by Carly Bishop
And as if that weren’t enough, no matter how disloyal and wicked she ought to feel, her eyes still fixed greedily on the bronzed hairs at Kiel’s throat. She admitted to herself that she had wanted that kiss.
She took a deep breath, reassuring herself that it didn’t make her a despicable person, and that she still controlled her destiny. Whatever attraction she felt to this man, this…angel, she could handle. She looked up at him. “What now?”
“Let me help you, Robyn. I promise you we will get to the bottom of Keller’s death.”
“I make the calls?”
“So long as I’m with you,” he agreed, an unruly lock of bronze hair falling over his brow, “you make the calls.”
“Good.” She angled her head toward the open door and the invisible barrier that blocked out the weather and shut her in. “You can start by opening the cage door.”
Without the least outward sign that he was banishing the force field, he did so. When she could smell the snow and feel the cold, Robyn accepted the absurd. Kiel had supernatural powers.
Devil or angel?
She had no basis for a decision other than his word, which even with her deeply ingrained skepticism, she somehow, finally, believed.
Kiel must be an angel.
She could trust him. Together, they would avenge both Keller’s death and that of Spyder Nielsen’s, the man whose murder remained unsolved and unpunished because Keller had died before his time.
SHE WANTED TO DO THINGS the ordinary way. No angel tricks, and she made that clear. He donned shoes and socks and put the small piece of ivory carving in his sheepskin coat pocket. His boots, the Sorels, one of the true trademarks of a native of the Rockies, looked broken in, another trademark.
“Your car,” he said, “is on the other side of that ridge. Are you sure you want to hike out of here?”
“I’m sure.” The snow had stopped and the clouds parted. Sunlight glittered on the blanket of white snow, reducing it to drifts and patches where the late summer alpine flowers peeked through. Bedraggled as they were, the pretty blue wood asters, columbines and alpine gentian weren’t ready to give up the ghost for winter.
Robyn took heart from their example and went through the door. “I could use the exercise. Besides—" she shot Kiel a look “—you can’t be popping up with golden steeds and mountain hideaways all the time. Not if you’re sticking with me.”
“No more wish fulfillment?”
“None. Mitts off my fantasies, Kiel.” She glared at him. “They’re mine, and they’re secret, and they won’t be fantasies anymore if you make them come true. I’m serious.”
His look said it was her seriousness that was the problem. “You’ve heard why angels can fly, haven’t you?”
“Because they take themselves so lightly?” She rolled her eyes. Every angel book in a decidedly flooded angelbook market contained some variation on the theme. “Silly me. I thought it was the wings.”
But without any wings of her own she was feeling incredibly light on her feet, and stronger than she had been even before the rotting mine shaft timbers had crushed her legs. Toting her own suitcase on principle, Robyn struck out in the direction Kiel had indicated.
He caught up with her, matching his much longer stride to hers. Dressed in jeans and the plaid flannel shirt, he let the gorgeous shin-length sheepskin coat flap open. They went along for several moments in silence. Robyn spent the time thinking about how striking the deal with Kiel had changed her own plans to confront Stuart Willetts and Trudi Candelaria.
After a while she also unzipped her parka—the one she hadn’t packed, either—and put back the rabbit-fur-lined hood. The sun warmed everything in Colorado, melting off snowfall in a few hours everywhere but atop the fourteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks.
Rugged granite dominated the landscape. She picked her way across the rocky ground, choosing a path over damp layers of pine needles. It was easy to believe in back country like this that you might never find your way out. She should be thanking Kiel—without him she would have had no idea which way to go to get back to the road. On the other hand, she wouldn’t be where she didn’t know where she was if it weren’t for him.
She spotted two squirrels chasing each other over a boulder jutting out of the ground. The bushy-tailed little guy in the lead must once have put up a hell of a fight—he had a raggedy ear and only one front leg. Kiel stopped and knelt to watch the pair of squirrels. Robyn finally asked herself the obvious question…why wasn’t her own leg actively protesting the strenuous hike?
She gave Kiel a sideways glance. “Are you going to fix the squirrel’s leg, too?”
“No leg to fix.” He kept watching the pair of squirrels. “I didn’t fix your leg, either. I just speeded up the progress you would have made yourself.”
“Put it back. I’d rather do it myself.”
Squinting against the sun, he gave her a quizzical look. “You really want it back the way it was?”
“No.” She meant to say yes, but the truth popped out. How contrary would she have to be to wish her leg ached again? She had to clamp her jaw hard so her chin didn’t start trembling. His question went to her heart, to the way she dealt with the world.
She put her suitcase down on a rock and sat down on the one next to that, folding her long legs up like a grasshopper and wrapping her arms around them. While everyone left in her life was busy encouraging her, telling her how well she was fighting back, coping and rehabilitating, she didn’t much like herself anymore.
She didn’t even like her plan to march in and get in Stuart Willetts’s face about his affair with Trudi. The whole idea lacked any hint of the finesse she had prided herself on in her career.
“I didn’t used to be like this,” she said, resting her chin on her knees, watching a patch of snow melt away under the blazing sun. Kiel sat down beside her. “My dad was always making whatever happened that didn’t suit him into this huge battle. There always had to be someone else at fault, something to be overcome, some evildoer to be defeated. You ‘n’ me against the world, kid, he’d say.”
She didn’t want to be against the world—with or without her father, she explained to Kiel. And she hadn’t been, not since she’d figured it all out at the tender age of eight when Bobbie Cantwell stomped her 100 percent spelling paper into the mud on the playground and she decked him and her third-grade teacher made her come back inside the school room and write one hundred times on the blackboard Fighting is never the answer.
But this past year she had let everything in her life be reduced to fighting. She had to fight to live after Keller had died, fight the dark inside and out, fight to recover, fight to perform the grueling physical therapy work, fight her stubborn heart, fight a mugger, and now, fight her leg being better even though doing so made no sense at all.
Kiel cuffed her gently on the chin when she had spilled all that, letting his fist come to rest on her shoulder. “Some things are worth fighting for, Robyn.” Her name sounded like an endearment on his lips. “You just have to be a little more discriminating.”
Tears prickled at her eyelids. She nodded. “I know.” She blinked back the pooling tears.
“This rule about angel tricks, for instance,” he said, straight-faced, his smiling eyes goading her out of her pity party. He gestured toward the cabin, which still sat nestled at the low point of the valley. “I can’t exactly leave a mountain hideaway where there isn’t supposed to be one.”
Robyn looked askance. “You remind me of Keller’s five-year-old nephew, Nicholas.”
“Me?” he croaked.
“Is that so surprising?”
“Well…I’ve never been a kid.”
“Well, you’re just like him. One more angel trick is the same thing as one more cookie or one last glass of water before bed. In a pinch he’ll even go for another kiss.” She smiled. “Though Nicholas isn’t real big on kisses anymore.”
Kiel laughed, but the sound faded in the thin mountain air. “Gi
ve him a few years.”
Robyn broke off the look Kiel gave her. “Do your angel thing, Kiel.”
He did the angel thing and made the mountain cabin where he had made love to her vanish into thin air. The human thing, kissing Nicholas Trueblood’s auntie again, would have been a terrible mistake.
DESPITE HER UNHAPPINESS with her plan to confront Stuart Willetts and Trudi Candelaria, she knew it had to be done. If nothing else, Robyn thought, the respectful, professional approach was to allow them both to state their side of the story.
When Kiel led her back to her small coupe, the snow had melted, and the ease with which Kiel pushed her out of the mud made her shake her head.
She pulled a U-turn and headed back down the mountain. She needed a shower and fresh clothes. She drove to The Chandler House, a bed-and-breakfast in Aspen proper, checked in to her small Victorian-style bedroom, showered and lay down for a while. Later, alone in the four-poster bed, Robyn woke and got up, enormously reenergized.
Kiel had arranged a light supper to be brought in on trays. By seven that night, Robyn was prepared. Kiel stopped her only long enough to put around her neck the small ivory carving he had completed and strung on a fine strand of gold. Standing behind her at an elaborately framed mirror near the door, he showed her what it was.
Robyn stared at the intricate pair of angel’s wings, joined in the middle, resting against her flesh. The ivory seemed to take on the radiance and sheen and warmth of the strand of gold. Centered in the deep V-neck of her mauve mohair sweater, the tiny wings were more beautiful than those of a butterfly.
“A reminder,” he said.
She swallowed; the wings seemed to move. “Of what?”
“That an angel takes herself lightly.”
THE HOME OF THE MURDERED Spyder Nielsen sat on the most coveted piece of residential property in all of Pitkin County, Colorado. The view, the sheer panorama, was unmatched anywhere in the Colorado Rockies.
The house itself was enormous, eleven thousand square feet, Robyn knew. Foreign nationals, princes with fabulous wealth, had built houses in the area nearing fiftythousand square feet, so this house could only be called pretentious in a relative way.
As Robyn drove up the circle drive and parked near the garage, she thought this was the most stunning, natural use of granite and glass she had ever seen. The native landscaping hid the single-story house from the view of the road until the last possible second. Such was the power of very deep pockets.
Spyder Nielsen had parlayed his ski jumping into a reputation exceeded only by his fortune, and Trudi Candelaria, by escaping the conviction for his murder, had fallen heir to it all.
Robyn drew a deep breath and opened her door slowly, but Kiel bolted from the car. Accustomed as he was to flying to the stars, traveling the firmament, closed-in spaces smaller than a house this size made him crazy. Panicked by the dark, she knew what that kind of phobia was all about, but she was still smiling when Kiel punched the doorbell. Angels with egos and phobias amused her.
A sharp-faced middle-aged woman answered the door. “Ja?”
This was not a surprise. Frau Kautz had returned from her holiday, but Robyn’s curiosity rose. Elsa Kautz had been Spyder Nielsen’s housekeeper long before he ever brought Trudi Candelaria home. Robyn would have expected Trudi to get rid of her, or that the woman would not have wanted to stay on with the woman accused of murdering Elsa’s beloved Spyder.
Robyn sucked in a quick breath and stepped forward. “Frau Kautz, my name is Robyn Delaney. This is my associate, Kiel…” She rushed on, not having thought to ask what he used for a last name. “We’ve come to see Ms. Trudi Candelaria, if we may, and Mr. Stuart Willetts. Are they—“
“Kiel?” she interrupted, looking right through Robyn. “Vaht kind of name—“
“Ezekiel, Frau Kautz.” He turned on a thousand-candle smile, glided forward, took the daunting woman’s hand and kissed her knuckles in a gesture reminiscent of a European count. “Kiel Alighieri. At your service.” In spite of herself Elsa’s stern visage cracked.
Kiel pressed his narrow advantage. “Ms. Delaney is a famous writer. She’s considering a work on Spyder Nielsen.”
It took all Robyn’s mental resources not to go slackjawed at Kiel’s choice of a surname to use, or his approach. This wasn’t the game plan—wasn’t even close to the cover they had decided upon, but he was winging it blithely past a barrier Robyn hadn’t prepared for, deftly turning the forbidding Frau Kautz from a harpy at the gates into a valuable ally.
With a few brilliantly conceived asides on how vital the old Frau would be to the success of the biography, Kiel had the woman leading them into the house, through the icy elegance of the stark and pristine white living room and the superlative ambience of a dining room done in shades of gray and mauve.
“Alighieri?” Robyn managed to whisper as they followed Frau Kautz.
“Yeah,” he grinned without even looking at her, talking sideways. “You know, Dante’s surname?”
“I know Dante,” she whispered disgustedly, “I’ve just never seen such rank impudence!”
“Me, neither,” he shrugged, still grinning. “Just a little spin on the inferno thing since I’m down—never mind. Show time.”
In the massive entertainment room where they had arrived, Trudi Candelaria sat curled up on a chaise longue flipping indolently through a recent copy of Town & Country. Dressed in gray raw silk leggings and a pink cashmere sweater, she had kicked off a pair of gold sandals Robyn had recently seen on sale in Denver for three hundred dollars.
The room itself was enormous. Twenty-foot ceilings, three conversation pits, a fireplace at each end, floor-toceiling glass windows. A wall of glass, really, perfectly framing the Maroon Bells, the most famous and photographed mountain peaks in all of Colorado. An Enya CD played on a flawless acoustic system.
Facing the double French doors into the room, Stuart Willetts sat at the foot of the chaise, massaging Trudi Candelaria’s feet.
Robyn’s anger at Willetts, at this proof that he had in truth taken up with Trudi Candelaria, rose like bile in her throat. She exchanged glances with Kiel. She felt a calming aura swathe her. She could almost hear Kiel’s sentiment. Easy, Robyn. Frau Kautz rapped softly on the doorframe.
“What is it, Elsa?” Trudi deigned to glance up from her fashion magazine. She seemed indifferent to visitors, and gave no hint of recognizing Robyn. Willetts ignored the interruption entirely until Trudi’s interest sharpened when she saw Kiel.
“A Ms. Robyn Delaney to see you, ma’am, and Mr. Kiel Alighieri. Ms. Delaney is a famous author interested in interviewing you for Spyder’s story.”
“Robyn?” Willetts said, his head jerking up. In the split second between hearing her name and seeing her, his shoulders stiffened. In the next, he managed somehow to arrange his handsome, narrow face in an expression that might have passed for pleasant surprise. “My God! It’s been…a year. How are you?”
His perfectly delivered solicitude galled her, all the more because she had expected to see guilt in his eyes, and there was none. She chided herself for being so artlessly naive. Michael Massie had warned her. Kiel had warned her.
She knew better.
She had interviewed more than a hundred murderers, several of them for days on end. Not one of them had guilt flashing over them like a bright neon sign. So why expect Stuart Willetts to roll over and give himself up?
Because she thought it should have been different with someone she had known before? It wasn’t at all. If Stuart Willetts had been successful in concealing his early attraction to Trudi Candelaria, Keller had been deceived as well. But Robyn Delaney wasn’t rolling over and giving up, either.
“I’m fine, Stuart. Physically.” She left it to his guilty conscience to make whatever he wanted of that.
“Who is this woman, Stuart? Do you know her?” Trudi’s beautiful plastic face creased as she dragged her gaze off Kiel.
“Don’t you remember, darling,�
� he said. “Robyn’s husband was—“
“Never mind.” Trudi’s voice was whispery, childlike, but her tone matched the icy decor. “Send them away. I’m not interested.”
Kiel stepped forward to shake hands with Willetts. “Kiel Alighieri. I’m an associate of Robyn.” He turned to Trudi. “You may be interested. Robyn’s husband was Keller Trueblood.”
Trudi’s enormous brown eyes narrowed as she turned her head slowly toward Robyn. She said nothing. One song after another played on the CD. Willetts seemed to hold his breath, waiting on Trudi’s response. At last she spoke, her whispered voice tinged with melancholy.
“Did you love him very much?”
“Yes.” Robyn’s answer simply spilled out. She had been prepared for anything from this woman. Bitterness. Outrage. Contempt. Anything but that question framed in such sympathy. Robyn crumbled. She felt faintly nauseous. She wanted to turn and walk away. Or run.
She stood there and held her ground. Kiel sat in a deepcushioned plum-velvet-covered chair. Stuart remained standing, his battleship gray eyes fixed on her. His uneasiness seemed to grow in tandem with hers, but that couldn’t be.
It didn’t even matter whether Trudi’s sympathy was genuine or a calculated effort to knock Robyn off her pins. The only thing that mattered was her choice. Her response.
She couldn’t stand up and fight for what needed to be done if she couldn’t deal, a year after the fact, with having lost Keller. It was a question of deciding once and for all whether she would be defeated, crushed by her loss, or if she would rise up again and conquer her terrible, cold-sweat fear of darkness…and then find the grace and courage to be herself, alone.
“You’re not in this alone, Robyn.”
She turned to Kiel, grateful he could read her thoughts, for this sliver of time, at least. But she suddenly had the eerie sense that Trudi and Stuart were caught up in some kind of suspended animation, unhearing and unseeing. Neither moved. The expressions on their faces were static. Frozen.