by Pamela Clare
Alarm shot through her. “You’re just deciding all this?”
“No, he decided. Long ago.” He took off his glasses, all the better to give her the evil eye. “Would you really have Cole choose between you and his career? Would you have him leave the life he loves to become a bureaucrat or some P.I. using his skills to track extramarital affairs? Bitter, useless, and stationary? Is that what you prefer? He does important work saving lives. Don’t take it from him.”
Angel felt hollow inside.
His voice softened. “There is no middle ground. I’m sorry.” He walked around to his side of the car.
As if in a dream, she went back to where Cole sat. His head had lolled sideways. She took his hand. Ran a finger over his callouses. His famous callouses.
There was so much she wanted to say. Cole would barely hear it anyway. She pressed his palm to her cheek.
Don’t take it from him.
Cole had a chance to help people. Make something of his life. She could only imagine what it meant to him. He liked to make things add up, to make things right. That was who he was.
She thought of the way he’d been with her in the mirror, needing to make her feel okay.
It would never work. She would never be that woman.
“Keep him safe,” she said.
“We do our damndest.” Macmillan started up the car.
She turned her head to kiss Cole’s palm.
He stirred. “Angel.”
“Bye, baby.” She kissed his cheek.
“Where am I?”
“You have to go to work.”
He squinted at her, seeming to try to make sense of the words. “…so tired.”
“I know.” She touched his hair. She raised her voice over the engine: “He lost his glasses.”
“We have some for him,” Macmillan said.
“Good.”
“Thanks.” Cole closed his eyes.
He was saying thanks for the glasses, but she decided to take it as thanks for letting him go. For letting him live a life full of meaning. Quickly, she pressed her lips to his, then she stepped away and shut the door.
She squeezed the top of Rhonda’s office chair as Macmillan sped off with Cole. She watched them until they were out of the parking lot and out of sight down the street.
“I love you,” she whispered. Then she wheeled the empty chair back into the building.
Chapter Seventeen
One week later
Angel stepped onto the elevator and hit the button for her floor.
Those few days with Cole seemed a lifetime away. Everything was normal now—too normal. Lisa’s curtains were almost done. Her lighting had arrived the day before, and Angel had spent the afternoon supervising the installation. She’d gotten sheetrock dust all over her hair and clothes for her trouble. She felt like she was covered with chalk.
At least Lisa was happy. The spaces they’d created together were taking shape, and she was helping affirm something beautiful and important inside the woman. Lisa would live in those rooms, and they would inspire her. It could be enough, Angel thought.
Design wasn’t as important as saving people’s lives, but if she did it the best she could, well, it was something.
And maybe, in time, it would soften losing Cole.
Yeah, right. They’d only been together three days, but it had been beyond powerful. Beyond everything she’d ever dreamed. Standing there in the parking lot watching him get whisked away, she’d said she’d loved him. The utterance had taken her by surprise, but she knew it was true. And being without him made her heart heavy—it felt literally heavy, as though it had become a lifeless, leaden organ, barely worth carrying around. And everything remotely happy had an echo of pain that hurt like hell.
The elevator bell dinged and the doors opened. She strode down her hallway, rooting through her bag for her keys.
Some days she’d wake up resolving to find him, to fight for him, but she could never quite get Macmillan’s words out of her head. She didn’t want to take Cole’s life’s work away.
And he knew where to find her, didn’t he?
Well, she’d had a lot of practice giving up the things she loved. At least there was that.
She needed to get changed; she had a meeting in an hour, somebody wanting to talk about a beach house. She shoved the key in and opened her door…to the smell of something cooking.
Somebody was in there…cooking.
She fumbled for her mace, torn between backing away and going in.
Cooking?
She crept in.
A voice: “Honey. You’re home!”
Her heart leapt and she walked in. He lounged at her dinner table with a beer, still looking roughed up seven days later. His arm was in a cast.
“Oh, Cole.”
“You should see the other guy.” He rose and closed the distance between them; with just his one arm, he pulled her to him. “I missed you so much, baby.”
“What are you doing?”
He kissed her. It was wonderful just to touch him again. Was this the long goodbye? She didn’t know if she could handle it.
He pulled away. “I made us pizza, honey. A good one this time to make up for the last one we shared, which was, admittedly, the worst pizza ever.”
“Cole, what is this?”
“Shh.” He took her hand. “I’m expecting you to put out. Like you always do when your man gives you dinner.” He kissed her neck, her cheek. “How are you?”
She pulled away. “What are you doing, Cole? Because I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what it can be—”
“It can be this.” He kissed her then, warm and solid against her. His fingertips pressed into her arms; his lips were a demanding force upon hers. He backed her into the door she’d just closed, pressed her there. She felt delirious with happiness.
“No.” She pushed him away, even though every molecule in her cried to stay in his arms. “I don’t want a long goodbye…”
“Macmillan,” he grumbled. “He’s sorry for how he treated you.”
“I want to be with you, but I won’t stop you from your important work. Not ever.”
“There’s always a way, Angel.”
“This isn’t logistics.”
“Everything’s logistics.”
She gave him an oh such bullshit look. “And I have a meeting.” She walked into the kitchen.
He followed her. “With me.”
“No, with a client.” She turned away from him and got a drink of water, trying to collect herself. She felt so vulnerable, so raw. His every word and his every kiss cut her heart into shreds of happiness and pain—didn’t he get that? She’d given him up. She wanted him desperately. She loved him.
“But Angel, I am the client.”
She set down the glass.
“Beachfront condo,” he said. “The only catch is it’s not around here. It’s in Singapore. And we’ll need you to use your talents, how can I put this…”
She turned.
A smile crept across his lips. “We’ll need you to bring out a certain somebody’s inner ugliness.”
“You want me to design an interior…in Singapore?”
“The design assignment is just to get you in. It’s an Association assignment. Yours if you want it. Hell, you’re great in the field, but you’ve been on the wrong side. The Association powers that be want to see if it’s a good fit. This guy has fired five designers and we feel sure you can satisfy him. I saw how Borgola took to your ideas. We think you can work this guy. You’d have an Association assistant. It can’t be me on this one, but if it’s a fit, there are other jobs.”
“What’s in it for the Association? Is this guy like Borgola?”
“Your Singapore client is a bad guy, but he’s not the target. He’s an influencer for the target. We feel sure this Singapore client will recommend you to our primary target, and there’s a Fenton Furst in the place. We don’t need you to rob it, we just need the combo. It would h
elp a lot of people. Basically, it’s a long game to get to that safe. Not without danger.”
Her heart swelled. “The important things never are.”
“You would do it?”
She gazed into his gray eyes with a heart so light and happy she thought it might explode into confetti. “I would love to.”
He let out a relieved breath. “Taking Association assignments, it’s not a regular life. But we’d get to see each other. Not consistently but—”
“Yes,” she interrupted. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“It’s not just about the safes. As a designer, you can see things we can’t. You can get pieces of the logistics equations. Though sometimes there might be a security guard or a cook or a lackey who…” he kissed her neck, “who is maybe in disguise, and all he wants to do is steal away with you.” He kissed her again. “And pull your hair. And ravish you.” He pulled away and looked into her eyes. “Because he loves you,” he said. He pressed her against the refrigerator. “I love you, Angel.”
She gazed up at him, and she knew that he was seeing her deep down, and it felt good. It felt wonderful. Being with Cole felt like home. “I love you, too, baby.”
And slowly but surely, the magnets hit the floor, one after another.
Chapter Eighteen
One week later
Angelique del Gado breezed into the Mikonos vacation home of Roman and Paula Hightower, strolling past a pair of thuggish guards. She was looking around at the fine bones of the classic Greek architecture.
She’d met with them while she was busy with another job, and they’d pored over magazines and discussed parameters. She’d listened to what they resonated with, located their inner ugliness, and pushed the design accordingly. In fact, Angel challenged them to embrace it further. They never understood that’s what she was doing; they only knew that she delivered on something exquisite and ineffable.
The darkness in some criminals drove a kind of delicacy; in others it drove gaucheness, sumptuousness. Whatever it was, she made it work in terms of balance and proportion. For the Hightowers, the watchword would be cool contemporary with a certain skewed relationship to space. She would give them the interior that would speak to them. Dare them. Excite them. She’d already picked out the centerpiece of the living room—a tilted table. A travesty of a table, but it would resonate with a certain perverseness inside of Paula, who was the brains behind one of the most vicious kidnapping rings in Southern Europe.
Over the past year, Angel had made a name for herself among the criminal set. Dax had arranged her first introduction back in Singapore. That had led to a few other jobs. Unfortunate that one of her past clients landed in prison for five life terms.
That summer she’d done an interior for a cowboy arms dealer, a man the Association had in their sites for an operation down the road. She gave the cowboy what he wanted and gave the Association schematic drawings of the entire place. It would come in handy as soon as the mysterious Dax assigned an Associate.
The cowboy served as an enthusiastic reference to a lot of other people in the arms trade. He was the one who’d recommended her to the Hightowers.
Angel’s Spanish wasn’t rusty anymore, and she’d gotten pretty good at Italian and Portuguese.
Angel opened her case and took out five small cans of paint. She painted a three-by-three swath of parchment beige on the west wall of the Hightowers’ living room. Then she painted antique salmon on the north wall. She put a yellowy orange and a sepia rose on the south and east walls.
The Hightowers were excited.
“I want you to live with these colors for a few days,” she said. “Sunrise, sunset, night, midday.”
They’d choose the salmon, and the salmon would go with the ice lighting that she’d already chosen, though they didn’t know it yet. They would think they chose it. Dax would arrange for an upscale design magazine to do a puff piece on the place once they were done. They would love living in it.
Angel did the same with different colors in the kitchen, then she glued up a few squares of the backsplash tile they’d selected so they could get a sense of things in concert. They repeated the process in the office. The Hightowers inspected the colors. Angel let her glance fall on the desk as she waited. An invoice. She spotted lots of old names, but one that was new. Pieces for the logistics puzzle, for equations she would never understand.
For Cole.
“We should talk about cabinetry hardware after this,” she said. “I want to pin those down for here and the kitchen before you finalize on color. There are a few places in Athens. I’ll come back in a few days with samples.”
Paula walked her out onto the porch where three thuggish looking men lounged in the shade, guns glinting.
One of the men leered at Angel. She could feel him undressing her with his eyes, pinning her with his gaze, mouth formed in a feral twist of lust.
“Sergio!” Paula snapped. She said something in Greek to him, diamond earrings glittering in the sun. Angel still appreciated diamonds, but other things outshone them. Like her work with the Association. And then there was Cole…
Paula turned to Angel. “Sergio will drive you to the ferry.” She turned to him with a frown. “And he’ll be a perfect gentleman or he’ll be very sorry.”
Sergio stood up, frowning. Angel doubted very much he’d be a perfect gentleman. Just two days ago he’d ripped off her clothes and made love to her in a deserted cove. Of course she didn’t call him by the name Sergio; she whispered the name she knew him by, Cole, as he sucked her nipples to painful peaks, thrusting unrelentingly into her.
And if you looked closely, you could see those were dark brown contact lenses in his eyes. And he had a hell of a scar on his shoulder. And they were getting married next month at Macmillan’s Swiss chalet—a wedding gift from the best man, who’d finally come around. They’d even sent an invitation to Dax, who politely declined. She wished her family could be there, but things were improving with them. Someday they’d meet Cole.
The three of them walked to a jeep. Paula checked her iPhone and Angel stole a glance at Cole, then looked haughtily away, playing the diva designer. They had gotten some role-playing mileage already out of this diva-and-thug setup.
He’d been right—they didn’t get to spend everyday time together like normal couples, but what time they did spend—weeks on end during downtime in glamorous foreign capitols, or stolen hours on assignments like this—was intense. Utterly focused. Beyond delicious.
She stole another glance in his direction. He dismissed her with a vulgar smile. Oh, yeah, she could feel his hands on her already.
Paula announced she could do the next meeting on Saturday afternoon, possibly at four. Angel shifted her bag to her other arm and checked her own phone. Yes, that would work.
“Thank you,” Paula said. “I’m really excited.”
Angel shook Paula’s outstretched hand. “So am I.”
Sergio got in the driver’s side and started up the engine as Angel settled in. “Belt,” he grumbled.
She belted herself in and they took off.
“Nice day for a drive,” he said once they were off.
“Clears the mind,” she replied.
They sped over twisty roads, heading west into the sun.
He said, “We have two hours before your ferry leaves, and there might be wine and a blanket in back there. I’m thinking about the beach.” Then he turned to her. His gaze was serious and true, and it made her heart skip a beat.
“Perfect,” she said, and she reached over and touched his arm, his thigh, and then she slid her fingers over his belly.
“Because we know you can’t get enough of that, girl.”
She grinned. The joke never got old. And it was true—she could never get enough of that. She could never get enough of him. She loved him helplessly, senselessly. Their love was the opposite of an equation; it was a fire—an all-consuming and hot-burning fire that created its own light, even in the darkest shadows.
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The End
Thank You
I hope you enjoyed Against the Dark.
Thank you so much for reading!!
If you’d like to know when my next book comes out, you can sign up for email release alerts on my website, www.authorcarolyncrane.com. If you’re a tweeter, connect with me on Twitter @CarolynCrane; I’m also on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AuthorCarolynCrane. I’m always thrilled to hear from readers! My email addy is [email protected].
Acknowledgements
I’m so grateful to my readers and critique partners and friends and fellow authors—I love how you make the world of books such a generous, friendly place to be.
Against the Dark benefitted immensely from the critiquing magic of my author pals—Joanna Chambers had important insights on the early version, and Jeffe Kennedy, Katie Reus, Laura Bickle and Marcella Burnard provided wisdom and encouragement on later drafts. Thanks also to Katie Reus for smart, tireless guidance on all things self-pubby. Lovely Marcela of www.thebookaholiccat.blogspot.com helped clean up my Spanish phrases, and Carolyn Jewel has been my formatting angel. (And you can chalk up any incorrect Spanish or formatting errors to a certain author’s inability to stop fussing and tweaking.) Thanks also to Brenda Errichiello of Eclectic Editing for the excellent proofreading.
About Carolyn Crane
Carolyn Crane is a RITA© award-winning author of romantic suspense, urban fantasy, and other tales of love and adventure. She makes her home in Minneapolis with her husband and two cats.
www.authorcarolyncrane.com
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Dedication
