Angel noted that he did not sound unduly concerned about that possibility, though she thought she heard a faint undertone of challenge, even so. “But I feel compelled to remind you that should you choose to do so, you leave only with what you brought into the marriage. Your debt will remain intact, but instead of owing a credit card company fifty thousand pounds and any accrued interest, you will owe it to me.”
He made that sound distinctly unappealing.
“I think I’d prefer to take my chances with the institutionalized usury actually, when you put it that way,” Angel managed to say, with some remnant of her usual tone.
“As you wish,” he replied, as he had once before, his tone very nearly mild. She hated him for it. “You need only speak up and we can end this arrangement right now.”
She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to! But that would be cutting off her nose to spite her face, so Angel said nothing. Rafe, meanwhile, shrugged with utter unconcern, as only a wealthy man who would never have to make such decisions could, and then he pulled out his mobile again and began to scroll through his messages. Dismissing her that easily.
Leaving Angel to fight a sudden war with herself, to keep those tears from spilling over her cheeks. To keep from flinging herself out of the car to appease the syrupy panic that kept growing ever tighter inside of her. To keep herself right there in her seat, beginning—too late, of course, she was always too late—to understand exactly what it was she’d done.
It was long after midnight, and Rafe stood out on the small rise some distance above the manor house that nestled between the thick woods on one side and the loch on the other, separating the Pembroke estate from the mountains that dominated the land by day. He could only sense them now in the stillness of the night, great masses hovering high above the land, as only the faintest wind moved through the sky above him and shivered its way through the trees.
He loved this land. He loved it with a desperation and a certainty that knew no equal, that allowed for no comparison. He felt that love like a fact, an organic truth as relevant to his existence as the air he pulled into his lungs, the hard-packed earth beneath his feet. He remembered well his early childhood in these woods, Pembroke land as far as the eye could see, backing up to national parkland along the northern border. He’d spent long hours with his beloved father as they walked this land together in those happy years before his father’s death, silently exulting in each pristine step they took into fresh snow in winter, or pausing to note the full burst of bright yellow gorse in spring.
Those days had been the happiest of his life. They’d been before. Before he learned the truth about the rest of his family, and how little they had cared for him. Before he’d lost everything that had mattered to him in the army. Before he’d accepted the dark truth about himself.
His gaze moved from the inky black woods around him and the night sky crowded with stars above to the manor house below him. For a moment he looked at the still-lit window of the countess’s chamber, once occupied by his own mother, as it had been by every Countess of Pembroke before her, and the wives of the lesser lords the family had boasted before they’d been elevated to the title. He wondered what she was doing, his reluctant wife, in that room he’d avoided for years now, ever since his mother had died. He wondered if Angel would ever forgive him for dragging her, so urbane and sophisticated, to a place she must consider the worst backwater imaginable. A thousand miles from nowhere.
He wondered why he cared. He had not married her to please her. Quite the opposite, in fact—he’d married her to please himself. He was not at all comfortable with the notion that one might be dependant upon the other.
He shoved the uncomfortable thoughts aside and focused instead on the east wing of the manor. Or what was left of it.
“How amusing of you to fail to mention that when you spoke of your manor house,” Angel had said in that dry way of hers upon their arrival, stepping from the car to frown up at the house before her, appearing impervious to the Scottish chill with the force of her impertinence, “what you really meant was part of a manor house. You may wish to disclose that little tidbit to one of your future wives before you present them with the great ruin they are meant to call home.” Her smile had been touched with the faintest hint of acid. “Just a thought.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve regained your spirit,” he’d replied in much the same tone. “And that sharp tongue along with it.”
“I certainly hope the roof holds,” Angel had continued in that razor-sharp tone, magnificent in the cold light, her blue eyes piercing and the prettiest he’d ever seen. “I neglected to pack my carpentry kit.”
It was not a ruin to him, he thought now as his mouth curved slightly at the memory of her words, and would not be until the last stone crumbled into dust. Nonetheless, he could not argue the point. Scaffolding had just been raised, but it couldn’t mask the fact that an entire wing of the manor house was a burned-out husk of what it had once been. All of those centuries, gone in an evening. Priceless art and objects, to say nothing of some of Rafe’s best memories—of lying in his father’s study on the thick rug near the fireplace, reading as his father worked at the wide desk that had dominated the far wall. All of it so much ash, scattered into the woods, the wind.
He would build it again, he vowed, not for the first time. He would make it right—he would make it what it should have been.
He supposed there was something wrong with him, that he could not mourn what surely ought to be considered the greater loss in that fire—his brother, Oliver. Perhaps he was more the monster than he’d imagined, but he looked at the blackened remains of the manor and felt … nothing. His brother had been drunk, as ever, and careless, as usual. The investigators assured Rafe that he had felt no pain, that he had been entirely insensate as the wing burned down around him, taking him with it and making Rafe lord of what remained. Rafe supposed that was some small mercy, but he could not seem to grieve over his brother’s wasted life as he thought he should.
Perhaps, he reflected as he looked at what was simply the most glaring example of his brother’s carelessness, it was because he’d been mourning the waste of Oliver’s life for as long as he could remember. He’d watched it all—the gradual decline, the increasingly erratic behavior. It had been like a particularly unpleasant echo of their mother’s own alcoholic spiral, which had ended in a similarly unnecessary fashion in an alcohol-induced stroke which had been, by that point, a kind of mercy. It was difficult to mourn at the end of that road when he’d fought so hard to prevent it ever having been taken at all, to no avail. When he had only ever been ignored—or jeered at—for his pains.
He thrust the unpleasant family memories aside, and pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his heavy coat. He started walking again, this time back toward the manor house and his own bed. His footsteps were loud in the quiet of the night all around him. His breath made clouds before his face, then disappeared.
Again, his gaze moved to that window, still lit against the dark.
Today, Angel had married him and then looked at him like he was the monster he knew himself to be as he dashed her hopes of a London life in that car. He found that, somehow, the former eased the blow of the latter, and imagined that very thought made him that much more of a bastard.
“I will go insane in the country,” she had said to him when they were aboard his private plane, winging their way toward the north. She had been sitting there so primly, her entire body rigid, as if she was holding back a tidal wave of reaction by sheer force of will. He had been impressed despite himself.
“You said you’ve spent your whole life in the city,” he’d replied, not sparing more than a glance
