a great comfort,” he said, his own voice dry.
He wanted to reach over and pull her into his arms. He wanted to strip away her clothes and test the perfection of her curves with his palms. He wanted. He was all too aware that she was prepared to fulfill certain obligations in this cold-blooded marriage of theirs—and that none of those obligations had anything at all to do with this need that rolled through him, distracting him and infuriating him. He contented himself with the smallest touch, just the finger of one hand, tracing the bloom of color against her cheekbone. He felt her slight shiver, quickly checked, like a dark triumph deep inside of him.
“And is that what I can expect then, Angel?” he asked quietly, his voice a low rasp. “Your honesty?”
“Of course,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, her eyes wide and locked to his.
He wanted that to mean more than it did, more than it could. He wanted that faint shiver he felt to be all of the things it could never, would never, be. She treated him not like a monster, but as a man, and he found that was more dangerous, more potentially ruinous than all the other women who had recoiled in horror at the sight of him. They’d been fooled by the ugly surface into thinking that was what made him monstrous. But Angel ran the risk of learning the truth.
He should never have let this get so far. He should end it now.
But instead, he traced a pattern along her cheek, and pretended he was whole.
“I’m sure I signed something to that effect,” she said.
Those perfect brows arched high. Again, that easy, insouciant smile that captivated him far too easily. That made him believe in all manner of things he knew better than to trust. That made the little flare of hope light anew, small but sturdy. And brighter all the time, heaven help him.
She smirked. “In triplicate.”
Angel Tilson married Rafe McFarland, the Eighth Earl of Pembroke, a man she wondered if she knew less now than she had when she’d met him, if that was even possible, on a gray spring day that was wet and dark and the precise color of his cold eyes.
It was precisely three and a half weeks since the day she’d met him at Allegra’s engagement party in the Santina royal palace. She wore a dress of deep, midnight blue, like the summer night sky far in the north, far away from this quick, quiet ceremony in a London registry office. It was the least bridal, least gold-digging sort of garment she’d been able to come up with from her closet, having declined numerous offers from Rafe’s staff to find her something appropriate to the occasion. Angel had been determined to go to her wedding, at least, in a dress that was entirely hers. As nothing else would be when this day was over.
Rafe was dressed in another glorious, obviously hand-tailored suit, all somber colors to match the fierce expression he wore on his scarred face. The suit clung to the hard planes of his body and shouted to all and sundry that he was exactly who he was: the head of a great family, steeped in generations of wealth and privilege. More than that, there was a soldier’s hard steel beneath it all, that seemed stamped into his very bones. The way he stood, still and sure. The way his gaze met hers, demanding and challenging.
Angel didn’t look away. She hardly heard the words the registrar spoke; she barely registered the presence of the two members of Rafe’s legal team who stood by as their witnesses. But she was aware of him, of Rafe, as she’d never been aware of anyone else in her life. She saw every one of his scars, saw the flat line of his hard mouth, and understood with a deep certainty that this was an irrevocable act. That no matter what happened from this day forward, she would never be free of this hard, watchful man, not really.
She supposed that should have terrified her, but it didn’t.
That, in turn, did.
As if he could sense it, his mouth curved slightly in the corner as he spoke the necessary words.
“I do solemnly declare that I know not of any lawful impediment why I …” and he intoned his full name then, with all his unnecessary middle names, the ones his solicitors had insisted she learn in their precise and proper order. His eyes never left hers. Daring her, Angel thought. Daring her to give in to her fears and end this right now.
Would she? For an impossible, breathless moment the panic surged through her and she almost turned and ran for the door.
But she didn’t. She only pulled in a breath as Rafe continued.
“May not be joined in matrimony to Angel Louise,” he said, finishing his part of the declaration. His dark eyes said something else entirely, something Angel was afraid to translate.
Angel repeated the words back to him, aware now of the heat in her, the flush across her cheeks and even lower, making her breasts feel heavy. Making her whole body feel hectic. Something like frantic. Her legs seemed to tremble beneath her even though she knew they were holding her steady, because she did not fall.
None of this should matter, these things she felt and the difficulty she seemed to have in pulling in a deep breath, but it did. It all mattered, suddenly. The deliberately blank expressions of the witnesses. The impartial and disinterested tone of the registrar’s voice. The bare room, really more of an office, empty of any bridesmaids, flowers, music, family. Anything that might make this wedding a joyous event instead of a dry business arrangement.
This was the very last thing I wanted, a voice cried out in the quiet of her mind, all of those vows she’d made to herself when she was younger cascading through her then, taunting her with how far she’d fallen and what she’d become, but it was too late for that. It was much too late. Fifty thousand pounds and twenty-eight years of Chantelle’s brand of mothering too late.
And then she was saying the rest of those words, those old, traditional words that so many brides had said before her, in cathedrals and in churches, in stately homes and in registry offices just like this one, so many of them filled with love and hope and a whole spectrum of emotions she did not expect she would ever feel. Some part of her grieved, even as another part was strangely exultant. She felt torn—ripped between parts of herself she didn’t even understand.
They joined hands. Angel felt the jolt of it, the pull. She worried that he could feel the way she shook, but when she looked at their hands clasped together like that, like a real couple’s, she couldn’t see the evidence of that shaking—she could only feel it on the inside, making her very bones seem to rattle in place.
Rafe spoke then. He said thee and then he said wife in that low, gruff voice, and then he slid a ring, the metal cold and heavy against her skin, onto her finger. She couldn’t even look at it. She could only look at him.
You will soon be trapped with little hope of escape, he’d told her in that same voice, and she could see, now, the doors of that trap shutting all around her. What it would mean, this loveless marriage. What she would give up.
She would be safe, she told herself, like some kind of chant. She would be free. There were better things, she thought, than love or hope or emotions that had no place in decidedly and deliberately practical arrangements like this one. More useful things, by far.
And still, she did not look away from him. Still, she gazed back at him, accepting his dare—throwing out one of her own. She knew she was doing it—she saw the awareness of it in his dark gaze—and she could neither stop herself nor seem to figure out what, exactly, she thought she was doing.
Marrying him, she thought, with something very like humor, dark and twisted though it seemed to her in that moment. I am actually marrying him.
“I call upon these persons here present to witness that I, Angel Louise, take thee,” she said then, as she was meant to do. And again, as she paused to breathe and then speak his name once more, there was nothing but Rafe and that cold, frozen sort of patience in his gaze. He made no move to coerce her, to convince her. His hands held hers easily, with that same stillness that made some kind of bell chime in her, deep and low. He only watched her, his ruined face carefully