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СКАЧАТЬ CHAPTER TWO

      “YOU want to marry into money,” he said, his voice cold, as if she had confirmed something he’d already suspected about her.

      Angel wished she could tell what he thought of that—or even of her unapologetic way of presenting it. But his dark expression was impossible to read, and she wondered if her stomach could twist any further, and harder, and if it did … would she simply be sick? Right here?

      She couldn’t believe she’d actually said that. So baldly. So brashly.

      But this was the plan. The only one she had, and so what if it had sounded much better in her head? She had no choice but to follow it—because no matter how humiliating this moment was and no matter how much she hated herself and would, she thought, loathe herself forevermore, she could not currently pay her mother’s debts. There was no way. So this was what she’d come to. This terrible game while this affecting, compelling man only looked at her, his gray eyes cold and stern, and she wanted to be someone else—anyone else—more than she’d ever wanted anything.

      Good luck with that, she thought darkly, and kept going.

      “I do,” she said, and shoved aside the part of her that wanted to drown in the shame, the tidal wave of embarrassment. That kind of second-guessing was for other women, perhaps, but not for her.

      “Bold as brass, you are,” her mother had always said, pretending to compliment Angel when she had really meant to compliment herself, because Angel so greatly resembled her. And now more than ever, Angel thought viciously.

      She waved her champagne glass languidly, indicating the ballroom all around them and the party that carried on, all appropriate voices and hushed royal splendor behind them, though she never dropped his gaze. “I will.”

      Angel watched some kind of quiet storm move through his dark gray eyes then, and discovered she was barely breathing. But she was still smiling, damn it. She was afraid that if she stopped, she might have to investigate the self-loathing and the sheer, dizzying whirl of something too close to terror beneath it. This man was not at all what she’d imagined when she’d comforted herself with visions of a wealthy husband to solve all my problems, just like Allegra on the plane ride to Santina. Just as she hadn’t imagined that she would feel something like that jolting, electric thrill that had sizzled through her when he’d touched her. What was that?

      “Ah,” he said, his voice even lower than before, but still with that same effect on her. And, she thought, faintly condemning. Or perhaps she was only hearing the echo of her own, now-buried shame. “And why do you need a wealthy husband?”

      “I thought about simply asking for charitable donations,” Angel said with a little smirk. He waited. She shrugged expansively. “A better question is, who doesn’t need a wealthy husband? Given the choice.”

      “You appear to be making the choice yourself, rather than waiting for it to be presented to you,” Rafe said in that dry way of his that seemed to move through her like heat. “Very enterprising.”

      “I’m extremely practical,” she told him, as if confiding in him. As if his words had been in any way approving.

      “You’d have to be,” he agreed, “if you mean to choose a spouse in so cold and calculating a manner.”

      “Is that meant to chastise me?” she asked lightly, as if she hardly noticed one way or the other. As if it would be nothing to her if, in fact, he did mean to do exactly that. A lie, she realized in some surprise —but she shrugged carelessly anyway. “I know what I want and am prepared to go after it. I believe that when a man exhibits this kind of single-minded determination, whole nations rise up and applaud his focus and drive. Sometimes grateful kings bestow earldoms upon such men, if I remember my history.” She smiled, though it was a bit more pointed than was strictly necessary. “Though it’s been a while.”

      His grim, hard mouth entertained the faintest ghost of what she told herself was a smile. Or could have been, had he allowed it. His dark eyes gleamed. In appreciation, she was sure of it.

      “You are a very beautiful woman,” he said, and the way he said it, so matter-of-factly and without the slightest whiff of flattery, prevented her from the folly of imagining it was a compliment. “You are obviously well aware of it, as you’ve dressed to showcase and emphasize your many charms. A man would have to be dead to fail to notice that you are quite spectacular.”

      “Thank you,” she said, her own voice dry this time. “This must be what it feels like to be a show horse. Or so I assume. There weren’t too many thoroughbreds littered about the streets of Brixton the last time I left my flat.”

      Her flat was smack in a scruffy bit of Brixton, south London, that was considered edgy and unpretentious, she knew, having read that exact claim in the guidebooks—which she imagined was another way of saying a bit dodgy. Still, it was the home she’d carved out for herself—the only one that had ever really been hers.

      “It seems to me you could simply captivate the man of your choosing in the usual way, without having to make crass pronouncements about marrying for money.” His dark eyebrow rose then, challenging and faintly wicked. It was the left one, sliced through with a scar, making him seem vaguely menacing, and entirely too lofty, all at once. But not, she noted after a moment, menacing in a way that actually frightened her, as perhaps it should have done. “I think you’ll find that your sort of beauty, used with a certain clarity of purpose, is the currency upon which many marriages rest—though the participants do not generally speak of it.”

      This time, there was no pretending he wasn’t chastising her. He was—in that excruciatingly polite, excessively wordy aristocratic way, complete with the expected backhanded compliment to remind her of her place. Her sort of beauty. How patronizing. Angel rolled her eyes.

      “I am many things, my lord,” she said, unable to keep the faint note of mockery from her voice as she addressed him formally, but equally unable to keep that smile from her face, as if she was, somehow, enjoying this. Was she? Surely not. “Crass, for example. As common as muck, certainly. But never a liar.”

      She didn’t understand why she couldn’t seem to look away from this man, and his ravaged, ruined face. Why she kept forgetting to look at the scars and found herself lost in the remote coldness of his gaze instead. Why the ballroom around them seemed like a bright blur, and he was the only thing in focus. The only thing at all.

      “So what are your specifications then?” he asked after a stretch of time, highly charged and breathless, that could have been a moment or an hour. “For the perfect husband?”

      “He must be very, very wealthy, and happy to share it,” Angel said at once. “That’s the main thing, and is, of course, nonnegotiable.” She bit her lip as if ticking off items in a list in her head. “And it would be lovely if he were good-looking, too.”

      “A pity,” he said softly, that menace in his tone again, and written across his destroyed face, though his eyes seemed darker then, and his gaze sharper. Her stomach clenched in reaction. “You’re wasting your time with me. Or have you blocked out my scars from the sheer horror of looking at them too long?”

      “It was the talk of your grimy, dirty money, of course,” she replied at once, finding her way back into the light, teasing tone she’d been using so carelessly before. Because she had the sudden sense that what she said now could make all the СКАЧАТЬ