"Then what?" he asked quietly. But she didn't answer.
She cried, silent sobs shaking her as she sat against him, and Rafe found himself murmuring soothing words, laying kisses on the bare skin near her collarbone, tracing that enticing ridge with his tongue.
Slowly, her sobs eased. And then her breath came quicker. Rafe moved from her collarbone to her neck, and then he reached up to slide his hands into her short hair, loving the way she fit so perfectly in his palms. He angled her mouth to his, and kissed her. Slow, lazy. As if the fire that always blazed between them might dry her eyes. As if he could kiss her smile back to him.
He pulled back, and searched her face. Her eyes were still damp, but the storm had passed. He used his thumbs to wipe away the excess moisture beneath each of her eyes, and something seemed to swell between them. It was deeper than electricity, and somehow warmer than their usual fire. Rafe felt almost dazed.
"Rafe … " she whispered, and he kissed her again, feeling something too restless, too huge, move through him. He kissed his way from her mouth to her cheek and all over her pretty face, tasting salt and Angel. That thing between them seemed to hum and glow. Still, it grew, and when he pulled away again he was smiling like a fool, like the kind of person who smiled without reservation, and he couldn't even have said why.
"You shouldn't look at me like that," he said softly, searching her pretty face, marveling at the brightness there, and inside him, where nothing had been bright in a long, long time. "You don't know what I might do."
Because she looked at him with whole summers in her blue eyes, and her smile made him want to be the man she saw when she looked at him, whoever that might be. Whatever it took.
She reached over and pushed his hair back from his forehead with one hand. Her smile deepened, turned tender. She let out a sigh he couldn't categorize, and when she met his eyes again, they were bright with more tears.
"You can do anything you like," she said softly. "I love you."
And everything inside of him went cold.
CHAPTER TEN
ANGEL felt the chill immediately. He might as well have thrown open the window and let the cold night air into the room. Without saying a word, he shifted in the leather armchair beneath her and then stood, taking her with him to stand her on the floor and put distance she didn't want between them.
Angel only stood where he left her, numbly. She knew she shouldn't have said it. She didn't know why she had.
"What did you just say?" he asked, and she recognized that voice. It was so terribly remote. Distinctly unfriendly. It was the way he'd spoken to her when she'd first approached him in the Palazzo Santina. She looked, and his eyes were as frigid, as forbidding. He stood there like he was made of stone, dark and coldly furious, as inaccessible as if he wore a suit of armor instead of that old pair of jeans and long-sleeved shirt that clung to the hard planes of his beautiful chest like some kind of cruel taunt.
He was a stranger again. So quickly, so utterly changed. It made her heart hurt, and she wasn't at all sure what she could do to make it stop. To make him stop. She was afraid that if she looked down, she would see that they'd somehow ended up standing on the edge of some dramatic precipice, with nothing to do but fall. And fall.
"You know exactly what I said," she replied, unable to make her voice light, but somehow keeping it even. "I didn't mean to say it, if that helps." She shrugged, feeling helpless and powerless and not at all sure how to combat that. "It just slipped out."
Like the tears. She wiped at her face, not knowing how to process the fact that she'd broken down like that, so completely, sobbing for the first time in all of her memory. So undone by the kindness in his gaze, the smile on his usually grim mouth, that she had only been able to weep in response. She didn't know how to feel about any of this.
But it was painfully obvious that he did.
"We have a very clear agreement," Rafe said, and something about his voice made her go very still. Too still. His eyes were frozen chips of gunmetal gray. His mouth was a flat line. "I am perfectly aware of what I purchased. You should be equally aware of what you sold."
She felt as if he'd kicked her. Hard and directly in the stomach. For a moment, she wasn't sure she could speak through the impact of it. It seemed to flare out, stealing her breath. She noticed her hands were shaking slightly when she went to smooth her skirt and she hated, suddenly, the fact that she was wearing a formal gown tonight. That here she was, playing dress up. Believing in magic and miracles. Giving in to hope, of all things.
She was furious with herself. And beneath that, something darker and far closer to despair turned over inside of her and started to grow.
"If you are going to call me a prostitute, Rafe," she said matter-of-factly, fighting to keep the pain from her voice, the shock and the fury, and all that swirling dark beneath, "just come out and say it. Don't hide behind vague euphemisms."
"You sold yourself for money," he said in that silky, insulting way of his. That dark eyebrow of his winged high, aristocratic censure of the first degree. She swallowed, and pretended she wasn't affected.
"Am I not allowed to love you?" she asked, her voice too quiet, but at least it did not quaver. At least, she thought, there were layers to this betrayal of herself. Degrees. "I don't recall signing anything that forbade it."
His face darkened and his eyes grew even colder. She wouldn't have thought it possible. She was torn between the urge to go to him and hold him, as if that might warm him somehow, and the urge to hide from this. From him. From her own limitless stupidity where this man was concerned.
"Do you think I don't know what's happening here?" he demanded. "I don't want this kind of act, Angel. I told you before."
"What kind of act do you think this is?" she asked, not sure she understood him. And not at all sure she wanted to. "What do you think I'm pretending?"
"I know what I signed up for, and it does not involve pretty tears and declarations of love," he said bluntly. Cruelly. "It won't work. Do you understand me? You can't manipulate me with emotional fantasies. I bought you. I never forget that and neither should you."
Every word was like a blow, all the worse after the sensual spell they'd been living in these past weeks, and Angel was so dizzy with the pain of it that she wondered for a panicked moment if she would topple over from the force of it all.
But she didn't.
One moment passed, then another, and still she stood there, reeling but upright. She didn't know if that was a good thing. Perhaps it would be better to fold-to give in. To let this particular storm pass over them and start again in the morning, when she could summon her usual airy manners and handle him the way she usually did. When she could make it all okay with a laugh and a smile.
But she couldn't seem to make herself look away. She couldn't quite bring herself to surrender. Not anymore. Not when so much was at stake. She'd had a glimpse of what they could have been, she and Rafe-and she wanted it.
Heaven help her, but she wanted it. She wanted all of him.
"I must have misunderstood," she said, still managing to keep her voice relatively even, as if what he'd said only rolled off her back. "I thought we entered into a mutually beneficial contract. A marriage."
"Yes, a marriage," he threw at her, his eyes so cold-the coldest she'd ever seen. She repressed a shiver. "And what a marriage it is. I am such a terrible creature that I was forced to buy myself a wife whose financial irresponsibility is what led her straight into my arms. What a joyous union indeed. How lucky we are."
"All this because I said I loved you," Angel said quietly. "It seems a little extreme, don't you think?"
"I don't want your love." His voice was like a lash. Angel had to fight to keep from flinching away from it.
He moved closer, so dark and big, looming there, and it crossed her mind that she should have been afraid of him-but she wasn't. It was almost sad, how much she wanted that to mean things it couldn't. It was even sadder how very much she wanted to simply reach over and wrap her arms around him. Even now.
"I want your compliance," he said, his voice a harsh whisper that might as well have been a shout. "I want your body. I want heirs. You can keep what you call love to yourself."
He turned then, and started across the sweep of Persian rug beneath their feet, as if for the door. As if, she realized in some mix of dawning horror and something else, something that rolled through her and made her stomach twist, he had said all he needed to say. And something in Angel snapped. She felt it break, hard, and then crumble into pieces.