style="font-size:15px;"> Waiting, she realized in dawning understanding, and something else that made her chest feel dangerously hollowed out from the inside. He was waiting. For the harsh rejection he must have learned to expect. For her to prove to him once again that he was the monster he believed himself to be—that he’d told her he was.
You will soon be trapped with little hope of escape, he’d said, because he thought that he was the thing that went bump in the night. That he was what she feared, instead of the trappings of this bargain they’d made, and what she knew it made her that she’d suggested it in the first place. And then taken it. And then, worse by far, gone and started to feel things she never should have let herself feel.
And Angel could not bear it. She could not add to this man’s pain. They were only scars, she thought, and yet he’d clearly been treated terribly because of them. And whatever else he was, or would be to her—and her mind skittered away from examining that too closely—she simply couldn’t be part of the great weight he carried around and wore like a badge of fierce pride, as if he expected nothing less.
She simply could not bear it, no matter the cost to herself.
So she smiled, and it was easy this time. Easy and bright, and she reached over and took his hand again, as if she had every right—which, she supposed, she did now. And would, for as long as this devil’s pact between them lasted. She ignored the darkness in his gaze. She ignored the rush of panic that threatened to tip her over where she stood, because none of this was what she’d wanted once, and she knew that what she did now would seal this marriage—would trap her just as he’d warned—more surely than any kiss ever could.
Even a kiss like his.
Beneath the panic there was something else, something hot and dark and his, and while she had no idea what would become of her, that part didn’t care. It only wanted more.
She smiled down at their signatures, then at him. And she laughed.
“Well, look at that,” she said, and she found she was carried away in her own merriment, suddenly. As if she’d made it real. As if it was true, this sudden light feeling that could, in other circumstances, have been some distant cousin to joy. Or perhaps not so distant after all. “I’m a bloody countess.”
“YOUR belongings have been packed up and moved out of your flat,” Rafe said in his gruff way, breaking the silence that had grown thick between them. “As planned.”
The wide and plush back of the sleek silver sedan seemed significantly less roomy with Rafe in it. He sprawled on his side of the seat, his long legs eating up the space before them, the heft of his big body—that wide, hard chest and those strong arms—seeming to encroach upon her when Angel knew, rationally, that he wasn’t moving. He didn’t have to move to take up all the space, all the air. He simply did. As if he exuded too much power to be contained in his own body.
He watched her, those dark eyes moving over her face like a touch. Like the touch she could still feel, that set her heart racing and made her breath shorten in her throat.
The truth she didn’t want to face seemed to expand inside of her, making her feel as if she might explode.
“Wonderful,” she replied, forcing the appropriate smile, hoping it looked duly appreciative.
She made herself relax against the seat, then made herself look at him too—as if nothing irrevocable had happened, as if nothing was sealed or set in stone or any of the other overly dramatic and frightening things she’d told herself during the actual ceremony. Anyone might get carried away during a wedding. She wasn’t a machine, after all. Of course she had feelings—she’d married this man! She could wish that things were different between them—that they were different people, who had gone about this in a very different way—without acting upon that wish. Who knew what she would actually feel, once the wedding day itself was over? Once they made it through whatever their wedding night might hold? The intensity of the occasion had simply got into her head, she reasoned. That and the seriousness of it all, of what she’d agreed to as she’d said those words. Understandable, really, that the enormity of this—of the huge, extraordinary step she’d taken with this man—would take a bit of processing. With or without her inconvenient desire for him.
Her smile felt less forced, suddenly. “I’ve never moved anywhere without having to spend day and night packing up boxes and making endless arrangements,” she said then, her voice deliberately light to dispel the tension in the very air between them, thick and treacherous. “It never occurred to me that it could simply happen while I was off doing other things. Wealth really does make everything so very convenient, doesn’t it?”
That ghost of something not quite a smile played with his hard mouth, and seemed to call out shadows in the cold gray of his gaze.
“It has its uses,” he agreed in that low voice that vibrated along the length of her spine. That single brow of his rose, dark and aristocratic. Demanding. “It has brought me you, has it not?”
“My goodness, Lord Pembroke,” she said softly, keeping that easy flirtatious tone in her voice. She found that she did not have to force herself to relax against the seat then—that she did it without thought. “Has the ceremony gone to your head? Do you think this is a romance?”
She took entirely too much pleasure in throwing his own words right back to him. Especially given what she’d been feeling all morning.
His dark eyes lit with something appreciative and purely male, and the way they met hers, so bold and knowing, made Angel’s heart stutter in her chest. She was sure he moved closer then, she was sure of it, and she leaned toward him as if drawn by some dark compulsion she couldn’t even see—but then he turned away, dropping the dizzying force of his attention to the mobile buzzing in his pocket.
Angel told herself she was relieved. She was. She wanted no part of this … mad whirl of sensation she couldn’t even name, much less begin to understand. It all felt too big, too impossible. It was too dangerous by far.
Liar, that little voice whispered. What was dangerous was her reaction to him. What was impossible was this overwhelming urge to simply sink into him and disappear. But this wasn’t a romance. There would be no happily ever after, not in the classic sense. If they were lucky, they would manage this union well, and get along with each other. Maybe even become friendly. That was all she should hope for.
That was all she could allow herself to hope for.
Rafe spoke into his phone, his voice clipped and sure, and she tuned him out, looking out at the passing London streets. Everything was going to be fine. Of course it would.
Today, it was all real—that desperate scheme she’d cooked up in her wildly uncomfortable coach class seat, on her way to see her favorite stepsister become a real, live princess. Her wildest imaginings had come true. She was married to an earl. She was a countess. She remembered Rafe’s dire warnings as they’d danced in the Palazzo Santina, Allegra’s engagement ball and the usual Jackson family antics no more than a blur to her. That he was not modern. Or fashionable. Or, if she recalled correctly, open-minded.
But what did that matter, really? He was an important man. A busy one, if his current conversation was any indication. She could soon be busy too, putting the generous monthly allowance he’d placed into
