Angel With an Attitude

  She should never have come this close…

  The babe’s essence was so small and tender and warm, but the essence of the man, so large and powerful and arrogant—and hot—brought her to her knees.

  “Angelo,” Isobel murmured.

  She wanted him to be mortal, to comfort her, to take her into his arms and make love to her till hell froze over and the triumph of good over evil was no longer at stake.

  But she knew that was not possible, and she pretended it didn’t matter. “Stay with him a little longer? I just want to go…to the kitchen.”

  “Whatever you want, Iso, you can have right here.”

  “You mean you’ll conjure it?” She barely prevented herself from bursting into hysterical laughter. He would not conjure the only thing she truly wanted. “No. I can t have what I want right here.”

  “Then go.” His voice was deeper, harsher than she had ever known. If he knew what was in her heart and her thoughts, then it had reason to be. She wanted more than anything to be away from him, where she could envision a life without him. “Seth and I will be fine,” he said, cradling the baby to his chest.

  And so will I, she thought fiercely. So will I, when you are gone and all that is left for me is Seth.

  Dear Reader,

  Last year we brought you a quartet of AVENGING ANGELS—the sexiest angels this side of heaven, to be exact. And you loved them so much that we’re bringing you two more of these very special heroes.

  Whenever there is injustice, the Avenging Angels are on the case, ready to right the wrong but often not ready to deal with the pleasures of the flesh.

  Carly Bishop, who was one of the originating authors of the quartet, is back with Angelo’s story. This Angel with an Attitude is about to learn a thing or two about life and love.

  Next month be sure to look for A Real Angel by Cassie Miles.

  We’re delighted we could bring you more AVENGING ANGELS!

  Regards,

  Debra Matteucci

  Senior Editor & Editorial Coordinator

  Harlequin Books

  300 East 42nd Street

  New York, NY 10017

  Angel with an

  Attitude

  Carly Bishop

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Isobel Avedon—A guardian angel, Isobel would risk anything for the life of baby Seth, even her immortal soul.

  Angelo de Medici—An avenging angel, Angelo held justice to be the highest value, until his love for Isobel taught him otherwise.

  Seth—The innocent babe was caught in a web of family passions and deadly intrigue.

  Pascal—Angelo’s fellow avenging angel knew better what Angelo would finally choose. Gina Sellers—Was Seth’s mother playing both ends against the middle?

  Ian Candless—Seth’s father—he wanted his illegitimate son.

  Bruce Candless—Ian’s eldest son was a force to be reckoned with, and his mother’s only ally.

  Conrad Candless—Second son Conrad took a dangerous path.

  Harrison Candless—lan’s brilliant, paranoid third son knew a photo op when he saw one.

  Kelsey St. John—Ian’s only daughter wanted her father’s fortune for her own expected baby.

  Emory St. John—The lead Candless attorney, Kelsey’s husband loved her too much.

  Patrice Candless—Ian’s wife took in his illegitimate son with more grace than compassion.

  Pilar Sanchez—Her green card couldn’t protect her loved ones.

  Chapter One

  All that fateful day Isobel had sensed the threat of mortal danger to the baby Seth. She should have seen it coming, should have been able to prevent it, but she was looking for an accident, not a cold-blooded murder.

  When the bullets from a drive-by shooting tore into tiny Seth’s mother and dropped her like a stone to the pavement, Isobel caved in.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t witnessed such unexpected, inhuman crimes. In another time and place, she had died of just such a heartless act as this young mother had.

  But when the baby tumbled screaming from his mother’s lifeless arms, Isobel’s angelic sensibilities deserted her. She lost perspective. A fierce and tender emotion, unheard-of in a Guardian Angel, rose up in her angel consciousness. Something about tiny Seth stole the heart and soul of the guardian Isobel Avedon had become.

  She could not have put a name to her fascination, nor any justification. She was, after all, five centuries into her angelic service to humankind. Thousands of babies had passed through her loving guardianship. No one child was any less precious to her than the hundreds before or the one to follow—which was as it should be.

  Part of her knew that. She was not little Seth’s birth mother and never could be. She owed her allegiance and her powers and her love to all mankind.

  Somehow, none of that mattered. All these centuries later, the memory of her own murder fueled the fire in her soul. It wasn’t so much that her own life had been cut short, as it was that in dying before her time, she had never even imagined the face of her own offspring, never conceived one or nursed one at her breast, never rejoiced in his or her first words or steps.

  Isobel Avedon had never even lain with her beloved.

  Now, hundreds of years later, Isobel wanted this babe—and he needed a mother. If she were to be cast out from paradise for ever after, she would still do it, for in that terrible instant of his real mother’s death, Isobel loved that child above all else.

  This was, of course, forbidden.

  The emotion took her by storm. She might have turned aside from such human feelings. She might have let them pass, might have chalked them up to a sweet and fleeting temporal aberration. She was a Guardian Angel, powerful enough to dissuade mortals—through sheer mind power—from committing illegal, cruel or thoughtless acts.

  But Isobel had never in all her time as an angel known such a swift or urgent need to act outside her powers. There were no rules to guide her…save the one that forbade what she was about to do.

  What she must do.

  So Isobel acted on her feelings, and in the wake of her decision, she became fully, awkwardly human—plunging into the earthly dimension without finesse or any semblance of grace.

  She had no plan, or the slightest concept of the consequences of materializing out of thin air into a human body.

  She hadn’t remembered what it was to assume human form. To be born again into the hellishness of human constraints. She knew nothing of the pain involved or what it was like to move on earth, how unbearably slow and plodding she would become.

  She hadn’t remembered what it was like to breathe, especially not air so thick and noxious she could scarcely drag a breath into her human lungs. Despite the loose flowing skirt and light silk tank top, her physical form weighed on her like the yoke on a beast of burden.

  Weaker than the babe she intended to save, she sank to her knees beside the terror-stricken child. Every detail seemed frozen in time to her. The screams and shouts of onlookers. The ungodly roar of cars. The scent of death on the breeze lifting strands of Seth’s dead mother’s long blond hair.

  Choking on his own cries, the babe strained toward his mother while her blood poured out onto the rough, cracked concrete sidewalk. Isobel’s transition to her temporal form had cost her dearly. She had no strength to move in those first moments, much less to touch the babe, to comfort him.

  He wore a tiny sweat suit and designer baby tennis shoes. A plump, healthy five-month-old, he had beautiful, shiny dark curls and enormous brown eyes. But as his mother lay lifeless, clumps of sparse grass poked him in his tiny mottled face, mocking his confusion and his rage.

  The danger to Seth hadn’t ended, either. The car carrying the murderers, a huge, sh
iny black monster, screeched to a halt fifty feet down the street, then whined as the driver backed up.

  Deadly weapons poked out the windows, and the hideous crack of gunfire began again—and Isobel wondered if Hell could be any more horrifying than the violent tableau playing out before her now.

  The murderers’ return meant they intended to finish the job and kill tiny Seth too.

  Onlookers shouted and dived for cover. Adolescents darted about with boxes that blared music that sounded to Isobel like nothing more than harsh, ugly sounds. Other cars slowed in curiosity and then sped away. Still, Isobel battled for the strength to move.

  And the baby…The baby reaching for his mother—the tears, the shrill scream of terror, his tiny nose running, mouth drooling. He could crawl, but barely. He fell and stretched and rolled over, his little body twisting with rage.

  She fought the terrifying earthbound sensations with all her might. She couldn’t fail. Nothing mattered save plucking that precious baby out of harm’s way.

  With a burst of energy, she scooped up the baby and clutched him tight to her mortal body. He smelled of powdery talc and panicky tears. A wave of pure maternal love swept through Isobel. Heedless for just that second of the bullets flying through the air, she savored the sensation, the earthiness, the raw power of simply being alive.

  Nothing in heaven or on earth could ever match the power of a mother’s love, or the feel of a baby in her arms—a sweet and needful baby clinging to her.

  But when bullets began biting into the sidewalk, blasting shards of concrete, the danger of indulging herself in cradling little Seth finally penetrated Isobel’s human mind. She didn’t know what to do, where to flee. Stuck with a human consciousness now, she had no chance to make a careful plan.

  Where to go?

  Small crumbling tract houses lined one side of the street. Seth’s mother had come out of one of them, but to run to any one of them would be to draw the danger with her. There was a park across the street, a pathetic excuse for a park, where the youngest barrio children swung on broken-down swings and climbed monkey bars, and the older ones bought street drugs on the sly.

  She chose instead the empty, run-down churchyard behind her and half a block down the street.

  She stood, instinctively crouching low. Heat rose off the street in sickening waves. The stench of clouds coming out of cars seemed to fill the air. Bullets strafed past her mortal body, but she couldn’t dwell on the pandemonium surrounding her.

  If only she could get to the church.

  If she tried, she thought desperately, she could make it to the sanctuary.

  Surely those murdering men would not dare follow her with their death-dealing weapons inside a house of God.

  Drawing on instincts she had long forgotten, Isobel darted past the confused and angry bystanders toward the churchyard.

  Fighting to breathe, she slogged through the hot, sticky, threatening atmosphere. Her angel self could move faster than a ray of sunlight, but her woman self could never outrun the deadly bullets of merciless killers.

  She had forgotten real fear, but now, for Seth, she knew it to her core. Knew it so well in one split second, when a bullet ripped over the flesh of her right shoulder, mere inches from Seth’s tiny head, that she could taste it.

  Cradling his small, sweet head to her other shoulder, she dared a backward glance. The car pursuing her wrenched to the curb. Angry, determined men in black clothing and dark glasses spilled out of it, shooting without a care for the lives of innocent bystanders.

  She made it to the churchyard, which was surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Bullets and obscenities cracked in the air. She clutched tiny Seth closer to her breast and ran for the gate.

  Choked with tired bougainvillea and unkempt, waist-high weeds, the gate held fast. She wasn’t used to dealing with obstacles on a physical plane, and a part of her still believed she could simply move through the gate.

  She tried, believing this, but the vines scratched her face, and her arm slammed painfully into the chain links. Near to panic without her guardian abilities, still the flight-or-fight human hormones flooded her mortal body. She managed with some sort of primitive, superhuman strength to force open the latch and shove through into the churchyard.

  Her clothing was damp with Seth’s tears and drooling and the blood welling from her own wound. Shouts and gunshots rang out over and over again, blasting the air. Little Seth choked and screamed, and rage—another all-too-human emotion she’d forgotten—crowded Isobel’s fear. If she were an avenging angel, she could have dealt with these evil men, but she wasn’t.

  Isobel Avedon, back in her human form after so many centuries, cradling the baby Seth, prayed hard, and ran even harder.

  GLANCING AT THE LIST of evil and immoral acts requiring the attention of an Avenging Angel, Angelo spared a moment to acknowledge to himself that, for all the natural beauty of the Pacific at the latitude of Los Angeles, he sorely missed his Denver office.

  He missed the Rocky Mountains in the distance—though what was distance to an angel?—west of the city. He missed the ambience, the essential friendliness of mortals there. In Denver, most of the streets still rolled up by ten o’clock at night, something only an Avenging Angel could properly appreciate, and yet the area, the mountains, was far from a cultural wasteland.

  On the contrary. He had a fondness—some would say a weakness—for mortal art forms, for plays and opera, for sculpture, and for music from clever rap and country and western to Wagner and Brahms and Sondheim. And though, as an avenger, he could roam the earth in the blink of an eye, searching for the finest performances anywhere, he favored the world-class visiting symphonies in the spectacular natural amphitheaters of Red Rocks and Vail, Aspen and Ouray.

  Colorado had no equal, unless he counted Italy, which was where he had left his mortal heart.

  In another oddly human and poignant manner, Angelo missed his staff, in particular his so-called secretary, Grace. He didn’t know why this should be true. Grace was a busybody, know-it-all angel. She’d been around the heavenly block more times than Methuselah. Grace believed that everyone was entitled to her opinion—not that she ever came straight out with it. He had simply found his agenda expertly and irrevocably arranged to reflect Grace’s priorities.

  They had gotten along together about as well as jackals in the wild, but Angelo respected her bedrock principles above all others, and that was saying a great deal among angels. Her strength and her unending compassion—even her blessed opinions—mattered more to him than he wanted to admit.

  So back at the Denver branch of Avenging Angels, he knew, Grace was in charge, if not in name, then by virtue of her opinions and her formidable organizational skills. All the same, he wished she had come with him to Los Angeles, where the International Avenging Angels ran its unwieldy operation.

  He could have used her sense of perspective.

  Or maybe he’d been too long about the business of assigning the avengers.

  Scowling, he looked again to the cases requiring his attention. Pascal, titular head of the Los Angeles division of International, and the one who had called for Angelo’s assistance, nodded.

  He knew the backlog was terrible. So bad that even Saint Michael, patron saint of cops, had himself been passing out avenger assignments to ease the incredible burden. International trafficking in the illegal, the depraved and the corrupt plagued humankind on the eve of the twenty-first century.

  Angelo took it personally.

  Pascal repeated his oft-shared gratitude for Angelo’s assistance in this time of crisis. “I’ve needed you, my friend. You see that now. You see for yourself how troubled is the City of Angels. Sorely troubled.”

  “Time for another flood of forty days and forty nights,” Angelo joked darkly.

  “A fresh start, so to speak?” Pascal concurred. “But of course, there was the covenant.”

  Angelo stifled a harsh response. He thrived on justice and lacked compassion—a
nd he knew it. Rainbows were the metaphor for the covenant Pascal referred to, God’s promise never to flood the entire earth again. But Angelo thought there must be two sides to a covenant. If there had been, mankind hadn’t lived up to its end very well. Evil and wickedness were alive and well and flourishing on Planet Earth, and everywhere, Avenging Angels fell further and further behind.

  Angelo dismissed his own dark thoughts. Despair wasn’t a becoming attribute for an Avenging Angel—or any angel, for that matter. He took the matter of his attributes quite seriously. If he lacked compassion, it was because justice was so often thwarted. But in his essence, he knew that miracles transcend the laws of time and space. The Avenging Angels played a vital role he would never forsake, no matter how desperate the times, how seemingly hopeless the chore.

  He often reminded himself of the old mortal saying, that the darkness was always greatest before the dawn—and dawn must soon arrive.

  Still, a strange, quaintly human anxiety had been stalking his consciousness like a shark circling nearer and nearer its prey.

  Pascal, always alert to the most fleeting impressions, noticed Angelo’s distraction. “What is it, my friend?”

  Angelo shook his head. “I don’t know.” Five centuries had passed since the last time such anxiety set upon him.

  Pascal turned his attention away from the small mountain of injustices demanding an Avenging Angel, focusing all his considerable faculties upon Angelo. “Tell me,” he urged.