time, highly charged and breathless, that could have been a moment or an hour. “For the perfect husband?”
“He must be very, very wealthy, and happy to share it,” Angel said at once. “That’s the main thing, and is, of course, nonnegotiable.” She bit her lip as if ticking off items in a list in her head. “And it would be lovely if he were good-looking, too.”
“A pity,” he said softly, that menace in his tone again, and written across his destroyed face, though his eyes seemed darker then, and his gaze sharper. Her stomach clenched in reaction. “You’re wasting your time with me. Or have you blocked out my scars from the sheer horror of looking at them too long?”
“It was the talk of your grimy, dirty money, of course,” she replied at once, finding her way back into the light, teasing tone she’d been using so carelessly before. Because she had the sudden sense that what she said now could make all the difference, somehow. That it mattered. She felt it deep in her gut. “I haven’t seen straight since you mentioned it. And depending on how much we’re talking about, I may never see straight again.”
“I am remarkably rich,” he said, that deep, aristocratic voice a posh drawl now, pure male confidence in every syllable. It was a dare, she thought, though she could not have said, looking at that deliberately expressionless, dangerous face of his, why she thought so.
“Is that an offer?” she asked, flirting with him. With this whole crazy idea that seemed less and less impossible by the second. A fairy tale by design, on demand. Why not? She was already standing in a palace, wasn’t she?
Again, that suggestion of a smile that, still, was not one.
“Why do you need money so badly that you would marry a stranger for it rather than simply finding yourself a well-paying career?” His eyes moved over her face as if searching for her intentions. As if he could read them there, if he looked hard enough. She feared he could. That he could see her cobbled-together history of temporary gigs that led nowhere, built nothing and depended entirely on her looks. What career was there for the likes of her? “What do you imagine you’ll do with it?”
“Count the great big piles of it,” she retorted easily, flippantly, as if she hadn’t a single serious thought in her head. “Naturally. Isn’t that what rich people do?”
“Only part of the time,” he said. Was that a joke? It was interesting how very much she wanted it to be. “But it is a finite exercise.”
“How finite?” she asked, a smile tugging at her lips. She tilted her head slightly to one side. “Five years? Ten?”
“Thirty at most,” he said gravely, but she saw the gleam in those gunmetal-gray depths, and imagined this was his version of laughing. She felt an answering sort of tightness in her chest. As if they were connected, or ought to be. “What will you do with the rest of your time?”
She considered him for a moment, and then decided she might as well go for it. No false advertising, she reminded herself. Bold as brass. Start as you mean to go on.
“As a matter of fact,” she confessed, leaning in closer as if what she had to say was salacious gossip instead of simply embarrassing. And of course he would draw the worst conclusions—who wouldn’t? “I am in some debt.”
“Some?” His brow arched again, while his gaze seemed to pry into her. Any further, she thought in a mixture of that same dizziness and something far darker and more dangerous, and he’d be able to see the number itself like a tattoo inside her head.
