“Some of them are a little wobbly.” Another thing she had to fix.
Still, it was good to be busy. Sometimes, she was so worn out at the end of the day that she slept like the dead.
Other times, she dreamed of him.
He arched a black eyebrow at the slabs and tested each one with his foot before trusting it with his weight. It wasn’t as if they were going to just fall out beneath him and send him plummeting to his death.
“You did not answer my question.” He stopped at the edge of the path, where it met the wild lawn.
Question? She frowned as she tried to remember it.
“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “I don’t work here.”
“So you just thought you would do some gardening at a place where you do not work?” He cast another look at the mansion. “Or is it abandoned? It appears abandoned.”
“It is not,” she snapped, the hardness of her tone surprising them both judging by the way he arched an eyebrow at her now. She tore her gloves off and jammed them into the pocket of her dark grey sweatpants. The action drew his gaze down, and it lingered, brightened in that way that always sent a hot shiver through her. She cleared her throat and his eyes lifted to meet hers again. Her stomach tightened, squirmed even as she struggled to get the words lined up on her tongue. “I… sort of… own it.”
That eyebrow lifted again and he swung his gaze back to the house. “You do not appear to be looking after it very well.”
He didn’t need to tell her that. She had her reasons, though. Being here was painful, and if she’d had more money saved, she might have gone abroad for her sabbatical, to somewhere sunny and tropical, with turquoise seas and lots of cocktails.
“It is a large house for one female. Do your family not share it?”
She shook her head. “No, they’re… gone.”
Which was an understatement. Wrenched from her was more appropriate.
“I need a drink. Do you want a drink?” She didn’t wait for him to answer.
She waded through the knee-high grass, heading towards the long patio that lined the entire length of the back of the house, stretching over one hundred feet wide. She took the steps up to it and stopped at the rickety cast-iron table she had found in one of the outhouses. It only had one chair, and the last time she had sat on it, her backside had come away covered in rust flakes.
She crouched and opened the lid of the cooler she had set on the flagstones this morning and grabbed a soda from the myriad of cans. The beer was tempting, but it was far too early for drinking. Unless he started probing about anything. Then, she might self-medicate a little.
Emelia cracked the can open and straightened, twisting to face the way she had come and expecting to find him there right behind her.
He wasn’t.
He stood by the copse of saplings, peering at her handiwork.
“It’s a bitch.” She shrugged when he glanced at her, and it hit her that she didn’t mind him looking at her now. She actually liked the way he would look at her from time to time, would even let his eyes linger if she didn’t disturb him. “I think the roots are tangled with the other trees. I can’t get the damned thing out.”
He leaned forwards, gripped the sawn-off trunk with one hand, his biceps flexing beneath the sleeve of his tight T-shirt, and casually pulled.
Her eyes shot wide as the entire root system popped free, cutting through the earth in places to leave streaks of dirt in the grass she had trampled down.
He looked at the mass of roots as he held the remains of the tree aloft, and then turned his head towards her and hit her with a killer smile.
“Show-off,” she muttered and sank to her backside on the first step. “Don’t suppose you want to give the others the same treatment?”
He dropped the vanquished tree at his feet and assessed the other ones. “Why do you want them removed?”
The more she looked at them, the less she was sure of the answer to that question.
Because they hadn’t been there when life had been good here, when she had lived here and had been happy?
She couldn’t get those days back, not even if she put everything back to how it had been then. Maybe change was a good thing and would allow her to come to love this place again as it entered a different era, similar to how it had been in those halcyon days, but different enough that she could be here without it constantly reminding her of everything she had lost.
“Leave them,” she said as he looked as if he might pull the other trees up.
He nodded and moved away from them, striding towards her across the lawn, his long legs devouring the distance between them.
When he reached her, she jerked her chin towards the cooler. “There’s drinks if you want one.”
He shook his head and sat a short distance from her, and the few feet between them felt like an ocean. When had she started wanting a man to be closer to her than arm’s length again?
She reminded herself he wasn’t a man. He was an angel. His wings might be hidden, but she had seen them, and she couldn’t allow herself to forget they existed. It would be so easy to pretend he was just a man, not an immortal, but she would be a fool to do such a thing.
He was powerful and dangerous.
Pretending he was anything other than that would be a mistake.
“Why do you keep hiding your wings from me?” She let the question slip from her lips and took a sip of her drink as his gaze landed on her profile.
He was silent for a long minute before he sighed. “I thought perhaps it would make you more comfortable.”
It did, but she didn’t want to be comfortable around him. She needed to remain distant from him. She needed to protect herself. To do both of those things, she needed to see him as the angel he was.
The warrior he was.
“Let them out.” She took another mouthful of her soda.
“No.” The firmness of that denial surprised her, and she glanced out of the corner of her eye at him.
His black eyebrows dipped low, the corners of his mouth twisting downwards as he turned his cheek to her.
She had pissed him off. Because he knew she wanted to use what he was as a barrier between them, a reason to keep him at arm’s length.
“Why are you here?” She swirled the drink in her can, staring at it now, and tried to push away her negative emotions and the fear that she was beginning to despise.
She was weak. Not in mind, apparently, but she was weak. She kept letting fear get the better of her.
She sighed and tipped her head back to stare at the blue sky.
She had let fear get the better of her long before now. It was the reason she had stayed away from her family estate. She feared she would end up like her parents if she came to this place, had convinced herself there was some sort of curse on it, one that would drive her to take her own life too.
“Why are you here?” he parroted softly, and she had the feeling he was trying to get her to talk again, to reveal things to him that would only bring him closer to her.
On a long sigh, she let her chin fall and looked out over the grounds as she rested her arm on her bent knee and let the can dangle from her fingertips.
Talking about what had driven her away from this place was always painful, but it was better than the alternative. If she didn’t talk about her family and her reasons for letting the house fall into neglect, he would want her to talk about the dragon.
“I took a few weeks off. Paid leave. Mark thought it was a good idea.” Would he let her leave it at that?
Of course he wouldn’t.
“You do not seem to visit this place often. Because your work at the hunter organisation keeps you busy?”
She could have nodded at that and he probably would have let it go, but her mouth had other ideas.
“I don’t like it here.” She frowned at her can as she rocked it back and forth, feeling the contents slosh side to side. “I love it… and I hate it at the same time.”
�
�So, why keep it?”
A reasonable question.
She shrugged. “It’s all I have left of them.”
“Your family?” He edged closer.
Her chest tightened at the thought of answering that question and she swiftly turned to face him, planting her free hand on the paving slabs that separated them. “Can’t you just do that looking-into-my-eyes thing and see it for yourself?”
She stared into his eyes, convinced that if she did, he would spare her the pain of speaking about her past.
The corners of his lips curled slightly, a regretful edge to that half-smile as he shook his head. “Your mind is a little… closed.”
It was?
“So open it.” She wasn’t sure how it worked, but the last time he had looked deeply into her eyes, he had seen things. “Like you did last time.”
“Your mind was open to me that time.”
It had been?
She didn’t like the idea she had been walking around with her mind open to anyone who possessed his talent.
“Why is it closed now?” She swigged her soda. “I don’t remember closing it.”
“You are more certain of yourself. Stronger now. Your mind is falling back into order. It was in chaos before.” He leaned back, planted his hands behind him, and stared at the sky, his noble profile to her.
He did that whenever he wanted her to be relaxed around him, to make himself non-threatening. She had figured out that much about him. She wasn’t going to complain. It was strange, but nice, feeling so at peace and calm in the presence of a man.
A relief.
She had thought she would always be jittery around them now.
But being around him felt… good.
It felt normal.
He didn’t poke and prod her, or make her feel as if she was liable to break. He didn’t treat her as if she was fragile or weak. He didn’t pity her or look at her as if she didn’t belong, or something was wrong with her.
He just looked at her as if she was another person.
No, that wasn’t strictly true.
There was heat in his eyes at times, an edge to them that made her feel he liked looking at her, that he found pleasure in it and in her presence. It made her feel as if he cared little about others, but she was different. Special.
Special enough that he wanted to slay a dragon for her.
“My mother would have loved you,” she said as she dragged her eyes away from him, and surprise washed through her when a smile teased her lips, unfamiliar warmth rising inside her with it. She felt his gaze land on her, a hot caress that had her blood heating in a way that had panicked her the last time they had met. “She was always a sucker for romantic white knight shit.”
“White knight?” He looked as puzzled as his tone had sounded when she risked a glance at him.
“Slaying a dragon for me? It doesn’t get more white knight than that.” Or more romantic. Maybe this wasn’t a good subject. “It’s the focus of many fairy tales.”
“This is not a fairy tale, though.”
It wasn’t, and Emelia didn’t expect any happy endings in life. Her past had taught her that much.
“My folks thought they’d been living a fairy tale.” She set her can down, brought her knees up, and hugged them to her chest.
She picked at a frayed patch on her grey sweats as she stared at the garden and remembered it in its heyday, back when her mother had spent hours each day working on it with the gardener.
“There were roses in that area once, beyond the wall.” She pointed to the golden dry stone wall that cut across the end of the lawn, where the path that started from the patio and cut past the fountain led. “I used to play in there while she worked, and she tried to teach me things. How to care for different flowers. How to grow herbs and vegetables and tend to the fruit trees in the orchard. I never listened.”
“But you do share her affinity for nature.” His soft voice drifted around her, and she nodded, relaxing again as she remembered little things about her past.
“I started helping out when I was a teen. Every summer, I would come home and work in the garden with my mum. There was always something that needed doing. The boxwood hedges in the formal garden would need pruning to stop them from growing higher than a foot around the displays. Or new flowers would need to be planted. Or the roses would need pruning. Every day I was doing something.” She rested her hands on her knees. “I think it was good for Mum to have company.”
“Your father was absent?” He edged closer, and she didn’t mind, actually found herself wanting him a little closer still.
“He was always working. Running the company in London. He would come home on weekends.” She used to hurl herself into his arms every time.
“You mentioned you came home each summer. You did not live here?”
She shook her head, frowned as a strand of her dark hair fell down and tucked it behind her ear. “I went to boarding school, so I was away from home most of the year.”
“They send children away from their homes?” He sounded horrified by that.
“What, angels don’t have boarding schools?” She almost smiled at him. “It was a good education. The best, really. My parents just wanted to give me the best shot at being happy in life.”
“But you do not seem happy. Being here saddens you. Why?” His gaze left her, and she ached for it to come back, for him to look at her again, because it had been comforting to know she wasn’t alone here, in this place.
In this world.
“I think I had rose-tinted glasses on my entire life before my parents died. I had everything I wanted… a horse… a pool… all the things a rich kid needs… except for independence. Looking back, I can see how controlling my parents were, my father in particular.” She rubbed at the frayed patch again, needing to do something with her hands to distract her from what she was saying. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved my parents… but they demanded too much from me. I was sent to study at Cambridge, and both the teachers and my parents expected me to do great things.”
She wanted to laugh, or maybe cry, as she thought about what university had been like.
“I busted my backside, but doing great in the subjects my parents had all but picked for me was impossible.”
“Did you fail?”
She nodded. “But not because I had bad grades. I failed because I had to ditch uni when my father’s company went bankrupt… and he took his…”
She couldn’t say it after all.
She tugged at the threads on her knee, fiercer now as her past crept up on her, the pain that refused to fade rising back to the fore.
“Emelia,” he murmured, as soft as a whisper, and she shook her head, because she didn’t want his pity or condolences.
“He took the easy way out.” She ground the words from between clenched teeth as the backs of her eyes burned. “He gave up, and my mother’s fairy tale turned into a horror story. She… It was gateway drugs at first… to calm her or take the pain away, but soon it was the harder stuff. I went back to uni to get my things so I could move back in with her and help her through it. I wanted to get her off that shit and show her life could go on. We still had each other.”
Her voice cracked. She sucked down a shuddering breath and shook her head again when she felt him move. Not because she didn’t want his comfort, but because he couldn’t touch her. Her throat closed at just the thought, and panic gripped her. She tried to breathe through it, covered her fear of being touched by a man with the fact she was upset and struggling to talk about what had happened to her family.
“I came home, and she… I found her…” She wasn’t sure she could say the rest, but his gaze rested heavily on her. Expectant. He wanted to know what had happened. She gathered her strength and forced the words out so he wouldn’t make her talk. “It was a coke overdose.”
She had lost both of her parents just months apart. Her mother had gone downhill so quickly that Emelia had been left reeling. She didn�
�t remember all the meetings with lawyers, or anything people had said to her. At the end of the roller coaster, when things had finally slowed down and smoothed out, she had been left with only the house and a small amount of money.
“Look at me, Emelia,” he husked, and she sucked down a breath before she slowly turned her face towards him and lifted her eyes to his.
They were bright silver again, shining and swirling, with gold edging his irises.
“Relax. Breathe slowly, evenly. Fall into each breath and do not fight the pull.”
She did as instructed, and with each breath, she seemed to fall deeper into his eyes, just as she had that night at Archangel. The world around her dropped away as she lost herself in his shimmering eyes, let herself go, and did something she had thought impossible.
Trusted him.
Warmth filled her, as comforting as when she woke wrapped in a duvet that was just the right temperature, sated from a restful sleep but unwilling to leave, savouring every moment beneath the blanket.
Light followed, flooding her in a way that left no dark spaces in her heart.
She swayed closer to him, fell deeper still.
“You have had a difficult life. I see that now.” His voice was distant, swimming in her ears as if he was speaking to her while she was underwater.
Heat streaked her cheeks, a terrible sense of loss welling inside her, but she couldn’t blink, couldn’t take her eyes away from his.
“Emelia.”
She tensed as she felt the nearness of his hand, the gentle warmth of it close to her face, and reared back.
The connection shattered.
She gripped the hem of her dark-grey T-shirt and scrubbed her cheeks with it, wiping away the tears.
“I apologise.” He drew back and turned away from her.
Silence stretched between them.
Emelia twisted around, reached, caught the handle of the cooler, and dragged it to her across the paving slabs.
He glanced at her as she flipped the lid open and rifled through the contents, heading towards the bottom where she had stashed the beers.
Avenged by an Angel Page 8
