CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: one week later
Angel stepped onto the elevator and hit the button for her floor.
Those few days with Cole seemed a lifetime away. Everything was normal now—too normal. Lisa’s curtains were almost done. Her lighting had arrived the day before, and Angel had spent the afternoon supervising the installation. She’d gotten sheetrock dust all over her hair and clothes for her trouble. She felt like she was covered with chalk.
At least Lisa was happy. The spaces they’d created together were taking shape, and she was helping affirm something beautiful and important inside the woman. Lisa would live in those rooms, and they would inspire her. It could be enough, Angel thought.
It wasn’t important like saving people’s lives, but if she did it as best she could, well, it was something.
And maybe it would soften losing Cole in time.
Yeah, right. They’d only been together three days, but it had been beyond powerful. Beyond everything she’d ever dreamed. Standing there in the parking lot watching him get whisked away, she’d said she’d loved him. The utterance had taken her by surprise, but she knew it was true now. And being without him made her heart heavy—it felt literally heavy, as though it had become a useless, lifeless, leaden organ, barely worth carrying around. And everything remotely happy had an echo of pain that hurt like hell.
The bell dinged and the doors opened. She strode down her hallway, rooting through her bag for her keys.
Some days she’d wake up resolving to find him, to fight for him, but she could never quite get Macmillan’s words out of her head. She didn’t want to take Cole’s life’s work away.
And he knew where to find her, didn’t he?
Well, she’d had a lot of practice giving up the things she loved. At least there was that.
She had a meeting in an hour down the street at the coffee shop—an email off her website from a new client wanting to talk about a beach house. She shoved the key in and opened her door.
Somebody was there.
Even if it wasn’t for the savory cooking smells, the lighting was wrong. She fumbled for her mace, torn between backing away and going in. Because there was that feeble hope. Could it be?
She went in.
“Hello?”
“Come on in, darling.”
Her heart leapt. Him.
She closed the door and walked in. He lounged at her dinner table with a beer, still looking roughed up seven days later. His arm was in a cast. “Oh, Cole.”
“You should see the other guy.” He rose and closed the distance between them, pulled her to him fiercely. “I missed you so much, baby.”
“What are you doing?”
He kissed her. It was wonderful just to touch him again. Was this the long goodbye? She didn’t know if she could handle it.
He pulled away. “I made us pizza, honey. A good one this time to make up for the last one we shared, which was, admittedly, the worst pizza ever.”
“Cole, what is this?”
“Shh.” He took her hand. “I’m expecting you to put out. Like you always do when your man gives you dinner.” He kissed her neck, her cheek. “How are you?”
“Not great.”
“The shooting?” he clarified, looking into her eyes.
“Partly.”
“Do you see his face?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
He pulled her to him. “You didn’t kill him. I did that.”
“Did you?” she whispered into his shoulder.
“He was alive when I shot him and dead after, darling.”
“Still,” she said.
“Still nothing.”
She pulled away. “What are you doing, Cole? You’re needed elsewhere, I get that. And I don’t know what this is.”
“It’s this.” He kissed her then, warm and solid against her. His fingertips pressed into her arms; his lips were a demanding force upon hers. He backed her into the door she’d just closed, pressed her there. She felt delirious with happiness.
“No.” She pushed him away, even though every molecule in her cried to stay in his arms. “I don’t want a long goodbye…”
“Macmillan,” he grumbled. “He’s sorry for how he treated you.”
“I want to be with you, but I won’t stop you from your important work. Ever, ever, ever.”
“There’s always a way, Angel.”
“This isn’t logistics.”
“Everything’s logistics.”
She gave him an oh such bullshit look. “And I have a meeting.” She walked into the kitchen.
He followed her. “With me.”
“No, with a client.” She turned away from him and got a drink of water, trying to collect herself. She felt so vulnerable, so raw. His every word and his every kiss cut her heart into shreds of happiness and pain—didn’t he get that? She’d given him up. She wanted him desperately. She loved him.
“But Angel, I am the client.”
She set down the glass.
“Beachfront condo,” he said. “The only catch is it’s not around here. It’s in Singapore. And we’ll need you to use your talents, how can I put this…”
She turned.
A smile crept across his lips. “We’ll need you to bring out a certain somebody’s inner ugliness.”
“You want me to design an interior…in Singapore?”
“The design assignment is just to get you in. It’s an Association assignment. Yours if you want it. Hell, you’re great in the field, but you’ve been on the wrong side. The Association powers that be want to see if it’s a good fit. This guy has fired five designers and we feel sure you can satisfy him. I saw how Borgola took to your ideas. You’ll have no trouble finding this guy’s inner ugliness. You’d have an Association assistant. It can’t be me on this one, but if it’s a fit, there are other jobs.”
“What’s in it for the Association? Is this guy like Borgola?”
“Your Singapore client is a bad guy, but he’s not the target. He’s an influencer for the target. We feel sure this Singapore client will recommend you to our target, and there’s a Fenton Furst in the target’s place. We don’t need you to rob it, we just need the combo. It would help a lot of people. Basically, it’s a long game to get to that safe. Not without danger.”
Her heart swelled. “The important things never are.”
“You would do it?”
She gazed into his gray eyes with a heart so light and happy she thought it might explode into confetti. “I would love to.”
He let out a relieved breath. “It’s not a regular life. But we’d get to see each other. Not consistently but—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “Yes, yes, yes.”
He kissed her. “I didn’t want to be without you,” he said into a kiss. “I couldn’t.”
“Me either.”
He got a serious look. “It’s not just about the safes. As a designer, you can see things we can’t. You can get pieces of the logistics equations. Though sometimes there might be a security guard or a cook or a lackey who…” he kissed her neck, “who, all they want to do is ravish you. And pull your hair. And they would want to steal away with you. And make you scream.”
He had her pressed against the refrigerator, against the magnets. They hit the floor one after another.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: one year later
Angelique del Gado breezed into the Mikonos vacation home of Roman and Paula Hightower, past a pair of thuggish guards. She was looking around at the fine bones of the classic Greek architecture.
She’d met with them while she was busy with another job, and they’d pored over magazines and discussed parameters. She’d listened to what they resonated with, located their inner ugliness, and pushed the design accordingly. In fact, Angel challenged them to embrace it further. They never understood that’s what she was doing; they only knew that she delivered on something exquisite and ineffable.
The darkness in some criminals drove a kind of delicacy
; in others it drove gaucheness, sumptuousness. Whatever it was, she made it work in terms of balance and proportion. For the Hightowers, the watchword would be cool contemporary with a certain skewed relationship to space. She would give them the interior that would speak to them. Dare them. Excite them. She’d already picked out the centerpiece of the living room—a tilted table. A travesty of a table, but it would resonate with a certain perverseness inside of Paula, who was the brains behind one of the most vicious kidnapping rings in Southern Europe.
Over the past year she’d made a name for herself among the criminal set. Dax had arranged her first introduction back in Singapore. That had led to a few other jobs. Unfortunate that one of her past clients landed in prison for five life terms.
That summer she’d done an interior for a cowboy arms dealer, a man the Association had in their sites for an operation down the road. She gave the cowboy what he wanted and gave the Association schematic drawings of the entire place. It would come in handy as soon as the mysterious Dax assigned an Associate.
The cowboy served as an enthusiastic reference to a lot of other people in the arms trade. He was the one who’d recommended her to the Hightowers.
Angel’s Spanish wasn’t rusty anymore, and she’d gotten pretty good at Italian and Portuguese.
Angel opened her case and took out five small cans of paint. She painted a three by three swath of parchment beige on the west wall of the Hightowers’ living room. Then she painted antique salmon on the north wall. She put a yellowy orange and a sepia rose on the south and east walls.
The Hightowers were excited.
“I want you to live with these colors for a few days,” she said. “Sunrise, sunset, night, midday.”
They’d choose the salmon, and the salmon would go with the ice lighting that she’d already chosen, though they didn’t know it yet. They would think they chose it. Dax would arrange for an upscale design magazine to do a puff piece on the place once they were done. They would love living in it.
Angel did the same with different colors in the kitchen, then she glued up a few squares of the backsplash tile they’d selected so they could get a sense of things in concert. They repeated the process in the office. The Hightowers inspected the colors. Angel let her glance fall on the desk as she waited. An invoice. Lots of old names, but one that was new. Pieces for the logistics puzzle, for equations she would never understand.
For Cole.
“We should talk about cabinetry hardware after this,” she said. “I want to pin those down for here and the kitchen before you finalize on color. There are a few places in Athens. I’ll come back in a few days with samples.”
Paula walked her out onto the porch where three thuggish looking men lounged in the shade, smoking, guns glinting.
One of the men leered at Angel. She could feel him undressing her with his eyes, pinning her with his gaze, mouth formed in a feral twist of lust.
“Sergio!” Paula snapped. She said something in Greek to him, diamond earrings glittering in the sun. Angel still appreciated diamonds, but other things outshone them. Like her work with the Association. And then there was Cole...
Paula turned to Angel. “Sergio will drive you to the ferry.” She turned to him with a frown. “And he’ll be a perfect gentleman or be very sorry.”
Sergio stood up, frowning. Angel doubted very much he’d be a perfect gentleman. Just two days ago he’d ripped off her clothes and made love to her in a deserted cove. Of course she didn’t call him by the name Sergio; she whispered the name she knew him by, Cole, as he sucked her nipples to painful peaks, thrusting unrelentingly into her. And if you looked closely, you could see those were dark brown contact lenses in his eyes. And he had a hell of a scar on his shoulder. And they were getting married next month at Macmillan’s Swiss chalet—a wedding gift from the best man, who’d finally come around. They’d even sent an invitation to Dax, who politely declined. She wished her family could be there, but things were improving with them. Someday they’d meet Cole.
The three of them walked to a jeep. Paula checked her iPhone and Angel stole a glance at Cole, then looked haughtily away, playing the diva designer. They had gotten some role-playing mileage already out of this diva-and-thug setup.
He’d been right—they didn’t get to spend everyday time together like normal couples, but what time they did spend—weeks on end during downtime in glamorous foreign capitols, or stolen hours on assignments like this—was intense. Utterly focused. Beyond delicious.
She stole another glance in his direction. He dismissed her with a vulgar smile. Oh, yeah, she could feel his hands on her already.
Paula announced she could do the next meeting on Saturday afternoon, possibly four. Angel shifted her bag to her other arm and checked her own phone. Yes, that would work.
“Thank you,” Paula said. “I’m really excited.”
Angel shook Paula’s outstretched hand. “So am I.”
Sergio got in the driver’s side and started it up as Angel settled in. “Belt,” he grumbled.
She belted herself in and they took off.
“Nice day for a drive,” he said once they were on the road.
“Clears the mind,” she replied.
He turned to her. “We have to two hours before your ferry leaves, and there might be wine and a blanket in back there. I’m thinking about the beach.”
“I’m thinking that I love you, darling,” she said.
He gazed at her, serious and true.
Her heart skipped a beat.
“I love you, too,” he said.
They sped over twisty roads, heading west into the sun.
~ THE END ~
Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed Against the Dark.
Book #2 of The Associates, entitled LETHAL LIAISONS, is scheduled for a summer 2013 release. (Macmillan's story!)
Look for #3 and #4 to follow in late 2013/early 2014
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Acknowledgements
I’m so grateful to my readers and critique partners and friends and fellow authors—I love how you make the world of books such a generous, friendly place to be.
Against the Dark benefitted immensely from the critiquing magic of my author pals—Joanna Chambers had important insights on the early version, and Jeffe Kennedy, Katie Reus, Laura Bickle and Marcella Burnard provided wisdom and encouragement on later drafts. Thanks also to Katie Reus for smart, tireless guidance on all things self-pubby. Lovely Barbra Upchurch helped clean up my Spanish phrases, and Carolyn Jewel has been my formatting angel. (And you can chalk up any incorrect Spanish or formatting errors to a certain author’s inability to stop fussing and tweaking.) Thanks also to Brenda Errichiello of Eclectic Editing for the excellent proofreading.
About Carolyn Crane
I’m a writer living in Minneapolis with my husband and two cats.
I work a day job as a freelance advertising writer, and have for years. I’ve waited tables at a shocking number of Minneapolis restaurants and bars, and I’ve also been a shop clerk and a plastics factory worker, too, which I was dismal at (think I Love Lucy).
During rare moments when I’m not at my computer, I can be found reading in bed, running, helping animals, or eating Mexican food.
Also by Carolyn Crane
Urban Fantasy
Mind Games (Book #1 of the Disillusionists)
Double Cross (Book #2 of the Disillusionists)
Head Rush (Book #3 of the Disill
usionists)
Kitten-tiger and the Monk, a Disillusionists novella (2.5) in Wild & Steamy, an anthology
Devil’s Luck, a Disillusionists novella (3.5)
Paranormal/cross-genre
Mr. Real (Code of Shadows: #1)
Coming up:
Romantic Suspense
Lethal Liaisons (Book #2 of the Associates) out Summer 2013
Untitled (Book #3 of the Associates) out late 2013
Paranormal/cross-genre
The Bodyguard (Mr. Real prequel novella) in Fire & Frost, an anthology (spring 2013; can be read before or after Mr. Real)
Friar Jack (Code of Shadows: #2) out 2014
Against the Dark Page 20