And they danced. Around and around the library, circling the old globe in its pride of place in the center. This time, they did not talk. They did not spar with each other. They only danced, as if they could both hear the same song, as if it played in them both, guiding their feet across the old, thick carpets. He held her in his arms as if she was his very own miracle come to life. Perhaps she is, some small voice whispered deep inside of him.
And then he spun her away, making her laugh in delight. He spun her back to him, dipping her down low in the sort of showy way that he would have abhorred in public. But this was for Angel. For that laughter of hers that made his chest feel tight. That made him believe. How he wanted to believe.
But when he pulled them both back to standing, he saw that she was crying.
“What is it?” He was shaken. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Had the monster in him struck when he hadn’t been paying attention?
“No,” she said, laughing slightly, wiping at her eyes. “This is so… I never cry!”
“I told you I was a terrible dancer,” he said softly, rubbing his hands down the seductive line of her back, wanting only to calm her. “I gave you fair warning.”
Still, the tears fell, no matter how she tried to stop them, and Rafe found he could not take it, even if there appeared to be no particular crisis. He settled them both in the leather chair so that Angel was across his lap, and he tried to calm her the only way he knew how.
“It’s not the dancing,” she said through her tears. “It’s not you. I’m not even sad!”
“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.