by Carly Bishop
“Who are you?”
Robyn’s eyes fastened on his lips. An errant frisson of a thrill skated over her skin. How could this be a dream?
“An avenging angel,” Kiel said.
“Of course. Did you leave your wings at the door?”
“No.” His brow rose. “I don’t do wings, except under extreme circumstances.”
She smiled. “I don’t fall into bed with strange angels, either. I’m a widow,” she confided, then frowned. “But I guess you know all that if you’re an angel, huh?”
“I know, Robyn.”
The firelight behind him set a halo about his hair. Or maybe, expecting angel accoutrements, she was only making that up. Kiel was way too sexy to be an angel. The way he made her feel was how only one man on earth had made her feel— her husband!
Dear Reader,
The word angel conjures up chubby cherubs or wizened old specters, not men who are virile and muscular and sinfully sexy. But you’re about to enter the Denver Branch of Avenging Angels to meet some of the sexiest angels this side of heaven!
Whenever there’s injustice, the Avenging Angels are on the case.
Carly Bishop brings you another irresistible angel in The Soulmate. As an Avenging Angel, sexy Kiel faces an assignment unlike any other—he has to avenge his own death!
I know you’ll love Kiel—and all the Avenging Angelsl We hope you haven’t missed any of this super-special quartet!
Regards,
Debra Matteucci
Senior Editor & Editorial Coordinator
Harlequin Books
300 East 42nd Street
New York, New York 10017
The Soulmate
Curly Bishop
To my dear Aunt Sody
for your
Grit and grace under a lifetime of fire
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Robyn Delaney Trueblood—She had to know the truth about her husband’s death…her very soul depended on it.
Keller Trueblood—As the special prosecutor in a high-profile case in Aspen, Keller had to die—or did he?
Ezekiel—Or “Kiel.” The avenging angel faced an assignment unlike any other—to avenge his own death.
Mike Massie, Jessie Blahnik, Scott Kline— Keller and Robyn’s friends mistrusted coincidence.
Trudi Candelaria—The wealthy socialite murdered her lover…or did she only need to kill the man who would send her to prison for life?
Lucinda Montbank—One of Aspen’s foremost citizens, a mining engineer, she was no fan of Kiel.
Ken Crandall—The police officer made the case, but he had a chip on his shoulder.
Betsy Crandall—The policeman’s daughter wanted too much.
Curt Wilson—Betsy’s boyfriend figured it was time to cut his losses.
Vincent Ybarra—The judge trusted Keller Trueblood.
Chapter One
“You guys ever asked yourselves why a mine shaft collapses on a particular day after standing there for a hundred-and-six years?”
Robyn Delaney Trueblood blanched. Before the comment she and her friends had been swapping gossip about the decadent life-styles of the Aspen, Colorado, rich and famous. Now her laughter died in her throat, and for a moment, a pin dropping would have rocked her condo.
Her husband, Keller, had died one year ago tomorrow in the collapse of a shaft of the Hallelujah silver mine, and her friends had gathered together tonight at her place to help her finally lay Keller’s memory to rest. To celebrate his life, not to wallow more over his loss.
Robyn’s best friend and local TV News producer, Jessie Blahnik, glared at Mike Massie, a Denver criminal defense attorney. “Stow it, why don’t you,” Jessie snapped.
“Because I want to know,” Mike persisted, undaunted by Jessie’s raised eyebrows. “I mean, look. Keller was winding up his prosecution of Trudi Candelaria. The dame murdered her lover, the internationally famous ski jumper, Spyder Nielsen. One day, Keller goes poking around in a mine shaft with Robyn that has withstood the test of time, marauders, hikers and mining fiends for well over a century—“
“Mike, everyone who grows up in Colorado knows old mines collapse. Besides, the last thing Robyn needs is your—“
“No…Jessie. It’s okay,” Robyn interrupted. “I’ve asked myself the same question a million times. Why that mine shaft? Why that day? Why did Keller have to die and not me?” Her head dipped low. She hadn’t exactly come out of the Hallelujah unscathed, either, but losing Keller had nearly killed her where the old, rotted timbers had failed.
She straightened her shoulders and finished her wine. She no longer needed to cry about it. “It was more dangerous than we knew, or we went too far—beyond where there were any modern reinforcements. But the only real answer I know, Mike, is that there is no answer. Things just happen, things we have no control over.”
“Exactly,” the third and last of her remaining guests, Scott Kline, put in. A writing buddy and colleague of Robyn’s, Scott wrote for the Denver Post. “It’s like asking why the Challenger had to blow up. Or, why did the Titanic have to sink? Or, why didn’t Abe Lincoln sneeze?”
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…how did you enjoy the play?” Mike muttered darkly, nursing his tequila and lime. “This one ain’t over, folks.”
“Massie, what are you talking about?” Jessie demanded.
“The murder of Keller Trueblood, Esquire, special prosecutor in the case of Colorado v. Candelaria.“
A chill swept over Robyn’s flesh. “Murder?” The pit of her stomach dropped like a stone. She stared at Keller’s oldest and best friend. Cocksure, arrogant, full of himself—maybe. He’d probably had one too many margaritas, but Robyn had never known Michael Massie to indulge paranoid, unlikely, off-the-wall crime theories.
Massie slugged down the dregs of his tequila and lime. “What would you say if I told you that Stuart Willetts put his condo in Aspen on the market yesterday?”
“How about, ’so what?’” Jessie jibed.
“And,” Mike went on, “the day before that, he moved in with Trudi Candelaria—right into Spyder Nielsen’s bed.”
“I’d say you’re so far out in left field you might as well be in the Rock Pile,” Jessie retorted, referring to the cheap seats in the Denver Rockies baseball park. “How do you know any of this?”
“Because I grew up in Pitkin County, Jess,” Mike snapped. “Because I know people. The regular live-in maid, Frau Kautz, who spent twenty years with Spyder, is on a week’s holiday. Candelaria has hired temporary help, and people I know know other people who’ve witnessed Willetts’s possessions being moved in. I’m telling you, as far as Candelaria and Willetts were concerned, Keller had to die.”
Jessie shook her head, put down her drink, picked up her purse and stood up. “Come on, Michael. It’s late. I’ll drive you home and you can sleep it off.”
But however easily Jessie tossed off Mike’s query, Robyn couldn’t. Murder was her stock in trade. She wrote true-crime novels—which was how she’d met Keller in the first place, interviewing him almost four years ago in the course of researching her book, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Keller had been the prosecuting attorney in that murder trial. They married fourteen months after Keller brought in a stunning conviction, and a few weeks after Robyn’s book hit the stands.
So Robyn knew murder. She’d spent hundreds of hours over the course of her career in maximum security pens, interviewing murderers. Even more hours went into poring over transcripts and research with the families, friends and associates of killers and their victims. She had a Ph.D. in sociology and three true-crime bestsellers to her credit.
No one could ever know what was in another person’s heart, but Robyn understood that most people didn’t get to be killers overnight
, or without passions and reasons and rages that drove them to commit such terrible, final acts as murder.
Stuart Willetts had been Keller’s second chair—his assistant—in the prosecution of Trudi Candelaria. If Stuart and the accused, Trudi Candelaria, were now involved, as Michael Massie was suggesting, the question begged to be asked—had Trudi and Stuart conspired to get rid of Keller so the murder indictment against her could be scuttled?
“Jessie, wait. Sit down for another minute, okay?” She waited until her friend gave in and sat back down before posing her question to make absolutely sure she understood his point. “Mike, are you saying Keller’s chief deputy prosecutor is having an affair with the defendant, with Trudi Candelaria?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Yes. I’d bet Willetts had the hots for the Candelaria dame from day one—and she damned well knew it.”
“Wouldn’t Keller have seen that kind of thing going on?” Robyn asked. “I can’t believe he wouldn’t have taken Willetts off the case in a New York minute if he thought there was any impropriety like that.”
“Maybe.” Mike shrugged. “I’m not knocking Keller, Robyn. Not at all. But Willetts swims with the rest of us sharks. He knows how to present himself and how to play his cards close to the chest. Tip his hand? I don’t think so. That’s why Keller picked him in the first place.”
Jessie shook her head. “Mike, you’re making shark bait out of minnows. How could Stuart Willetts possibly have known that Keller and Robyn were going to that mine on that particular Sunday? What could he possibly know about making a mine shaft collapse?”
Robyn grimaced. “He knew we were going, Jessie. He was at dinner with us at Planet Hollywood in Aspen that Friday night. I wanted to go see the Hallelujah. I was working on a story about the silver miners, remember?”
“Of course. It was Mike who put you in touch with Lucinda Montbank.”
“Yes.” Montbank was a well-known name in Aspen. The Montbank fortune was made in silver mining a century ago, before gold became the standard. Now, of the Montbanks, only Lucinda remained, and the rights to the Hallelujah remained in her possession. She also possessed substantial real estate holdings in a town where multimillion-dollar homes were the norm.
“I asked Keller to go with me to the mine. I remember this all very distinctly because Willetts was giving me a hard time about not going hang gliding with Keller and him instead.”
“Okay,” Jessie granted. “Supposing that’s true, what about the technical knowledge? How could anyone be sure Keller would die in that mine? How would you even go about making a mine shaft collapse?”
“Come on, Jessie.” Mike got up to pour himself a cup of coffee. “This is Aspen we’re talking. That kind of information qualifies as local lore. There’s the library, the Historical Society. Hell, some crusty old miner living in a shack up by Marble could do it for a few bucks on a bet.”
Scott Kline plunked his cocktail glass down on the table. “I hate to admit it, but this scenario is beginning to make sense. Willetts had to know that if Keller died, the defense would lobby for the charges against Trudi to be dismissed—or for a mistrial at the very least.”
“Which is exactly what happened, isn’t it?” Robyn asked.
Mike nodded. “Willetts beat the land-speed record for conceding to a mistrial. At the time, I thought he was just being cagey. That he would reinstate the murder charges and start over.”
“He never did, did he?” Robyn asked. It seemed hard to believe, now, that she hadn’t followed the news after the mine collapsed, but she had been in a Denver hospital undergoing the first of three operations to restore her leg to some semblance of working order.
Even if she hadn’t been knocked out for weeks on end with pain medications for the operations, she and Keller had agreed it would be vital to both their careers to keep their professional paths from crossing after they married. She’d made a point of steering clear no matter how juicy the Spyder Nielsen case became, and to pick up the threads after it was all over, after Keller died, wasn’t in her heart.
“That’s right,” Mike concurred. “Willetts never reinstated the charges. He bailed out on the pretext that the evidence against Trudi had proven too shaky to make the charges stick.”
“Maybe it wasn’t a pretext at all,” Robyn protested. “Maybe Stuart Willetts just knew when to cut his losses. I overheard Keller on the phone one night in a pretty heated conversation with the main detective. Maybe the case wasn’t stacking up.”
“Yeah, well, you can put that spin on it,” Mike said, sitting back. He hung both arms over the back of his chair. “But now Willetts has moved in with the merry widow. Lover, I guess,” he corrected himself, “since Trudi and Spyder weren’t married.
“I think,” he concluded darkly, “you have to ask yourself this question. If you were an obscenely wealthy jet-setter like Trudi Candelaria, why would you give a guy like Willetts the time of day—unless he was the one who kept you out of the slammer?”
“Love?” Robyn suggested.
Massie gave her a look. “Get a grip, Robyn. You and Keller may have been soulmates unto eternity, but the only person Trudi Candelaria gives a rat’s ass about is Trudi.”
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Monday, on the anniversary of Keller’s death, Robyn departed the Rocky Mountain Rehabilitation Center for the last time.
Her outpatient treatment program had run its course, though her leg wasn’t back to one hundred percent. The prognosis said it never would be. Most nights a numbness around her foot and ankle kept her awake, and in the mornings she would awaken feeling as if she hadn’t slept very well.
Last night she hadn’t slept at all.
After a year spent in a hellish round of operations and physical therapy, she could get around without her cane for most of the day. She could drive, take small hikes and even manage an hour on a stair stepper. As for her emotional fitness, she was making do with a little seashell night-light plugged into the wall, where for months she hadn’t been able to endure the lights being turned off at all.
There was no darker place than a mine shaft that has collapsed, and before her rescue was effected, more than the pain of her leg, the blackness had invaded her heart, mind and soul, leaving her unable to cope with the dark at all.
That was passing, too. The tiny light of the seashell kept her rational in the dark now.
What she couldn’t seem to do, what had motivated the small party last night, was to get over losing Keller.
She didn’t buy into New Age anything. Not crystals, not dream catchers, not the advocates of creating your own reality, not Richard Bach and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or even Aspen’s most famous resident, John Denver. All of which put her at odds with half of the bestsellers of the decade—and a lot of what Aspen in the 1990s was all about.
Robyn Delaney believed in what she could see, hear and touch, and not much of anything else—with one exception. That she belonged, body, mind, heart and soul, to Keller Trueblood. She felt churlish and ungrateful with her friends, hateful and disconnected from her family, because all she wanted was the one thing she couldn’t have. She couldn’t have Keller back in her life.
She felt cut off, adrift in a sea of strangers, who even if they were dear and caring friends, would never understand her as Keller had.
Now, after Massie had trotted out the possibility last night that the collapse of the old Hallelujah silver mine had been a deliberate attempt on Keller’s life, her despair had shifted shape on her. She made her living drawing such inferences, pulling together threads of motive and secret agendas and the deadly passions of real people.
Her head throbbed. She still had waking flashes of rotted timbers collapsing with a horrible cracking noise.
Her leg had been crushed.
Keller had died.
The thought that his death was murder and not an accident seemed paranoid but way too coincidental—as Robyn’s beloved Austrian grandmama Marie would have said long ago, crazy-maki
ng.
Robyn had to find out if there was any substance to her suspicions. To do that, she had to return to Aspen.
The heat of the late afternoon sun at Denver’s milehigh altitude sapped even the marigolds and mums, which were wilting on their stems. The cottonwoods seemed to gasp and shed leaves in small clumps. Fire bushes glowed red.
Robyn left the shade of the striped awning and waved with her brass-handled cane to the evening therapy staff and nurses just arriving. The parking lot had cleared out with the departure of the day crew. She made a beeline for her midnight blue coupe and unlocked the door.
Heat rolled out in waves, but she sank gratefully down into the leather-covered bucket seat. Her therapy session had left her muscles behaving like overdone spaghetti. The steering wheel blazed from the sun beating down inside the windshield.
“Holy hot,” she muttered. Switching on the engine and then the air-conditioning, she left her door wide open to blow out the hot and bring in the cold. She turned to put her shoulder bag in the passenger seat when a wiry, wild-eyed teenager darted up to her car.
His head was shaved and a ring pierced his eyebrow. He planted his huge, gangly hands on the doorsill above her and demanded she hand over her purse. “An’ while you’re at it, the rock on your finger.”
Keller’s wedding ring? Her temper snapped. “Not a chance.” Not Keller’s ring, not anything else that remained of her shattered life. Not if the hounds of hell were after her. After the year she had just put in, three long operations and countless hours of grueling physical therapy, Robyn Delaney was not only tough as nails, she spit in the eye of death.
