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.
CHAPTER SIX
HE FOUND her in the library, of all places, his brand-new wife who had perhaps taken his talk of madwomen and attics far too much to heart. She'd become like a ghost in his house in the two weeks they'd been here-and Pembroke Manor already had more than its fair share. So did he.
She did not hear him enter. The library was a vast cavern, made bearable in the depths of the long northern winters only by its dual fireplaces, one at each end, and the bookshelves that lined the walls and seemed to wrest warmth from the cold stone. Rafe had spent innumerable hours here in his youth, lost in stories of lands far, far away from this place-and far away from what remained of his family after his father's death when he'd been only ten.
Angel sat near the far fire in the old leather armchair that had always been Rafe's favorite, her legs curled up beneath her, all her attention focused on the book she held open in her hands. Rafe took in the haphazard pile of books at her feet, and another two balanced precariously on the arm of the chair, with a feeling he could not quite place washing over him. It looked as if she'd been here for the whole of the two weeks they'd been in Scotland-two weeks in which he'd seen remarkably little of her.
But it was the expression on her face that made him stand so still for a moment, as if he had never seen her before. Perhaps he hadn't. She looked so … rapt. Engrossed. Unguarded. Filled with something he might have called wonder, if he still believed in such things. It made something deep within him stir to life, as if in recognition.
It was as if, he thought, she was an entirely different person than the one she'd so far showed him.
But then she looked up, and in that moment, that quickly, the Angel he knew slid into place across her face. That quick smile, those clever eyes, sizing him up in the space of a single breath. Weighing, measuring. She closed the book she was reading on a finger, and let that hand hang over the side of the chair, the book dangling. She met his gaze, her blue eyes clear. Open. He found he didn't believe it any longer.
"Is this where you've been hiding then?" he asked, his voice not nearly as calm as he would have preferred it. He expected her smile, but even so, the power of it moved through him like the wind. "For two weeks?"