by Carly Bishop
She struck her futile angry blows against his chest until he pulled her into his arms again, trapping her hands between them.
Her anger excited him past all reason. He knew what to do with her desire but not her burning anger. He wanted to make up to her what she couldn’t have, or he wanted to give her something to remember…or he wanted her too much to fight her fury.
He would never know why, but he matched her passion, degree for degree. Thrusting his hand into her exquisite hair, he clenched his fist and pulled back until her lips came too near his to stop the kiss.
His mouth covered hers, his pressure forced her head back even more. It began in anger and exploded in desire for them both. His mouth watered at the taste of her, at the heat and the softness, at her answering urgency.
His tongue touched hers, their chins met. He had no recall of how it felt, his whiskers scraping her tender flesh, but emotions, memories flared and clashed in a moment out of time. He cupped her neck and deepened the kiss, and cupped her bottom and brought their bodies together more powerfully than if they had lain naked and joined together.
Isobel’s anger flowed into desire and then into a tenderness too singular to be a dream. She invited and he engulfed her. He took and she gave—lavishly—and all only in the space of that kiss and the coming together of their fully clothed bodies.
He conceded his mind to her, along with his heart and his soul. He admitted in that ever-deepening kiss, in its undertow, his arrogance and conceit He treasured her rash compassion. He cherished her spirit. He counted her stronger than himself, strong enough to defy heaven and earth for the sake of a mortal infant.
All this he conveyed in their heated, wet kisses. His unbending values were suited to a medieval paladin, but with this kiss he went beyond himself, and she finally knew what it was to be loved beyond the physical, beyond the need to join more closely.
He was hers, body and soul, yet not hers. He belonged in his role as an Avenging Angel. She belonged with Seth. She had provoked him to this. She would grieve its loss her whole life through.
Their kiss ended. He let her go and stood back, dazed, backhanding the moisture from his lips and chin, his eyes fixed darkly on hers. She backed away and fought to breathe again. She obviously didn’t know what to say, how to act. He didn’t know how to follow his own act.
Angelo was in love with a mortal woman, and he knew, if she didn’t, that the love affair between them was more powerful and sacred than any marriage, and could never end. But the realization left him powerless.
He was the mighty, resourceful Avenging Angel, to whom no evil had ever presented too great a challenge, but in the wake of that kiss and that realization, he had no better idea how his universe worked now than Einstein would have had, if gravity had suddenly failed.
AT SEVEN FORTY-FIVE Ian Candless came for Isobel and his baby son. Isobel had given Seth a bath, in the time left her, which always put him in a warm, cuddly mood. He even smiled for Candless, and when Isobel put him into his father’s arms, he was still grinning. Isobel took up her sewing basket, which concealed the listening devices that she intended to begin leaving around like a trail of bread crumbs. The basket had been an accidental stroke of genius. She didn’t have much to do with her hands when she wasn’t carrying Seth.
He led the way to the open-beamed living room. An exquisite Biesendorfer grand piano sat at the near end, nearly dwarfed by the size of the room. At the far end, enormous French doors on either side of a carved marble hearth looked out onto the rolling green estate, the cliffs and the churning Pacific Ocean beyond. The setting sun lent mauve and pink hues to the sky, which then reflected against the white stucco living-room walls.
The hardwood floor shone like brass polished to a high sheen. Scattered artfully about, Aubusson carpets of the highest quality broke up the expanse of floor. The finest grade of leather furniture mixed cleverly with more tailored upholstery. And art—suitable to the collections of major museums—graced the white stucco walls and antique tables.
Candless’s wealth had not been underestimated. Nor, Isobel decided, could she afford to underestimate the will of the man who had created such wealth and used it to surround himself with such beauty.
She didn’t need to remind herself that his behavior and mores offended her deeply, and that he was about to cause a great deal of pain to his family.
Or that he if he chose, he could dismiss her with a wave of his hand, and keep her from Seth, and Seth from her. She would have no chance of fighting him alone.
She dared a glance at Angelo, took his look of encouragement in, breathed deeply and allowed Candless to escort her into the midst of his family.
Seven of them waited. All three sons, one with a wife, Candless’s daughter and her husband, and an older woman. Candless’s wife.
Not one of them pretended to be happy, but at least Bruce, the oldest son, a tall, lean, handsome dead ringer for a much younger Ian Candless, didn’t take it out on Isobel with ill-concealed looks.
Standing at his mother’s side—a statement of alliances, Isobel thought—Bruce shook her hand and winked in an automatic way, as if they had a secret between them. He kissed the back of her hand.
“Not many people,” he said, “would have rushed in and saved young Seth, here. Not in the hail of bullets the police describe. Whatever possessed you?”
“I think you’re wrong,” Isobel disagreed pleasantly. This was the man who, according to Kathryn Weston, did all his father’s dirty work. Interesting that he stood so close by his mother, if that was true. “I think anyone would have done what I did, if they had been there.”
“A philosophical difference,” he allowed, watching her closely, trying, she thought, to quickly assess what made her tick. With respect to his response, she knew better. Too many people held back in an assault, too few intervened, for fear of being hurt themselves. It had simply not occurred to her that she could be harmed, until she had been. “Maybe later you’ll tell us how you happened to be there,” he said.
“Hardly matters how she came to be there, does it?” Candless said, shifting Seth carefully from one arm to the other, dismissing any significance in Bruce’s question. “She was. She saved my son.” He turned to his wife to present his illegitimate baby. “My dear. May I present Seth?”
Patrice Candless somehow managed to be civil under very difficult circumstances. Her husband, after all, was parading about the son of one of his dalliances. Isobel flashed on Biblical stories of patriarchs presenting their wives with the child of another woman, a servant.
Hoping Patrice would emerge from this humiliation in some meaningful way, Isobel’s heart went out to her. Of them all, she was the one most victimized by her husband.
“Careful,” Angelo warned Isobel from his invisible vantage point. “She may be victimized, Iso, but she is strong-willed.”
She would have to be, Isobel thought in answer.
Patrice tried, in fact, to take Seth from Candless’s arms, asking to hold him.
He blithely refused. “In a bit, my dear. Let me first introduce my son all around.” She dropped her arms, the folds of her designer blouse caving. She gave a brittle smile and Candless moved on.
“Harrison. Glad to see you could make my little soiree to greet Seth.” He confided to Isobel, “Harrison had a hot date, which I’m sure it pained him a great deal to break. Or was it some never-to-berepeated photo opportunity? Harrison, you see,” he said to Isobel, “is a bit of a shutterbug.”
“You wouldn’t believe the photo ops out there, Dad,” Harrison said. The jut of his chin was smug, but the plaintive tone of his voice robbed him of whatever punch he thought he had. “Besides. How could I miss this?” He stared with loathing at Seth.
“You couldn’t, of course. Harrison is also a gambler of some repute.” Seeming to speak to Isobel, he stared his son in the face. “The higher the stakes, the better, isn’t that right, son? Except that you’re too paranoid to really shoot for the moon.”
Harrison’s too-pretty face cracked in a smile. “I remember when you taught me that only the paranoid survive, Dad. Do you remember? Easter Sunday morning, 1977?”
Isobel swallowed. Harrison’s humorless jibe, pitched with his plastic smile, suggested a deep pit of resentment, which Candless’s reaction only confirmed. “You’re whining again, Harry.”
The tension rose with each in-your-face confrontation. Isobel wondered how long it would be before Seth began to absorb it and act out. Thus far he had entertained himself with Candless’s tie. Maybe if he spit up or something this disastrous meeting would end.
She didn’t need to see any more. She had no idea what Harrison’s Easter Sunday of 1977 had been like, but Seth’s life in this fabulously wealthy compound would be crowded to the open-beamed ceilings with things, and bereft of even the most basic emotional requirements.
Leaving this gathering, however, was out of the question.
Candless moved on to his middle son. “Conrad. Michele. Meet your new brother.” Rising from matched hunter-green leather club chairs near the marble hearth, Conrad and his wife, Michele, stood stiffly awaiting their turn. Michele went through the motions of cooing at the baby, but her eyes and voice were flat and uncaring. Conrad ignored Isobel as well as the baby, heading to refill his glass with tequila.
“Conrad oversees IJ Candless factory personnel,” Candless explained. “He’s lowered our operating costs five percent this year.”
Conrad ignored the faint praise. Licking, then salting his wrist and licking again, he tossed back the shot of tequila in one gulp. “It’s enough to make a grown man cry, you know? Your bringing home a new baby brother and all.”
Candless merely blinked. Seth patted his cheek, seeking his eyes, his attention, to no avail at all. “Your overwhelming joy is duly noted, Conrad.”
“Why not, Dad? If this is the way you want things, my inheritance is already shot to sh—”
“Watch your mouth, will you, Connie?” Candless spat, reducing his son to the level of a three-year-old by use of the nickname.
“If I wanted to disinherit you, and God knows you’ve given me ample reason quite on your own,” he let his eyes flicker toward Michele, “you would have been bouncing drunks to scratch out a living a long time ago.”
“Oh, Daddy, stop it,” Candless’s pregnant daughter Kelsey interrupted, stamping her foot. “This is just hideous of you!”
Isobel took her to be the youngest, the one who would insist on attention, and get it because she was Daddy’s little girl. Bruce protected his mother and did his father’s dirty work, Harrison gambled and whined, wanting desperately to one-up his father, Conrad drank until he could say what was on his mind, and Kelsey sopped up the attention.
“Just let’s meet the baby and get this over with. You aren’t disinheriting anyone, isn’t that right?”
Candless eyed his daughter. He had grimaced at her little foot-stamping gesture, and Isobel thought if she had once had can-do-no-wrong status with her Daddy, she’d lost it somewhere along the line.
“That’s right, Kelsey, even if it’s just some chunk of coal I leave you.” He laughed out loud as if this were some long-standing joke. “This is Isobel. Isobel, Kelsey and her husband, IJ Candless counsel, Emory St. John.”
“Kelsey,” Isobel greeted Candless’s daughter. Less good-looking than any of her brothers, she would still draw the eyes of men. She wore a delicate A-line dress and a woven leather bracelet as easily as her diamonds, which flared in the light against her country-club tan. Her waist had only begun to thicken. “Your father told me you are expecting his first grandchild. You must be very happy.”
“Of course. It’s all I’ve dreamed of, giving Daddy a grandchild.” Only now her father had a new son, and Kelsey, obviously, wasn’t happy at all.
Isobel turned to her husband. “Was it you, Mr. St. John, who advised Mr. Candless against acknowledging Seth as his son?”
St. John cleared his throat. Twenty or more years older than his wife, he had lizard-like eyes that constantly checked his wife’s mood, and then defied it. “Yes. That was my advice. I felt strongly that it would have been the least…disruptive path.”
Candless laughed. The sound wasn’t jovial. “Ah, but what a bore you are, Sinjin. What about the drama of life, eh?”
St. John sipped from a martini. Closer to Candless’s age than his wife’s, he behaved as if they were equals. “I prefer drama in the confines of fiction, Ian.”
“And I prefer,” Candless replied in a flinty tone, “to do the honorable thing.”
“Then we return to our basic conflict as usual. Honor and decency aren’t always in the same ballpark.” St. John shrugged, and though Kelsey made him the object of a furious jab to the ribs, he ignored her. “It is honorable, for instance, to take responsibility for your actions, Ian, no matter how distasteful. It is quite another thing, indecent to my way of thinking, to foist that responsibility on your wife and family.”
St. John’s daring took Isobel’s breath away. Angelo whistled softly. Isobel glanced toward him. He poured himself a goblet of Chardonnay, made it invisible to the gathering as well, and took a healthy swallow. “Wonder why we don’t hear Candless complimenting ol’ Sinjin on his cojones.”
She nearly burst out laughing, but Angelo pointed warningly at her with the forefinger of the hand holding his wine glass. Her tension eased, even though Candless glared at his son-in-law. His complexion darkened and his eyes narrowed dangerously.
Seemingly desperate to distract her father, Kelsey interrupted. “Daddy, this is not the time. Come on. Please. We’ve all done as you asked and gathered to meet Seth and Isobel. We don’t need to add to the—”
“To the what, Kelsey?” Candless demanded softly.
“The…tension, Daddy. It’s too much. We don’t need you and Sinjin getting into some ridiculous moral debate.”
“Well, there you have it from the horse’s mouth. Kelsey is uninterested in morals,” Conrad muttered darkly, his voice filled with some kind of fear of his sister.
“That’s not true!” Anger flashed in Kelsey’s eyes. Isobel thought she cared too much for the opinion of her brothers and father. It obviously hurt her to be criticized by him.
Bruce stood up for her. “She’s right, Dad,” he said, pouring his mother a glass of wine, then one for himself. “I think it’s time we let Isobel tell us about herself if she’s to be our little brother’s nanny.”
Although Candless had been ready to deliver some scathing remark to St. John, he shrugged and couched his warning in a lighter tone. “Try and remember who signs your paycheck, Sinjin.”
He started to hand the baby to Isobel. Patrice put down her wine and began to cross the plush dovegray carpeting. “Let me hold him now.”
Candless relented and handed Seth over to her. He called for a staff assistant, Isobel had no idea from where, to come and take several photos of the assembled family. One or more would be issued with a press release, acknowledging that the newest Candless heir and his nanny had been found and had safely joined the family.
Isobel knew there was no escaping this, but she hated every second of it. The ill feelings among Candless’s family were hardly concealed. Seth, however, was doing remarkably well. She wondered if Angelo had anything to do with the baby’s good behavior, but he denied it. He poured his invisible self another invisible glass of wine, then sat at the piano. He began to play a thin, haunting tune with only one hand, echoes of a musical canon she recalled but could not place.
No key depressed. No sound played for anyone’s ears but hers. It was as if he merely thought the plaintive melody, and she heard it through the strings of the instrument. His eyes fixed on her, hers on him. “I haven’t done a thing to influence the baby’s behavior, Iso.”
She nodded distractedly, struggling to make it seem as if her nod had something to do with Bruce’s suggestion.
Patrice invited them all to sit down; everyone but Harrison complie
d. Bruce took the baby from his mother, long enough for her to settle into her antique Queen Anne chair. She looked to Isobel. “Tell us about yourself, my dear.”
“Yes, Isobel,” Kelsey purred. “Helena tells us you’ve no baby bottles.”
Isobel swallowed. “No, I—”
Lighting a cigar clipped exactly so, a scowling Candless interrupted her. “What the hell are you talking about, Kelsey? Do you think the rest of us want to sit around here listening to you prattle on about baby formulas?”
“Why, that’s exactly the point, Daddy. Seth isn’t on any formula at all.” She turned to Isobel. “Helena says Seth smells as if he is breast-fed. Is that true?”
Chapter Eight
Isobel froze.
Candless looked taken aback, his daughter vaguely triumphant, his wife and sons embarrassed but dying to hear what Isobel would say next. What were the chances, after all, that a woman who only happened to be close enough to rescue a baby in mortal danger would also be able to breast-feed him?
Her heart skipped beat after beat. She had never been more blindsided or less prepared for a question that so efficiently sliced through the heart of her necessary lies.
“Say yes, Iso,” Angelo commanded, to draw her beyond her shock. “Say it’s true.”
“Yes,” she repeated numbly. “It’s true.”
“Well, how very extraordinary!” Kelsey chimed. “Not only were you Johnny-on-the-spot at the murder scene, but you came with functioning breasts.”
No explanation came to Isobel’s mind. It was a gift, she supposed, some physical reckoning with the metaphysical, that when she plunged into her human existence, her body came prepared to nurse the baby.
She had no idea what to say, and yet her credibility depended upon it.
“Stick it to them, Iso. Embarrass them.” Angelo continued, giving her a reasonable explanation to recite. “Tell them your last position was as wet nurse to a baby whose mother died in childbirth. And say it,” he urged her, “as if you consider her question beneath contempt.”