Angel With an Attitude Read online

  But that was ancient history. Here and now, he believed she had again done something so brazenly unfit: she had forsaken her place among the angels for the sake of an innocent child.

  But an angel could not lie.

  He had blamed their deaths on her rash decision to confront her father, yet in some way she couldn’t comprehend, he had ceased to blame her. Otherwise, he could not justify denying that he held her responsible. She wanted very much to understand him.

  “Angelo, please. It matters to me. Are you saying that you never blamed me, or that you have forgiven me?”

  He sank down onto the settee as if the weight of all eternity had fallen on his shoulders. His gaze fell to the satisfied and slumbering babe, then caught upon the damp spot of milk that had seeped through her cotton shift.

  He glanced quickly away and swallowed. The lurching thrust of his Adam’s apple was as familiar to her as the stroke of a raven’s wing. Scorched in some way by the intimacy of such a stain at her breast, he could not even control the telltale physical responses of the human image he’d conjured to present himself to her. A deep ravine of masculine insecurity had been exposed.

  She knew he would retaliate. Being male, he simply wouldn’t know what else to do. Angelo was about to come out with a truth she didn’t know if she could stand.

  It took him several more moments. “What happened,” he said at last, “was not your fault, Iso. We knew the stakes. We knew the political fallout of our liaison—of our love. But if you had gone away with me instead of confronting your father, we would have had our lives together.”

  Her chin trembled. “I could not do that.”

  “Then it doesn’t really matter what I believed then, or what I feel now, does it?”

  Isobel straightened, symbolically adding to herself some small semblance of a backbone in the face of an outcome she had never imagined. Her emotions ran too high, too raw. Whatever consequences she might have expected when she made the fateful decision to plunge back into her mortal being, dealing with her past, with Angelo was not one of them.

  It should not have mattered. They spoke of events and passions and political intrigues that had burned themselves out half a millennium ago. That it mattered so much threatened her in ways she could not name.

  She rose and took the sleeping Seth to a bed made up of a sofa turned the wrong way against the old plaster wall. Angelo’s eyes followed her every move.

  He had about his human form the aura of an angel. He had taken on a form she would recognize, but he remained a heavenly being. She well knew he realized to his core the primal satisfaction of the babe having nursed at her breast.

  Without Seth in her arms she felt more vulnerable than ever. Angelo knew the scent of a palette of colors, the taste of a sonata. His keen angelic senses transcended ordinary sight, scent, touch, taste and sound. The synthesis of them gave him a commanding edge over her in any battle of wits or heart or intellect, and she could no longer bear to speak of their past with him.

  Her only defense lay in seeking his help. “I know that there is someone out there who wants this little boy dead.” She gestured awkwardly at the makeshift crib. “Was it you who drove away the murderers?”

  He nodded.

  “And you who brought the priest back to the parish?”

  Again, he nodded. From the look in his eyes, she knew he had had a great deal to do with Father Sifuentes keeping her out of a shelter where she could be betrayed, despite the pastor’s probing questions. Angelo, she knew, had placed those questions in the priest’s mind.

  His relief in dropping the subject of their past seemed palpable to her. He turned and waved a hand at the air, producing an immense black box against one wall of her primly Victorian room. The box immediately sprang to life, startling her with vivid images.

  “These are the news accounts. You should understand what it is you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  She sank to the pillowed seat of a simple, wooden, black-lacquered chair beside a small tea table and watched as a woman’s face filled an ephemeral screen. Isobel had never seen anything like it. A camel could well have gone through the eye of a needle more easily than she comprehended such modern contrivances.

  The woman reporter began, “In the ongoing investigation of the drive-by shooting in this barrio neighborhood, KCBJ has learned that a baby was kidnapped in the wake of the murder. Authorities are speculating now that the shooting was both a means of disposing of the baby’s mother and a cover for the kidnapping. Let’s go live now to our reporter on the scene. John?”

  Isobel’s heart began to sink. Angelo conjured up a couple of glasses of a fine Sicilian wine and focused his attention on the screen as well, which showed an artificially lighted image of a man standing in the dark outside the church where Isobel had been.

  The man began speaking into his microphone. “Sheila, what we know now is that there was indeed a baby who fell to the ground from the victim’s arms. Several witnesses indicated that a woman seemed to appear—and I quote—’from out of nowhere.’ This woman apparently snatched up the baby and ran. After that, the story gets sticky. While the shooters seemed to pursue the disappearing woman, even firing shots at her, she escaped cleanly, and no one thought to go after her.

  “Detectives on the scene are apparently not buying into that escape. There were by preliminary counts at least fifty rounds fired, and only one bullet struck the fleeing woman. Witnesses indicated it must have been a superficial wound to the woman’s shoulder or upper arm, since it did not fell her. Police are asking for any information leading to this wounded woman.”

  When she checked, Isobel was stunned to find that her wound was suddenly healed, her flesh whole again.

  Angelo had done it, had healed her. She would not be recognized by her wound, and she wanted to express some modicum of gratitude, but the story wasn’t done and her attention went again to the television.

  “At any rate,” the reporter near the church was saying, “the detectives have concluded that the shooting was carefully scripted. They believe the gunmen never intended to hit the mystery woman. If that is in fact the case, then the police fear the whole thing may have been a setup for a kidnap conspiracy.”

  The screen image divided so the woman could now be seen as well. Isobel took a gulp of her wine. In her mind, authority was tyranny, police had a jackbooted mentality, and if they believed Seth had been stolen in a kidnap conspiracy, her point was made.

  “John,” the woman said, “there are some pretty wild stories going around. Is it true that some witnesses insist it was an avenging angel who drove the gunmen away?”

  “True story,” he responded to the anchorwoman. “That’s what several witnesses claim.” His lips curled in disdain for such apparently harebrained reports. “No accounting for eyewitness accounts, as they say. But in fact, the gunmen were taken to the emergency room of County General for third-degree burns to their hands—burns approximating the pattern of a handgun grip. The police aren’t talking, though, and except for the consternation over the pattern of burns, the ER staff members whom I’ve been able to question are keeping this all under tight wraps.”

  Isobel shivered. “Make it stop. Please.”

  Without so much as a wave from Angelo this time, the picture and sound went still. “That was hours ago, Iso. There is more.”

  She ignored his warning and tried to focus on the facts, to concentrate on containing her paranoia. “I must have appeared to come from nowhere, but I don’t understand the logic of assuming that I was conspiring with those murderers to kidnap Seth.”

  “They only know that you were not seriously injured by any of the shooting. Think, Iso. If you were them, you would have to consider what that means. They killed Seth’s mother. How likely is it that if they really wanted to kill you and Seth, they would have failed?”

  She felt herself chilling deep inside where the shivering didn’t show. She knew, of course, that what the police and reporter refused to belie
ve was true. It was only by the grace of Angelo’s intervention that she and Seth had not been dropped dead to the ground exactly as his mother had been.

  “It doesn’t matter that there were eyewitnesses to your appearance, does it?”

  Angelo laughed and shook his head. His commanding brow and strongly Roman nose dominated his profile, but when he faced her straight on, laughing, Isobel was struck by the pure masculine symmetry of his face, the mahogany brown of his eyes, the olive tones of his skin, the beauty of his straight, almost blindingly white teeth.

  She resented his laughing at her. “It was a rhetorical question,” she snapped. “I am not so naive as that.”

  He had never bothered stifling his endless amusement at her. “You are that naive, Isobel, and you have always been.”

  She jutted her chin. “And you have always been an ass about it.” She hesitated. She wanted him to know she had not been some bubbleheaded sweet thing in charge of the cherubs for all these centuries. “A lot has happened since you knew me. I take the ugliness in mankind seriously now, whereas before I used to discount it. I admit that.”

  “And still you ask how they can believe you were in league with the murderers, Isobel,” he chided. “You may never have had an ill-intentioned bone in your body, but that doesn’t mean no one else does. And it doesn’t mean they won’t come after you with everything they’ve got.”

  “I didn’t kidnap this babe,” she uttered fiercely.

  “I know you didn’t.” He hesitated and took her hand. She felt doubly scared. “So does the baby’s father.”

  “His father?” If he had spent the ages calculating how best to destroy her, he could not have come up with anything stronger. She could barely get a sound past her throat. “His mother was unwed, and—”

  “Iso, I told you there was more.”

  She pulled her hand away. She couldn’t have Angelo’s love. She’d been robbed of him, of that, too long ago to believe she would ever again have anything from him but the love any angel bears every mortal.

  She didn’t want his comfort or his pity, either. “Show me.”

  The picture on the large screen faded to black, and then Isobel watched as a different woman introduced a much older man sitting beside her. “In a stunning development concerning the apparent murder and kidnapping that occurred in the barrios this afternoon, we bring you tonight Mr. Ian James Candless, owner and CEO of Candless Industries, including the Rodeo Drive flagship store, IJ Candless & Sons. Sir?”

  From her small stiff chair, clinging to an empty wine goblet, Isobel watched Ian Candless’s aging, troubled features fill the screen. He had to be well into his sixties, but he had clearly had the advantage of the finest plastic surgeons and athletic trainers. Still, he looked straight into the living room at her, and his suffering seemed real to Isobel.

  “I had thought to offer a reward,” he began, “for the return of the baby kidnapped in the terrible driveby shooting early this afternoon. My legal counsel advised that I couch such an offer as one made out of pure, charitable benevolence—a gesture to the community in which I have lived and made my fortune for fifty years.

  “I could not do that. Until today, only my attorneys knew of the existence of my infant son, Seth, or of his mother, who was so brutally shot down this day. She was a beautiful woman with whom I shared a brief relationship more than a year ago. I never knew of Seth’s existence until his mother tried, several days ago, to use our son to blackmail me. She expected that I would pay any amount to keep the living proof of our dalliance from Patrice, my wife of thirty-seven years, and my grown sons and daughter. She was mistaken. I regret the suffering of my family, but I could never shirk the responsibility of a child I fathered.

  “Instead, through intermediaries, I established that the child is mine, and I offered this young woman a home on my estate in exchange for turning my son over to me. Neither I nor anyone connected with me saw her again until her photograph was shown on the early evening news as the murder victim.”

  Isobel felt her skin crawl. She couldn’t point to anything Candless had said as being less than upstanding and honorable, yet she felt dragged through layer upon layer of slime. He had confessed to a “brief relationship” with Seth’s mother, but in a tone and a context Isobel despised, as if his adultery were on a par with jaywalking.

  “Men like Ian Candless never get their just deserts, do they?”

  “They do, Isobel,” Angelo assured her quietly. He had caused Candless’s image and voice to freeze on the screen. “His soul is shriveled to dust. Ian Candless regards his grown sons as spoiled, ineffectual leeches not worth his spit. In Seth he sees a chance at a new beginning, a tabula rasa.”

  She stared at Angelo. “Do you know him?”

  “We’ve met. Candless Industries have been subjected to a couple of IRS investigations and have come up clean each time. He frequents the Brentwood Smoking Club where Saint Michael and a few of the International Avenging Angels crowd hang out.”

  “Would I know them?”

  “Rafe Santini?”

  She shook her head.

  Angelo gave a quirky smile. “You’d remember him. Women do. He deals in high-profile international crime.”

  She wondered fleetingly how he believed she would have crossed paths with Rafe Santini. More to the point, she wondered how well Angelo knew his own effect on mortal women, for he could not have failed to notice their appreciative gazes in his own age or any other. Or how enamored of him she still was. Even under these circumstances, the heat of her attraction pitted against the cold realities, knowing their chance had come and long since gone.

  She caught herself up short. She couldn’t dwell upon that. She needed to know more about Ian Candless.

  “Do tales of adultery go over well in this smoking club?”

  One of Angelo’s heavy dark eyebrows rose. “Men do not label themselves adulterers, Iso. If you’re asking whether Candless talked about his affairs with women, I don’t know. I haven’t been here very long.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Do you think it matters?”

  “It matters to me what kind of man Seth’s father is.”

  “If there had ever been any hint of a scandal before, Candless would have been quietly invited not to return. What matters,” he went on gently, pointedly, “is what kind of father Ian Candless intends to be now, not his reputation in a Beverly Hills smoking club. And even now, he may be lauded for stepping up to his responsibility to Seth.”

  She didn’t care what kind of father Candless intended to be, and Angelo knew it. She didn’t have to point out to him that he had, in the last hour, called her on her own good intentions. “Is there more?”

  “A couple of minutes.”

  She pulled her hair back and looped its weight in on itself to hold it back. “Go ahead.”

  “I have to warn you, Iso. Candless will show a police artist’s rendering of you.”

  Her chill went deeper still. “Of me?”

  He nodded. The picture flickered on. Candless’s voice picked up. “The police suspect this young woman, whose face you now see on the screen, in the kidnapping of my son. I do not believe she meant to kidnap Seth. I believe she only intended to rescue him from the men who so brutally murdered his mother.

  “I believe this woman to be a heroine. She risked her own life to save the life of an innocent child, and it’s my opinion that she is, even now, hiding Seth away in the fear that his mother’s murderers intend to kill my son as well.

  “If you are out there watching now, young woman, let me say to you that I admire what you have done, and if you will only call, you and no one else, I will take my son, I will protect him against any threat, and I will reward you with whatever you ask. Please. This day you have proved yourself a heroine. Please. Return my son to me.”

  As soon as the newswoman took over to go to reactions from the Los Angeles community, Angelo caused the television to turn off. In fact, to disappear.
r />   Isobel made herself breathe. “Do you trust him?”

  “I’m a long way from trusting Ian Candless, Iso. He’s a past master at public relations, and a man who can and will say anything to get what he wants.”

  She nodded and rose from the small chair to walk off her chill. She went to the makeshift crib and looked at the baby sleeping soundly. “It’s possible he’s sincere. He knows I didn’t kidnap the baby.”

  “On the contrary. He doesn’t know anything about you. What he’s done is make a brilliant preemptive move. He has managed to make himself sympathetic, and in the same stroke, he’s said he will not pay a ransom. He didn’t cave in to the mother’s demands. He won’t cave in for any kidnapper.”

  “He offered me a reward! I don’t want it, of course, but—”

  “But he didn’t offer not to press charges, did he?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He smiled, a curve of his generous lips somewhere between indulgent and sad. “You would make a lousy detective, Iso.”

  “I would never dream of trying.”

  “In order to deal with your enemies, you have to think as they do. If you were to come forward and accept a reward—even if you didn’t—it is still possible for Candless to pressure the DA’s office to pursue kidnap charges.”

  Angelo had refilled her goblet. She longed for a healthy shot of the aged wine—for courage—but she declined. She had never looked to the dark, hidden agendas of others. If Candless’s offer concealed such intentions, she needed Angelo’s help more than she had imagined. “The babe’s mother…her murder must demand your retribution.”

  “Isobel.” He looked steadily at her, but his Adam’s apple did a slow stroking descent again. He seemed more man than angel, more affected by her backward approach than he should have been. “Are you asking for my help?”

  She straightened, willing herself to prove she had a backbone. “Yes.”

  “Then ask it.” He stood. Though no closer to her than perhaps a few yards, his presence, his eyes on her, the focus of all his attention crowded her toward some nonexistent wall.