The Man Behind the Scars

Fifty thousand, she thought now, standing in the middle of the dazzling ballroom, but it didn’t feel real. Not the fairy-tale beauty and elegance of the palace around her, and not that stunning number either. The sickening enormity of that sum of money rolled through Angel like thunder, low and long, and she wasn’t sure, for a moment, if she could breathe through the sheer panic that followed in its wake, making her skin feel clammy and her breath shallow. Fifty thousand pounds.

Neither she nor Chantelle had a hope in hell of paying off a sum that large. In what universe? Chantelle’s single claim to fame was her marriage to beloved ex-footballer and regular subject of tabloid speculation and gossip Bobby Jackson. It had resulted in Angel’s wild-child half sister, the sometime pop idol, Izzy, who Angel did not pretend to understand, and very little else. Aside from notoriety, of course. Chantelle had been a market stall owner before she’d set out to net herself one of England’s favorite sons. No one had ever let her forget it. Not that Chantelle seemed to care—she got to bask in Bobby’s reflected glory, didn’t she?

Angel had learned better than to inquire after the state of Bobby and Chantelle’s deeply cynical union a long, long time ago, lest she be subject to another lecture from her relentless social climber of a mother on how marriage, if done correctly and to a minor celebrity like big-spending and large-living Bobby, was simple common sense and good business. Angel shuddered now, trying to imagine what it was like to remain married to a man that everyone in the whole of England knew was still sleeping with his ex-wife, Julie. If not many others besides. How could Chantelle be so proud of her marriage when every tabloid in the UK knew the shameful state of it? Angel didn’t know.

What she did know was that there were certainly no heretofore undiscovered stashes of pounds sterling lying about Bobby’s house in Hertfordshire or the flat in Knightsbridge Chantelle preferred, or Chantelle wouldn’t have had to “borrow” from her own daughter in the first place, would she? The truth was, Angel suspected that Bobby had cut Chantelle off from his purse strings long ago. Or had emptied out that purse all by himself, with all of his good-natured if shortsighted ways.

Angel couldn’t seem to fight off the sadness that moved through her then as she thought—not for the first time—what her life might have been like if Chantelle had been a normal sort of mother. If Chantelle had cared about someone other than herself. Not that Angel could complain. Not really. She’d always been treated well enough by Bobby’s rowdy brood of children from his various wives and lovers—even by Julie, if she was honest—and the truth was that carelessly genial Bobby was the only father she’d ever known. Angel’s real, biological father had done a runner the moment seventeen-year-old Chantelle had told him she was pregnant. Angel had always been grateful for the way the Jackson clan—especially Bobby—had included her. They’d tried, and that was more than others might have done. But at the end of the day she wasn’t a Jackson like the rest of them, was she?

Angel had always been far too aware of that crucial distinction. She’d always felt that boundary line, invisible but impossible to ignore, marking the difference between all of them, and her. She’d always been on the outside looking in, no matter how many Christmases she spent with them, pretending. The Jacksons were the only family she had, but that didn’t make them hers. All she had, for her sins, was Chantelle.

Angel wished, not for the first time, that she’d gone on to university. That she’d dedicated herself to an education, a career—something. But she’d been so very pretty at sixteen, blessed with her mother’s infamous blagging skills and the body to back them up. She’d been confident that she could make her own way in the world, and she had, one way or another. She’d talked her way into more jobs than she could count since then, none of them long-lasting, but she’d always told herself that that was how she liked it. No ties. Nothing that could hold her back should she need to move on. She’d been muse and model to a fashion designer, had run her own retail shop for a year or two, and could usually pick up some kind of modeling job or another in a pinch. It was always a struggle, but she paid her rent and her bills, and often had a little bit left over, as well.

Not fifty thousand quid, of course. Not anything even remotely close to that.

Her stomach heaved, and she pressed her fist against her belly as if that would settle it, by force. By her will alone. What was she supposed to do? Declare bankruptcy? Have her mother arrested for identity fraud? However angry she was, however hurt, again, she couldn’t quite see taking either route. One was humiliating and unfair. The other was unthinkable.

Right, she thought then, her usual cool and practical nature taking over at last, shoving the unfamiliar lashings of self-pity aside. Enough whingeing, Angel. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity tonight. Pull yourself together and use it!

Angel helped herself to a flute of champagne from a passing waiter, took a restorative sip and squared her shoulders. She decided to ignore the faint trembling in her hands. She was Angel Tilson. She was tough—she’d had to be, the whole of her life. She did not break at the first sign of adversity—or even at fifty thousand pounds’ worth of signs. She did not recognize defeat. As Bobby had always said—while throwing the odd drink down his throat, but the sentiment was the same regardless—defeat was nothing more than an opportunity to succeed the next time. And the glorious thing about having no options was that she had absolutely no choice but to succeed.

“So,” she murmured to herself, fiercely, “I bloody well will.”

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 eyes grew colder the closer she came, and were very nearly glacial and intimidatingly stern when she came to a stop in front of him. He held himself silent and still, with the thrust and heft of his clearly evident power all but glowing beneath what had to be superb self-control. She told herself it was only nerves that made her mouth so dry, and sipped at her champagne to wet it. And to brace herself.

The woman in her liked that he was an inch or so taller than she was in her wicked four-inch heels. And the mercenary part of her liked the fact that he practically exuded wealth and consequence. He might as well wave it like a banner over his dark head. It was glaringly obvious in the elegant simplicity of everything he wore—all of it boasting the kind of stark, simple lines that came only with exorbitant price tags from the foremost ateliers. She knew. She’d worn that sort of clothing when she’d modeled—the kind of high couture that she could never have dreamed of buying herself. But she’d studied it all from an envious distance. She knew it when she saw it.

“You appear to be lost,” he said, in a low, stirring sort of voice, for all that it was noticeably unfriendly. Or anyway, as remote as his gaze. As uninviting. Luckily, Angel was not easily fazed. “The party is behind you.”

His voice seemed to curl into her, around her, like the touch of a hard, calloused hand. It was also very, very posh. Angel smiled, and then tilted her head slightly to one side, considering him. If possible, his dark eyes grew even colder than before, the line of his mouth grimmer.

She knew then, with a sudden flash of something too like foreboding for her peace of mind, that nothing about this man would ever be easy, whether he was target—a candidate for this game of hers—or not. And more, perhaps even more importantly, that a man like this was unlikely to be impressed with a woman like her. But she shook that off almost as soon as she thought it. It was the challenge of it, she decided in that moment. She wasn’t one to back down. She preferred to jump in feet first, and sort it all out later. She might have cooked up this make-your-own-fairy-tale plan in a wild panic on her flight across Europe, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t a good one. There was surely no point in changing her plan or even her wicked ways now. No point in false advertising, either. She was who she was, take it or leave it.

Most left it, of course, or ran up exorbitant debts in her name, but she told herself she was better for the things she’d lived through. Stronger anyway. Tougher.

She didn’t know why she suspected that, with this man, she’d have to be. Or why that suspicion didn’t send her running for the pretty green hills she’d seen as her plane came in to land on this magical little island.

“What happened to your face?” she asked, simple and direct, and waited to see what he’d do.

Rafe McFarland, who loathed the fact that he was currently dressed in fine and uncomfortable clothes for the express purpose of trumpeting his eminence as the Eighth Earl of Pembroke to all of his royal Santina cousins, as duty demanded, stared at the woman before him in the closest he’d come to shock in a long, long time.

He could not have heard her correctly.

But her perfectly arched eyebrows rose inquiringly over her sky-blue eyes, making her remarkably pretty face seem clever, and she regarded him with the kind of amused patience that suggested he had, in fact, heard her perfectly.

Rafe was well-used to women like this one catching sight of him from afar and heading toward him with that swing in their hips and that purpose in their eyes. He knew exactly how irresistible he’d once been to women—he had only to look at the remnants of what he’d once taken for granted in the mirror. He knew the whole, sad dance by heart. They advanced on him, delicious curves poured into dresses like the one this woman wore, that made her body look like a fantasy come to life—until he showed them the whole of his face.

Which he always did. Deliberately. Even cruelly.

It was, he knew all too well, a face that no one could bear to look at for long, least of all himself. It was the face of a monster all dressed up in a five-thousand-pound bespoke Italian suit, and Rafe lived with the bitter knowledge that the scars were not the half of it—not compared to the monster within. He took his terrible face out into public less and less these days, because he found the dance more and more difficult to bear with anything approaching equanimity. It always ended the same way. The more polite ones abruptly fixed their attention to a point just beyond him and walked on by, never sparing him another glance. The less polite gasped in horror as if they’d seen the very devil himself and then turned back around in a hurry. He had seen it all a hundred times. He couldn’t even say the specific reactions bothered him anymore. He told himself they were, at the very least, honest. The sad truth was that he was grateful, on some level, for the scars that so helpfully advertised how deeply unsuited he was to human interaction of any kind. Better they should all be warned off in advance.

This woman, however, in her tiny black dress that licked over her tight, perfect curves, with her short and choppy blonde hair that seemed as bold and demanding as her sharp, too-clear blue eyes, had kept right on coming—even after he’d presented her with his face. With a full view of the scars that marked him as the monster he’d always known he was, since long before he’d had to wear the evidence on his face.

And then she’d actually asked him a direct question about those scars.