Already kneeling, Kiel bowed his head, instinctively seeking guidance,
the wisdom of a power greater than his own. Robyn Delaney hovered
between life and death, and no radiant cocoon of warmth, no direction
of her life forces, no therapy, no miracle save love was going to bring
her back this time.
He knew how far she had come, how many times since -her leg was crushed
in that mine shaft that she had bat-tied back from death's door. She
could have given up and joined Keller Trueblood in eternity a year ago,
but she had chosen life then, a dozen times since then--and even this
night when she fought to get back to her car.
Body and soul, her resources were spent. She needed the intimacy of
another human body, the reassurance of love and life and purpose and
meaning in order to go on living. She needed the love of Keller
Trueblood one last time, and Kiel was as close as she was going to
get.
He took this reasoning for the divine guidance he sought, and stood to
tear off his clothes and join her in that feather bed in a place that
had no real existence in space and time.
He drew her on her side flush to his body, and deep, cell-level memory
took over, fitting her head to his breast, her breasts to his torso,
her pelvis 'to his stomach, her thighs to his male flesh. He crossed
one leg over hers, taking her more fully into his body's embrace.
At last her body began to respond, burrowing closer, instinctively
seeking contact deeper than flesh and bone, and after a few moments, a
deep shuddering took her in its powerful grip. Even then, Kiel 'knew
it was not from the hypothermia but the hollowness of her soul where
the love of Keller Trueblood had lived. Her hands began to move over
Kiel's human form in deeply instinctual ways, seeking union in the only
vein left to her.
He made love to her. His touch, his kisses, had nothing to do with
lust, which, like swearing and all the seven deadly sins, were
forbidden him. His soul was Keller's, united for all time with Robyn
Delaney's. Making love to her was an expression of deep and abiding
love, one precious moment in which he could give her reason to go on.
His human flesh grew hot and turgid. He stroked her, trailed his lips
from the jagged course of her terrible scars to her breasts, to her
sweetly bow-shaped lips, and slowly, slowly, he seduced her back from
the terrible brink.
She called out Keller's name when Kiel penetrated her
Afterward, when she had fallen deeply asleep, Kiel prayed that this
union of his and Keller's soul with hers would have the flesh-and-blood
result of a child.
But, being an angel, Kiel was required absolutely to be truthful, so he
admitted to himself that he had not prayed on her behalf but for
himself, instead.
Chapter Three
Robyn wavered in and out of consciousness, still caught up in the
remnants of a dream. Could she awaken in her dream and still be
asleep? It must be so, for her eyes opened and her gaze fixed on the
man in her dreams sitting quietly on the stone hearth of a log cabin.
A tide of sensual memories flowed through her. Her heart began to
thump.
She watched him through her lashes. Nothing about his physical
appearance reminded her of any man she had ever known--least of all
Keller, who had been long and too lean, darkly handsome and deeply
tanned. He was, Keller had always joked, a candidate for that
weather-beaten leathery look in old age.
This man's softly curling hair gleamed like polished bronze. His skin
was fair, his eyes a stunning, deep shade of blue, his body more
muscled than Keller's had been. He seemed ageless to her. He held
something white in his hands--ivory, maybe--turning it over and over as
if some treasure was concealed inside.
She had never expected to awaken from that moment when she saw Keller,
when she believed that she had crossed over from life into the
Hereafter with him. But sometime after seeing him, she had been
compelled to turn back.
She'd expected that when she woke the dream would be over. She would
discover that she had not really been saved from freezing to death by a
mysterious rider and been warmed by his body. That she had not seen
the light of Keller's eyes in those of a complete stranger, and that
she had not made love with him.
But she had. Her body told her that.
In her dreams, it was Keller touching her, Keller whose lips trailed
fire and life, Keller whose touch incited her body and invited, no,
commanded, that she edge back from extinction, Keller whose thrust she
recognized and craved like no other, ever. But this man was not who
she had believed he was.
Her cheeks flamed, but she could not sustain the flash of deep,
piercing anger because something more deeply substantial, more
meaningful than his physical appearance, spoke to her heart.
So much so that she knew.
Making love with this man was more the brushing together of her soul
with his than a physical mating, which scared her more than if she'd
gone out looking to have Keller's memory blotted from her heart.
Lying naked and afraid of what she had done beneath a fluffy down
comforter, she closed her eyes. The feather bed era died her.
Pillows, soft as clouds, cushioned her head. Her ankle felt whole and
healthy. Her cheek didn't ache, either, so she knew she must be in that
nether-world of not being quite awake. But her heart still thumped,
and the stranger consumed her dreamy dismay at finding herself still
occupying her body, even in a dream.
She opened her eyes again. He had begun to whittle the piece of ivory.
"What is your name?"
He looked up. His intense blue eyes. focused on her in a way she
didn't understand, as if he didn't expect her to have to ask such a
question. "Kiel," he said. "Kiel what?" "Just... Kiel."
"And who are you, just Kiel?"
His lips curved.
Her eyes fastened on his lips. An errant fris son of a thrill skated
over her skin. How could this, this, be a dream?
"An Avenging Angel," he said.
"Of course." She drew a pillow up tight against her tender breasts.
She clung to her dream as if her sanity depended upon it. "That's
possible in a dream. Isn't it? Did you leave your wings at the
door?"
"No." He raised his brow. "I don't do wings, except under extreme
circumstances." He gave a half smile. "Even then, I don't check them
at the door."
She smiled dreamily. "I don't fall into bed with strange angels,
either--except in near-death experiences, I guess. 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 around his golden red hair. Or
maybe, expecting angel accoutrements, she was only making that up in
her dreams, too. The troubling thought occurred to her that angels
didn't go around making love to mortals, even in dreams. Kiel was way
&nbs
p; too sexy to be an angel. The way he made her feel, looking at her, was
how Keller had always made her feel, only more so. More earthy.
Sexual. Rooted in what was real. Love.
But she must be wrong about dreams. Anything could happen, couldn't
it? He could know what was in her heart if this was her dream. Isn't
that what all women wanted in a mate, a man who understood what was in
her heart?
She sat up, pulling the comforter up to cover herself. "Maybe that's
what this is all about. My poor little lost psyche fulfilling my
deepest needs in my dreams." His eyes betrayed a glint of terrible
guilt. "What?" she asked. "Tm sorry, Robyn."
She swallowed. She didn't understand. "Sorry for what? Being in my
dreams?"
"Not exactly." Dressed in jeans and a green-and-blue plaid woolen
shirt, barefoot, male, freckled, strong and testy enough to make a
believer of her, he stopped whit-fling and set aside the chunk of ivory
and his knife. "This isn't a dream."
"Oh. Well." She straightened her backbone. "In that case you need to
pop out, or whatever earth angels do, and I need to be on my way."
She tossed aside the comforter and stood, naked, her body still rosy in
the afterglow of sleep and one dangerously sensual dream. She figured
Kiel, the-figment-of-her-imagination-angel, would fade in a trice. That
she would wake up in her own bedroom with Keller's outrageous
pen-and-ink cartoon sketches on the bookshelves, the thick
gray-and-peach Aubusson carpet, the too-neat, half-empty sleigh bed and
the scent from a vase of white roses that she had bought herself
because Keller wasn't around to bring her flowers anymore.
The only trouble was, when she stood, naked as the day she was born,
Kiel didn't fade. Reality crowded in on her. A bare plank floorboard
creaked beneath her feet.
The bed was rumpled. The scent of burning pine logs permeated the
cabin.
And the Avenging Angel Kiel stared an instant too long at her body.
He stood and raked a hand through his fiery golden hair, then turned to
plant his hands on the. mantel and stare into the fire instead. "Get
dressed, Robyn."
She panicked. Would an angel have a gritting voice of a frustrated
human male? No. Keeping a sharp eye on his broad, plaid-dad back, she
snatched up clothes from her open suitcase, then stared at the designer
jeans she didn't remember packing and a beautiful Scottish wool
pullover sweater of Keller's she wore only at home. The remains of her
euphoria vanished into thin air. "What are these?"
"Your clothes?"
"I want to know what is going on right now!" She put on the underwear,
jeans and Keller's sweater, then jerked on warm socks. "Who are you,
really? How did these things get in my suitcase? For that matter,
where is here?"
He sighed, then picked up the poker and sent sparks flying up the stone
chimney. "I'm an angel, Robyn. An Avenging Angel." He seemed to know
the precise moment she was dressed and he could safely turn around
again. He put the poker back in its place and sat down, taking up his
knife once more. "The clothes are yours--"
"No," she contradicted him fiercely, ignoring for the moment his
delusions of being an Avenging Angel. "The sweater belonged to my
husband--to Keller--and I only wear it when I'm... alone." Her head
dipped low. Embarrassment nagged at her for betraying herself.
Again.
That she would wear Keller's sweater to drive away her loneliness told
a pretty pathetic tale.
"I must be going crazy." She pressed her lips together, and lifted her
chin. She couldn't question how Keller's sweater got in her suitcase
if she wasn't willing to accept the possibility of an angel--an
Avenging Angel--intervening in her life. "I must have put the sweater
and jeans and socks there myself."
"I thought the sweater would be a comfort to you." Kiel whoever-he-was
sat back on the hearth. His eyes never left her.
She swallowed. "How would you know that?" She met his gaze defiantly.
He seemed to be waiting on her to accept the absurd, but he would have
a long wait.
He tilted his head. "Robyn, I know this is a stretch to believe--"
"It's more than a stretch, buster. It's either loony tunes or a
miracle." She had made her reputation drawing together the threads of
unlikely events, crimes, motives. She knew how battered and bruised
hearts became so twisted that a woman could drown her own children or a
husband kill his wife, but those weren't things that led to a great
deal of faith. "I don't believe in miracles." "Not in any, Robyn?"
Her chin tilted stubbornly. "Not unless I count Keller's presence in
my life. But then Keller was ripped right back out again, so that
would be a miracle gone awry, wouldn't it?" she demanded. "Not a
miracle at all, but some cruel cosmic joke I can't ever forgive!"
He lowered his wildly blue eyes. Didn't have an answer for that did
he? she thought. She felt perilously close to panicking. She latched
onto her anger instead, watching him leaning back against the stone
fireplace, his legs outstretched. His bare feet were utterly
masculine,
therefore completely human. And whether she'd packed those clothes
herself or fallen into bed in some hypo-thermic stupor, she wasn't
ready to be carted off by men in white jackets.
She plopped herself down in the wooden rocker a little way away with
her cosmetic bag and began tugging at the laces of winter hiking boots
she had not packed, either. "Suppose you start at the beginning. With
the truth, this time."
His fingers toyed with the knife but his eyes focused on hers. "Angels
can't lie, Robyn." His voice was still laced with that human male
grittiness. "It doesn't matter whether you believe I'm an angel or
not. I've been sent to prevent your death."
She went along for the hell of it, wisecracking to pretend she had a
choice. "Wouldn't that more properly be the province of Guardian
Angels?"
Kiel's lips curved. "Usually." His smile made her skin prickle. "The
truth is, Robyn Delaney, your Guardian threw up his hands in
despair."
She blinked. "I hope you're kidding."
"I'm not."
"You're saying there are such things as Guardian Angels?"
"Yes." He nodded. She knew he was looking again at her black eye and
swollen cheek where the mugger had backhanded her. "Yours gave you up
for a hopeless cause. He didn't know what to do for you anymore."
For an intelligent woman, she had made some fairly reckless decisions.
She knew that. Her fingers went to her cheek. It didn't hurt at all,
or feel the slightest bit swollen to her fingers. She snatched up a
compact from her tapestry bag of makeup and flipped it open. Her black
eye was completely clear, and her cheek unbruised.
"Oh, my God." Her hands began to shake. She snapped the compact
closed and let it fall into her lap. Her hand waved aimlessly in the
direction of her cheek. "Did you do this? Fix this?"
"Not exactly
. I made your own healing go a little... faster, is
all."
She took a deep breath and blew it out. She could no longer cling to
the notion that this was all a dream. Kiel didn't seem to fit the
manic mold, which might have explained his delusions of being an
Avenging Angel.
She had a preocupation with reasons, a passion to know why people
behaved as they did, what drove them, a need to understand how things
happened. Right now she couldn't explain anything, not her clothing,
not her cheek being healed, not this place.
Or even why she had allowed Kiel to entice her back from the promising
brink of the Hereafter where she could have had Keller back again. Why
had she been so willing to see something of Keller in this stranger?
Queen of the Lonely Hearts, Robyn Delaney Trueblood .... If her eyes
weren't deceiving her and she hadn't gone over the edge, then what he
claimed must somehow be true. She needed answers.
She needed them now. "Where are we?"
He paused in his whittling and looked around the cabin. "This place
doesn't really exist."
"Humor me. If it did exist, where would it be?"
"A ways from your car, tucked away in a remote valley beyond Aspen."
Then, Robyn thought, she was still within striking distance of Spyder
Nielsen's place. "And you just materialized out of thin air? On--"
"You were half frozen to death."
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