The Man Behind the Mask. Christine Rimmer

filled up the world. He had dark brown hair and eyes to match. A tender mouth—half of one, anyway. He was tall. Lean. Too lean, really, but with strong, wide shoulders.

      And all that is…only fact. The full reality was so much grander, so much more complete. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen—and the most terrifying.

      How can I tell you?

      How can I make you see?

      Half of his face appeared to have melted. Remember that old Mel Gibson movie, The Man Without a Face? That was Valbrand. It happened, I’d been told, in an accident at sea that almost killed him. An accident that included second- and third-degree burns from temple to jaw on the left side—burns never treated, that healed on their own.

      Brit had prepared me, or at least she’d tried to. We’d had a few minutes alone the day before and she’d told me of his injuries, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself, gaping like an idiot the first time I saw him, so that I wouldn’t pile any more hurt on all that had already been done to him.

      So much for Brit’s thoughtful preparations. I saw him and the world spun away and I flat-out gaped. Rudely. Blatantly.

      There was a sudden, welling pressure at the back of my throat. I was so busy staring, I didn’t make myself swallow the emotion. My eyes brimmed and two fat tears escaped. They slid over the dam of my lower lids and trailed down my cheeks.

      They felt hot. Scalding. Should I have swiped them away? Probably. Tried to hide them? I suppose.

      But I didn’t. I only tipped my face to him, higher, as if to display both my face—and those tears.

      Somewhere, in some part of me, I realized that Brit had to be thinking she couldn’t take me anywhere.

      But it wasn’t something I could control. It was love like a thunderbolt. And it was my heart breaking.

      For him.

      For what I saw in his lightless eyes.

      What he was once. What he had become.

      For all that was lost.

      Chapter 2

      I gazed down at the redheaded American in the blue gown, at the wide eyes that were some gleaming color, green and gold and brown all mixed, at the tears sliding over those soft, smooth cheeks, leaving a glittering trail.

      First one and then the other, the tears dropped. They fell to the front of her dress, just below where her fine, full breasts swelled from their prison of fabric. I watched them fall, watched dark blue turn darker: twin small stains. I wanted to lower my head, stick out my tongue and taste them: the salt of her tears.

      That was when I looked away—for a second or two only, long enough to collect my suddenly scattered wits, long enough to remind myself that, while a madman might bend close and lick the tearstains from a woman’s breast, I must not.

      I was a madman no longer. I was, once again, a prince. Once again, I was bound by all the strictures, all the dragging obligations and careful courtesies that being a prince—and the only surviving son of a king—entailed. This servitude to princely sanity was necessary. I had goals. Sworn. Sacred. And murderous. Goals the madman in me was too disorganized to achieve.

      I dared to look at the American again. Her expression had not changed. She gazed at me as if all that she was, all she had been or would ever be, was mine. It stunned me how powerfully I wanted to take what she offered—right there. On the polished, inlaid hardwood of the ballroom floor.

      I had to look away again. I glanced toward the dancers in the center of the floor. Once I had loved nights like that one, in the ballroom, all the lights blazing, fine music, the laughter of flirtatious women…

      And the absolute assurance that I was where I belonged.

      But that was before the horror. Before the madness. By that night, the night I met my sister’s friend, it was all too difficult, too hurtful—the pity in such large doses, the expressions of shock followed instantly by broad counterfeit smiles.

      I longed, if not for the refuge of madness, at least for the mask. For the comfort of shadows.

      Or I had, until that moment.

      Until the redheaded American with the wide, honest eyes.

      I looked at her again and found she had waited for my gaze to find her once more—waited with her head tipped up, the tear-tracks drying on her velvet skin. I did not smile at her. My smile, after all, had become an exercise in the grotesque. Flesh and muscle pulling in the most bizarre ways.

      I was thinking, A few words only: Hello. How are you? So pleased to meet my little sister’s dearest friend, at last.

      A few words, and then farewell. I would turn and walk away.

      But no words came.

      Instead, in a moment of purest insanity, I held out my hand. I knew she would trust her hand to me, without hesitation. With no coyness.

      And she did.

      Somewhere a thousand miles away, my brave and cheeky little sister said, “Well, um, okay. Looks like I can leave you two on your own for a while…”

      Neither I nor the woman with her hand in mine answered her. Brit was far away right then. Everything was far away and I was glad it was. Everything but the American, everything but her soft hand in mine, her honest eyes, the truth in her tears, shed for me.

      The music right then was slow in rhythm. No longer a waltz, but a foxtrot. An American classic: “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Suddenly I was ridiculously smug, as if the orchestra had played this perfect song at my command. I saw I had the excuse a sane man needs to take a woman he’s only just met into his arms: a dance.

      I guided her to me, put my left arm at the curve of her back, felt the slightly stiff fabric of her dress—and the warm softness waiting beneath it.

      Her flesh, I thought and heat shot up my arm to break at my shoulder into arrows of need. The arrows flew on, cutting all through me. My body responded like the starved thing it was.

      I knew shame.

      Loss of control was a thing I greatly despised since my slow return from the horror and the madness. I might be hideous now. But I was well-behaved. And in perfect control.

      I hadn’t thought to worry about my penis betraying me. Since the horror, it kept…a low profile. At times I might imagine the joys of bedding a woman, but those thoughts were like faint echoes from a safer, happier time; not real to me anymore, vague bittersweet fantasies that always remained strictly above the neck.

      Or they had until that night, at the first in a gala series of balls honoring the imminent union of my sister and my bloodbound lifelong friend—that night, when I made the mistake of pulling the American I’d just met into my arms for a dance. That night, when I saw something I wanted beyond the triumph of my revenge and knew that it was something I would never have.

      I longed to yank her closer—and at the same time, to shove her away, turn on my heel and run.

      I didn’t fear that anyone would see the way my body shamed me. My trousers, like every other man’s in the room, were black. Black is effective at masking unwelcome bulges. And while I held the woman in my arms, no one would be glancing there anyway. And even if they had, I would not have cared.

      The shame was not that someone might see. The shame was that I had let my guard down so far and so fast that it had happened at all. One would think I would have learned better, after all I’d allowed to be done to me—and more important, to those who followed me—as a result of failing to stay in control and on guard.

      I held the American lightly, enough away that I knew she couldn’t feel my physical response to her. And I kept my wreck of a face carefully composed.

      As I led her across the floor, I saw in her sweet and dreamy