were her friends who would remain when he must go. He couldn't prevent
himself from moving in again to claim her, anyway. Talking animatedly,
Lucy tried to ease Robyn outside her circle of friends. Kiel put his
arm possessively around Robyn's shoulders and stood firm.
Lucy grew annoyed. "Dear God, Mr. Alighieri! One would think you'd
single-handedly rain vented Robyn. Let her go."
Turned into Kiel, touching his chest, Robyn cajoled her friend. "Don't
be silly, Lucy. "Kiel is only--"
"Only what?"
"Showing me a good time, Lucy!" The music resumed, but no one around
them moved, Massie and Kline exchanged looks. Jessie could only stare
dumbfounded at Lucinda's sudden, inexplicable tantrum. "I don't
understand what you're getting so upset about!"
"He rarely lets you out of his sight," she snapped. "He controls your
every waking moment. He behaves as if you're able to dance again
solely because of him. I've quite had it up to my gills."
"Gills?" Kiel knew discretion, and he should have used it, but she'd
goaded him one too many times. He was done pulling the punches where
Lucinda Montbank was concerned. "An apt description."
"Kiel, don't," Robyn cried softly. "It's not worth it!"
"Res ipsa loquitur, Robyn," he said, eyes clashing with Lucy's. "If a
thing has gills, it must..."
But in the same instant, in the way he had of dividing his
consciousness, he sensed the color draining from Robyn's face, all the
pleasure emptying from her body.
She pulled away and turned on him. "What did you say?"
Res ipsa loquitur. An odd term Keller had used. Often. He looked at
her stricken face, at her breasts heaving, at the pulse pounding in the
thin, delicate column of her neck, and he knew what the slip had cost
him. What it had cost her.
Heat streaked down his belly. He tried to cover the mistake. ""The
thing speaks for itself'.... Gills and ill-tempered creatures--"
"That's not what you said. You said--" Res ipsa loquitur
He heard it as surely as if she had uttered the words only Keller would
have said. "Robyn--"
"Keller. You are Keller, aren't you? That's your real name, isn't it?
Not Kiel!" Her heart slammed and her head throbbed. Her friends were
looking at her as if she'd lost her mind, when the truth was she'd just
found it. She thumped his chest. "Aren't you? You've been lying to
me... you said angels couldn't lie, You said, oh God, I can't even
believe this. You--"
Massie moved in from behind her, and Jessie, who interrupted her and
took hold of her arm and tried to reason with her. "Robyn, sweetie,
no! What are you talking about? This is Kiel--"
She jerked her arm away from Jessie. Reason told her the truth no one
else could guess. "Don't tell me this isn't Keller, Jessie... can't
you see it, don't you see?"
Her whole world seemed to collapse and go silent. The music continued,
but she stopped hearing it. The air never stirred. She was making a
spectacle, but she couldn't stop herself. Kiel's eyes were shuttered,
his face closed to her. "Don't you see that's why I went to bed with
him, because I sure as hell wasn't--"
"Oh, for God's sake, look what you've done now," Lucy railed angrily.
"You've pushed her right over the edge, babbling about going to bed
with you in public. Are you satisfied? Now will you finally leave her
alone?
"Leave me?" Robyn cried, despising the hysteria climbing in her own
voice. "Leave me? He's already done that and come back
pretending--no, lying--"
"Robyn, stop," Kiel commanded, stepping forward, slowing time so that
everyone and everything around them in the grand ballroom of the
fanciest hotel in Aspen all but stopped. The music persisted in a
constant, nerve-racking hum, every note drawn painfully long.
She looked around her at the frozen expressions of confusion and pity
plastered on the faces of her friends who believed she'd snapped.
A deadly calm rose in her when she looked at Keller in the disguise of
Kiel. A furious and deadly calm. "How-could you? How could you do
this to me? How could yOU lie? Keller never lied to me."
"Robyn, you needed me." "I needed Keller." "I knew that."
She backed up. "I made love to my husband." He stepped forward, "I am
your husband." The throb in her head darted clear to her bare,
shoulder. "You lied to me, Kiel."
"Robyn, it's not so simple."
"Keller believed the truth is simple." '
"I believed that." He hung his head. He jerked the white tie around
his neck. "This wasn't so simple.
you think for one minute that I Wanted to hurt you?"
"Do you think it matters at all to me what you wanted? What should I
think?" she cried. "Should I believe could possibly have thought so
little of me? Or should just accept that in heaven they think every
mere mortal must be too simpleminded to guess the truth. Is that it?"
"No. There is no--"
"And even when I knew, even when I said that if they could send me an
Avenging Angel, surely they could have sent back my Keller, that maybe
you were Keller, even then you stood there and let me believe I was
losing my mind. What am I supposed to think, Kiel? Or is it Keller?
Kiel. You tell me."
He lowered his head. The terrible silence mocked him, the still-frozen
faces of her friends, his friends, shamed him. He had denied her time
and time again so he would never be confronted with her loss or this
anger.
He had never felt so heavy, so laden, so much less a being not subject
to gravity and space and time. He had to get out of here, had to get
her away from here.
He stilled her with his angel tricks and touched her so that together
they could be transported away, and then he sealed the rift in the
continuum of time on earth and moved with her in the blink of an eye
back to her suite at the bed and breakfast. He thought it, and a fire
to warm her began to blaze in the hearth.
She blinked and looked around the now familiar surroundings. Clamping
her mouth shut, she turned away from him. The irony clawed at her
heart. Heaven had sent her Keller and tried to make her believe he was
not. She swallowed her tears. "Why; Ken?"
"You needed me, Robyn, but no one wanted to see you go through losing
me twice in one lifetime." He stripped out of the tux coat and slumped
into the' easy chair behind her. "Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Seems monumentally wrong now--but.... that's not true. I knew it was
wrong a long time ago."
She sank down on the hearth to the fire. The supple fabric of her
sparkling blue dress gave easily enough. In another life, another
time, no matter that neatness had never been her strong suit, she would
never have risked so expensive a dress so close to the fire, or on a
hearth where soot could so easily spoil the gown.
The dress didn't matter. She couldn't think what mattered.
"Your life matters, Robyn."
"So now the cat's out of the bag, you might as well pull all the angel
tricks, even mind-reading? Or should I call it eavesdropping?"
"Robyn, could you look just once," he said wearily, "just this one
time, for the good intentions?"
Tears made her throat feel tight and on fire. "Yep, that's my Ken."
The fault Keller always found with her. But that was when he was human
and alive and more honest than an angel. "Haven't you heard? Good
intentions pave the way to hell."
He looked away, suddenly deeply angry. "You think you're the only one
who suffered? I'm the one who died in that godforsaken mine shaft,
Robyn. I was the one trapped and broken, listening to your cries and
knowing there was not one blessed thing I could do to break free and
hold you." He shoved himself out of the chair, too wound up, too
filled with grief and anger, to sit there any longer.
"If you think it was easy to watch you making such self-destructive
decisions, and then to pick you up from that snowdrift and know that
you wanted nothing so much as to die, then think again, Robyn. How do
you think I felt, confronted with those scars all over your legs, and
your hands bleeding and raw, and your battered face? If you "His voice
cracked. He had to start over. "If you think it was an easy decision
to let you believe in your heart it was me making love to you, you're
wrong. I did what I had to do to make you step back from that
decision, and I would do it all over again because saving your
ungrateful little neck was what I was given to do." "I'm not
ungrateful--"
"You can't have it both ways, Robyn. Either you're grateful to be
alive because I let you believe I was Keller, or you're not."
Her face felt tight and hot, swollen with tears she fought back. "I
wanted it to be you so much." He couldn't say anything. "Didn't you
know?"
"Robyn, dear God, of course I knew. Yes. God help me, I knew. But
there was nothing else I could do. When I became an Avenging Angel, I
possessed the same soul as Keller but I had no memory of being Keller.
But after a while, things--memories--started coming to me. I told you
how I flashed back to the cave-in as if I were Keller." She nodded,
waiting for him to go on.
"Well, it wasn't only the mine caving in. I was Keller. I was with
you there. I carved our initials in the support beam." He swallowed.
"I was the one pointing out our shadows on the wall." He stopped.
"Should I go on?"
She was numb, must have been numb not to stop him. His eyes bore into
her. "I was the one ... I lived it again. I was the one with his
hands all over you. I was the one getting hard, right there in your
car, right in the thick of Keller's memories."
Her heart thumped beneath her ribs.
"Think about it, Robyn."
The air was locked in her lungs. "Kiel ... Keller. I can't think of
anything else. Was it... is it a sin? Is it so terrible?"
He met her wee lay gaze, then had to break it off. "This was no sin.
This was the love and the lust of a man for his wife, only this body is
Kiel, not Keller." He looked steadily at her again. "I'm an angel,
Robyn. What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to deal with
carnal feelings of a mortal man for his mortal wife?"
The inescapability of it hit her hard, the tension, the need he had
denied. She finally understood it must be one thing for him to make
love to her when she was intent upon letting her life slip away, and
quite another thing for him to have such feelings, such desire, out of
a life-and-death context.
At last she understood what it was all about, the times he had touched
her and filled her needs, denying his own. She finally grasped the
nuances of all the times he had been forced to cloud her mind and
memory so she would not see Keller's need in him, or the answering
instincts in herself.
She understood that it had to be Keller they sent to her, because she
would never have come back for any reason other than Keller himself
calling her back.
"Kiel, I'm so sorry. What are we going to do? How is this ever going
to turn out all right?"
"I don't know." He shook his head. He had no reason to believe that
it could all possibly be made right, none but faith. "He sank down
again into the chair. "It might all end very soon, Robyn."
She rose from the hearth and went to kneel at his feet. "Then, make
love to me, Kiel." She spread her hands on his thighs. "Now. Make
love with me now. It can't be wrong between us."
Heat spread through his physical body "Robyn--"
"Shhh." Her hands stroked higher. "Don't say anything, just... kiss
me."
Frantically he sought the dispensation he had been granted when it was
her life at stake, but the awesome silence in his head granted no such
surcease. Her hands were very close now to the throbbing in his groin,
and he gave up the desperation. He cradled her face in his hands.
"Robyn." Her name was a prayer on his lips. A. surrender to a calling
more primal and urgent and sacred. He leaned forward. His lips
approached hers. His body hummed. The space between their lips was
alight,
charged, alive. Sparkling.
"Kiel."
He thrust his hands into her hair and pulled her closer, closer, until
the heat of their flesh melded, until the flesh of their lips
touched.
It was a kiss, he believed, more glorious, more sacrosanct, more pure,
than any kiss anywhere, in all time, had ever been. He turned his head
in the smallest possible degree, back and forth, so that their lips
brushed ever so lightly, the stroke like his own angel wings against
the vast firmament of the heavens.
But her body was mortal and was on fire and she wanted more than the
chaste and pure, more than heaven. She reached for his hands and
dragged them to her breasts. She tore at her bodice and ruined the
dress, but the beautiful midnight blue gown had long since ceased to
matter. His hands cupped her fullness and stroked. His thumbs drew
across her beaded nipples.
Her cry of stabbing pleasure filled him. Her eyelids fluttered closed
but he saw beyond them into the eyes of her soul, and he saw heaven
there.
And he saw in her eyes the faces of his unborn children.
Agony ripped through him and he began, literally, physically, to
disassemble. He wanted her children to be his so powerfully that he
had caused a rift between heaven and earth.
He felt his physical body dispersing, fragmenting like a holographic
image slowly exploding into points of light until he was no more than a
specter. He focused every bit of his will and power into their kiss,
but too quickly the instant of his disappearance came and she knew.
She opened her eyes. But for the barest specter of light in the shape
of the hands of Kiel Alighieri at her breast, he was gone. Sparkles of
light, the last of his physical energy, went out.
To Robyn, it was as if the stars had gone out that night, and if that
was true, the sun must also have died.
She sank to the floor. Changed in
ways she could not have described
with all the power of her pen, she knew she was still Robyn Delaney
Trueblood, skeptical to her bones, believing in what she could see and
hear and touch.
Heaven had taken Keller away from her again. She had no way of knowing
whether or not he would be back. Hell, she remembered the saying went,
hath no fury like a woman scorned.
She shed her dress and panties and nylons and dragged a blanket and
pillow from her bedroom to sleep in front of the fire so she wouldn't
have to wake in some wretched sweat when the darkness finally got to
her.
Left to her own puny mortal devices or not, she would continue seeking
justice where Kiel had left off. Maybe then they would let her have
Kiel back. Or Keller. Then she would believe in more than what she
could see and hear and touch.
But she doubted, as she doubted most things, that such a thing would
ever come true in her lifetime.
Chapter Thirteen
In the morning, she rose stiff and sore from sleeping curled like a rag
doll in the chair. She knew instantly that Kiel was not there, that he
had not returned in the night. Resigned, she showered and washed her
hair, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, put on her shoes and went
looking for Detective Crandall.
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