Читать книгу The Scandalous Collection - Кейт Хьюит, Пенни Джордан - Страница 72

“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 an account with her name on it to excellent use around London. No more waiting around, cobbling together what paying gigs she could find, hoping she made the rent this month. Those days were over. That life was finished.

She could make herself over completely into one of those Sloane Rangers she’d never quite had the money to wholly emulate, flinging herself in and out of Harvey Nicks with a charge card in her hand and nothing more important on her mind than her next lunch date. She could even become one of those fixtures on the London charity circuit, forever attending this or that ball, draped in fabulous gowns and envy-inducing jewels, mouthing platitudes to every reporter she encountered about the great philanthropic work she was doing in all her couture. She was newly rich, and had married a pedigree. She could choose any life she wanted, surely. She could buy it, come to that.

And only contend with her husband—she still wasn’t used to that word, and wondered if she’d ever be, if it would ever simply be a term she used instead of something more like a bomb—on the odd occasions they crossed paths. Which, if she knew anything about busy men with great amounts of wealth, a subject she had studied in some detail for some time, as it happened, would be increasingly rare as time wore on. That was how these marriages worked, no matter what claims Rafe might have made about how unmodern he planned to be.

She folded her hands together in her lap, and only then remembered that she now wore a ring on her formerly bare finger. Once she noticed it, it was impossible to ignore the alien feeling of metal and stone on her hand, digging into her flesh. For the first time, she looked down at her hand and really took a close look at the ring he’d put there.

It was stunning. As was, she reflected, every single thing of his she’d seen, from his suits to his car to his lovely town house. Of course the ring was gorgeous. The man, clearly, had exquisite taste. He was far too good for the likes of her, Angel knew, and the truth of that seemed to twist inside of her in a new, unpleasant way. She concentrated on the ring instead.

A large dark blue, square-cut sapphire rose above a bed of gleaming diamonds and platinum. One ring of diamonds circled the blue stone, while two other rings of diamonds sat on either side, though lower, each circling another, bigger diamond. The dark blue center stone glittered softly as Angel turned her hand this way and that, and something about it seemed to echo deep inside of her, hitting hard at that same well of sensation Rafe seemed to arouse in her so easily.

“It suits you,” Rafe said, breaking into another surge of panic—surely it was panic this time, and none of that far more dangerous desire—that was rushing through Angel, making it hard to breathe. She was almost grateful.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, unable to look at him. Too afraid of what he might see if she did.

“It was my grandmother’s.” There was something in his voice then, some kind of emotion. She didn’t know how to respond to it. She didn’t know why she wanted to, with an intense and sudden surge of that same protectiveness as before. “I’m glad it will finally be worn again.”

“Do you have your mother’s ring as well?” Angel asked.

She didn’t realize that was, possibly, an impertinent question—impolite, at the very least, when she’d only meant to make a bit of conversation—until his silence made her glance over at him. His face was shadowed. Dark.

“Sorry—” she began, but he shook his head.

“My mother gave her wedding rings to my older brother,” he said after a moment, his voice entirely too calm. And distant. “They had a similar aesthetic, while my sensibilities were always more closely aligned with my grandmother’s—my father’s side of the family.”

Angel had the sense he was choosing his words carefully. Then she focused on the most important word.

“Had?” she echoed hesitantly. She was conscious, suddenly, of that same urge she’d felt in the registry office. She did not want to cause this man pain. Even with an innocent question.

“They both died some time ago,” Rafe said matter-of-factly, any emotion she might have sensed gone as if it had never been, hidden away beneath his scars. He shifted slightly in his seat, turning to better face her, the stern set to his mouth discouraging any further comment. “Is it really the time to discuss our pasts, Angel? We are already married. Perhaps it would be better to let them lie.”

There was a kind of menace in the air then, simmering in the close confines of the backseat. Or was it simply a kind of warning? Either way, Angel ignored it.

“I insist that you tell me about your former lovers,” she said expansively. She felt that she had to dispel the strange tension that seemed to hover between them, as dark as the day outside the car, or sink into it without a trace. “All of them. I want to know everything, so if we run into any of them at any point in time, I will have access to all their salacious details while I am pretending to be polite.”

“I am fascinated that you assume my former lovers are the sort of people we will be running into at all,” Rafe said in a dry voice. “I don’t know whether to be complimented or insulted.”

“And yet you show no interest in mine?” Angel shook her head. “That is certainly no compliment.”

That brow arched high. “My interest in your former lovers is directly related to your medical records,” he said. “Had they been anything less than pristine, we would have had a very different discussion.”

In a different marriage, Angel thought, eyeing him, she might have been tempted to loathe him for that remark. But he was only being practical. Depressingly, insultingly practical.

“I am most definitely insulted,” she said. “And not about medical records.” She waved a hand in the air. “It’s about the appropriate level of flattering jealousy, Rafe. I do require a little bit of it. It’s only polite.”

He gazed at her until her smile faded slightly. Then his hand moved, slow yet sure, and he reached up to brush a thumb across the curve of her jaw, the swell of her lips, sending a slow, sweet burn spiraling through her.

“You work so hard to be provocative,” he murmured, his eyes so dark, his ruined face so intent. “What if I were to take the bait, Angel?”

She pulled in a ragged breath, finding it harder to gather herself than it should have been, and still his hand traced patterns against her skin, dousing her in his particular brand of fire.

“I would wonder why you were so easily provoked,” she replied, her voice as uneven as her breath. His dark gaze was consuming, connecting hard and hot to something deep inside of her, making her feel as if she was melting. She could feel him—as if they were already naked, as if he was already inside of her, that powerful body moving over hers, driving her right over the edge—

“I will assume, as any gentleman would, that you are entirely untouched,” he said. He dropped his hand back to his hard thigh. His dark brow rose again, mocking her. “To be polite, of course.”

“Gentlemen and their virgins,” Angel said, as if the topic were one she had discussed endlessly and been bored by years ago. “What vivid fantasy lives you men have.”

“It is less the fantasy life and more the fragile ego,” Rafe replied, amusement gleaming in his dark gaze. “I think you will find the history of the world far easier to comprehend when viewed through the filter of male insecurity.”

“That is certainly true of my personal history,” Angel said dryly.

“You are a virgin bride,” he reminded her in that silky tone of his. “You have no personal history. Do try to keep up.”

Her lips twitched, and Angel looked away from him, fighting the urge to laugh in a decidedly indecorous, un-countess-like manner. She looked out of the windows again instead, a certain warmth moving through her that had nothing to do with desire. In its way, it was far more dangerous. It promised too many things Angel knew she’d be better off banishing from the lexicon of possibility in this marriage. It was better not to hope, she told herself again, more fiercely this time. It was better to keep her expectations as low as possible. She knew that.

It took a moment or two of watching the world slip by on the other side of the rain-splattered window for Angel to make sense of what she was seeing. She blinked. The congested city streets had given way to the smooth expanse of the M4, headed in very much the opposite direction from the Pembroke town house in its graceful, historic square in central London.

“Why are we on the motorway?” she asked, bewildered.

Rafe only looked at her when she turned back to him, his expression unreadable, his mouth again in that impossible line. A trickle of something too much like foreboding, and far icier, began to work its way down the nape of her neck. She fought off a shiver.

“The London town house is not my primary residence,” he said, with no particular inflection. His voice was still like silk, wrapping its spell around her, tempting her to simply sink into it. But she couldn’t process what she was hearing. She couldn’t take in what it must mean. “I spend the majority of my time at Pembroke Manor. We’re flying to Scotland today.”

“Pembroke Manor,” Angel repeated dully as her mind raced.

Dimly, she remembered fiddling with her tea and trying to remain alert while one of the solicitors had droned on about “the Scottish estate.” But had he said where it was located? Scotland was a rather large and varied place, which she knew primarily from the telly and that one ill-advised trip with her debaucherous friends to Aberdeen in her wild youth, best left forgotten.

There was all that … empty land, she thought with a shudder, just stretched out there at the top of the map of the United Kingdom, all icy lochs, impenetrable accents and ancient ruins scattered about the desolate landscape. On the other hand, there was also the beautiful, graceful city of Edinburgh, or the bustle and life in vibrant Glasgow. Neither city could compete with all of London’s attractions, of course, but Angel was sure she could learn to make do. Somehow.

Even so, “Scotland?” she queried, just to make certain that was what he’d said. As if perhaps there’d been some mistake.

“The Scottish Highlands,” Rafe corrected her, dashing her hopes of anything resembling a decent nightlife. Or shops worthy of her new rank and net worth. Or entertainment of any sort at all, aside from all those caterwauling bagpipes and the odd kilt. “Lovely place.”

“Remote,” Angel choked out, visions of barren mountainsides, isolated lochs, endless fields of heather and precious little else dancing in her head. “Extremely and famously remote.”

He only watched her, entirely still save for that wicked left brow, which rose inexorably as he gazed at her. It occurred to her, as it should have from the start, that he had done this deliberately. He had waited until it was already happening before he’d even told her it was a possibility. She couldn’t think about that—about what it meant. For her and for her future. For her life. Not now. Not while her head was still spinning.

“Rafe,” she gasped out, the panic taking hold now and making her stomach clench as surely as it made her flush in distress. “I can’t live in the Scottish Highlands! It might as well be the surface of the moon!”

The part of her that wasn’t swept away in the horror of the very idea of a city creature like herself condemned to some forced commune with the natural world that had never held the slightest appeal to her noticed that Rafe seemed to grow even more still, even more quiet.

“It is the ancestral seat,” he said softly. Dangerously, that distant part of her noted, but it was thrust aside. “It is home.”

“You must be mad!” she breathed. She waved a hand, indicating herself. She even let out a short laugh, trying to picture herself, all ruddy cheeks and jolly hockey sticks, milking a cow or shearing a sheep or whatever it was you did while slowly dying of boredom on an earl’s rural estate. She couldn’t manage it. She couldn’t even come close. “I am not at all suited to rustication. Clearly. I’ve never lived outside the city in all my life, and I have no intention of starting now—especially not when you have that lovely town house sitting idly by!”

“Unfortunately,” Rafe said in a tone that indicated it was unfortunate only for Angel, “this is not negotiable.”

He might as well have slapped her. Hard.

Angel felt herself go white, as reality asserted itself yet again. And it was harsh.

“Part of what you signed was an agreement to live where I live until any heirs we produce are of school age,” Rafe said in that cool way of his, as if he did not care one way or the other, but was simply reciting the facts. “I promised you I won’t rush you into the physical part of our arrangement, and I’ll keep that promise.” She felt his voice like another slap, so cold and sure when she was coming apart, when she was fighting so hard to keep from falling to bits all over the floor of the car. “I have no problem maintaining separate addresses in future if that is what you want, but not until the question of heirs is settled. And I apologize if this distresses you, but until then we will live at Pembroke Manor, with only occasional forays into Glasgow and even fewer trips down to London.”

Too many thoughts whirled through Angel’s head then, making her feel slightly sick. There was a heat behind her eyes that she was desperately afraid might be tears, and she knew that if she unclenched her hands they would shake uncontrollably.

And none of that even touched the storm that raged inside of her. It didn’t come close.

How could she have forgotten the truth about this relationship? How could she have tried to protect this man, tried to shield him from hurt, when she should have known he would not do the same? Because why should he? This was a cold and calculated arrangement, not a love match. Not even a like match—as they’d hardly known each other long enough to tell! Why had she let herself lose sight of that for even a moment?

Why was there a part of her—even now—that wanted it to be different when it so very clearly wasn’t and would never, could never, be?

He did not want her by his side at all times because he was swept away in emotion, which might have been forgivable, no matter how confining. No, he demanded it for the oldest reason in the world—because he wanted to make sure that any heirs that might turn up were his, and he had no particular reason to take her word on that subject or any other subject, because they were total strangers to each other. And she had no right to complain about that, or even about the fact he was whisking them off to Scotland in the first place, because this was the deal. This was what she’d signed up for—literally. She got access to his money. He got to make the decisions.

She hadn’t imagined how difficult it was going to be to swallow those decisions when he handed them down. You fool, she chastised herself with no small amount of bitterness. You pathetic fool—what did you expect?

“And what if I can’t do it?” she asked, not surprised to hear that her voice sounded like a stranger’s. So far away. So thin. Desperate, she thought. She didn’t look at him, but then she didn’t have to. He still occupied twice the space that he should have done, all that power seeming now to pollute the air around them.

“You can leave any time you like,” Rafe replied evenly. 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 from his newspaper. “The charms of the country may surprise you.”

“I don’t mean that in a conversational, descriptive sort of way,” she continued in that same very deliberate tone. “I don’t mean I will feel restless or bored, or cranky. I mean that all of that emptiness—broken up only by the occasional flock of sheep—will drive me over the edge. I mean I will literally descend into madness.”

He’d supposed he would have no one to blame but himself if that were true. But then, he had ample practice in that regard, didn’t he?

“The manor house has extensive attics,” he’d said instead, looking at her over the edge of his paper. “Ample room for all manner of psychotic breaks and raving madwomen, I should think. No need to worry.”

She’d been quiet for a very long time. When she’d spoken again, her voice was smooth. He’d wondered what that had cost her.

“How delightful,” she’d said, her voice arid. “You’ve truly thought of everything.”

Heaven help him, he thought now, staring up at her window like some moon-faced adolescent in one of those unbearable melodramas, but he wanted her.

He supposed he would pay for that too.