by Carly Bishop
Angelo stopped the message to replay it, and she was vaguely aware that the messages had stopped playing, but she was busy playing peekaboo from behind the baby’s diaper.
“This is it, Iso. This is the one.”
Reluctantly, she shifted her attention to Angelo. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “Listen.”
I have the information you want, but I won’t go public. The sultry voice gave only a phone number where the woman could be reached, no name or address.
Isobel taped the diaper into place and gently pulled Seth into a sitting position. “Should we call her?”
“I’d rather see her in person. It won’t be a problem to get her address.”
It wasn’t. With one telephone call to amenable authorities, Angelo knew her name was Kathryn Weston, and that she lived in an upscale townhouse in a Beverly Hills subdivision. Angelo materialized a jetblack BMW to create the image of someone with the bucks to pay for the kind of information they were seeking.
Which didn’t even address the real problem—that Isobel and Seth might be recognized—or the even stickier problem of why some high roller willing to part with a small fortune for whatever information the woman might have would be going around with a woman and a baby in the first place.
Isobel wasn’t going to be content to leave the investigation to Angelo, and she wasn’t going anywhere without Seth. She wouldn’t have given the first consideration to leaving him in the hands of Mother Teresa herself.
Angelo wasn’t going anywhere without Isobel, either. The standoff demanded a resolution. He was used to traveling alone, acting spontaneously, without giving thought to a woman and child.
“Isobel, I can cloak you and Seth so that no one will recognize you as the woman in the police sketch. What I can’t do is to make it a reasonable proposition that any woman with an infant would be involved in going after some sleazy tabloid tale.”
“Then don’t try,” she answered sweetly, standing on the porch of the Victorian house, shading her eyes against the noonday sun. “Let the woman think what she will. If she wants the money, she’ll talk.”
Angelo gave it up and closed the door behind him. In another minute they were all safely belted into the BMW headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic was light, and Angelo opened it up to speeds the state wouldn’t approve.
Inside forty minutes he pulled to the curb on a side street intersecting the one where Kathryn Weston lived. He knew, in the way an Avenging Angel just knows, without physically inspecting the threethousand-square-foot townhouse, that Weston was at home and alone.
He helped Isobel from the car, lifted the baby from his car seat, then placed Seth in her arms. Together they approached the row of houses beneath palm trees and canopies of bougainvillea.
Kathryn Weston answered the door in chic, silk paisley pajama bottoms and a blazing orange-silk halter top. Deeply tanned, her long, bleached blond hair spilling over her shoulders, she wore multicarat diamonds on every other finger.
She wasn’t pleased to find strangers at her door. Isobel got the impression that Kathryn had been expecting a man—probably a very wealthy one.
Angelo turned on the charisma. “Kathryn?”
She angled her chin, eyeing Isobel, radiating haughtiness. “Who are you?”
“Angelo de Medici. This is my wife, Isobel, and my son, David.” He clearly lost vast ground with her by introducing a wife, but, on the other hand, she relaxed a little, obviously feeling less threatened. “You called about information on the illegitimate son of Ian Candless.”
Beneath her tan, Kathryn Weston paled. “How did you find me?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me,” she snapped. “I left a phone number. I have nothing to say to you.”
“I think you do, Kathryn,” he persisted. His hand rested lightly on the small of Isobel’s back, but his focus, his whole demeanor focused on the other woman. “You said you have pertinent information.”
“That was before. I have nothing to say to you—or anyone else.”
She tried to shut the heavy oak door, but in some unseen way, Angelo thwarted her efforts. “Before the child’s mother was murdered, you mean?”
“Yes. Before that. I’ve no wish to get myself murdered, Mr. de Medici, so again, I have nothing to say.” She gave him a speculative, seductive look that totally dismissed Isobel’s existence. “Come back another time, when you aren’t so…occupied.”
Shielding Seth, Isobel wanted to scratch her eyes out. “Maybe you would rather tell your story to the police?”
“Don’t you dare threaten me with the police,” she hissed. “I won’t have it.” Again she tried to slam the door shut, and again she failed.
“Kathryn.” Angelo tilted his head forward. His voice insinuated an intimacy Isobel had only heard centuries before, and only with her. “Talk to me. Tell us about Seth’s mother. I promise you no trouble will come to you because of it.”
Whether it was his eyes or his promise or his voice, Isobel didn’t know, but after a long silence, Kathryn Weston took a step back and let them in.
She turned on her heels and led the way across a foyer of painted and glazed terra-cotta tiles to a sunroom furnished in white wicker, an extravagant floral print and antique bronze candlesticks.
She sat on a chaise longue. Angelo took the larger of the wicker chairs. Isobel settled at his side on an oversized footstool. Sucking on his pacifier, Seth lay in her lap, his eyes following the slow turn of a white ceiling fan. Isobel was acutely aware of Angelo’s now divided attention, his uncanny, angelic ability to focus his attention in two places at once.
He sat there in that white wicker chair, too masculine to bear, too intensely, darkly handsome for even Kathryn Weston to ignore, taking in every detail of the woman’s behavior, and at the same time, watching Seth, cradled in the skirt between Isobel’s thighs.
In some devastatingly sudden and uninvited and untimely way, desire for her flared in his eyes. It could have lasted only an instant, but the heat of it burned in Isobel until her lungs ached for air.
“Angelo.”
His name came out in a whisper, a plea to stop and a plea to go forward, a plea to douse the flames between them, because where it would lead was an impossible place, out of space and time or the grace of any miracle.
He broke off looking at her, his face a mask of forced indifference. If Kathryn Weston had noticed the brief exchange, Angelo relieved her of the impression. She looked with distaste at Seth. “Gina’s kid is about that size.”
Isobel stroked the curve of Seth’s head. “You’ve seen Gina and her baby recently then?”
“Not since she told me her plan to get some, uh…generous…child support from Ian Candless.”
“Then, to your knowledge, he is the father of Gina’s baby?”
Kathryn plucked a cigarette from a gold case on the glass table before her and lit it. “He said as much last night on television.” She exhaled sharply. “Surely you didn’t need me to confirm that.”
Isobel tried to focus on the interview, but she couldn’t help feeling bereft since Angelo hadn’t looked toward her or the baby again. She knew now that she had to make him stop seeing her that way, making her see him the same way. It would break her mortal heart to fall for him, to allow her feelings for him to come roaring back after all these centuries.
She hadn’t come back to a mortal existence for that. He had to understand.
She had no choice, sitting in Kathryn Weston’s extravagant sunroom, but to smother her feelings, bury her trembling hands in Seth’s blanket and listen to Angelo deflecting the woman’s animosity.
He began with questions that wouldn’t provoke Kathryn’s defenses. Questions meant to uncover Gina’s side of the story so Isobel would know how to respond to Candless’s televised plea.
“How long did you know Gina?”
“Altogether, less than two years.”
“Go on.”
“Since she came to L.A., all right? There isn’t much to know. She arrived on a bus from Utah, fresh and dewy and stupid. She went to a couple of talent agencies. One of them hooked her up with me.” Her choice of words and inflection pretty well revealed exactly the relationship she had had with Gina Sellers. Kathryn Weston ran an escort service, and young, inexperienced girls were quite a find.
Angelo looked at his hands. His gentle tone reminded Isobel of a hypnotist, able to assuage any fear. “Did she know what she was getting into?”
“Not at first. But Gina was desperate. She’d followed some jerk here who had promised her the moon and then dumped her. I took her in, got her some decent clothes and within a couple of weeks, I arranged an introduction between her and Ian Candless.”
Isobel felt a slow burn begin inside her. “Couldn’t you have sent her home to her family, Kathryn?”
She laughed. “Some of us don’t have that option. We do what we have to do.”
“And that includes setting up desperate girls with men like Candless?”
Her eyes glittered with disdain, and her tone was icy. “Please. Don’t presume to judge what you can’t possibly understand.”
“I do understand—”
“I doubt that very much.” Kathryn snapped. Her expression grew rigid and angry, dismissing Isobel as a fool. “Gina was one of the lucky ones. Candless was her first—and her last, and then she quit.”
“One of the lucky ones?” Isobel repeated. Her throat ached. Kathryn Weston had learned only one way to respond to the conditions in her life, and that way was the only one she had to offer Gina Sellers. But in the end, it had cost Gina her life. “She’s dead, Kathryn.”
The other woman shrugged. The grisliness of it made her too flippant. “It happens.”
“Do you have any idea who would have wanted to kill her?”
“Who are you people?” she shrilled. “What do you care? I thought you wanted information about an illegitimate Candless heir for some article, not—”
“We do,” Angelo interrupted. “We still do.”
“Yeah, well, you sound like cops, and I have nothing to say to you.”
“We’re not cops, Kathryn,” Angelo swore to her, meeting her brittle edge, compelling her with his eyes and his tone to back off her attitude. Isobel swallowed hard, retreating inside herself. She had let her emotions get in the way of getting the information they needed.
“The existence of an illegitimate Candless heir was always an explosive possibility,” Angelo said, and again trained his eyes on her. Isobel knew Kathryn had forgotten, due to the sheer magnetism of his countenance, that she had meant to say nothing more.
“Now that the baby has been taken and his mother murdered, the story is even hotter,” he said, but Kathryn only dragged on her cigarette and stubbed it out. He went on without a trace of reproach. “Do you know who needed Gina Sellers dead?”
“Other than Candless’s grown children, you mean?”
“Anyone less obvious, yes.”
“His wife. His son-in-law. His business associates. His public relations firm. His lawyers. Rumor had it that there were illegal immigrants employed in the clothing factories he owns.”
Isobel took the baby’s tiny exploring fingers from her mouth. “Did Gina know that?”
“She told me the last time I saw her that he had gotten some kind of phone call. He was on a speakerphone and didn’t know she was around. She said there were some officials making noises about inspecting his employment records. When he saw that she had overheard him, he gave her this heartwarming song and dance about providing a better life for the underprivileged among us.”
“Like the people who live in the barrio where Gina was murdered?” Isobel guessed. This might explain Gina’s having been in that unsafe neighborhood in the first place.
“I suppose.”
“Do you know why she told you about this?”
“I don’t know. To warm my heart?” Kathryn laughed unpleasantly. “I don’t think she believed him, but I doubt she knew what to believe. A part of her had to know Candless uses people.”
Isobel gave a troubled sigh. “Would knowing any of this give her leverage for blackmailing Candless?”
Kathryn shook her head, doubtful and disbelieving. “Maybe, but she didn’t know anything firsthand. Why would she do that anyway, when she had his son? Wasn’t that blackmail enough?”
“Apparently not,” Angelo said. “Not if Candless was prepared to preempt the threat of exposure by telling his family and the public anyway.”
“Maybe she did resort to that, then. I couldn’t tell you. I know she meant to get the money out of him, but I never saw her again.”
The baby had grown restless. Isobel shifted him into a sitting position. “Why else would she have been in that neighborhood, though? Did she live there?”
“No.”
“Here with you, then?”
“She lived in a condo six or seven blocks away.” Kathryn recited an address. “She had a one-year lease, prepaid. It was up this month.”
“Then,” Angelo concluded, “their relationship wasn’t as bnef as Candless claimed.”
“A couple of weekends.” She laughed harshly again. “No more. However brief, living arrangements were a typical parting gift from him. Cheap, by his standards, and ever so compassionate.”
Isobel rattled a chain of plastic keys to distract Seth from his growing fussiness. “Before the baby was born, did Gina ever try to tell Candless she was pregnant?”
“It wouldn’t have done any good for her to try. Ian Candless is surrounded by people whose job it is to make sure he isn’t troubled with petty details.”
Angelo posed one last question, mostly, Isobel thought, to prevent her from lashing out on the subject of men like Ian Candless and petty details. “Do you believe he was really prepared to let her live on his estate in exchange for handing over his son?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Better yet,” she challenged, ignoring the demand, “ask his son.”
“His son?” Isobel blurted out in dismay.
Her elegant eyebrows rose. “Bruce always did his daddy’s dirty work.” She gave one last, dismissive shrug. “Collecting Ian’s mistress, and dealing with her afterward, fell into that category.”
Chapter Five
The provocative option of going directly or somehow indirectly to Bruce Candless, to follow up on Kathryn’s allegation, appealed to Angelo. If he’d been alone in this, he’d have gone for it. But there was a lot to be said for checking out Gina Sellers’s condo as well, and they were already in the neighborhood.
They made the short drive from Kathryn Weston’s condo with the purpose of finding out what they could about Gina’s life and intentions in her last weeks. But from the moment Angelo tripped the lock and opened the door of the condo, Seth began to whimper. At some level he recognized the place, familiar colors and textures and scents, and in his tiny heart, he expected his mother to be there.
He didn’t understand, and though he had been fussing to be fed, he refused to nurse, struggling instead to be free even of Isobel’s arms.
Sitting on the elegant chintz-covered sofa in the house Ian Candless had provided for Gina, Isobel fought to stay calm herself. The babe was inconsolable. Had she still had access to her angel powers, she would have been able to ease his uncomprehending heart.
She had never felt so helpless or inept. She tried everything, while Angelo scoured the condo for any stray piece of paper or envelope, or notes scribbled in the margins of the telephone book. He checked every drawer and cabinet, every nook and cranny.
Neither of them was successful. Not the smallest hint remained of the people Gina Sellers might have spoken to or even known. At the ragged edges of her awareness, Isobel knew Angelo had concluded that someone had beaten them here, but she was consumed with worry for the baby.
Nothing she did for him seemed to comfo
rt him. He was only five months old, but he was grieving for what he couldn’t even understand. His mommy, the face he knew, the only caretaker he had ever known, wasn’t here or coming back.
“Iso, it’s not you,” Angelo offered at last, desperate, she thought, to help salvage her crumbling composure. “Let me take him.”
She nodded and allowed him to take the babe, to do for Seth what she would have done if she still had her guardian powers. In the space of a heartbeat, the babe fell asleep, his anguish eased. Angelo laid him down on a thick, downy quilt at the end of the sofa.
Isobel had only just stood to walk off her tension when a sharp rap came at the door.
“Open up! This is the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Agents Terrence and Landau. Open the door now and stand back!”
Isobel froze. Her breasts already ached, heavy with the milk Seth had refused. Now dread coursed through her body. They would surely take Seth away from her, or hand her over to the ones who would.
Her heart hammered. Her mortal body began to sweat. She doubled over with the pain in her chest.
“Iso, what is it?” Angelo demanded sharply.
“The police,” she whispered in their native Italian, the term she used conveying black-hearted bullies—fascists in another time. Her slight body, even her voice trembled. “Don’t let them take him. Dear God, don’t let them.”
“Isobel,” he commanded, giving her shoulders a jarring shake. “Isobel, stop. Think. Deal with this. You are strong enough, you are. These are not thugs and they’re not after Seth.”
But he saw from the fear in her wide beautiful, haunted eyes that Isobel was caught up in memories so visceral she couldn’t breathe, much less think clearly. In a trice he acted to create a warp that left the agents outside Gina Sellers’s condo virtually frozen in time, and then he cupped Isobel’s stricken face in his big hand, using the connection between them to join his mind to hers.
What he saw in the images of her mind shook him deeply.
He saw himself turning from her, from their kiss, startled by some unexpected noise in a courtyard of a fifteenth-century villa. The air was thick with the scent of jasmine, the moment rife with emotions unspent between them.