really meant to compliment herself, because Angel so greatly resembled her. And now more than ever, Angel thought viciously.
She waved her champagne glass languidly, indicating the ballroom all around them and the party that carried on, all appropriate voices and hushed royal splendor behind them, though she never dropped his gaze. “I will.”
Angel watched some kind of quiet storm move through his dark gray eyes then, and discovered she was barely breathing. But she was still smiling, damn it. She was afraid that if she stopped, she might have to investigate the self-loathing and the sheer, dizzying whirl of something too close to terror beneath it. This man was not at all what she’d imagined when she’d comforted herself with visions of a wealthy husband to solve all my problems, just like Allegra on the plane ride to Santina. Just as she hadn’t imagined that she would feel something like that jolting, electric thrill that had sizzled through her when he’d touched her. What was that?
“Ah,” he said, his voice even lower than before, but still with that same effect on her. And, she thought, faintly condemning. Or perhaps she was only hearing the echo of her own, now-buried shame. “And why do you need a wealthy husband?”
“I thought about simply asking for charitable donations,” Angel said with a little smirk. He waited. She shrugged expansively. “A better question is, who doesn’t need a wealthy husband? Given the choice.”
“You appear to be making the choice yourself, rather than waiting for it to be presented to you,” Rafe said in that dry way of his that seemed to move through her like heat. “Very enterprising.”
“I’m extremely practical,” she told him, as if confiding in him. As if his words had been in any way approving.
“You’d have to be,” he agreed, “if you mean to choose a spouse in so cold and calculating a manner.”
“Is that meant to chastise me?” she asked lightly, as if she hardly noticed one way or the other. As if it would be nothing to her if, in fact, he did mean to do exactly that. A lie, she realized in some surprise —but she shrugged carelessly anyway. “I know what I want and am prepared to go after it. I believe that when a man exhibits this kind of single-minded determination, whole nations rise up and applaud his focus and drive. Sometimes grateful kings bestow earldoms upon such men, if I remember my history.” She smiled, though it was a bit more pointed than was strictly necessary. “Though it’s been a while.”
His grim, hard mouth entertained the faintest ghost of what she told herself was a smile. Or could have been, had he allowed it. His dark eyes gleamed. In appreciation, she was sure of it.
“You are a very beautiful woman,” he said, and the way he said it, so matter-of-factly and without the slightest whiff of flattery, prevented her from the folly of imagining it was a compliment. “You are obviously well aware of it, as you’ve dressed to showcase and emphasize your many charms. A man would have to be dead to fail to notice that you are quite spectacular.”
“Thank you,” she said, her own voice dry this time. “This must be what it feels like to be a show horse. Or so I assume. There weren’t too many thoroughbreds littered about the streets of Brixton the last time I left my flat.”
Her flat was smack in a scruffy bit of Brixton, south London, that was considered edgy and unpretentious, she knew, having read that exact claim in the guidebooks—which she imagined was another way of saying a bit dodgy. Still, it was the home she’d carved out for herself—the only one that had ever really been hers.
“It seems to me you could simply captivate the man of your choosing in the usual way, without having to make crass pronouncements about marrying for money.” His dark eyebrow rose then, challenging and faintly wicked. It was the left one, sliced through with a scar, making him seem vaguely menacing, and entirely too lofty, all at once. But not, she noted after a moment, menacing in a way that actually frightened her, as perhaps it should have done. “I think you’ll find that your sort of beauty, used with a certain clarity of purpose, is the currency upon which many marriages rest—though the participants do not generally speak of it.”
This time, there was no pretending he wasn’t chastising her. He was—in that excruciatingly polite, excessively wordy aristocratic way, complete with the expected backhanded compliment to remind her of her place. Her sort of beauty. How patronizing. Angel rolled her eyes.
“I am many things, my lord,” she said, unable to keep the faint note of mockery from her voice as she addressed him formally, but equally unable to keep that smile from her face, as if she was, somehow, enjoying this. Was she? Surely not. “Crass, for example. As common as muck, certainly. But never a liar.”
She didn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to look away from this man, and his ravaged, ruined face. Why she kept forgetting to look at the scars and found herself lost in the remote coldness of his gaze instead. Why the ballroom around them seemed like a bright blur, and he was the only thing in focus. The only thing at all.
“So what are your specifications then?” he asked after a stretch of time, highly charged and breathless, that could have been a moment or an hour. “For the perfect husband?”
“He must be very, very wealthy, and happy to share it,” Angel said at once. “That’s the main thing, and is, of course, nonnegotiable.” She bit her lip as if ticking off items in a list in her head. “And it would be lovely if he were good-looking, too.”
“A pity,” he said softly, that menace in his tone again, and written across his destroyed face, though his eyes seemed darker then, and his gaze sharper. Her stomach clenched in reaction. “You’re wasting your time with me. Or have you blocked out my scars from the sheer horror of looking at them too long?”
“It was the talk of your grimy, dirty money, of course,” she replied at once, finding her way back into the light, teasing tone she’d been using so carelessly before. Because she had the sudden sense that what she said now could make all the difference, somehow. That it mattered. She felt it deep in her gut. “I haven’t seen straight since you mentioned it. And depending on how much we’re talking about, I may never see straight again.”
“I am remarkably rich,” he said, that deep, aristocratic voice a posh drawl now, pure male confidence in every syllable. It was a dare, she thought, though she could not have said, looking at that deliberately expressionless, dangerous face of his, why she thought so.
“Is that an offer?” she asked, flirting with him. With this whole crazy idea that seemed less and less impossible by the second. A fairy tale by design, on demand. Why not? She was already standing in a palace, wasn’t she?
Again, that suggestion of a smile that, still, was not one.
“Why do you need money so badly that you would marry a stranger for it rather than simply finding yourself a well-paying career?” His eyes moved over her face as if searching for her intentions. As if he could read them there, if he looked hard enough. She feared he could. That he could see her cobbled-together history of temporary gigs that led nowhere, built nothing and depended entirely on her looks. What career was there for the likes of her? “What do you imagine you’ll do with it?”
“Count the great big piles of it,” she retorted easily, flippantly, as if she hadn’t a single serious thought in her head. “Naturally. Isn’t that what rich people do?”
“Only part of the time,” he said. Was that a joke? It was interesting how very much she wanted it to be. “But it is a finite exercise.”
