by Carly Bishop
She thought they spent a night and a day and another night, but after a while she felt herself pulled back into his embrace and into his kiss, and then she felt the incredible drag of gravity pulling at them.
She was again in Kiel’s lap, in the swing in the park in Aspen. Back on Earth, her watch said it was 10:52 on the twentieth of September.
With what he had given her in that hour, with what he had shared with her and where he had taken her, knowing now what it was to fly, she knew when he left, her heart would be broken all over again. But she would not trade it back.
Not for anything.
Chapter Eleven
Jessie Blahnik, Mike Massie and Scott Kline drove up from Denver for Lucy’s party. Kiel had been so much a part of Robyn’s life in the past week that it seemed impossible her friends had not met him. The shock on Jessie’s face, to find a man in Robyn’s suite at The Chandler House, made Robyn laugh out loud. Scott’s brows went up, too. Mike managed to keep the shock off his face, but he was schooled in impassive poker faces where Jessie was not.
“Jess, really. You should see yourself!” Robyn turned to introduce Kiel one more time. In a tux, he looked incredibly handsome…sexy. She put her arm through his. “Kiel Alighieri, local investigator helping me sort through Keller’s records, these are my friends, and Keller’s, from Denver. Jessie Blahnik, TV news producer extraordinaire, Michael Massie, Denver defense counsel of choice, and one of my fellow writers, Scott Kline of the Denver Post.“
Kiel shook hands with Jessie, and then Mike and Scott. Jessie turned to Robyn, pretending to fan herself from a swoon over Kiel’s good looks.
Massie launched into a discussion with Kiel and Scott over what progress Robyn had made in trying to uncover the truth about Keller’s and Spyder Nielsen’s deaths.
Robyn took Jessie back to the bedroom suite. Jessie presented her the dress bag and small suitcase she had brought up containing the backless bra, earrings, purse and shoes Robyn needed to go to the party. Jessie had only to slip into her gown and shoes, but dressing together gave them their first chance to talk in the week Robyn had been gone.
Taking Robyn’s gown from the garment bag, Jessie demanded the scoop. “I absolutely cannot believe that you didn’t tell me about this guy when you called!”
Robyn took the dress on its hanger from Jessie and shed her robe. “He’s a little hard to explain, Jess, but I didn’t mean to be holding out on you.”
“What does that mean, ‘a little hard to explain’?”
“He’s…different, he’s not—” Robyn broke off, confronted again with the difficulty of accounting for an Avenging Angel dropping into her life. “What can I say, Jess?”
“Indeed!” Jessie cracked. “A week ago, you were still in the thick of a lot of pain over Keller. Now you’re not? Now you’ve suddenly got a hot date for a ritzy party in the middle of—“
“That’s what I mean, Jess. He’s not a hot date.” She put on the backless bra and then stepped into a glittering, sequined midnight blue gown. “He’s not going to be any part of my life. I will always be in the thick of my feelings for Keller. Kiel is just…helping me.” She pulled the bodice of the gown up over her breasts and turned her side to Jessie. “Look,” she said, sticking her hand out, waiting for Jess to help with the zipper. “I haven’t even taken Keller’s wedding ring off.”
Her friend stuck the straight pins that had been holding her own dress on its hanger into her mouth and reached for the zipper placket, talking around the pins. “Meaningless, Robyn. Have you kissed him?”
In the mirror, Robyn watched her own china doll complexion go prettily, shamefully pink.
Jessie glanced up into the mirror, too, to see the dress, then did a double-take at Robyn’s expression. She snatched the pins from between her lips. “Omigod. Robyn, you’ve slept with him, haven’t you?”
“Jess, you don’t understand.”
“Are you crazy? What’s to understand? What do you know about him? Did you use a condom? For heaven’s sake, Robyn, in this day and age, you can’t just go out and get yourself—“
“Give me a little credit, Jess.” Her tone silencing her best friend’s tirade, Robyn turned away and sank onto the bench in front of the old-fashioned dressing table. She began fashioning her hair up into a high, elegant chignon. “It wasn’t like that.”
Jessie sat down on the bench beside her, facing away from the mirror. “How was it, then?”
Robyn stuck in bobby pins here and there. “He…I was caught in that snowstorm and my car got stuck off the road. I got out and started to walk—“
“Oh, Robyn! I knew I shouldn’t have let Massie goad you into running off on a wild-goose chase—“
“I had to come, Jess. You know that. I know it was way beyond the pale to get out of my car in the middle of a blizzard. It was stupid. I was on this deserted road on my way to Nielsen’s estate, and I thought I could make it. I was wrong. I fell a couple of times but…do you know what?” She picked up the hot curling iron and began working at stray tendrils of hair. “Jess, I didn’t care if I died! That’s how bad it was. I remember thinking I could be with Keller again if I just let go.”
“Robyn, no. You don’t mean—“
“I did, Jess.” Her throat locked for a moment. “I couldn’t take it anymore.” She skipped over the worst of it. “Anyway, I was about dead from hypothermia when Kiel found me. He saved my life, we made love, I…he volunteered to help me avenge—I mean resolve— Keller’s murder. End of story.”
“Well, thank God he saved your life, Robyn—” she broke off and took the curling iron. “Let me help you with this one. You have to know it sounds like he took advantage of the situation.”
“He didn’t, Jess.” She tried to keep her mouth shut, but the truth wasn’t going to stay buried, not with Jess. “The truth is, I took advantage of my own stupor to take advantage of Kiel.”
“Robyn, that’s positively daft!” Jessie protested.
But it wasn’t. It was exactly what she’d done. She was the one who saw Keller where Keller wasn’t. “Isn’t it taking advantage of a man,” an angel, she thought, “to make love with him and pretend he’s someone else?”
Jessie’s soft brown eyes, shades lighter than Robyn’s own, misted. “I don’t understand. Are you saying you were…pretending he was Keller?”
Robyn’s jaw clamped tight; her chin wouldn’t quit puckering. She couldn’t keep the tears back.
“Oh, Robyn.” Jessie reached for a tissue. “Don’t cry. You’ll ruin your mascara.”
Jessie always made her laugh. That’s the way this had all started—with Jessie making her laugh about the decadent rich and famous of Aspen. But this was too hard. “It hasn’t happened again. It won’t. He…” He’s an angel. Not to be confused with a real man. “It just won’t.”
Jessie offered a quick hug. “I’m sorry to scold. If it does happen again, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it should, Robyn. Maybe he’s perfect for you. Maybe this is what God intended when he took Keller.”
“Jessie, you don’t believe that!”
“Well—” she stood quickly and peeled out of her jeans so she could get dressed, too “—maybe I’m starting to.” She took off her sweater and put on a slip, then reached for her dress. “Fix your left eye, girlfriend.” She gave a savvy grin. “Otherwise, you know, the whole effect of a twelve-hundred-dollar dress is sorta wasted.”
Massie started pounding on the door. “You women coming out, or what?”
Robyn opened the door. He almost knocked her on the nose, but he backed off. The effect of the dress wasn’t wasted. Kiel’s eyes told her so. Jess nagged at Mike for being so impatient, but she smiled like a fellow conspirator at Kiel’s look.
Robyn sighed happily, knowing all the while what Jessie didn’t know, what heartbreak she was setting herself up for all over again.
The limousine Mike had rented was still waiting outside. “Sparing no expense,” he crowed, handing Jessie and then Ro
byn inside the luxurious interior.
They arrived by nine-thirty, half an hour after the start time on the invitation. The ballroom at the historic hotel was only moderately filled. Unlike the celebrity Christmas parties of years gone by, this was off-season, and the guest list for Lucy’s party was even more exclusive.
Jessie had to break off to spend a few minutes with the Denver TV station camera crew that had driven up separately, arriving before them. Lucy’s big bash would get a couple of minutes airtime on the ten o’clock news. It wasn’t hard to draw top performers to Aspen. The band was well known but loud.
Scott hung out with Jessie, and Massie was having an old home week. Kiel and Robyn began to circulate. Kiel was getting a lot of interested looks, enough to irritate her. “So what do you think of Mike?”
Oblivious as usual to the feminine interest, he grinned. “Quite a spendthrift, isn’t he?”
She decided to relax and bask in being the reason Kiel was so oblivious. “Michael Massie is one of the most generous people I’ve ever known, actually. Not just with his money, either. He spends probably twenty hours a week helping kids in juvenile detention centers.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed,” Kiel admitted.
“Not many people do at first blush.” She looked up at Kiel. “I thought angels had instant insight.”
A waiter stopped to offer them champagne and mushroom caps stuffed with steak tartare. “We don’t. We’re not mind readers, Robyn…. Well, sometimes.” He adjusted his statement at her skeptical look.
He thought about his mentors in the ranks of the DBAA. Only little Ariel was more a rookie at this in all the DBAA than Kiel, but between them, Sam and Dashiell had centuries’ worth of experience. Kiel gave Robyn Dash’s take on darkness lurking. “Evil exists. No way around it. The thing is, even with our powers, even with higher powers than all the angels, there are these dark crevasses in the human heart no one can see into.”
Balancing her cocktail plate and glass, Robyn polished off a mushroom. “All that free will stuff?”
Kiel nodded solemnly, drinking champagne from his crystal stem. “That’s what makes you human, you know? The ability to choose for yourself, to decide right from wrong.”
“The absolute right to screw our lives up all by ourselves, you mean.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Anyway, Mike grilled me the whole time you and Jessie were getting dressed. Scott pretty much let him do the honors.”
Robyn polished off a mushroom. “Jessie was dying of curiosity, too. What did they want to know?”
“Everything. Whether or not you were closer to proving his theory that Keller was killed to scuttle the trial. Where I came from. Massie wanted to know what my intentions toward you are.”
She choked on a sip of champagne. Kiel had to pat her on the back, and she drew lots of concerned looks. It was funny on one hand, Kiel being an angel being questioned about his intentions, and not funny on the other. She wanted Kiel to have intentions an angel could never have.
“What did you tell him?”
“To mind his own business.” Kiel grinned, but the look in his eyes told her he knew what was funny and what was not.
“Good for you,” she managed to say. “Although, if I were to guess, I’d say that only made him more nosy.”
“I just went on telling him what we’d been doing. He had to settle for that, or be an ass. He might get there yet.” He touched a tendril of the softly curling hairs at her nape. “If he does, it’s because he cares about you, Robyn. You—” He broke off and took his hand away from her hair, away from the heat of her. “You have good, caring friends. That’s important.”
“For when you leave, you mean.”
Small muscles at his jaw tightened. “Yeah. For when I have to go. But for all time, Robyn. Good friends, in the end, are the best testament to one’s life.”
Her chest tightened. In the end, Keller had been as much her best friend as her lover, the one who brought her back to earth when she went off on some tangent, the one who strung her Christmas lights and brought her flowers and drew her funny little cartoons.
Keller was the best testament to her life in that sense, but he was gone. She had to go on alone being the testament to his life, the better person she had become because of him.
She drew a deep breath and drank down all her champagne. The fizz, the warmth, emboldened her, and she kissed Kiel, bold and naughty, with tongue and teeth.
He growled deep in his throat at her, took her by the elbow and propelled her along until someone he didn’t know she knew might stop them and say hello.
The local newspaper editor, talking shop with Scott Kline, proved to be the one. Margaret, an older woman, born and raised in the valley, a woman Robyn knew to be absolutely allergic to exploiting celebrity in her paper, threw her arms around Robyn. “Robyn Delaney, how wonderful to see you! You look positively stunning!”
“Thanks, Margaret,” she answered warmly. “I am fine. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Kiel Alighieri.”
Out came the thousand-candle smile Robyn knew to be totally sincere. Margaret, like all the women before her, tumbled to it. Kiel spent a couple of minutes talking about what a relief it was to have such a fine party in the off-season. As if Kiel would know…but he made a great listener, which was all Margaret ever really wanted, second only to an avid reader of her newspaper.
Margaret turned back to her. “Robyn, I’m sorry we never got the chance to keep our appointment. I was just telling Scott that I wished I’d thought to send him those papers I copied for you. The Hallelujah caved in, and then naturally, you were not here.”
“I don’t remember now if we were just going to meet to talk shop, or—“
“Oh, no! Well,” she amended, “that, too, but you had a very specific agenda. Something to do with Jerome Clarke. The day he died. About the avalanche, that sort of thing—at least, that’s what I understood you to mean. I went through rolls of film from the newspaper accounts and made printouts for you.”
Robyn gnawed gently at her lip, trying to think back. “I haven’t even looked at my notes for the Smithsonian article since the…accident.” She didn’t want to get into her theories about the collapse not being an accident. Not tonight, especially. It was looking less and less as if they could ever prove someone had intentionally caused the cave-in.
“Are you thinking about picking up the threads of your story?” Margaret asked.
“I don’t know, Margaret. It’s hard to get passionate about the story idea again when you’ve been buried alive and excavated out.”
The old newswoman laughed because Robyn had made a joke of it. “But of course, it must be really hard to marshal any enthusiasm.”
Her last word came out loud as a shot when the band abruptly ended a set. Everyone standing around the three of them laughed, teasing Margaret.
Kiel went back to the subject of the article. “I don’t think you’ve given up the idea of returning to your article altogether, though, have you, Robyn?”
She didn’t know where he was going with his question, but his pointed tone cued her to go along. “Not entirely.”
He turned to Margaret. “Robyn was just telling me the other day about her research before the accident. Weren’t you thinking, Robyn, that Jerome Clarke couldn’t have been killed in that avalanche?”
Where was he getting this stuff? “I had some questions, yes.”
“That day was one to go down in history,” Margaret admitted, raising the level of her voice when the band started another set. “My father was a small boy at the time. Grew up, as you know, to write several history texts and to teach at the university.”
“What was his opinion?”
“Oh, there was never any doubt about Mr. Clarke’s demise. The whole town was in an uproar, all the rescue teams and such. I believe there’s even a photo of the volunteer fire department. They had a wagon on which they could interchange wheels and sled runners.”
“And Jerome C
larke? Was he in any of the photos?”
Margaret frowned. “None that I can remember. I believe it was said Mr. Clarke went up the mountain to see how he could facilitate the rescue, and was then killed in the second wave of the avalanche.”
“Where was this all going, Robyn?” Scott asked, trading his empty goblet of champagne for another as a waiter passed by.
“I barely remember anymore. I think…yes. I saw something in the Denver newspapers about Clarke falling ill at the conclusion of the apexer’s lawsuit.”
A small clutch of more rowdy guests crowded their way through to the dance floor. “I do believe Mr. Clarke was stricken with some pneumonia or other,” Margaret said.
“Then would he have been out and about in the middle of an avalanche?” Robyn put her arm through Kiel’s. “I remember also thinking it was pretty odd that his body was never found.”
“That wouldn’t have been uncommon, unfortunately,” Lucy said, sailing into the group, her spirits high. She laughed. “Shame on me for eavesdropping—but really! This is a party!” She threaded her arm through Robyn’s other arm. “I know the concept is not entirely lost on you. Come. I want you to meet a few friends I don’t think you know.”
Kiel gave Robyn’s hand a squeeze to indicate she should go on without him. It was ten-thirty by then, forty-five minutes until he and Robyn would find their way to the liquor storeroom to meet Chloe Nielsen and the mystery man. Kiel wanted to become invisible and move among Lucy’s guests just to see if Robyn’s presence in town had set someone on edge.
He moved around in his physical form for a while, finding it unnecessary to use his powers to become invisible because so few people knew him. By a few minutes before eleven o’clock he’d taken up a position and cloaked himself in invisibility near the door, just in time to see the arrival of Trudi Candelaria and Stuart Willetts.
Fascinated to see what would happen, he followed them from the time they arrived to the time they left. Despite their formal clothes and the fact that the party would go on for at least another two or three hours, the couple stayed less than ten minutes, having been snubbed at nearly every encounter.