"These walls are cluttered with your relatives," Angel had said at one point in that flippant way of hers that had made his mouth curve against the crown of her head. She had lain sprawled across his chest, her choppy hair standing in spikes he could not stop toying with, both of them a little bit dazed and replete in the aftermath of their passion. "It's like living in the center of a constant family reunion . How do you stand it?"
He'd been more interested in the enticing view of her exquisite bottom, naked and lush, than in the same old art on the walls. Especially in this particular room. He'd tested her curves with his hand, making her stretch luxuriously against him.
"I don't think I've paid attention to the paintings in this house in years," he'd said. "They are simply part of the Pembroke Manor legacy. They fade into the woodwork after a while."
But even as he'd said it, his gaze had moved across the countess's chamber to find the one painting that he'd never managed to either ignore or remove, much as he'd tried. Much as he'd told himself he wanted to.
"Who is she?" Angel had asked.
He'd wondered what Angel saw as she'd looked at the painting. Not what he saw, he'd been sure of that. Angel had no way of knowing the truth. There was no sign of who she really was in those painted features. He'd been surprised to find that there was some part of him that had wanted to lie about it-wanted to refuse to claim the relationship, as if that could erase the painful truth of it too. But for some reason, he hadn't lied.
"My mother," he'd said finally, when the moment had gone on too long. Angel had turned those clever blue eyes on him then, looking at him as if she could read him like one of the books she loved. As if, he'd thought in something closer to panic than he'd been comfortable with, she'd been able to see everything he'd shoved away inside, so far down he'd spent years pretending there was nothing there at all.
"You must have loved her very much," Angel had said quietly.
And he'd pulled her head down to his and kissed her, lazily and deliberately, stoking the fire between them, because the last thing he'd wanted to do was discuss his mother. Not with Angel, who, he'd suspected, would understand all too well the things he'd not wanted to say. Who would, he'd known, see all too clearly the great wealth of bitterness he carried inside, all these years later.
Now, alone, he stood before the same portrait and stared at it as if he was looking for clues. As if they would be buried there, in brushstrokes and oils. He saw the family resemblance. He shared her dark eyes, her high brows, the color of her hair. Oliver had had that same oval face and that same notoriously English peaches-and-cream complexion, while Rafe's distinctive bone structure and his darker coloring were all from his father. Rafe had his father's height and leanly muscled build, while Oliver had been shorter and stockier, just like her.
But more importantly than all of that, Oliver had shared her alcoholism.
Nine years older than Rafe, Oliver had encouraged it, participated in it and perpetuated it. Or maybe she had been the one to encourage Oliver to join her on that long, terrible path. What did it matter, when it all ended in the same ignoble way?
"I wanted to love her," he said out loud, to the quiet room, to the memory of Angel and her wicked half smile as she'd moved to sit astride him, helping him forget. His voice sounded raw. Harsh. "But I couldn't."
He felt a sort of wave crash over him then, catapulting him straight into some kind of emotional undertow. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't fight. He saw all those terrible images from his childhood cascade through his mind, one after the next-all the jeering, the taunts, the vicious insults. The long nights he'd spent huddled alone in his grandfather's library, listening to that razor-edged merriment elsewhere in the house, hoping that this time, this night, he would escape it unscathed. He saw himself, all of fourteen, begging his brother not to drink with his mother, and Oliver's sneering derision in return. He saw Oliver and his mother huddled together in his father's old study, long after the earl's death, swaying slightly as they drank their poison and plotted. Always plotting. They'd fed off each other. They'd made each other that much sicker, that much nastier. And without the earl around to take them in hand, they'd simply spiraled into that great darkness together.
By the time he'd left at sixteen, Rafe had been desperate to escape. He'd hated them both equally and wholeheartedly. But never as much, and as totally, as they'd hated him.
As a grown man, he could look back and tell himself that it was Oliver's influence that had so eroded any hint of maternal affection-but he knew that wasn't entirely true. His mother was a woman who had fallen so head over heels in love with her firstborn child that there had been nothing left over, nothing left to share, nothing to give a second child. She should have stopped at one. But she hadn't.
She'd enjoyed his scars, he remembered now, the memories of his terrible initial recovery period after the explosion washing over him. He had been mourning so much-his friends, his face, the life he'd planned far away from his family-and she and Oliver had taken such pleasure in calling him those terrible names. Quasimodo. Frankenstein's monster. How they'd laughed! How they'd enjoyed their own sharp wit! He had been twenty-five and barely able to imagine life at all without the army, without his friends, much less with a ravaged, destroyed face.
They'd told him he was a monster. And he'd believed them.
He still believed them.
Rafe found himself moving before he knew what he meant to do. He reached up and jerked the painting in its heavy frame from the wall. Enough. He didn't have to look at her, and the parts of Oliver that came from her
either. He didn't have to keep her hanging here, like a hair shirt, reminding him that the person who should have loved him most in the world had not managed to love him at all. Enough.
He moved to the fireplace on the opposite wall and he didn't let himself think. He cracked the painting over his knee, exulting in the loud sound it made as it broke in two. He should have done this years ago, he thought. And then he fed her to the fire. And watched her burn.
It was as if some kind of spell was broken. Something hot and unbearably heavy moved through him, then, abruptly, was gone. His chest heaved as if he'd been running up the sides of the mountains outside. He thought of Angel's warm, sweet mouth as she'd explored each one of the scars on his face and across his torso, tracing them from start to finish, licking and kissing her way across them, until he suspected she knew them better than he did. Until he'd half believed that she had healed them with her touch alone, believed her capable of that. He thought of her first, arch comment on his disfigurement in that long-ago ballroom, her blue eyes sparkling with life, with merriment.
Not exactly the Phantom of the Opera, are you? she'd asked.
The manor house was so empty. He was so empty. Was that the McFarland family legacy? Would he molder away in this place? Both his mother and Oliver had died here, bitter and alone and incapacitatingly drunk. Was that his future too? Would he painstakingly reconstruct the manor house so it could stand as the perfect mausoleum to hold him as he slowly turned to dust?
He was already made of stone, he thought bitterly, staring at the painting as it blackened and curled. Who was to say he would even notice his own, slow decline?
You might as well have died, she'd told him, her blue eyes dark and haunted with the pain he'd caused her, because all you are now is a ghost.
And he understood then. It fell through him like light, like her smile, burning him alive from the inside out. Making him realize exactly what kind of life he was living here, and what it meant. What he would become if he continued along this path. If he continued to listen to the drunken jeers of the departed instead of the living, breathing woman who had dared to stand in front of him. And see him. She had truly seen him.
He could not repair the past; he could only restore the destroyed wing of a grand old house. He could not build his way back to a happy childhood or a loving mother. He could not make this house perfect enough to prove, somehow, to all of his lost family that he was worth the love they'd denied him.
He finally understood.
Rafe had been a ghost for most of his life, and Angel was the only person who had ever seen him. All of him.