“You do that,” he told her in his serious way, his voice all cool command and dark authority over the phone. And, she thought, somewhat disapproving too. She didn’t like how much that bothered her. “I will send for you on Monday morning. We’ll discuss the ramifications of this arrangement then, in detail and with my solicitors.”
“And what if I want to speak to you before then?” she asked, more to see what he would say than from any current burning desire to have access to him. And in any case, it was only Tuesday morning now. Monday was a long way away. It was going to be difficult, she thought, to have a savior in hand yet still out of reach. To be still smack in the middle of her life, with her problems, while the new and far better, far easier life dangled just beyond her fingertips.
She might very well go mad.
“You seem remarkably adept at leaving extraordinarily long voice-mail messages,” he replied silkily, and she felt it like the sharp reprimand it was. “I imagine you will have no trouble whatsoever leaving more if you feel it necessary.”
She stood there near the front window of her flat, the phone in her hand, for a long time after he ended the call. She stared out toward the street, her heart beating hard and too fast, seeing nothing at all but the future she’d conjured up out of sheer bloody-mindedness, pure shamelessness … and her big mouth.
Maybe she’d taken this whole make-your-own-fairy-tale thing a bit too far.
She imagined that was a common enough reaction when you suddenly found yourself in an actual palace, stepsister to a real, live Cinderella. And when faced with Allegra’s happily ever after, complete with an island kingdom and a handsome Prince Charming, it was perhaps understandable that Angel had conjured up fantasies of modern-day princes who would dance off into bliss and happiness with a common girl like her, all choirs of tweeting budgies and swelling, rapturous soundtracks. But that was the shiny, happy Disney version, wasn’t it?
There was also the rather more dark and dangerous Grimm Brothers version, which she’d spent perhaps too much time reading as a lonely, largely ignored child. In that version of Cinderella, as she recalled, birds did not so much sing pleasing melodies as peck out the eyes of the nasty stepsisters. The famous glass slipper was filled with blood. The woods in the original fairy tales were always perilous, filled with wolves and menace, and she had no idea what on earth she was playing at with a man like Rafe.
“Oh, Angel,” she said out loud, her voice shaky in the quiet room, and as rough to her own ears as if it was a stranger’s. “What the hell are you doing?”
It was much too late at night, and yet Rafe was awake, staring at the sheaf of photographs spread out across the wide expanse of the platform bed he sprawled across. The pictures chronicled Angel’s entire sporadic modeling career, in glossy color and intense black and white—one pouty-mouthed, mysterious-eyed, loose-limbed shot after the next, helpfully supplied by his legal team for his review.
“Your future countess,” Alistair, the lead solicitor, had intoned in his habitually contemptuous way when he’d handed Rafe the folder. With a derisive flourish.
He shouldn’t have liked the way that sounded. He shouldn’t have felt that fierce need move through him again, wanting her in all the ways he could not let himself want anything.
She was so distractingly beautiful. But, of course, that was irrelevant here. He of all people should know how little outside beauty had to do with anything. He’d been aware of that stark truth from a very young age. The scars on his face now were incidental at best. They paled in comparison to the ravaged remains of the rest of him, and well did he know it. He had the ghosts to prove it. His entire army unit. His whole family. He never forgot a single one of them. He felt them all like deep, black holes where his heart should have been. He wore them like regret and recrimination where others wore only bone and skin.
He knew exactly what kind of monster he was.
He rose from his bed and moved restlessly to the tall windows that looked out over London, a city he loathed deeply but hardly saw tonight. He saw only her face. That insouciant smile. The sharp intelligence in her gaze. The heat of her touch. Her delectable mouth.
He knew better than to want her—to want anything—this much.
A good man would not have let this happen, no matter how tempting she was. A decent man would have ended it the moment they were back in London, back to reality. He might not have been either one of those things, but he knew there was still a part of him that longed to be what he should have been, what he’d never been. There was still a part of him that dreamed, sometimes, that he could be better.
If he was any kind of man at all, if there was any shred of humanity in him, he would not let her chain herself to a ruined creature like him. She didn’t know any better—but he did. She saw only bank balances and some kind of savior, but he knew that was only the tiniest part of what she’d get—of what she’d have to endure. He carried the weight of every single person who had ever been close to him. Surely Angel deserved better than that. Better than him.
But he couldn’t seem to make himself do what he knew he should.
He told himself that she knew what she was getting into, or near enough. She was marrying a perfect stranger, for money. He told himself that only a woman with extremely low expectations could possibly consider such a course of action. He told himself that theirs would be a practical business arrangement, with possible side benefits, perhaps, but one that would never, could never, involve feelings of any kind.
It was important to make all of that clear from the start. He wanted a marriage that was shot through with the cold light of reality. He wanted duty and obligation, responsibilities and rules. That would keep the monster in him at bay. That would curtail the inevitable damage.
He was doing this because it was more honest, he told himself. He was not promising her anything. She was not pretending to be in love with him. They would both get exactly what they wanted out of this, and nothing more. Surely that would keep her safe, if nothing else.
He put his hand against the windowpane then, letting the cold glass seep into his skin, reminding him. Who he was. What he could do. What, in fact, he’d done. The cold turned to a numbing kind of pain, of punishment and penance, and still he held his palm there, determined.
This was not about hope. It was about need.
All he had to do was remember that.
It was Friday when Angel saw an unexpected picture of herself in one of the horrible tabloids, tucked up next to Rafe as they’d headed toward his car after the engagement party on Santina. It crystallized her thus far shaky resolve to finish this thing before it really started. To call it off, as she’d been closer to doing every day. That was, she’d decided, the only sane thing to do.
She stood staring at the grainy photograph for far too long in the aisle of her local off-license, as if she expected it to divulge the secrets of her own heart right then and there. As if it could.
The girl in the picture had her head tilted invitingly as she gazed up at the dark, dangerous face of the man next to her. Even in a cheap and sleazy tabloid, Rafe was impressive—too much so—and Angel looked, she was embarrassed even to think, entirely too much like her money-grubbing, social-climbing mother, a connection the tabloid was quick to make itself. It made her cringe in shame, and then redden with deep embarrassment. And it brought home the unpleasant reality of what she’d set out to do.
What she was, in fact, doing.
The entire world would know that she was marrying Rafe for his money, just as Chantelle had married Bobby for his money before her. And they would be right. They would call her all those terrible names, like opportunist and the far nastier gold digger. And they would be right. She might as well simply give in now and accept that she was her mother, after all these years desperate to be anything but.
And the truth was, she didn’t think she could live with that. With herself, if that was who she became, no matter her reasons. She pushed her