He didn't smile. Not this cold, hard man, not quite, but his grim mouth softened, and his dark eyes gleamed. "Nothing comes to mind."
"And why would it?" Angel asked, rolling her eyes. "I suppose it's all run of the mill to you. A plantation in Kenya, an estate in Scotland-all just a day in the life of Lord Pembroke. Very boring, I'm sure."
"I am never bored by my responsibilities," Rafe said in a tone that should have been quelling, and might have been, had that same gleam not still been lighting up his gaze. "Someday, perhaps, you can use that quick mind of yours to help me rather than simply sitting about the place making clever remarks."
"Perhaps I will," Angel said, not knowing how to take that. Not knowing what he meant. Did he have the same image she did then-of the two of them, working together toward a common purpose? As if this is all real after all, that irrepressible voice whispered inside of her.
He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, presenting her with an unobstructed view of that lean, hard body of his in all its tough, masculine glory and making her forget anything and everything else.
"I am partial to islands in the Caribbean," he said. "Excellent suggestion. I'll have to look into that."
Angel's mouth went dry. She took another pull from her mug to keep from choking on what she suspected was pure, unadulterated lust. She assured herself that it was the prospect of whole Caribbean islands at her disposal, but she knew better.
It was Rafe. It was always Rafe.
He was wearing jeans, as usual, which hung low on his hips and clung to his perfect backside and meant he planned to labor alongside the construction team that came daily to work on the ruined wing of the house. Today he wore a rugged-looking button-down shirt, rolled up at the cuffs. There was absolutely nothing about this very casual, unremarkable ensemble that should have made Angel's heart flutter wildly, and yet it did.
Oh, it did.
She meant to keep the easy, breezy chatter going, to continue in her unofficial role as ambassador of good cheer in this marriage, the better to balance his eternal grimness, but she couldn't seem to manage it in that moment. Rafe took a last gulp of his own coffee, then set it back on the table, all seemingly casual-and yet his dark eyes seemed to be alive with that heat. That insidious, impossible heat. It burned away inside of her, eating her whole from within.
She remembered her hands on his face in the woods, his skin so hot in the cold air, his scars under one palm and the rasp of his beard-roughened jaw beneath the other. That same look in his eyes as the world seemed to shatter all around them. He'd taken her breath away then. He was doing it now.
His mouth crooked slightly in the corner. She wanted him to put his hands on her, his mouth-anything … .
"I told you I wouldn't touch you again," he said, his voice like silk, low and addictive. "Did I not?"
"You did." Angel hardly recognized her own voice, had to blink away the heat glazing over her eyes. "What was it? Ah, yes. A stated concern for my tender sensibilities, despite my clear indication that I have none that should concern you."
He had been so faultlessly polite, so relentlessly formal, that night after she'd failed so spectacularly to leave him, and they'd sat once more over a meal fraught with all the things neither one of them could say out loud. He'd apologized for what he'd called "the scene" between them, and then he'd assured her that it would not happen again.
"Unless and until you want it to happen," he'd said, his low, gruff voice promising her everything she wanted and yet was afraid to ask for. Sex. Heat. Her surrender. His command. And then more of the same.
All with that same bright fire in his gaze. That challenge.
"If that is so," he replied now, his dark gray eyes nearly pewter, and polished to a high shine that made a kind of chill sneak over her skin, "then you need only say the word."
He was so deliciously male, so clearly, entrancingly dangerous. She could feel the force of him, the power, moving through her body, using it against her, making her want. Making her need. Making her think, in moments like this, that she might go mad if she didn't taste him again. That it might kill her if she did.
His voice dipped lower as his dark eyes moved over her the way she wished his hands would. "Any word."
They kept having this conversation.
And Angel didn't know why she didn't do what every part of her body longed for her to do, and had wanted since that morning in the woods-since the night that had precipitated it, and even before that, if she was honest. She didn't know why she didn't simply rise from her seat and close the distance between them, letting the morning sun spill all around them as she put an end to this dangerous, torturous game. She already knew how those strong, tough hands would feel against her skin. She had spent long nights keeping herself awake and aching with memories of his talented, wicked mouth, so hard and commanding against hers.
She knew exactly what she was missing.
But still, she did nothing. One long, hot moment turned into another. She only returned that simmering, stirring gaze of his, and then, somehow, smiled. The way she always did, coward that it turned out she was.
"Fair enough," he said as if she'd amused him yet again, as if his patience was boundless-or he was just supremely, arrogantly certain about how this would end-and then he left the room. Just as he always did.
It was only then that she let herself breathe.
And admit the truth. She knew that it was only a matter of time before she surrendered to this wild heat between them. To him. She could feel that clock ticking with every beat of her heart. And she knew, somehow, that once she did she would never be the same again. It was foolish, perhaps, but there it was. Rafe was too potent, too overpowering. And her impossible, highly unsuitable feelings for him had already inspired her to act completely out of character, more than once. She was already too weak where he was concerned. Too fascinated. Too spellbound. Too in awe.
Making love to him would be, she was sure, the worst mistake of a life already littered quite liberally with them. It would stand as a dividing line between before and after, and she had no way to know, now, what parts of herself she would give up in the process of crossing that line. She only knew that it would cost her to do it. No doubt dearly.
Not that that would stop her, she thought then, her mouth twisting into something wry as she brought her coffee back to up to her lips and took another transformative sip, wishing he were as easy to sink into as the coffee he served. As uncomplicated. But as long as she could make herself wait, she would-and pretend that she still had some tiny bit of control in this marriage, some tiny bit of power.
Because she knew, deep inside, with a kind of feminine intuition that she'd never experienced before and which shook her to the bone with its own inexorable truth, that once she surrendered to her husband, she would not even have that.
* * *
Rafe knew the moment she came outside that afternoon.
Not because he was glancing over toward the front door to the still-usable part of the manor far too often, though he suspected he might be, as galling as that was. He could feel it. Her. It was as if she changed the very air with her presence, made the spring breeze blow warmer, or made the clear air smell that much sweeter.
Or perhaps she simply inspires you to launch into dreadful poetry at the slightest provocation, he thought darkly. Which should be appalling enough.
But he turned anyway, and she was there.
He was supposed to be attending to the building supervisor's long-winded thoughts on why some of the walls in the burned out east wing were proving so tricky to put up, but instead he found himself watching his wife as she picked her way across the lawn, looking as delightfully out of place as she always did.
His wife. He let the words echo in him, liking them far more than he should. He couldn't understand why he found her so compelling. She stood out in every possible way-deliberately, he thought. She was wildly inappropriate, rather endearingly disrespectful, entirely too clever for her own good, and he was, he realized, quite shockingly fond of her.
He refused to allow himself to dwell on that. Or even to examine it in any detail.
The working men knew better than to ogle the countess in front of the earl, for which, today, Rafe felt some sympathy. She had yet to get the message that women of her new rank, in the country no less, did not dress as if they were taking a stroll through the high-end shops in some desperately fashionable part of London. Angel wore a pair of jeans that looked as if she'd glued them to her tight curves, a pair of completely unsuitable shoes and one of those immensely complicated, profoundly feminine tops that looked fussy and strappy and yet made him want nothing more than to take the whole thing off with his teeth. The high shoes made her hips sway invitingly-a sweet rhythm that made him even harder than he usually was, just at the thought of her-and there was something about her oversize sunglasses and deliberately mussed and choppy blonde hair that made him want to use his teeth in other places too.