Angels Fall

by Nora Roberts

  his face, couldn't know him.

  "Who are you?" She screamed it out in a voice that blew across the wind. "Who the hell are you?"

  As he came toward her, the ringers of his gloved hands curling, uncurling, she made her choice. She jumped.

  The wind slapped her. Back into the kitchen at Maneo's. A spin to the door, another faceless man, this one in a hoodedjacket. The blast of a gun. Fain exploded—the impact of the bullet, the impact of the water.

  The river closed over her, the pantry door shut.

  And there was no light, there was no air. No life.

  SHE WOKE WITH Brady gripping her arms.

  "Snap out of it." he ordered. "Right now."

  "I jumped."

  "What you did was fall out of bed."

  "I died."

  Her skin was slicked with sweat, and his own heart was still skipping several beats. "You look pretty lively to me. Bad dream, that's all. You were putting up a hell of a fight."

  "I… what?"

  "Kicking, clawing. Come on. Up."

  "Wait. Just wait." She needed to orient herself. The dream was brutally clear, every detail. Until she hit the water, or fell into the pantry. "I was running," she said slowly. "And he was there. I jumped. Into the river. But then, it got mixed up. Or it blended. I was falling into the river, I was falling into the pantry at Maneo's. But I didn't just sink." She pressed a hand to his chest, felt the warmth against her cold skin. "I didn't just give up."

  "No. I'd say you were fighting your way to the surface. You were trying to swim."

  "Okay. Okay. Good for me. About damn time."

  * * *

  Chapter 27

  GETTING UP EARLY every day changed Brody's perspective. He saw more sunrises, and some of them were worth the trouble of prying his eyes open, he got more work done, which was going to make his agent and his editor happy. It gave him more time to poke around his cabin, and consider the possibility of change.

  The location was good, and while he'd toyed on and off with the possibility of buying instead of renting, maybe he should get more serious about becoming a home owner.

  Investment value, equity.

  Mortgage, maintenance.

  Well, you had to take the bad with the good.

  And if he owned the place, he could expand his office, maybe add on a deck. Better view of the lake from up there, especially in the summer when the leaves thickened up. In summer, he could barely catch a glint of the water from the first-floor windows.

  A deck would be a nice place, he mused, to sit in the morning and have coffee, gear up for the day.

  He stood at the window of his office now, with coffee, picturing the change. It could be good.

  One chair or two? he asked himself as he imagined the deck. If keeping the cabin was a big step, keeping the woman was a giant leap over a chasm.

  He'd always enjoyed women, for their brains as well as their bodies. But if anyone had told him he'd one day want a very specific woman around all the time, he'd have reeled off a long list of reasons why such a possibility wasn't for him.

  Now, with Reece, he couldn't think of one item for the list.

  Having her around started his day early, that was true. And he'd gotten into the habit, once he'd quit the Trib, of rolling out of bed whenever he damn well felt like it. But there was always coffee, really good coffee he didn't have to make himself. And food. Hard to overstate the advantages of getting up to food and coffee every morning.

  And her voice. The smell of her. The way she arranged things. Ingredients for a meal, her clothes, the pillows on the bed. He'd found himself ridiculously charmed by the way she folded the bathroom towels over the rung.

  That was a little sick. Probably.

  But what man could resist the way those amazing eyes of her stayed a little blurry for the first half hour in the morning?

  She was a more compelling reason to get out of bed every morning than the most spectacular sunrise.

  She was troubled, complicated and would probably never shake off all her phobias and neuroses. But that's what made her Reece, made her interesting. What sucked him in. There was nothing, absolutely nothing run-of-the-mill about Reece.

  "Two chairs." he decided. "It's going to have to be two chairs."

  Turning away from the window, he went to his desk. He picked up the thumb drive she'd given him. When he booted up, he saw there were two documents on the drive. One headed CMB the other LIST.

  "Cookbook thing," he mumbled, and wondered if she meant for him to have it, or had slipped up. Well, either way, he had it now.

  He opened that first, started reading the text she had headed as INTRO.

  The in-laws are coming into town unexpectedly—tomorrow… It's the third date, and you're making her dinner. And hoping to follow it up with breakfast in bed… It's your turn to host your book club… Your perfect sister invited herself and her fiance—the doctor—to dinner… Your son volunteered you to make cupcakes for the entire class…

  Don't panic.

  No matter how busy you are, how overwhelmed, how inexperienced you might be in the kitchen, it's going to be fine. In fact, it's going to be spectacular. I'm going to walk you through it, every step.

  From the sumptuous to the casual, from tailgate parties to elegant dining and everything in between, you're the chef.

  All right, I'm the chef. But you're about to become a Casual Gourmet.

  "Not bad," he decided, reading on. She'd woven in little bits about time, equipment, lifestyles. Kept it all light, a little frothy. Accessible.

  After the introduction, she'd included a basic summary of the tone of the book she was proposing, then half a dozen recipes. The instructions—with bits of pep talk—were clear enough that he thought it might not be completely impossible for him to follow one through himself.

  Topping each were stars, running from one to four. Degree of difficulty, he noted. Smart. In parentheses, she'd made a note suggesting the asterisks might be chefs' hats.

  "Clever girl, aren't you, Slim?"

  He considered for a moment, then composed a quick e-mail to his agent. And attached Reece's file.

  He closed it, opened her list.

  Oh yeah, she was clever, he thought again. Her little sketches of the men were insightful and on target. Maybe it surprised him to find names like Mac Drubber and Doc Wallace, but she was thorough. And he enjoyed reading comments about Mac such as mildly flirtatious, likes to gossip.

  He'd have to ask Reece what she'd have put after his name if she'd included him on her list.

  He edited in some of his own comments, observations. She couldn't have known, for instance, that Deputy Denny had gotten his heart broken by a girl who'd worked as a maid at the hotel, had strung him along for six months, then blown out of town with a biker the previous autumn.

  He saved the updated file, copied both it and the cookbook data to his machine.

  When he'd finished, it was still shy of eight in the morning.

  Nothing left to do but go to work.

  He broke at eleven, went down to the kitchen to switch coffee for Coke and added a handful of pretzels. He was munching down on the first of them when his phone rang. He scowled, as he always did when the phone rang, then lightened up when the caller ID readout showed his agent.

  "Hi, Lyd. It's going good," he told her when she asked about the book. He looked at the cursor on his screen. Today it was his friend. Other days, it might be the enemy. Then he smiled when she asked if he had time to talk about the proposal from his friend. "Yeah, I got a few minutes. What did you think?"

  WHEN HE HUNG UP, he scratched around through his piles of notes for the copy he'd made of Reece's schedule. He found it between a gun magazine—research—and a printout on the plasma TV he was thinking of buying.

  He looked at the clock, back at the cursor. And decided he wasn't going to feel guilty for knocking off early.

  HE WANDERED IN TO Joanie's just as Reece was stripping off her apron. He
leaned on the counter. She had her hair bundled up, and the heat from the grill had her face flushed. She looked soft, he thought.

  "You eat anything you cooked today?" he asked her.

  "Not exactly."

  "Pack something up."

  "Pack something up? What's this? Another picnic?"

  "No. It's lunch. Hey, Bebe, how's it going?"

  "I'm pregnant."

  "Ah… congratulations?"

  "Easy for you to say. You don't have morning sickness. The fun never ends." But she smiled, eased her feet by leaning on the counter across from him. "Jim's hoping for a girl this time. I wouldn't mind. How come you never ask me to pack something up, Brody?"

  "Because Jim would kick my ass. Am I supposed to ask when you're due and stuff like that?"

  "You're a guy. You're supposed to look flustered and a little afraid. And you're doing a good job. In November, around Thanksgiving. By then, I'll look like I've swallowed an entire Butterball anyway. When's your next book coming out?"

  "A couple months sooner, and much less painfully."

  At the call of order up, Bebe rolled her eyes. "Well, back to the thrill and excitement of food service."

  "Lunch." Reece held up a large bag as she came out of the kitchen. "You can be among the first to sample our new and experimental paninis."

  "Paninis. At Joanie's."

  "Et tu, Brody? You'd think I was cooking snails and calf brains— which I can do, and deliciously."

  "I'll take the panini." He led her outside, taking her elbow and steering her across the street as she glanced around for his car.

  "Where are we going?"

  "To the lake."

  "Oh. Nice idea. It's a pretty day for lunch by the lake."

  "We're not having lunch by the lake. We're having lunch on the lake." He nodded toward a canoe. "In that."

  She stood where she was and eyed the boat, a little dubiously. "We're going to sit in a canoe and eat paninis?'

  "I picked the spot, you picked the food. It's Doc's boat. He said we could borrow it for a few hours today. We're going to do a little paddling."

  "Hmmm."

  She liked boats. That is, she liked boats with motors, or boats with sails. But Reece had no idea how she felt about boats with paddles. "I bet that water's still plenty cold."

  "You bet right, so let's stay on it, not in it. Get in the boat, Reece."

  "Getting in the boat." She stepped aboard, balanced herself and walked to the rear bench.

  "Turn around the other way." Brody told her.

  "Oh"

  He got in, handed her a paddle, then took the front bench. Using his paddle, he launched them from shore. "Just do what I do, only on the opposite side of the canoe."

  "You've done this before, right? What I mean to say is this wouldn't be the maidenvoyage for both of us, would it?"

  "I've done it before. I haven't bought a boat yet because I waver between a canoe and a kayak, and it feels stupid to have both. Besides, there's always one to borrow without storage and maintenance hassles. You just buy the owner a six-pack or a bottle, and you're good.

  "Always an angle." She had to put her shoulder into the paddle. "Water's harder than it looks."

  Her muscles were already warming, and as she watched Brody paddle like a hawk watches a rabbit, she thought she had his rhythm. She could admit she liked the sensation of gliding; the boat just seemed to skim over the water. But gliding took work, and she could already feel it in her shoulders, her biceps.

  Time to start weight resistance again, she told herself.

  "Where are we going?" she called out to him.

  "Nowhere."

  "There again?" She laughed, shook back the hair that had blown loose in the breeze.

  And the mountains caught her like a fist.

  "Oh God. Oh my God."

  In the front of the boat. Brody smiled. He heard the awe, the reverence in her voice. "A kick in the head, aren't theyr" He secured his paddle, turned to face her. then took her paddle from her still hands, secured it.

  "It's different from here. It's all different somehow. They look…" They look?"

  "Like gods. Silver and shining with thin crowns of white, dark belts of green. Bigger somehow, and more powerful."

  They rose, rose and spread, silver blue against the purer blue of the sky. The snow that clung to the higher peaks was as white as the clouds that drifted over them. And on the water, they mirrored. On the water, she felt as if she were inside them.

  An egret soared up, skimmed the lake, glided like a ghost into the marsh on its north end.

  There were other boats. A little Sunfish with a yellow sail fluttered in the center of the lake; a kayaker worked on his skills. She recognized Carl fishing out of a canoe, and a couple who must have been tourists streamed out of one of the braided channels and slid onto the plate of the lake.

  She felt weightless and small, and punch-drunk.

  "Why don't you do this every day?" she wondered.

  "I usually do it more once June hits, but I've been busy. Last summer, Mac talked me into going on a three-day trip on the river. Him, me, Carl. Rick. I went along because I figured it would be good research. Floated along the Snake, camped, fried fish Carl caught like they were eager to jump in the boat for him. Drank cowboy coffee. Told a lot of lies about women."

  "You had fun."

  "Had a hell of a time. We could do that, take a couple of days once you get the hang of paddling and try one of the easy channels."

  "Easy might have to be the key word, but I think I'd like that."

  "Good. I read your list."

  "Oh." It was like a cloud over the sun. Still, it had to be discussed, she thought, explored. She opened the bag of sandwiches. "What did you think?"

  "Pretty thorough. I added some bits. A little discreet poking around, we should be able to eliminate some. I already found out Reuben, Joe, Lynt and Dean were in a poker game in Clancy's back room. Seven to after ten for Reuben and Joe, when they knocked off to head to Joanie's. Dean, Lynt, Stan Urick, who's not on your list since he's seventy and built like a twig, and Harley—who's not due to the thicket he calls a beard— were in it until after one in the morning. Nobody left for more than the time it takes to piss. Dean lost eighty bucks."

  "Well, three down."