by Carly Bishop
But in moonlight, in the eerie silence of her memory, he saw the glint of a sword arcing toward him, slowly, deliberately, inescapably now, delivering a killing blow to the side of his head with the blunt side of the weapon.
The clash of flesh and bone and blade dropped him to his knees. He saw himself fight to get back up, stumble and fall again to the ground. He had never stood a chance, and the only way that was possible was if he had been betrayed.
Isobel’s awareness flared in her memory for all too brief a moment, encompassing the image of her father forcibly dragging her across the cobbled stones, away from the grisly scene and her beloved’s fallen body. He watched her fight her father tooth and nail, lose her wrap and her slippers and her dignity before her wrist snapped in her father’s grip.
All the fury and wrath at his disposal in his role as an Avenging angel rose up inside him, fury with nowhere to go. Isobel’s courage and fire and passion for him had delivered her to this, but the worst was yet to come. His attacker came out of the shadows, and in the man’s face, Angelo had his first taste of her raw and unreasoning panic in a condo in Beverly Hills five centuries later.
Never before had he seen the face of his murderer, or learned his identity. Now he knew he was the captain of the guard, a man in the employ of the prince to whom Angelo was allied, and allied with his enemies as well.
The face belonged to Vittorio de Medici, Angelo’s own brother. At his murdering back stood an easy half-dozen others, men under his command who were sworn to guard Angelo’s life, and Isobel’s, with their own.
The distant, fearsome rage gripped him. In her memory her broken bones meant less than nothing. To him the betrayal by the untrustworthy guards, even by his own flesh and blood, meant less than the harm that had befallen her. But Isobel feared them all for the blackguards they were, for the way they used and abused their power, for the way they could be bought and sold, twisting and distorting the truth until even murder could be justified in their minds.
“Isobel.”
In an instant, he made the decision to materialize into his truly human form. There was always a toll—a price to be paid, a loss of certain powers, the sacrifice of objectivity. But his spectral form was without warmth or real substance, and unless he made that change, he could offer her no real comfort.
When his transformation was complete, he took her into the shelter of his arms, surrounding her with his physical body and his warmth. He could not take from her the horror of her memories.
He could not erase her fear, or even make it manageable.
It was not outside his powers, even in his human body, to confer those consolations, and in truth, it was exactly what he had done for Seth. But Isobel must cope in the world she had chosen, and he would do nothing that would finally strip Isobel of her own resources.
“Angelo.” She went naturally to him, clinging to his shoulders, resting her head against his warm and solidly male chest. For the first time in five hundred years, she could smell his skin, feel his heat, hear his heart beat. Memories of her long-ago lover collided with the very real man before her and drove everything else from her mind.
Her throat tightened. This was the flesh-and-blood, imperfect man she had once loved more than life.
This was the man whose mind and scruples and soul she admired above all others.
This was the man whose secret glance stole her breath, whose arrogance and swagger and judgment galled her…and whose touch she craved.
She raised her head. Her eyes came to rest on the cleft in his chin, on the pits and pores in his skin, the evidence of a dark and heavy beard shaved close.
Pleasure too intensely human threatened to swamp her. The crush of her heavy-laden breasts against him incited her toward him; he was rigid and aroused against her belly as well. But she knew his temporal form, his humanity, his humanness was only an elaborate illusion.
His lips caressed her brow. Tears more sweet than bitter spilled from her eyes. In that fleeting, ethereal instant, she would gladly have died for it to have been her lips he kissed. In the end, she would be left again to do without Angelo.
She had to remember that it was not for Angelo but for Seth’s sake—and the maternal longing inside her—that she had defied heaven and hell.
What was it to her, after that, to pull her human self together and defy the men at the door, or Ian Candless himself?
She stepped back, brushing the tears from her cheeks, and took a deep, steadying breath. She forced a certain fearlessness to appear in her eyes as she met Angelo’s gaze. A careful scrutiny of his eyes revealed feelings for her she knew to be as deep as her own. “Will you let them in now?”
He nodded slowly. “If you’re ready.”
“I am.”
“Remember they are only men, Iso.” His eyes glittered. His voice cracked lower. “And remember what you have done just now.”
She swallowed hard. His regard for her strength in backing away from the comfort and protection of his arms awed her. “I’ll remember.” She breathed sharply, then breathed again for courage. “Shall I…will they recognize me as the woman in the artist’s sketch?”
His gaze had never left hers. He could continue to cloak her appearance or not. Though fully human now, his extraordinary powers remained intact, unlike Isobel who had forfeited everything to become human. Only avenging angels were spared their powers. “It’s your call.”
She straightened, nodding, not trusting her voice to sound as if she weren’t really certain. “Then do it. Drop the cloaking.”
Approval radiated in his smile. He cuffed her gently on the chin, then strode to the fireplace. He had chosen, she understood, to put himself behind her and let her deal with the federal agents as she must. He rested an arm on the stone mantelpiece, and at his nod the knock came again.
Isobel looked to the sleeping baby to assure herself they had not awakened him, and then went to open the door.
The agents stood waiting, impatience carved in their expressions. The one closest to her, fortyish and overweight, his pug nose flaring unbecomingly, had been reaching behind his body and beneath his suit coat for a gun. The other, taller and more pleasantlooking, already had his weapon drawn.
Shaking inside, Isobel demanded they put away their guns before she would move aside. “There is no need of weapons here. I won’t have them drawn around my child. Please keep your voices down as well.”
The pair exchanged glances and put away their handguns, too slowly to suit her. She moved aside. The heavier one introduced himself as Agent Marvin Terrence. “This is Agent Clive Landau.” They moved past her into the condo, and Seth was, of course, the first thing that drew their attention.
She looked to Angelo. She thought his presence would have commanded their attention first.
“They believe you are alone, Iso,” he warned her.
“Is this the Candless kidnap?” Terrence spoke almost at the same moment as Angelo, so she knew they could neither see nor hear him.
Shivering, uncertain, she nodded her understanding to him and then looked directly at Terrence and his partner. “The Candless baby, you mean?” she retorted coolly. “I believe he is, yes. And I am the one who saved him.”
Landau glared at her. “That hardly makes him your child, ma’am.”
She refused to rise to an accusation that mocked her and insulted her intelligence in the same breath. “He’s in my care. What is it that you want?”
“For starters, your name. What you do. What you’re doing with this baby.”
“Isobel,” she said. “Avedon. “I’m a guardian…sort of. A nanny.”
Again the two men exchanged glances. Terrence began to work his way around the living room, looking for something, anything—whatever men like him looked for. Or maybe he meant to unnerve her, to keep moving while his partner grilled her.
“A nanny,” Landau repeated. “Don’t nannies usually take the baby home at night?” he demanded, bearing out her intuition.
&
nbsp; “Nannies,” she returned coldly, “aren’t usually witnesses to the murder of a child’s mother.”
“Oh, I see. You’re afraid you’re targeted.” He obviously didn’t believe her, as contempt for such a lame excuse at ducking kidnap charges thickened his voice. “Why haven’t you turned the kid over to Candless?”
She glanced at Angelo and gave a shrug. “I don’t intend to ‘turn the kid over’ to anyone.”
Terrence’s head jerked sharply around. “You’re not interested in Candless’s offer?” he demanded.
“No.” Both of them waited for her to elaborate or justify, somehow explain herself. She wouldn’t start, but she could see that she was only making them angry and despite her resolve, she needed Angelo’s measure of these men.
Angelo responded to her as if she had spoken her musings aloud. “They didn’t come here looking for Seth, Iso. It’s dumb luck on their part and they know it.”
“Listen,” she said finally, taking her cue from Angelo’s counsel. “I was there when the baby’s mother was murdered. I only wanted to save his life, because whoever did this obviously meant for him to die, too. You had no idea when you came here that you would find me or this baby. For all I know, you’re the reason Gina Sellers was murdered.”
Landau shot his partner a guilty, telling look. “What do you know about it?”
“Nothing,” she returned, piqued by the barest flush of anger on the agent’s narrow face. “What is there to know? What did Gina have to do with you?”
Angelo grimaced. The agents were under no obligation to reveal their purposes. He leaned—hard—on their consciences till both men cracked.
“Look.” Landau sighed heavily, his brow creased in aggravation. He looked to Terrence, and at the other agent’s slow nod, he continued, “Gina Sellers had agreed to work for us, to get onto the Candless estate and act as an informant in a sort of Trojanhorse operation.” He gestured with his head toward Seth. “She had the perfect entry. Ian Candless wanted his son. He offered Sellers a home. All she had to do was go along with his proposal.”
“I don’t understand. What are you after? How could a young, frightened, inexperienced woman like Gina be of any help to you just because she lived on Candless’s estate?”
Landau coughed. The sound made Isobel’s skin crawl. “Exactly. Gina Sellers was young and inexperienced, and on top of it, she had nowhere to go. Her lease here was up. She needed money. She’d grown used to this sweet deal, and she wasn’t prepared to hit the streets again.”
Isobel shook her head, not fully comprehending. Gina might have been desperate enough to go along with their plan, but what was the point of anyone getting into Candless’s estate if it was his business practices that had come under investigation?
“There are any number of possibilities, Iso,” Angelo responded softly, as if she’d verbalized her question. He moved behind the agents so she could see him as he spoke. Creating a temporal space in which Landau and Terrence would not recognize the passage of any time, he explained. “Candless could have removed business records to the estate.
“He—or his sons for that matter—could be conducting illegal operations from there. Gina was a long shot, but a perfect opportunity—and it sounds like they’d run out of options.”
Isobel nodded. The logic sickened her, the willingness to use Seth to get his mother onto the estate of criminals. “Why would she have agreed to do this just to bring Candless down? How would that serve her interests in the long run? If Candless had gone to jail, she might have wound up with nothing.”
Angelo shrugged. “Humans don’t often think past the ends of their noses, Iso. If she wanted revenge, and the Feds promised her that, with her help, the old man would live out his life in a prison cell…then, why not?”
“I don’t get it, Angelo. We have to assume she wanted revenge on Ian Candless, or else she was in desperate need of money.” Isobel understood Gina’s desire for revenge, if that’s what it was, even for money. What she couldn’t imagine or condone was a woman agreeing to anything at all that would put her baby at risk, or into the hands of evil men as some sort of pawn, even—or especially—if one of those evil men was her baby’s father.
She watched Seth sleeping beside her for a moment, then straightened. “What is this investigation about?”
Terrence gave up prowling, sat in the club chair matching Landau’s and took over explaining. “Illegal immigrants. We’ve been trying since the beginning of the year to nail Candless—or his sons—on counts ranging from blackmail and extortion to facilitating illegal immigration for cheap labor in the company’s clothing factories.
“Our investigation into the business practices of IJ Candless & Sons is at a standstill. We need eyes and ears inside that estate. We could go after the staff, but it might take months to accomplish. Gina Sellers could have gotten around that immediately.”
Isobel felt an eerie, awful anxiety taking hold of her heart. “And you’re telling me all of this because…?”
“You have the kid,” Landau stated, bald as that.
“Excuse me?”
Glowering at his partner, Terrence’s jaw tightened. He tried to take a less offensive route, to smooth it over with her. “Ms. Avedon, listen very carefully. If we chose, we could toss you in the slammer and throw away the key. We could take the baby. We’d rather salvage the operation. You have essentially the same offer from Candless now that he made to Sellers. He thinks you’re some kind of heroine, and he knows what you look like from the police artist sketches. You could, if you choose, simply replace Sellers in our plan.”
In a heartbeat her anxiety turned to anger. “Your scheme can’t possibly work now!” she cried. “They know, or someone knew, exactly what you were up to, and that’s why those men shot and killed her. You’re responsible for Gina Sellers’s murder!”
Terrence stretched his neck uncomfortably. “It’s one possibility.”
“Among dozens, I’m sure,” Isobel snapped. “How do you even dare ask me to put myself and this baby into such a position?”
“Two reasons, Ms. Avedon,” Terrence said. “One is that it is highly improbable that anyone would suspect you. You have no prior connections to Candless—in essence, no one has anything to fear from you. Sellers was a different story. She had not only given birth to an illegitimate Candless heir, she was your archetypal ‘woman scorned.’ She had an ax to grind. As far as she was concerned, Candless was going to suffer. You have nothing against Ian Candless, and if I’ve understood you, no desire for any reward whatsoever. He may wonder how any woman could interrupt her life in such a manner. We have to hope you can pull it off. Make him believe you had no real life before in any case.”
She hadn’t, of course, but Terrence was very wrong to believe she had nothing against Seth’s father. He was every bit as responsible for Gina Sellers’s death as these men. But she was waiting to see the other shoe drop. “What’s the other reason?”
They should have been clued into her resistance by her tone, but if they were, they didn’t care. “Frankly, Ms. Avedon,” Landau said, “you don’t have much of a choice. We have no choice. Candless expects a woman with your appearance. There are active kidnap charges and warrants out for your arrest. There is a natural parent waiting to take custody of his child. You won’t see this baby or the light of day again for thirty years…unless you cooperate fully with the ongoing investigation.”
Isobel swallowed hard and looked to Angelo. “Can you lock them out?”
“Lock who out?” Landau asked, but in another instant he was silent, his brow frozen in a puzzled expression.
She got up carefully from the sofa so that she wouldn’t disturb Seth, but then she began to pace. Angelo watched her, keeping his silence.
“I already know what you’re going to say.”
“Do you, Iso?” he asked gently.
“Yes. This is, of course, the perfect opportunity for me to see what kind of man Candless is. Maybe they’re wrong, you�
�ll say. Maybe their investigation stalled because there is nothing there to find. Maybe, you’ll say, I’ll find that he is a changed man who has found his scruples again. Or, if what these immigration agents believe is true, and if I help them, then Candless really will go away to prison, and I will get the legal guardianship of his baby son. And isn’t that what I want, finally?”
“Isn’t it?” he asked, admitting by his smile that she had covered the possibilities he would have suggested. There were others. Gina Sellers’s murder to avenge. The hundreds of lives affected if Candless was exploiting illegal laborers. But he wanted for her what she had sacrificed so much to have. “Isn’t that exactly what you want, to have Seth to raise as your own?”
“Yes. But Angelo, it is not as simple as that! It’s easy for them,” she waved in the agents’ direction, “to say that no one will suspect me of taking Gina’s place, but what if someone does? I’m supposed to just take it on faith that I won’t end up dead? And if I die, what happens to Seth then?”
“Iso, you don’t have to take it on faith. You will not die, nor will Seth. I promise you that. But faith would not hurt you. That’s the human condition, that you cannot know how things will turn out. Forget their bullying tactics!” he urged. “You know I will not allow you to spend your mortal life in prison. And Terrence is nght. You have no choice. Isobel, you know it yourself. This is the day you have to stare down every naysayer, even the one inside yourself. And if that means going along with a plan that offends your sensibilities because that’s what you have to do, then you do it.”
She swallowed as hot emotions pooled in her throat. “It’s not my sensibilities I worry about, Angelo.”
“I know. But I have promised you no harm will come to Seth, so it is only your sensibilities left.”
The flicker of doubt in her wide silvery-gray eyes slammed into him. He was asking her one more time to trust that his promises to her were good. That she could depend on them with her life—and Seth’s—when a matter of only an hour ago, he had seen in her memories what little good his temporal promises had been to her.