jaw, and the grim mouth that Angel suddenly felt was some kind of challenge, though she couldn’t have said why.
Whatever else this man was, she thought then, anticipation and adrenaline coursing through her, making her whole body seem to hum into alertness, he was a candidate. She moved toward him, pleased to note that the closer she got, the more impressive he was. There was a certain watchful stillness to him that she felt like an echo beneath her ribs. She wasn’t at all surprised when he turned his head to pin her with a cold, dark stare while she was still several feet away—and she got the sudden and distinct impression that he’d sensed her approach from the start, from the moment she’d laid eyes on him. As if he was preternaturally aware of everything that happened around him.
For a moment, she saw nothing but that stare. Cold gray eyes, the most remote she’d ever seen, and darker than anyone’s ought to be. He seemed to see into her, through her, as if she was entirely transparent. As if she was made of some insubstantial bit of glass. As if he could read her desperation, her dreams, her plans and her flimsy hopes, in a single, searing glance. She felt it, him, everywhere.
She blinked—and then she saw his scars.
A wide, devastating set of once angry, now simply brutal scars swiped across the whole left side of his face, raking him from temple to chin, sparing his eye but ravaging the rest of the side of his face and carrying on to loop under his hard, masculine chin. She sucked in a shocked breath, but she didn’t stop walking. She couldn’t, somehow, as if he compelled her. As if he had already pulled her in and she was only bowing to the inevitable.
What a shame, she thought, because the part of his face not damaged by the scars was undeniably handsome. She could see the thrust of his cheekbones, that tough line of his jaw. And that untouched mouth, entirely too hard and male, with that stamp of darkness—but inarguably attractive. More than attractive. As magnetic, somehow, as it was grim.
But there was another part of her—the practical part, she told herself, forged at her callous and cold mother’s knee—that whispered, The scars make it all the better. As if he was some kind of an easy target because of them. As if they made him as desperate as she was.
She hated herself for thinking it. Deeply and profoundly. Like acid in her veins. But she kept walking.
His eyes grew colder the closer she came, and were very nearly glacial and intimidatingly stern when she came to a stop in front of him. He held himself silent and still, with the thrust and heft of his clearly evident power all but glowing beneath what had to be superb self-control. She told herself it was only nerves that made her mouth so dry, and sipped at her champagne to wet it. And to brace herself.
The woman in her liked that he was an inch or so taller than she was in her wicked four-inch heels. And the mercenary part of her liked the fact that he practically exuded wealth and consequence. He might as well wave it like a banner over his dark head. It was glaringly obvious in the elegant simplicity of everything he wore—all of it boasting the kind of stark, simple lines that came only with exorbitant price tags from the foremost ateliers. She knew. She’d worn that sort of clothing when she’d modeled—the kind of high couture that she could never have dreamed of buying herself. But she’d studied it all from an envious distance. She knew it when she saw it.
“You appear to be lost,” he said, in a low, stirring sort of voice, for all that it was noticeably unfriendly. Or anyway, as remote as his gaze. As uninviting. Luckily, Angel was not easily fazed. “The party is behind you.”
His voice seemed to curl into her, around her, like the touch of a hard, calloused hand. It was also very, very posh. Angel smiled, and then tilted her head slightly to one side, considering him. If possible, his dark eyes grew even colder than before, the line of his mouth grimmer.
She knew then, with a sudden flash of something too like foreboding for her peace of mind, that nothing about this man would ever be easy, whether he was target—a candidate for this game of hers—or not. And more, perhaps even more importantly, that a man like this was unlikely to be impressed with a woman like her. But she shook that off almost as soon as she thought it. It was the challenge of it, she decided in that moment. She wasn’t one to back down. She preferred to jump in feet first, and sort it all out later. She might have cooked up this make-your-own-fairy-tale plan in a wild panic on her flight across Europe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good one. There was surely no point in changing her plan or even her wicked ways now. No point in false advertising, either. She was who she was, take it or leave it.
Most left it, of course, or ran up exorbitant debts in her name, but she told herself she was better for the things she’d lived through. Stronger anyway. Tougher.
She didn’t know why she suspected that, with this man, she’d have to be. Or why that suspicion didn’t send her running for the pretty green hills she’d seen as her plane came in to land on this magical little island.
“What happened to your face?” she asked, simple and direct, and waited to see what he’d do.
Rafe McFarland, who loathed the fact that he was currently dressed in fine and uncomfortable clothes for the express purpose of trumpeting his eminence as the Eighth Earl of Pembroke to all of his royal Santina cousins, as duty demanded, stared at the woman before him in the closest he’d come to shock in a long, long time.
He could not have heard her correctly.
But her perfectly arched eyebrows rose inquiringly over her sky-blue eyes, making her remarkably pretty face seem clever, and she regarded him with the kind of amused patience that suggested he had, in fact, heard her perfectly.
Rafe was well-used to women like this one catching sight of him from afar and heading toward him with that swing in their hips and that purpose in their eyes. He knew exactly how irresistible he’d once been to women—he had only to look at the remnants of what he’d once taken for granted in the mirror. He knew the whole, sad dance by heart. They advanced on him, delicious curves poured into dresses like the one this woman wore, that made her body look like a fantasy come to life—until he showed them the whole of his face.
Which he always did. Deliberately. Even cruelly.
It was, he knew all too well, a face that no one could bear to look at for long, least of all himself. It was the face of a monster all dressed up in a five-thousand-pound bespoke Italian suit, and Rafe lived with the bitter knowledge that the scars were not the half of it—not compared to the monster within. He took his terrible face out into public less and less these days, because he found the dance more and more difficult to bear with anything approaching equanimity. It always ended the same way. The more polite ones abruptly fixed their attention to a point just beyond him and walked on by, never sparing him another glance. The less polite gasped in horror as if they’d seen the very devil himself and then turned back around in a hurry. He had seen it all a hundred times. He couldn’t even say the specific reactions bothered him anymore. He told himself they were, at the very least, honest. The sad truth was that he was grateful, on some level, for the scars that so helpfully advertised how deeply unsuited he was to human interaction of any kind. Better they should all be warned off in advance.
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
