The Man Behind the Scars(3)

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.

In all the years since his injury, this had never happened. Which alone  would have made it interesting. The fact that she was so beautiful it  made him ache in ways he'd thought he never would again-well, that was  just an added bonus.

"No one ever asks me that," he heard himself say, almost as if he was  used to conversations with strangers. Or anyone he did not employ.  "Certainly not directly. It is the elephant in the room. Or perhaps the  Elephant Man in the room, to be more precise."

If possible, she looked even more closely at his scars, tracing the  sweep of them with her bright blue gaze. Rafe hardly looked at them  himself anymore, except to note that they remained right where he'd last  seen them, no longer red and furious, perhaps, but certainly nothing  like unnoticeable either. They did not blend. They did not, as a wildly  optimistic plastic surgeon had once suggested they might, fade. Not  enough to matter. And anyway, he preferred them to stay right where they  were. There was less possibility of confusion if he wore the truth  about himself right there on his face. He didn't know how he felt about  this strange woman looking so intently at them, really looking at them,  but he didn't do anything to stop her, and eventually her clever eyes  moved back to his.

A kind of thunderclap reverberated through him. It took a moment to realize it was pure desire, punching into his gut.

"It's only a bit of scarring," she replied, that same smile on her  mouth, her tone light. Airy. Teasing him, he realized in some kind of  amazement. She was actually teasing him. "You're hardly the Phantom of  the Opera, are you?"