by Carly Bishop
“Was a baseball bat with autographs what you wanted?”
“More than anything.”
“But then something happened to ruin your birthday?”
“You could say that.” He sniffed. His handsome face twisted in a grimace. His thumb toyed idly with the chamber of the gun, spinning it. “Old Ian pitched till I couldn’t swing anymore, and then he pitched some more. The only time I hit the freaking ball, I hit him in the face with it.” He gave that desperate little snort again. “See, he really wasn’t iookin’, ‘cause he never expected me to connect. Didn’t even get a black eye, tha’s how pathetic it was.”
Isobel poured her tea and sat down across the table from Harrison. Her throat tightened. There was no way she could look at Ian Candless’s adult son and not see the little boy, the baby he had once been.
Or Seth.
“What happened then?”
“He flew into a rage. Picked up the ball and threw it at me, hard’s he could.”
She couldn’t help flinching. “He hit you with a baseball?”
“Yeah. See, I thought he was pitching. I’d miss, and then I’d chase it down and throw it back to him.” He choked. “Smart kid, huh? Took me about ten times to figure out he was doin’ it on purpose, hittin’ me with that freaking ball.”
Isobel clamped her lips shut. Her body cringed with the same sense of betrayal that must have consumed Harrison, the shame and humiliation and rage at being his father’s all-too-trusting target.
Ian Candless had made a believer of his youngest son at the ripe old age of seven.
Only the paranoid survive.
The sentiment ruled his life, she could see that. He took the risks, and if he was too paranoid or paralyzed to go for broke, then he had his father to thank for that too.
Ian Candless hadn’t changed, either. Kathryn Weston—and all the men in the Brentwood Smoking Club, where Angelo sometimes went—might have been correct in saying that Candless was a paragon of virtue in his business dealings. But he’d crippled his youngest son with fear, rubbed his family’s noses in his infidelities, and provoked ill will between his adult children for the perverse pleasure of seeing them squabbling over a fortune that might end up going to an illegitimate contender.
After all they had been through.
Harrison Candless felt threatened by Seth. God only knew what he would do, or what he had done. Something was eating him alive with guilt or he wouldn’t be sitting here planning to blow himself to hell in the kitchen of his father’s estate.
Isobel sat back, took a deep breath and steeled herself. “Harrison, did you have anything to do with the murder of Seth’s mother?”
He could only look at her. She couldn’t read the slightest emotion in his face—not guilt, knowledge or innocence. She didn’t know him well enough to guess what impassive, total control meant.
He picked up the bullet and shoved it into one of the grooves, then knocked the chamber into place. “When are you going to make your play, Saint Isobel?”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he mimicked softly. “I think you do.” His handsome face drew into an even nastier twist. A lock of his blond hair fell over his forehead. He was seeming a lot less drunk now, and far more focused. “I think you have it planned down to the gnat’s ass. I think you’re just waiting till we all get a really stinking good feel for what it’s going to be like having precious little Seth around for the next twenty years.”
Bile stung her throat. The bitter taste triggered deadly memories in her soul. Angelo de Medici was a strong and powerful man, a man to be reckoned with, a man his enemies had feared. A man, nevertheless, murdered in an unguarded moment.
An unguarded moment devoted to her.
Guilt threatened to swamp her. Like a predator, the memory caught her by the throat, struck her dumb; but her fear now was for Seth. She still had no idea what Harrison meant, what he expected her to say, but her delay in answering made him crazier.
“How much?” he snarled, throwing the gun down on the glass-top table, relishing the intimidating clatter of metal against glass. “What’s it going to take to get you and that little bastard out of here?”
Isobel flinched, fighting to breathe. The gun unnerved her. Harrison Candless’s meaning chilled her to her mortal marrow. “What was Gina asking?”
“Sellers wanted five million. What’s your price?”
Isobel fought the chill, the numbness. “Harrison, was Gina Sellers murdered so you wouldn’t have to come up with that kind of money? Is that the way this works? If you can afford what I want, okay, but if not, I’m dead too?”
He laughed at her. “I’m the coward, remember? I’m the one who…oh, forget it.” He swigged straight from the bottle of tequila. He gritted his teeth. His eyes squinted closed. The tequila must have burned going down. It cost him his voice for a moment. “I don’t know who killed Sellers. I didn’t have anything to lose, see, because we were all going to have to come up with a share of the five mill, and I didn’t have the money in the first place. Can’t wring blood from a freaking turnip.”
Isobel shivered. She had no reason to disbelieve his story. And if it was true, then Gina Sellers had been playing both ends against the middle. Extorting money from the legitimate Candless heirs on the one hand, against the threat of accepting Ian’s offer, and agreeing to accept the offer anyway in exchange for the protection and money the Feds had offered her.
Where had a fresh-faced girl from Utah come up with such a plan, or such nerves of steel?
“I don’t want your money, Harrison. Or anyone else’s. You can report back to whoever put you up to this that I didn’t just rush in to take up where Gina left off.”
“You intend to stay here and be the kid’s nanny?”
“Yes.” She had no intention at all of staying here, where Candless could work his disastrous influence on Seth, but saying as much was out of the question. She had to appear, for the sake of the government investigation, to want nothing more than to be employed as Seth’s nanny for as long as she could. She gave him a curious look she had to conjure up. “Is that so hard to believe?”
He stared at her. “Are you really that freaking stupid?”
Dear God, where was he going with this? Shouldn’t it have eased his mind that she had planned no extortion?
“Do you think,” he went on, “that we want his bastard brat or you hanging around here? Lady, you are too dumb to live.” He reached for the gun, picked it up and aimed the barrel straight at her forehead. “Let’s just see how dumb luck holds up.”
Her throat closed off, her mouth pooled with saliva. He could not afford the extortion, but he could afford to lose his inheritance to Seth even less. He must be too drunk to judge his actions. She had none of her angel powers left, save some residual ability to slow time in her mind.
She saw his fingers curling tighter around the grip, the alcohol clouding his senses, the hesitation, maybe the stray thought occurring to him that to put a bullet through her head here in the kitchen of his father’s guarded estate would be the truly stupid thing to do.
“Don’t do it, Harrison. Don’t do it.”
“Shut up!” Through his anger and all the betrayal he had ever suffered at his father’s whim, the tequila won out. “Just shut up!” He swallowed. “You’re not stupid at all, are you?” he shouted. “You’re just holding out for more!”
Nothing she could say would convince him otherwise. She let her hands trail off the edge of the table. His forefinger began to squeeze the trigger.
Her heart skipped a beat. Seth filled her mind. Another beat. Angelo…dear God.
A third. She would not go down, not if she could help it. She had only this life, and no one was going to take it from her, not now.
She butted her hands against the table’s edge. If she could lift it high enough, shove it hard enough, she could deflect his aim, topple him over. But the table was too
heavy, and in the split second she saw his finger jerk back, adrenaline poured through her as the trigger clicked and the hammer slammed home.
Chapter Ten
In the silence afterwards, after the trigger clicking, after the bullet which was in the proper groove to fire failed, Isobel came undone.
Harrison Candless lay slumped on the table as if he had been shot, and Angelo stood, wrathful and glorious, powerful and angry, stretching out an arm toward Harrison as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea. The half-empty tequila bottle went dry as the wilderness, and the gun he had dared aim at Isobel withered to dust and vanished into thin air.
Relief flooded her body. Her breath came out in giant heaves. She would have thrown up if there had been anything in her stomach. She had come so close to losing everything she had defied heaven and earth to be—a living breathing woman, who desired to mother a baby who had lost his own.
She longed to fling herself into Angelo’s outstretched arms, to abandon her resolve. But what she wanted most was to bathe herself in the safety and security of knowing he would be there for her no matter what happened, for so long as she lived. But that was false hope.
He had saved her life just now, but she would spend it without him, so she sat there hugging herself, willing her shaking to cease, and wiped the tears of relief from her face. She met Angelo’s angry gaze. “Is he…”
“Passed out.” He straightened and lowered his arms. “If he remembers this at all, it will be in a nightmare.”
By Angelo’s tone, Isobel believed Harrison Candless would suffer his nightmares. He would have killed her, and still she knew inside herself the towering pain that brought him to such a brink. She wouldn’t wish Angelo’s vengeance upon a flea.
“He’s been so wounded—”
“He’s not beyond help, Iso,” Angelo warned her. He would not soften his rebuke. “He is the cause of what he becomes. His nightmares will serve him well.”
She stood shakily. “I want to get out of here. Is Seth by himself?”
“He is fine. Sleeping. In the charge of an army of Guardian Angels.”
She nodded, relieved, and took up her teacup.
“Leave it,” Angelo commanded.
“But they’ll know I was here by the video—”
“The tapes will show that you were here and gone before he arrived.” He gestured toward Harrison Candless with his head, but his eyes never left her. His look unnerved her for its possessiveness, for his expectation that she would do what he told her.
She didn’t want to do what he said, anything he said. She wouldn’t be at his beck and call, at his whim or command in even so trivial a matter, even if he had saved her life. She turned away with the cup. “I’d rather wash it and put it away.”
He came as close to swearing then as he had ever come. He had had it up to his mortal-seeming eyeballs with Pascal and his marriage-of-convenience accusation, and he didn’t need Isobel behaving like this.
She thought she had come too close. It could never happen. He would defend her to the ends of the earth, so that if he chose, she would never die. But the alltoo-human panic that had consumed him in the instant of what she perceived to be the greatest danger still pounded through his being. He was scared and angry, and he hadn’t been scared in a very long time.
He took the cup and saucer from her, shut off the water, made it clean and replaced it in the glassfronted cabinets long before she could begin to offer a protest.
“Let’s go.”
“Fine.” She turned from him and went through the door, pulling it shut behind her.
He simply went through door, the physical matter meaning nothing to him. He meant to keep stoking his anger, but it guttered out. “Isobel, stop.”
“Or what?” She kept on walking. “I’ve been through too much tonight to deal with you anymore, Angelo.” Her voice came perilously close to cracking with tears. “You saved my life, but you don’t own me. I won’t put up with your attitude anymore. I loved you once, but—”
“Don’t say it…Iso,” he pleaded, more desperate now than if he had his own human emotions.
“Don’t tell me what to say or not to say, Angelo! You have no say over me. You don’t love me—”
“That’s not true—”
“—nor are you still the man I loved. Or else I was crazy. You need to get out. Send your Rafe Santini or Pascal, or let Pascal send someone else.”
When had he ever even spoken Pascal’s name to her? What had he done? “Iso, I’m begging you—”
“Don’t,” she cried, whirling on him. “I mean it, Angelo. Damn you, I mean it! I can’t do this anymore!”
“Neither can I, Iso.” He choked. What moonlight there was sparkled in her unspent tears. What hope there was rankled in his heart, mocking him for a fool of an angel. Was he too late, had he turned her away one time too many? “I can’t be with you and not…love you.”
She froze as if he had physically caused her to do so. She swallowed. Her chin dipped low and she dashed away her tears. She stood there in her pretty little dress with all its tiny buttons and the skirt lifting in the breeze about her thighs, her breasts heaving, her arms empty, her hands clenched tight. She searched his eyes, his face, his being, not trusting what she had heard or what it meant.
Not trusting herself, he knew, to judge correctly. Her naked confusion plucked at his soul.
“Iso, it’s true.” He moved toward her because he could do nothing else. In his mind he begged her to stay still. “I can’t…not…be with you. I swear to you it’s true.”
She moved toward him. He wanted to think it was because she had lied, that she had no real desire to be apart from him.
“You’re certain,” she whispered, anxious about the babe, “that Seth is safe?”
“I promised you, Iso. Nothing will happen to him. He is protected.”
Reassured, she let him take her in his arms and he gained hope.
She let him draw her body tightly to his, and he began to believe.
She let him bring her closer, his hand cupping her bottom, let herself feel his passion risen against her, let herself cry out and go moist and cry out again, this time crying his name. Then he knew for God’s own truth that his making love with Isobel Avedon was more sacred in heaven and on earth than avenging all the evils the world had ever known.
He gave himself to her. He lifted her so that her legs encircled his waist and he could feel her heat. He buried his face in her swollen breasts and began to turn, and turn, and turn until they were no longer halfway between the kitchen and Seth’s nursery suite, but on the beach, on a blanket of the finest mohair, beneath the full moon from which all the clouds had, at his will, blown away.
He laid her down on the blanket and covered her body with his, her lips with his. Her heart and soul with his. He held her face cupped reverently in his hands, and kissed her till he knew for certain that there was no elixir, no honey, no wine more heady and earthy and sweet than her lips.
His member throbbed, his heart soared. Isobel pulled his shirt from his jeans and let her hands move beneath the soft denim to thread her fingers in the mass of his dark and curling chest hair. Her fingers touched his nipples, her pleasured murmur filled his mouth.
His excitement pitched out of sight and mind. Angelo de Medici was a virgin. He had waited five hundred years for this.
For this.
But though he wished to bury himself inside her, to go inside where he longed to be, to go home,he took his time with her. Isobel was a virgin as well.
“I love you, Iso. I love you.” He kissed her neck and touched his lips to the tops of her tender breasts, then raised up for her to undo her own buttons and his. His throat thickened, for in the moonlight the moisture beading on her nipples reminded him how thick his member had grown after she’d taken the babe from her breast and he’d caught a glimpse of her, damp and puckered and flushed in her cheeks with a profound and womanly maternal pleasure.
She represen
ted to him everything a mortal woman could be—feminine, sensual, sensitive, heartful, maternal. Sexual.
He touched his tongue to her beaded breast, his hand to the dark moist cavity between her legs, and Isobel simply dissolved in pleasure.
His desire for her unraveled whatever hesitation, whatever fear she had left inside her. He had made his choice and he had made it for her. Whether he went back now to the corps of Avenging Angels or never did, he had chosen once for her.
The ocean sucked gently at wet shifting sands glistening in the moonlight, blurring the boundaries between earth and sea, drawing one into the other, giving and taking, tide pools spilling free and sinking deeper for it, to hold more, still more.
An echo, she thought.
An echo of their lovemaking, repeating itself endlessly. She went willingly to him and opened herself and came, then came again with the touch of his fingers, before he finally entered her. And thus, they entered eternity together.
THEY SAT SPOONED TOGETHER inside the blanket, Angelo with his back to the cliff side, Isobel between his legs, her back against his chest. They stayed that way until the moon set.
She pulled away to dress when her breasts began to ache severely.
“Tell me what it’s like, Iso, when it hurts.” He didn’t want her to hurt.
She groaned and shoved his hands away as playfully as she could for a woman whose babe needed his breakfast Badly. “Your skin is hot and tight, you feel like you’re going to burst. You feel like if something doesn’t happen, and soon, you’ll go mad.” She pulled her dress over her head and began to do up the buttons. “Think about it.”
He didn’t have to. He grinned as if he’d learned it from the devil himself. “That good, huh?”
“That good,” she answered, blushing red as a firebush in fall, then headed for the staircase built into the cliff. “Step on it, mister, ‘cause I’m out of here.”
He pulled on his jeans and shirt and followed. He’d known sweeter moments, but none so recklessly joyful as teasing her. He held back so he could watch the stiff morning sea breezes whip her skirt tight against her slender legs. This was lust, no doubt, but lust in the service of feelings so deep for her that to consider it a sin would be a worse sin. But now she needed, he knew, to return to the babe and ease her needless fears.