She was driving him slowly insane. And the worst part was, on some level, he was actually enjoying it.
"I see you dressed to lend your hand to the ongoing construction," he drawled when she drew near. "How thoughtful."
"There are very few mirrors in this house," she replied, seemingly unbothered by his ironic tone. "I am forced to toss things together and hope for the best. You have only yourself to blame if you do not care for the result."
He had forgotten about the mirrors, he thought. He had the urge to look in one so rarely, he'd forgotten that he'd removed almost every last one of them from the house. Too many ghosts in the damned things, he'd found. He saw only the explosion and the terrible aftermath. He heard only the screams, not all of them his own.
"I hate mirrors," he said, realizing only after he spoke that his tone was clipped and dark.
"This outfit is meant to be my form of encouragement and support," Angel replied at once, merrily, smiling brightly at the building supervisor who reddened under the force of all that shine. As well he should, Rafe thought when she turned that same smile on him. It banished the dark, the ghosts. It made him want to lick her all over, as if she was made entirely of the sweetest, richest cream. "Are your spirits not lifted?"
"My spirits, certainly," he murmured in a low voice when the supervisor stepped away, out of earshot. "And many other parts of me."
"I'm sure I don't understand your meaning," she said demurely, with a quirk of her wicked mouth that indicated that, again, she was playing with him. Playing. With him. No matter how often she did it, it never failed to surprise him. He wondered why he found her so entertaining. He, who never found anything in the least bit entertaining, and hadn't, really, since he'd left Pembroke Manor as a broken, unwanted boy of sixteen to join the military academy that had made him a man.
"Put your hands on me the way we both know you want to," he suggested, not caring that he was standing out in public. That he was no doubt being watched, even now. She made him cease to care about everything except her-which should have given him pause. But it didn't. "The meaning will come to you, I'm sure."
But she only aimed that maddening smile at him, and then turned her attention to the clatter of the reconstruction going on in front of them. Rafe ordered himself to calm down, though he was starting to think that was well nigh impossible when in her presence. She slid her hands into the back pockets of those skintight jeans, which thrust her breasts forward against the delicate material of her top, and very nearly made him groan aloud.
"Is it going well?" she asked, utterly oblivious to the torture he was in. Or, perhaps, not quite as oblivious as she seemed, he thought, when she slid him a sideways look. He felt it like electricity, shuddering through him. Heaven help him, how he wanted her. "I'm afraid I can't tell. All I see is the scaffolding, and a whole host of tired-looking men stamping to and fro with very loud tools."
He bit back a smile, amazed, as usual, that one even attempted to appear.
"It is going well," he told her. "The loud tools are a good sign. You'll want to worry when it's silent out here."
He followed her gaze to the skeletal beginnings of the new east wing, the physical manifestation, he often thought, of his new beginning here. Of this new chapter in the history of the earldom and his dysfunctional family. One that might erase what had gone before-all those dark years he'd survived somehow while watching the rest of his family succumb to their demons, one after the other. One that had more to do with protecting and caring for the estates and all those who worked them, and less to do with bleeding those same estates for every penny, as Oliver had done with so much reckless entitlement. If it had not been for Rafe's stern discipline and careful stewardship of the relatively small inheritance he'd received from his father, and the personal holdings from his grandmother that she'd signed over to him before her death, Pembroke Manor might well have had to have been sold off. Chopped up into pieces, no doubt, and ruthlessly developed, like everything else in the whole of the United Kingdom these days.
He had not let that happen. He would not let that happen.
He would rebuild this house as a monument to the childhood he'd lost when his father died. To the boy he'd been so briefly back then. To what he might have been had he not become … this.
"Why do you love this place so much?" she asked, very much as if she could read his thoughts.
He should not have been surprised by another incisive question from her. He should have been used to it by now, surely. But he still found himself taken back, and frowned at the scaffolded ruin before him as if it would help him construct an answer.
"Do you mean that you do not?" he asked quietly. It wasn't a fair question, loaded as it was with all of his own personal history, and that of his family, stretching back through the generations. But he didn't rescind it.
"I can appreciate it, of course," she said. Carefully, he thought. He could not see her marvelous, expressive eyes behind those dark glasses, and he did not care for it-for being shut out. It occurred to him to worry at how completely he wanted her-how comprehensively-but he shoved it aside. "I can see that it is very beautiful, and very old, and I have the normal level of admiration for stately houses and historic estates." She shrugged, and tilted her head slightly as she regarded him. "But that is not what you feel, is it? For you, it goes much deeper."
"This is my home," he said simply. He crossed his arms over his chest because he wanted to put his hands on her, and that would not be wise, not out here in public. Not when he wanted it-her-far more than he should. "It was my father's pride and joy, and his father's before him, and so on, since the first small hall was built here sometime in the early fifteenth century. Though they say my branch of McFarlands have been living in this part of Scotland since the start of Scottish history, as far as anyone can tell. I want to honor all of that."
It was his form of penance, too, for having played his part in the destruction of this place. For having contributed somehow to all that had gone on here. He could not help but think that if he'd been better, if he'd irritated his mother and brother less, perhaps none of this damage would have happened. He would never know. But he could rebuild.
"You never say you were happy here," she pointed out, something almost wistful in her voice then, reaching parts of him he'd thought he'd excised long ago, the parts that still remembered, with such clarity, those long, quiet walks in the woods with his father. The childhood he wanted so desperately to honor somehow. "You never mention any happy memories at all. Only duty and your heritage and other such things. Have you ever noticed that?"
"I will be happy when the manor is restored," he said after a moment, something large and unwieldy moving through him, despite his best efforts to clamp it back down.
"Will you?" she asked, and he could have sworn her voice was sad.
Temper cracked through him then. Or so he told himself. Temper was far easier to understand than this other thing that seemed to tie him up in knots, that forced him to feel any number of things he'd prefer to ignore completely. That he'd spent years ignoring, in fact.
"Do not waste your time making up sad stories about me to make me more palatable," he told her, far harsher, perhaps, than was necessary. "I keep telling you that this is no fairy tale, Angel. No kiss will turn me into Prince Charming."
"Clearly," she replied pointedly, without seeming the least perturbed by his tone, which only served to irritate him further. As did her light little laugh. "Maybe we should talk about your obsession with fairy tales then. You bring them up a lot. Do you read them nightly? Should I be careful when eating shiny red apples in this house?"
Rafe was well aware that he was picking a fight with her-that he wanted an explosion-and he even knew why. If tempers flared, so, too, would this repressed, contained passion that was making his life a misery. He wanted it to explode. He wanted it to incinerate them both. He wanted to force her to put her damned hands on him and rescue them both from this interminable waiting.
It was not the first time in his life he'd wished he was slightly less self-aware.