He took her hand and, obeying an urge he did not care to examine and could not quite understand, lifted it to his lips. Something arced between them when their skin met, his mouth against the soft back of her hand, something white-hot and wild, and for a moment it was as if the Palazzo Santina fell away, as if there was no well-blooded crowd playing the usual drunken games all around them, no strains of soothing music wafting through the air, nothing at all but this.
Heat. Light. Sex.
Impossible, Rafe thought abruptly.
He let go, because that was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do. Her smile seemed brighter than the gleaming chandeliers high above them, and he couldn’t seem to look away. She was much too pretty to be looking at him like this, as if he was the man he should have been. The man he’d pretended to be, before the accident.
As if he wasn’t ruined.
Perhaps, he thought darkly, she was blind.
“Lord Pembroke,” she repeated, as if she was tasting the title with her lush little mouth. He felt a flash of appreciation for the earldom in an area he had never before associated with it. “What does that mean, exactly? Besides the fancy title and all the forelock tugging I assume goes with it? A stately home and an Oxbridge education, with guest appearances in Tatler to whet the appetite of the commoners from time to time?”
He liked her. It was revolutionary, but there it was. He hardly knew what to make of it.
“It means I am an earl,” he said, with rather too much pompous emphasis, he thought, suddenly deeply tired of himself. But it was who he was. It had been all that he was for longer than he cared to admit, even to himself, even before he’d inherited the title—when he’d had only the sense of its import and the abiding respect for it that his wretched older brother had sorely lacked. He shook off the ghost of Oliver, Seventh Earl of Pembroke and drunken disgrace to the title. He wished he could shake off Oliver’s legacy of debts and disasters, cruelty and sheer viciousness, as easily. “I have responsibilities, and little time for the tabloids, I’m afraid.”
“That would be a yes then, on the grand old estate and Oxbridge and all the rest,” Angel said, still teasing him, not appearing in the least bit cowed by his dark tone. “And I suppose you’re also filthy rich. Doesn’t that usually go hand in hand with nobility? A bit of compensation for the heavy load of the peerage and generations of privilege and so on?”
He didn’t deny it, and she laughed as if he’d said something delightful. He almost felt as if he had.
“I don’t know about filthy rich.” He considered. He wondered why he didn’t find this entire topic distasteful, as he should. As he imagined he would under any other circumstances. But he didn’t, and he knew the reason he didn’t was looking at him with far too blue and direct a gaze. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to see if she was real. Among, he admitted in some grudging surprise, other things. “But there are several centuries’ worth of grime, I’d say. Certainly dirty enough for anyone.”
She laughed again, and he became a stranger to himself in that moment, as he actually contemplated joining in. Impossible, he thought again.
“It’s your lucky day, Lord Pembroke,” she confided, leaning in closer and tapping her champagne flute against his chest. He felt it like a caress. She looked at him, and something dark moved across her pretty face, something too like grief there and then gone in her expressive eyes. “I happen to be interviewing candidates for the position of wealthy husband, and you fit the bill.”
And suddenly it all made sense.
This, Rafe thought, everything going very still inside of him, he understood perfectly.
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU want to marry into money,” he said, his voice cold, as if she had confirmed something he’d already suspected about her.
Angel wished she could tell what he thought of that—or even of her unapologetic way of presenting it. But his dark expression was impossible to read, and she wondered if her stomach could twist any further, and harder, and if it did … would she simply be sick? Right here?
She couldn’t believe she’d actually said that. So baldly. So brashly.
But this was the plan. The only one she had, and so what if it had sounded much better in her head? She had no choice but to follow it—because no matter how humiliating this moment was and no matter how much she hated herself and would, she thought, loathe herself forevermore, she could not currently pay her mother’s debts. There was no way. So this was what she’d come to. This terrible game while this affecting, compelling man only looked at her, his gray eyes cold and stern, and she wanted to be someone else—anyone else—more than she’d ever wanted anything.
Good luck with that, she thought darkly, and kept going.
“I do,” she said, and shoved aside the part of her that wanted to drown in the shame, the tidal wave of embarrassment. That kind of second-guessing was for other women, perhaps, but not for her.
“Bold as brass, you are,” her mother had always said, pretending to compliment Angel when she had 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