Her reasons for going ahead and playing this game might have been desperate, but that didn’t change the fact that it was a game she was very good at playing. How could she not be, she thought with something like dark humor. It was in her genes.
She ran her free hand over the curve of her hip, making sure her dress was in place, sticking like glue to the tight, toned curves she’d inherited directly from her mother. She could not quite bring herself to be grateful to Chantelle for that little gift. Not quite. Not tonight. The dress was strapless, short and black as sin—and pretended to be decorous while instead showing off every mouthwatering inch of what was, she knew, her only weapon and greatest asset. Her body.
Nearby, a gaunt-faced older man with centuries of breeding stamped into his sunken bones and his so-proper-it-hurt wife stared at her as if she’d committed some hideous breach of etiquette right there in front of them. Anything was possible, of course, but Angel knew she’d successfully kept a low profile here at Allegra’s party—so outside her realm of experience was it to find herself in a palace. The well-bred couple averted their eyes in apparent horror, and Angel bit back a laugh.
She’d leave the truly appalling behavior to the rest of the Jackson family, as she suspected her half sister and stepsiblings, all seven gathered together under this much-too-elegant roof, were more than up to the task. It was, in fact, a Jackson family tradition to stir up scandal wherever they went.
Her half sister, Izzy, had recently been involved in a highly publicized engagement that had ended so dramatically and so openly—at the altar, no less, flashbulbs popping—that Angel had cynically assumed it was all part of her younger sister’s increasingly desperate bid for attention from the less and less interested press. Izzy was as bad as their mother, who was no doubt also in this huge crowd somewhere right now, flinging her mane of blonde hair about like a woman half her age, inevitably dressed in something scandalous and up to who knew what. They could even be up to their usual mischief together—a prospect Angel couldn’t bear to think about any further.
She, on the other hand, had to be just well-behaved enough to catch the right sort of eye—and just badly behaved enough to make sure that eye didn’t stray. When the gaunt older man snuck an appreciative second look at her figure behind his wife’s stiff and scandalized back, Angel smiled in satisfaction. The game was on.
She prowled around the edge of the great gala event, fortified with another glass of the remarkably good champagne, scanning the party for any possibilities. After some consideration and a long look at an obviously wealthy-looking sort with an unfortunate nose that could, in a pinch, double as a bridge over the English Channel, she admitted that she was, regrettably, not that desperate. Not yet.
Looking around, she also automatically excluded any men with women already hanging off of them, or even standing too close to them, as she didn’t have the time or inclination to compete, and anyway, she wasn’t at all interested in someone else’s husband.
She might have descended to following in her mother’s footsteps and becoming a shameless gold digger, she thought piously, but she did have some standards.
She took care to avoid any of the Jackson family, Chantelle and Izzy included—or perhaps especially—as she moved through the crowd. Those she was particularly close to—like the bride-to-be Allegra herself or Ben, the eldest Jackson sibling and as close to a big brother as Angel was likely to get—she was determined to avoid at all costs. She couldn’t handle any sort of show of concern, not from the people she actually considered near enough to family. She didn’t want either of them to ask her how she was doing, because she might accidentally let the awful truth slip out in all its ugliness, and that would hardly put her in the right frame of mind to catch a husband, would it?
Not that she had any idea what frame of mind that was meant to be, she thought wryly, slipping behind another pillar to avoid a tight scrum of what, to her untrained eye, looked like a pack of highly disapproving priests. Or possibly bankers.
And that was when she saw him.
He was lurking—there was no better word for it—almost in the shadows of the next pillar, all by himself, presenting Angel with a view of his commanding profile. He was … magnificent. That was also the best word for it. For him. She paused for a moment, letting her eyes travel all over him. His shoulders were wide and strong, and his torso looked like packed steel beneath a suit that should have been elegant, but on his lean, rugged frame was instead … something else. Something that whispered of great power, ruthlessly and not altogether seamlessly contained. He stood with his feet apart and his hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers, and she got the impression that there was something almost belligerent in that stance, something profoundly dangerous.
Every hair on her body seemed to stand on end.
There was just something about him, Angel thought unsteadily as another kind of thunder seemed to roll through her then, making her breath seem harder to catch than it should have been. She couldn’t seem to look away. Maybe it was his thick dark hair, too long to be strictly correct and at distinct and intriguing odds with the conservative suit he wore. Maybe it was the brooding, considering way he looked out over the ballroom, as if he saw nothing at all to catch his interest, nothing to combat whatever it was he carried inside of him, like a deep shadow within yet almost visible to the naked eye. Maybe it was that lean 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
