by Carly Bishop
Her pride was at stake, but her mortal life, the life of the babe, meant more. “Help me. Please.”
His human form, calculated to make mortal beings believe they were dealing with another mortal, breathed deeply.
“Will you do as I say?”
The sudden tension between them felt thick and throbbing as a pouring rain in a monsoon. Humor was the only defense left to her against such a question. “When did I ever do as you said, Angelo?”
“Never.” He smiled again, and shook his head. “Will you at least trust me, Iso?”
Tears sprang to her eyes so fast she had no chance to hide them. She knew she had failed utterly to distract him from asking whatever he wanted. This question of her trust in him was a loaded one, and he knew it.
But perhaps she was making far more of this than it was worth.
She blinked away the sudden tears. “You’re here with me to avenge the death of Seth’s mother, and to safeguard our lives. I trust you absolutely to do those things.”
He must have understood the limits of her trust—clearly—because in the next instant, his mortalseeming complexion darkened with anger. “In the end, nothing may turn out as you would choose.”
“Is that a threat, Angelo?” He had it in his power to thwart her attempts to remain with Seth.
“Of course not.”
She swallowed. She refused to let it lie. “It feels like a threat. Like you’re angry, like you will go out of your way to assure that I can never have what I want.”
He could not, it seemed to her, take his eyes from her face. Old passions lit his eyes, but his voice was without expression. “Do you believe, Isobel Avedon, that I would ever do anything to hurt you?”
There it was again, the question of her trust in him, just phrased in another way.
“Answer me, Iso.”
“No, then!” she cried. “I do not believe you would willingly do anything to hurt me. But this child has no one who truly loves him. If Candless cared, he would have given Seth’s mother anything in his power. I know that. So if you’re asking me to accept on faith that things will not turn out as I want them, I cannot. Then you would be asking me to hand Seth over whether Candless’s family will love and take care of him or not. That won’t do, Angelo. I won’t do it.”
Chapter Four
Angelo faced the toughest of all critics in his old friend Pascal. They’d agreed, in a manner mortals would deem telepathic, to meet at the Brentwood Smoking Club where men of Candless’s ilk gathered for a fine cigar and espresso or brandy, perhaps a merlot as old as the hills.
Conversations here tended toward the sublime. No one got particularly disturbed over anything. What was the point of this fine establishment, if not to put the outside world at bay and bathe the senses in the exalted for a couple of hours?
But this night, the public revelations of Ian James Candless, carried on every California station and half the cable network news organizations, had the place in a mild uproar.
It was flatly unimaginable that the old man would claim an illegitimate son at this stage in his life. Why not pay off the mother, especially when you possessed a half-billion-dollar estate, and let your small indiscretions fade gently into oblivion?
Angelo thought it was a good thing Isobel was not here, or the good gentlemen of the Brentwood Smoking Club would have gotten an earful and more on the subject of “small indiscretions.”
He couldn’t blame her. She had spent hundreds of earth years in her guardian capacity easing the burdens of women left to cope alone with their babies, particularly the ones whose husbands—or at least the fathers of the babies—had left them.
A rose by any other name…philandering was still adultery, and Isobel had zero tolerance.
Pascal was amused. Not that he condoned such behavior. Lust was one of the Seven Deadlies, and adultery was specifically forbidden in the Ten Commandments. His attitude stemmed from Isobel’s chronic naiveté.
“As long as human beings walk the planet, my friend,” he said, pausing to fashion smoke rings that rose toward the ceiling, “sins are bound to be committed. Isobel is human again, bound to folly. What is your excuse?”
Angelo set aside his glass of wine. “I have none.” He’d known their conversation would finally come to this.
Pascal’s brow rose. “You will be asked to answer more fully than that before the heavenly councils.”
“Don’t you suppose that if I could come up with some mildly feasible explanation for my own intentions, I would practice it on you?”
Tapping ashes into a crystal ashtray beneath a small brass lamp on the table between them, Pascal backed off his goading. “What are your intentions, my friend? What is it that you want?”
Angelo bowed his head, blocking out the clink of ice in glasses, the scent of tobacco burning and the low murmur of masculine voices in the Brentwood Smoking Club.
In his mind’s eye, he saw himself succumbing to the distant pull of his centuries-old attraction to Isobel. He saw her again, emerging from the bath she’d shared with the babe, her alabaster skin warm and flushed, her shift conforming to the curves of her body, her breasts swelled with milk for the child.
Isobel was alive again—truly alive—fresh and vital, bursting with life and a joy different from any an angel ever experienced. Her joy in being fully human was all the more precious for how fragile it was, how fleeting it might prove. Life was precious, and he found that he wanted it once more as well.
He shifted uncomfortably in the richly upholstered hunter-green leather chair.
Without so much as a word exchanged between them, Pascal nodded. He understood, better than any of their peers, the battle that raged in Angelo’s consciousness between duty and desire, a desire he knew would never have arisen had Isobel not done what she had done.
Pascal had spent the better part of two hours laying waste to every argument Angelo could summon for taking on this case himself. He had given up. Angelo could lay waste to his own reasons, but only Isobel mattered.
“What will you do?”
“Help her, any way I can.”
“Will you take on your human form?”
Angelo shrugged. “Whatever it takes.” He offered his suggestions on a number of pending cases for the International Avenging Angels, then stood, struggling for a way to clarify, even to himself, what was at stake, why he could not hand over Isobel and the babe to any other halo.
“These things happen for a reason, Pascal. Surely there was divine intent that Isobel do what she has done.”
Pascal blinked slowly, a wicked spark of humor lighting his eyes. “Ah, at last the old ‘mind of God is unknowable’ argument, is it? And by extension, surely it was meant to be that you and Isobel should meet again like this, else there is nothing but chaos in the universe?”
Angelo nodded and smiled, glad that Pascal understood.
“Mark my words, Angelo de Medici, you will make the choice yourself, to do exactly what Isobel has done.”
“That will never happen. We were meant to meet again, in this way, I am sure of it. I want another mortal life to spend with her, but not now. I am an Avenging Angel, and I will always be.”
Pascal shrugged, delighting in a physical essence with which to elaborate, and winked. “As we French say, mon ami, Que sera, sera.”
WHEN HE RETURNED to the small Victorian mansion set high up on the hill near San Juan Capistrano, Angelo found Isobel awake, curled up in the window seat, staring out into the moonlit night.
Materializing in his human-looking form, he stood well back in the moon shadows, curiously unprepared to speak to her. Her body was clearly silhouetted in the thin cotton shift. He found himself stirred in the most masculine ways, making him unable, as well as unprepared, to speak. Still he knew she was aware of his presence.
After a while, still watching clouds scuttle past the moon, Isobel broke the silence. “How did the police artist know what I looked like?”
Of such mundane thing
s, he could speak. “Once the news broke, the pair of slugs you ran into at the shoe-repair shop fell all over themselves to get to the cops with your description.”
“For money, then?” Her voice caught, frayed by the fear of an all-out search for her.
“Yes. A reward for information is a fairly standard thing.”
“The same thing would have happened if I’d gone to a shelter, wouldn’t it?” She refused to let the seeds of panic take root in her. “Someone would have betrayed me.”
“Worse. You’d be in some eight-by-nine cell by now, and Seth would be in overnight foster care.”
Isobel shivered. Her sigh was one of gratitude. Angelo found the last thing he wanted from Iso was her thanks. “What are you doing awake?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I know my…that a body needs to sleep, but it makes me worry all the more.”
“What does, Iso?”
That the police will come. “That something terrible will happen while I’m sleeping.” Her head dipped low. Moonlight glinted off her sable hair like quicksilver. “That something will happen to the babe, or that I will awake and this will all have been a dream I dreamed out of season.”
He saw clearly the genesis of her fears. Angels never slept, and so never dreamt. What need was there of dreams in paradise? But it was equally unheard-of that she had embarked on a mortal life again. She was afraid to waken and find that this was only some errant dream.
Fearful.
“It’s only human, Iso.”
She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Something else I never expected.”
“How could you?” Perhaps until this hour, she had herself forgotten her own powerful fear of men empowered to detain and interrogate any citizen, good and bad alike.
“I couldn’t have remembered what real fear was like. You’re right, as you have always been.”
Her bittersweet remark caught him off guard, mostly because he knew it wasn’t true that he had always been right.
She had already gone on to other things, other concerns. “I want to know the mother’s story before I do anything about Candless’s appeal to return Seth. I was wondering what she was doing in that neighborhood, and why she never contacted Candless again about his offer to let her live on his estate if she turned the baby over to him. How do we learn such things now that she’s dead?”
“There are ways.” He sat on the floor a few feet away from Isobel, his back against a wall. “You didn’t know anything about her when the shooting started?”
“No. I had never been guardian to Seth before that time. How will we find out about her? About why she never told Candless she was pregnant with his child?”
Angelo looked curiously at her. “Iso, you know that almost half of all babies born in this country are born to single mothers?”
She gave an impatient sigh. “Better than you. I only meant that she must have had a reason for keeping her pregnancy a secret. Did she tell anyone? Did she have anyone to help her? Did she intend for him to ever know? Maybe she was afraid of Candless or what he would do. Maybe she knew he would kill her, or hire someone to do it for him. Maybe that’s why she dropped out of sight again when he refused to give her any money.”
“Or maybe,” Angelo warned softly, “the babe’s mother had only feared what you fear. That with all his resources and power, Candless would take the baby from her.”
Isobel’s chin went up. “Are you saying that with all his resources and power he would not have had to murder Seth’s mother? If that’s true, then why was she murdered? And why now, unless she represented a threat to him?”
“If she represented any kind of threat to him, Iso, all Candless had to do was to follow the legal advice he was given. He didn’t have to admit to his infidelity or claim the baby at all to make the same offer after her death.”
Isobel pulled her knees to her chest and drew the cotton shift down to her ankles. If she knew what effect she created—how vulnerable, how feminine—she gave no indication of it at all. “Do you think Candless is beyond caring what his family thinks? Why else would he make such a statement?”
“Maybe he intended to send his family a message.”
“Then he’s using Seth’s existence to bludgeon his older children.” Isobel shook her head. “Maybe I should just take Seth and get as far away from this city as I possibly can. He wouldn’t come after me. He doesn’t care enough about Seth one way or the other.”
“I think you underestimate him, Iso. He has the clout to demand a police dragnet, and afterwards, to send private dicks after you for as long as it takes,” he warned her, leaving aside the issue of how she would accomplish such an escape. “Is that the way you want to live?”
She didn’t answer. He felt fear growing like a living thing inside her. Maybe he should have stopped.
“Iso, he controls a half-billion-dollar estate, and now he’s publicly acknowledged that this baby is his child. At the very least, Seth is entitled to a share of Candless’s estate. At the old man’s discretion, Seth could wind up with the whole ball of wax. People kill for far less than what’s at stake here.” He glanced toward the makeshift crib. “They’ve already tried.”
He didn’t have to get any more graphic. He saw in Isobel’s posture how clearly she understood the danger to Seth, and the threat he represented to anyone who stood to inherit a portion of the Candless estate.
“Will we even find anyone willing to talk to us about Seth’s mother now?”
“There are ways.” He approved her insight. It would have been far easier to find someone willing to talk before the murder of Seth’s mother.
She turned expectantly toward him. “Can we…can you go back in time?”
Angelo went very still. Her suggestion blindsided him, and he wasn’t used to being taken by surprise. But he knew in the collision of his intellect and soul that if he were to go back in time and take Isobel with him, it would not be to investigate this murder.
He would take her where none of this had yet happened.
He would take her where they could live a mortal life together without impacting the rest of history, to a place and time where he could make her his, make love to her and have babies with her and grow old with her.
He could do none of those things. Not him.
Pascal was wrong.
It didn’t matter how many times an Avenging Angel had returned to a mortal existence, or at least a mortal-looking life. In Denver, half his staff had sought such special dispensation. Sam, Dash, Kiel, tiny Ariel. He didn’t begrudge them.
Nor would he follow them.
Isobel’s eyes were impossibly dark in the shadows. Still he felt her gaze on him, and knew that her intuition was suggesting to her where his train of thought had led him. He felt her heat, her resistance, the thrumming beat of her heart; her certainty that their chance had been forever lost was cracking under the pressure of being together again in any form.
“It’s not possible for us, Iso.”
She shook her head, refusing to look at him now. “I only meant—”
“I know what you meant,” he interrupted harshly, “but when this is done, when the murder of Seth’s mother has been avenged, then, Iso, I will have to…I will have to go. There are still more evil acts to avenge than there are stars in the galaxy.”
Her head dipped low again, struggling with deep emotions too old to conquer. “You misunderstood me, my heart. I chose my fate, to be a mother to this child. I have not pinned my mortal heart on such an impossibility as your joining me.”
“Isobel—”
“No. No more. Please. Tell me how we can find someone who will talk to us about Seth’s mother.”
He could sit no longer, watching her, knowing her heart—knowing she had done the forbidden for a purpose that had nothing at all to do with him. He got to his feet and began to pace the confines of the long, narrow sitting room.
He felt constrained, caged. Trapped in a nevernever world of lost possibilities. It battered his
faith to know it was his own desires and not hers that he must conquer.
“Angelo?” He turned from matters of faith to deal with her question, but she had her own idea. “If the police gave a reward to those two in the shoe-repair shop for my description, couldn’t we offer a reward? The tabloids do it all the time, don’t they? Put out word on the street that you’ll pay for information?”
“That’s a fine idea, Iso—”
“Maybe you could just shove the offer back in time by a few days. That way we wouldn’t have to wait.”
He smiled at her. The suggestion was worthy of an experienced Avenging Angel. “There’s hope for that chronic innocence of yours.”
“There has to be. I’m responsible for this baby now.”
Angelo nodded. This was what Isobel wanted, what she had traded for heaven. “You know, evenword on the street will alter the way this all plays out?”
Isobel straightened, for in that instant she knew that their strategy would shove Ian James Candless’s back to the wall. With word out of an illegitimate heir to the Candless fortune, he would have no choice but to either deny Seth altogether or acknowledge him as his son.
They already knew what choice he would make. What they couldn’t know was whether he would have made the honorable choice if his hand hadn’t been forced.
THUS IT WAS that word hit the streets, nearly seventytwo hours before the murder of Seth’s mother, of an outrageous offer for information on the illegitimate son of Ian James Candless. Angelo put out a cellular phone number that could not be tracked or located, and an answering mechanism to screen the crank calls.
Isobel sat listening to the calls with Angelo for a couple of hours the next morning. Most were useless. At least seventeen women called claiming that Candless was the father of their child. Any one of the claims might have been true, and Isobel’s mood soured with each one of them. If even a fraction of those calls had any merit, Candless was a worse excuse for a man than she had imagined.
The thirty-seventh message had begun to play when Isobel walked away to get a fresh diaper for Seth. His toothless grin reeled her in, and in a moment she wasn’t even really hearing the woman’s voice leaving the message.