"Do you have any idea how hard it was for me to tell you I loved you in the first place?" she demanded. "I cried, Rafe-and I never cry. The one thing I always promised myself was that I'd never fall in love, that I'd never give someone that much power over me-"
"Angel," he said in a low voice that seemed to reach into her, finding her most vulnerable places and wrapping around them and demand, "don't you understand? All I've ever had are those ghosts, that poison. You terrify me too."
She didn't want to understand. She wanted to disappear. She wanted things to be easy again. She wanted to be anywhere but in the middle of all this painful truth telling. Anywhere but near this man, the only person alive who had ever seen her like this. No mask. No pretty words. Not even showing off her body to distract him. Nothing at all but Angel.
She couldn't take it.
"Go to hell," she raged at him, and then she turned around again, mindless and panicked, and simply ran. She dropped her bag at some point, and she didn't care. She dodged through the crowds in the concourse, weaving her way around them, running as if it was her life that depended on it now. She knew without a doubt that it did, and she didn't even know why.
She burst through the grand doors of the station and out into the street. Only then, in the pouring rain, did she come to a stop. She simply stood there and let the rain fall all over her, soaking her, while she gasped for breath. And somehow she was not at all surprised to find Rafe standing next to her, holding her bag, not even breathing hard.
"Run wherever you like," he said, his voice tight, his eyes intense. "As long as you feel you must. It doesn't matter. I will always find you."
"As if you'd want to find me!" she tossed at him, incredulous. And something else beneath it, something she ignored. "Why don't you find someone else?"
"I want you," he said. Implacable. Sure. "I married you."
"I can't do this," she said, tears mixing with the rain, and she couldn't bring herself to care. "I can't live like this. I never should have approached you-"
"But you did," he said, some fierce note in his voice that she didn't fully understand, though her body heard it and warmed. "And here we are."
"It's your fault!" she accused him. "It was just a crazy idea. I never would have gone through with it! But you were so … " She shook her head, wishing she could clear it, but nothing seemed to work. Not since the day she'd met him, if she was honest. "I never really meant for any of this to happen."
"While I can't regret a single moment of it," he said. He shifted, this strong, powerful man, as if he was uncertain. As if she meant that much to him. But how could she believe that? He sighed, slightly. "I don't want to be a ghost anymore."
She turned toward him, searching his face, looking for something she wasn't even sure she would recognize if she found it. That great red rage left her in a sudden rush, along with that driving, instinctive need to run, and she wasn't at all certain what was left. But she couldn't seem to look away from him as the rain came down in sheets all around them, over them.
"I have been alone all my life," he said gruffly. "I lost my father too young. My mother and brother excelled at cruelty. They enjoyed it. The only friends I ever truly had were in the army, and they all died in that explosion." His mouth tightened, and shadows twisted through his dark eyes. "I survived, but I was covered in scars. Suddenly my outsides matched what I'd always thought was already on the inside." He looked away for a moment, as if he was battling something, and then met her gaze again, his own fiercely probing. Furious-but not, Angel understood, at her. Perhaps none of this had ever been aimed at her. "My mother only told me she loved me when she was playing one of her games," he said softly. "She thought it was funny if she could get me to believe her, even for a moment."
"Rafe … " she whispered, her throat tight, her heart seeming to somersault behind her ribs. Something in her shifted then. The fear fell away, the hurt seemed to subside, and all that was left was that same old feeling, that sharp urge to protect him, somehow, even from this, his own past.
Maybe she had loved him all along.
"You are the first person I've ever known who is more beautiful inside than out," he said, his eyes so dark, so very dark, and Angel felt it inside of her. "I don't know why you love me," he continued in the same low voice, twisting in and around the rain that fell upon them, and her heart began to pound. "I don't know if I've already ruined it. All I've ever seen in me are these scars, long before they showed on my face. Ugly, incapacitating scars, in and out, that make me wholly unfit for the company of others. I don't know why you approached me, and I can't think of a single reason why you would stay."
She couldn't speak. He raised his hand, cautiously, and when she didn't flinch away, he slid it over her jaw to cup her cheek, leaning down close, as if the rain that fell on them was some kind of blessing. As if it held them there, in a kind of embrace, cocooning them. Washing away all the harsh words, all the pain. The past. Their families. All their shields and armor, masks and hiding places.
Clearing the way, somehow, for whatever came next. Making space for their strange marriage, their rocky start. Making it feel new. Right, somehow.
"What I know is that you are like sunlight to me," he said, his voice ragged, but sure, and his eyes warming to quicksilver as he looked at her. "You make me want to come out of the dark, Angel. You make me want to believe that I can."
She felt that dangerous spark of hope ignite within her, but this time, she let it glow. She felt it turn into a fire, then grow into a blaze. And then it began to spread. And spread.
And she let it.
"You can," she whispered, almost overcome with the heat of all that hope.
She was lost again, but this time with him. In him. Where she belonged. Where she would stay. No masks. No scars. Just them. She smiled then, a real smile, and after a moment he returned it.
"I am skeptical," he whispered, and she could hear the pain in his voice, the monster he believed himself to be, the fear. It made her heart ache. She concentrated instead on the matching gleam of hope she could see in his dark gray gaze, and she knew, somehow, that it would be okay.
That they would make this work, make it real. Together.
"I am not," she said. She turned her face into his palm, and kissed his hand. Loving him, pure and simple. Forever. She smiled wider. "I'll show you."
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt of A Secret Disgrace by Penny Jordan!
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CHAPTER ONE
"YOU say it was your grandparents' wish that their ashes be buried here, in the graveyard of the church of Santa Maria?'
The dispassionate male voice gave away as little as the shadowed face. Its bone structure was delineated with strokes of sunlight that might have come from Leonardo's masterly hand, revealing as they did the exact nature of the man's cultural inheritance. Those high cheekbones, that slashing line of taut jaw, the hint of olive-toned flesh, the proud aquiline shape of his nose-all of them spoke of the mixing of genes from the invaders who had seen Sicily and sought to possess it. His ancestors had never allowed anything to stand in the way of what they wanted. And now his attention was focused on her.
Instinctively she wanted to distance herself from him, to conceal herself from him, she recognized, and she couldn't stop herself from stepping back from him, her ankle threatening to give way as the back of her pretty wedged shoe came up against the unseen edge of the gravestone behind her.