by Carly Bishop
At last she saw the lumpish shape of her car, covered by snow in the time since she had taken off on foot, but her leg collapsed beneath her one last time. The extreme mountain cold and damp ate away at her will. A dangerous euphoria threatened her thinking. Her body was so cold that her mind shut down the pain signals. She had finally found the way to end her anguish with no one around to shame her out of it or stop her.
All she had to do was fall back and let the cold sap her body heat a little longer, and then she would be free and clear. Hypothermia would save her from feeling anything ever again.
She fell asleep, startled awake and drifted off again, and finally, finally succumbed to the overwhelming illusion of warmth and peace.
Her tears froze on her lashes, and her eyes fell shut. It wouldn’t be long now.
She dreamed she heard the laboring sough of a stallion, and that she could feel the pounding of hoofbeats through the snow-blanketed earth.
Caught in her frozen dream, a golden horse and rider seemed to materialize in her hallucinations from out of the snowy darkness. A peculiar lightness seemed to emanate around them. The rider wore a long sheepskin coat, boots, jeans and a light-colored Stetson pulled low over his eyes.
“Keller!”
Untold joy suffused her sleeping mind and frozen heart. She was going now. She would not have to endure an hour longer.
Keller had come for her.
“ROBYN.” KIEL UTTERED her name and scooped her up from the hard snow-covered earth and cradled her against his body. He held her close, sheltering her, knowing it would take a miracle, and a fast one, to bring her back from the brink of a fearsome and terrible decision. She wanted to die, to let go, and she would unless he could find some way to lure her back.
He carried her back toward the golden stallion. Supporting her weight in one arm, he grabbed the leather horn, lifted a foot to the stirrup iron and swung high into the saddle. The stallion sidestepped, searching for footing. Kiel wedged Robyn’s limp body between his and the swell of the saddle pommel, then urged his mount up the steep, treacherous slope.
He guided the stallion further from the upscale ski resort town of Aspen, Colorado, beyond civilization and onto national forest service land. In a valley not too distant from Spyder Nielsen’s home, Kiel constructed a log cabin safe house in his mind and it materialized in the next instant.
Dismounting, he carried Robyn through waist-high drifts to the warm and welcoming cabin. The door closed behind him. A fire crackled in the stone hearth fireplace as the need occurred to him.
Had Robyn been conscious, he might have been a little more circumspect about utilizing his extensive powers, but she wasn’t and he feared for her life. Her hypothermia was meaningless in his arms; her normal body temperature was already restored and had been from the moment he plucked her from the snow, but the will to live had all but fled her fragile spirit.
He strode across the room to the feather bed and sat, still holding Robyn in his arms. By the light of the fire, he began to peel away the wet, bone-chilling clothes from her body. He knew at this moment it was in Robyn Delaney’s subconscious power to choose to live or die, and he feared her choice. He could help keep her alive. He could even speed the healing process, but without her will, her choice, he could do nothing.
He dropped her sodden, ice-crusted clothing on the floor and, holding her against his body, threw back the covers. Wrapping her tightly in the down quilt, he tucked her body between the flannel sheets, knelt at the side of the bed and took her raw and bleeding hands into his.
He focused all his angelic powers upon bringing the life-sustaining resources of her body to bear upon the scrapes and abrasions on her palms. As he watched, the healing began to take place. A little longer, and fresh new skin, whole and sweet, overtook the bleeding places, restoring her hands until the shape of them caught at his memory. Or rather, Keller’s memory—but it was Kiel who turned her left hand over and recognized the wedding ring, the square-cut sapphire surrounded by halfcarat diamonds, that Keller had vowed upon to be hers forever.
His throat thickened, another first for him, like the flash of despair he had experienced. He separated himself from the emotions as a ghost slips from a dying body.
“Robyn, listen to me,” he urged. “You must come back. Don’t go. Don’t go.” Her body was still and stiff as a sculpture in ice. Her body temperature was normal, but she lay still as death.
He maintained a cocoon of radiant heat around her, then let his awareness traverse her body, searching for other injuries he had not seen. When he sensed the damage to her face, an unangelic rage stirred in him.
He tilted her chin upward. Firelight illuminated the bruised and swollen cheek her Guardian Clarence had mentioned. As an angel, Kiel could not swear but he had never been as sorely tempted. Again he focused her body’s own healing power upon the battered flesh below her eye, and that injury healed, as well. Still she showed no signs of fighting to live.
Kiel jerked back the covers and ran his hand from her calf up her thigh, along her slender waist and torso, and he knew from the lifelessness he sensed that Robyn Delaney had given up.
“Don’t do it, Robyn!” he urged. “Try. Come back to me!” He shook her shoulder, and for a moment her beautiful brown eyes opened and fixed on him. “Robyn, do it for Keller. Hang in there.”
Her eyes filled with tears. Her chin quivered, and she swallowed and caught her lip between her teeth, looked away, then again deep into Kiel’s eyes. Her small whimper sounded to him like “Keller.”
Unblinking, she reached to touch his cheek, but her body had been pushed past its limits. Her hand fell away. “Hold me. Please. Hold me.”
Already kneeling, Kiel bowed his head, instinctively seeking guidance, the wisdom of a power greater than his own. Robyn Delaney hovered between life and death, and no radiant cocoon of warmth, no direction of her life forces, no therapy, no miracle save love was going to bring her back this time.
He knew how far she had come, how many times since her leg was crushed in that mine shaft that she had battled back from death’s door. She could have given up and joined Keller Trueblood in eternity a year ago, but she had chosen life then, a dozen times since then—and even this night when she fought to get back to her car.
Body and soul, her resources were spent. She needed the intimacy of another human body, the reassurance of love and life and purpose and meaning in order to go on living. She needed the love of Keller Trueblood one last time, and Kiel was as close as she was going to get.
He took this reasoning for the divine guidance he sought, and stood to tear off his clothes and join her in that feather bed in a place that had no real existence in space and time.
He drew her on her side flush to his body, and deep, cell-level memory took over, fitting her head to his breast, her breasts to his torso, her pelvis to his stomach, her thighs to his male flesh. He crossed one leg over hers, taking her more fully into his body’s embrace.
At last her body began to respond, burrowing closer, instinctively seeking contact deeper than flesh and bone, and after a few moments, a deep shuddering took her in its powerful grip. Even then, Kiel knew it was not from the hypothermia but the hollowness of her soul where the love of Keller Trueblood had lived. Her hands began to move over Kiel’s human form in deeply instinctual ways, seeking union in the only vein left to her.
He made love to her. His touch, his kisses, had nothing to do with lust, which, like swearing and all the seven deadly sins, were forbidden him. His soul was Keller’s, united for all time with Robyn Delaney’s. Making love to her was an expression of deep and abiding love, one precious moment in which he could give her reason to go on.
His human flesh grew hot and turgid. He stroked her, trailed his lips from the jagged course of her terrible scars to her breasts, to her sweetly bow-shaped lips, and slowly, slowly, he seduced her back from the terrible brink.
She called out Keller’s name when Kiel penetrated her body.
Afterward, when she had fallen deeply asleep, Kiel prayed that this union of his and Keller’s soul with hers would have the flesh-and-blood result of a child.
But, being an angel, Kiel was required absolutely to be truthful, so he admitted to himself that he had not prayed on her behalf but for himself, instead.
Chapter Three
Robyn wavered in and out of consciousness, still caught up in the remnants of a dream. Could she awaken in her dream and still be asleep? It must be so, for her eyes opened and her gaze fixed on the man in her dreams sitting quietly on the stone hearth of a log cabin.
A tide of sensual memories flowed through her. Her heart began to thump.
She watched him through her lashes. Nothing about his physical appearance reminded her of any man she had ever known—least of all Keller, who had been long and too lean, darkly handsome and deeply tanned. He was, Keller had always joked, a candidate for that weatherbeaten leathery look in old age.
This man’s softly curling hair gleamed like polished bronze. His skin was fair, his eyes a stunning, deep shade of blue, his body more muscled than Keller’s had been. He seemed ageless to her. He held something white in his hands—ivory, maybe—turning it over and over as if some treasure was concealed inside.
She had never expected to awaken from that moment when she saw Keller, when she believed that she had crossed over from life into the Hereafter with him. But sometime after seeing him, she had been compelled to turn back.
She’d expected that when she woke the dream would be over. She would discover that she had not really been saved from freezing to death by a mysterious rider and been warmed by his body. That she had not seen the light of Keller’s eyes in those of a complete stranger, and that she had not made love with him.
But she had. Her body told her that.
In her dreams, it was Keller touching her, Keller whose lips trailed fire and life, Keller whose touch incited her body and invited, no, commanded, that she edge back from extinction, Keller whose thrust she recognized and craved like no other, ever. But this man was not who she had believed he was.
Her cheeks flamed, but she could not sustain the flash of deep, piercing anger because something more deeply substantial, more meaningful than his physical appearance, spoke to her heart.
So much so that she knew.
Making love with this man was more the brushing together of her soul with his than a physical mating, which scared her more than if she’d gone out looking to have Keller’s memory blotted from her heart.
Lying naked and afraid of what she had done beneath a fluffy down comforter, she closed her eyes. The feather bed cradled her. Pillows, soft as clouds, cushioned her head. Her ankle felt whole and healthy. Her cheek didn’t ache, either, so she knew she must be in that netherworld of not being quite awake. But her heart still thumped, and the stranger consumed her dreamy dismay at finding herself still occupying her body, even in a dream.
She opened her eyes again. He had begun to whittle the piece of ivory. “What is your name?”
He looked up. His intense blue eyes focused on her in a way she didn’t understand, as if he didn’t expect her to have to ask such a question. “Kiel,” he said.
“Kiel what?”
“Just…Kiel.”
“And who are you, just Kiel?”
His lips curved.
Her eyes fastened on his lips. An errant frisson of a thrill skated over her skin. How could this, this, be a dream?
“An Avenging Angel,” he said.
“Of course.” She drew a pillow up tight against her tender breasts. She clung to her dream as if her sanity depended upon it. “That’s possible in a dream. Isn’t it? Did you leave your wings at the door?”
“No.” He raised his brow. “I don’t do wings, except under extreme circumstances.” He gave a half smile. “Even then, I don’t check them at the door.”
She smiled dreamily. “I don’t fall into bed with strange angels, either—except in near-death experiences, I guess. I’m a widow,” she confided, then frowned. “But I guess you know all that if you’re an angel, huh?”
“I know, Robyn.”
The firelight behind him set a halo around his golden red hair. Or maybe, expecting angel accoutrements, she was only making that up in her dreams, too. The troubling thought occurred to her that angels didn’t go around making love to mortals, even in dreams. Kiel was way too sexy to be an angel. The way he made her feel, looking at her, was how Keller had always made her feel, only more so. More earthy. Sexual. Rooted in what was real. Love.
But she must be wrong about dreams. Anything could happen, couldn’t it? He could know what was in her heart if this was her dream. Isn’t that what all women wanted in a mate, a man who understood what was in her heart?
She sat up, pulling the comforter up to cover herself. “Maybe that’s what this is all about. My poor little lost psyche fulfilling my deepest needs in my dreams.”
His eyes betrayed a glint of terrible guilt.
“What?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, Robyn.”
She swallowed. She didn’t understand. “Sorry for what? Being in my dreams?”
“Not exactly.” Dressed in jeans and a green-and-blue plaid woolen shirt, barefoot, male, freckled, strong and testy enough to make a believer of her, he stopped whittling and set aside the chunk of ivory and his knife. “This isn’t a dream.”
“Oh. Well.” She straightened her backbone. “In that case you need to pop out, or whatever earth angels do, and I need to be on my way.”
She tossed aside the comforter and stood, naked, her body still rosy in the afterglow of sleep and one dangerously sensual dream. She figured Kiel, the-figment-of-her-imagination-angel, would fade in a trice. That she would wake up in her own bedroom with Keller’s outrageous pen-and-ink cartoon sketches on the bookshelves, the thick gray-and-peach Aubusson carpet, the too-neat, half-empty sleigh bed and the scent from a vase of white roses that she had bought herself because Keller wasn’t around to bring her flowers anymore.
The only trouble was, when she stood, naked as the day she was born, Kiel didn’t fade. Reality crowded in on her. A bare plank floorboard creaked beneath her feet. The bed was rumpled. The scent of burning pine logs permeated the cabin.
And the Avenging Angel Kiel stared an instant too long at her body.
He stood and raked a hand through his fiery golden hair, then turned to plant his hands on the mantel and stare into the fire instead. “Get dressed, Robyn.”
She panicked. Would an angel have a gritting voice of a frustrated human male? No. Keeping a sharp eye on his broad, plaid-clad back, she snatched up clothes from her open suitcase, then stared at the designer jeans she didn’t remember packing and a beautiful Scottish wool pullover sweater of Keller’s she wore only at home. The remains of her euphoria vanished into thin air. “What are these?”
“Your clothes?”
“I want to know what is going on right now!” She put on the underwear, jeans and Keller’s sweater, then jerked on warm socks. “Who are you, really? How did these things get in my suitcase? For that matter, where is here?”
He sighed, then picked up the poker and sent sparks flying up the stone chimney. “I’m an angel, Robyn. An Avenging Angel.” He seemed to know the precise moment she was dressed and he could safely turn around again. He put the poker back in its place and sat down, taking up his knife once more. “The clothes are yours—“
“No,” she contradicted him fiercely, ignoring for the moment his delusions of being an Avenging Angel. “The sweater belonged to my husband—to Keller—and I only wear it when I’m…alone.” Her head dipped low. Embarrassment nagged at her for betraying herself. Again. That she would wear Keller’s sweater to drive away her loneliness told a pretty pathetic tale.
“I must be going crazy.” She pressed her lips together, and lifted her chin. She couldn’t question how Keller’s sweater got in her suitcase if she wasn’t willing to accept the po
ssibility of an angel—an Avenging Angelintervening in her life. “I must have put the sweater and jeans and socks there myself.”
“I thought the sweater would be a comfort to you.” Kiel whoever-he-was sat back on the hearth. His eyes never left her.
She swallowed. “How would you know that?” She met his gaze defiantly. He seemed to be waiting on her to accept the absurd, but he would have a long wait.
He tilted his head. “Robyn, I know this is a stretch to believe—“
“It’s more than a stretch, buster. It’s either loony tunes or a miracle.” She had made her reputation drawing together the threads of unlikely events, crimes, motives. She knew how battered and bruised hearts became so twisted that a woman could drown her own children or a husband kill his wife, but those weren’t things that led to a great deal of faith. “I don’t believe in miracles.”
“Not in any, Robyn?”
Her chin tilted stubbornly. “Not unless I count Keller’s presence in my life. But then Keller was ripped right back out again, so that would be a miracle gone awry, wouldn’t it?” she demanded. “Not a miracle at all, but some cruel cosmic joke I can’t ever forgive!”
He lowered his wildly blue eyes. Didn’t have an answer for that, did he? she thought. She felt perilously close to panicking. She latched onto her anger instead, watching him leaning back against the stone fireplace, his legs outstretched. His bare feet were utterly masculine, therefore completely human. And whether she’d packed those clothes herself or fallen into bed in some hypothermic stupor, she wasn’t ready to be carted off by men in white jackets.
She plopped herself down in the wooden rocker a little way away with her cosmetic bag and began tugging at the laces of winter hiking boots she had not packed, either. “Suppose you start at the beginning. With the truth, this time.”
His fingers toyed with the knife but his eyes focused on hers. “Angels can’t lie, Robyn.” His voice was still laced with that human male grittiness. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe I’m an angel or not. I’ve been sent to prevent your death.”