able to slip the bonds of earth, to escape gravity, but she had.
Joy flooded every part of her being. The perspective lightened her
heavy heart. From here she could see into eternity.
This was where Keller must be. Out here, somewhere, Keller must be.
She laughed and cried, and when she looked at Kiel's dazzling bright
form she could see his halo, see how his thousand-candle smile outshone
the sun without blinding her, and that his human form had wings
attached--enormous, beautiful, shining golden white wings.
He showed her the moon and the stars and the North Pole and the South.
He showed her K-2 and the Angel Falls, Old Faithful and Sri Lanka,
Jupiter's moons, Sat urn's rings and nebulas never seen from earth or
its most far-ranging satellite probes.
She thought they spent a night and a day and another night, but after a
while she felt herself pulled back into his embrace and into his kiss,
and then she felt the incredible drag of gravity pulling at them.
She was again in Kiel's lap, in the swing in the park in Aspen. Back
on Earth, her watch said it was 10:52 on the twentieth of September.
With what he had given her in that hour, with what he had shared with
her and where he had taken her, knowing now what it was to fly, she
knew when he left, her heart would be broken all over again. But she
would not trade it back.
Not for anything.
Chapter Eleven
Jessie Blahnik, Mike Massie and Scott Kline drove up from Denver for
Lucy's party. Kiel had been so much a part of Robyn's life in the past
week that it seemed impossible her friends had not met him. The shock
on Jessie's face, to find a man in Robyn's suite at The Chandler House,
made Robyn laugh out loud. Scott's brows went up, too. Mike managed
to keep the shock off his face, but he was schooled in impassive poker
faces where Jessie was not.
"Jess, really. You should see yourself!"
to introduce Kiel one more time. In a tux, he looked incredibly
handsome ... sexy. She put her arm through his. "Kiel Alighieri,
local investigator helping me sort through Keller's records, these are
my friends, and Keller's, from Denver. Jessie Blahnik, TV news
producer extraordinaire, Michael Massie, Denver defense counsel of
choice, and one of my fellow writers, Scott Kline of the Denver
Post."
Kiel shook hands with Jessie, and then Mike and Scott. Jessie turned
to Robgn, pretending to fan herself from a swoon over Kiel's good
looks.
Massie launched into a discussion with Kiel and Scott what n had made
in trying to uncover the truth about Keller's and Spyder Nielsen's
deaths.
Robyn took Jessie back to the bedroom suite. Jessie presented her the
dress bag and small suitcase she had brought up containing the backless
bra, earrings, purse and shoes. Robyn needed to go to the party.
Jessie had only to slip into her gown and shoes, but dressing together
gave them their first chance to talk in the week Robyn had been gone.
Taking Robyn's gown from the garment bag, Jessie demanded the scoop. "I
absolutely cannot believe that you didn't tell me about this guy when
you called!"
Robyn took the dress on its hanger from Jessie and shed her robe. "He's
a little hard to explain, Jess, but I didn't mean to be holding out on
you."
"What does that mean, 'a little hard to explain'?" "He's ...
different, he's not--" Robyn broke off, confronted again with the
difficulty of accounting for an Avenging Angel dropping into her life.
"What can I say, Jess?"
"Indeed!" Jessie cracked. "A week ago, you were still in the thick of
a lot of pain over Keller. Now you're not? Now you've suddenly got a
hot date for a ritzy party in the middle of--"
"That's what I mean, Jess. He's not a hot date." She put on the
backless bra and then stepped into a glittering, sequined midnight blue
gown. "He's not going to be any part of my life. I will always be in
the thick of my feelings for Keller Kiel is just ... helping me." She
pulled the bodice of the gown up over her breasts and turned her side
to Jessie. "Look," she said, sticking her hand out, waiting for Jess
to help with the zipper. "I haven't even taken Keller's wedding ring
off."
Her friend stuck the straight pins that had been holding her own dress
on its hanger into her mouth and reached for the zipper placket,
talking around the pins. "Meaningless, Robyn. Have you kissed him?"
In the mirror, Robyn watched her own china doll complexion go prettily,
shamefully pink.
Jessie glanced up into the mirror, too, to see the dress, then did a
double-take at Robyn's expression. She snatched the pins from between
her lips. "Omigod.
Robyn, you've slept with him, haven't you?"
"Jess, you don't understand."
"Are you crazy? What's to understand? What do you know about him? Did
you use a condom? For heaven's sake, Robyn, in this day and age, you
can't just go out and get yourself--"
"Give me a little credit, Jess." Her tone silencing her best friend's
tirade, Robyn turned away and sank onto the bench in front of the
old-fashioned dressing table. She began fashioning her hair up into a
high, elegant chignon. "It wasn't like that."
Jessie sat down on the bench beside her, facing away from the mirror.
"How was it, then?"
Robyn stuck in bobby pins here and there. "He ... I was caught in that
snowstorm and my car got stuck off the road. I got out and started to
walk--"
"Oh, Robyn! I knew I shouldn't have let Massie goad you into running
off on a wild-goose chase--"
"I had to come, Jess. You know that. I know it was way beyond the
pale to get out of my car in the middle of a blizzard. It was stupid.
I was on this deserted road on my way to Nielsen's estate, and I
thought I could make it. I was wrong. I fell a couple of times but...
do you know what?" She picked up the hot curling iron and began
working at stray tendrils of hair. "Jess, I didn't care if I died!
That's how bad it was. I remember thinking I
could be with Keller again if I just let go."
"Robyn, no. You don't mean--"
"I did, Jess." Her throat locked for a moment. "I couldn't take it
anymore." She skipped over the worst of it. "Anyway, I was about dead
from hypothermia when Kiel found me. He saved my life, we made love,
I... he volunteered to help me avenge--I mean resolve--Keller's murder.
End of story."
"Well, thank God he saved your life, Robyn--" she broke off and took
the curling iron. "Let me help you with this one. You have to know it
sounds like he took advantage of the situation."
"He didn't, Jess." She tried to keep her mouth shut, but the truth
wasn't going to stay buried, not with Jess. "The truth is, I took
advantage of my own stupor to take advantage of Kiel."
"Robyn, that's positively daft!" Jessie protested. But it wasn't. It
was exactly what she'd done. She was the one who saw Keller where
Keller wasn't. "Isn't it taking advantage of a man," an angel, she
/> thought, "to make love with him and pretend he's someone else?"
Jessie's soft brown eyes, shades lighter than Robyffs own, misted. "I
don't understand. Are you saying you were... pretending he was
Keller?"
Robyn's jaw clamped tight; her chin wouldn't quit puckering. She
couldn't keep the tears back.
"Oh, Robyn." Jessie reached for a tissue. "Don't cry. You'll ruin
your mascara."
Jessie always made her laugh. That's the way this had all
started--with Jessie making her laugh about the decadent rich and
famous of Aspen. But this was too hard. "It hasn't happened again.
It won't. He..." He's an angel. Not to be confused with a real man.
"It just won't."
Jessie offered a quick hug. "I'm sorry to scold. If it des happen
again, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it should, Robyn. Maybe he's
perfect for you. Maybe this is what God intended when he took
Keller."
"Jessie, you don't believe that!"
"Well--" she stood quickly and peeled out of her jeans so she could get
dressed, too "--maybe I'm starting to." She took off her sweater and
put on a slip, then reached for her dress. "Fix your left eye,
girlfriend." She gave a savvy grin. "Otherwise, you know, the whole
effect of a twelve-hundred-dollar dress is sorta wasted."
Massie started pounding on the door. "You women coming out, or
what?"
Robyn opened the door. He almost knocked her on the nose, but he
backed off. The effect of the dress wasn't wasted. Kiel's eyes told
her so. Jess nagged at Mike for being so impatient, but she smiled
like a fellow conspirator at Kiel's look.
Robyn sighed happily, knowing all the while what Jessie didn't know,
what heartbreak she was setting herself up for all over again.
The limousine Mike had rented was still waiting outside. "Sparing no
expense," he crowed, handing Jessie and then Robyn inside the luxurious
interior.
They arrived by nine-thirty, half an hour after the start time on the
invitation. The ballroom at the historic hotel was only moderately
filled: Unlike the celebrity Christmas parties of years gone by, this
was off-season, and the guest list for Lucy's party was even more
exclusive.
Jessie had to break off to spend a few minutes with the Denver TV
station camera crew that had driven up separately, arriving before
them. Lucy's big bash would get a couple of minutes airtime on the ten
o'clock news. It wasn't hard to draw top performers to Aspen. The
band was well known but loud.
Scott hung out with Jessie, and Massie was having an old home week.
Kiel and Robyn began to circulate. Kiel was getting a lot of
interested looks, enough to irritate her. "So what do you think of
Mike?"
Oblivious as usual to the feminine interest, he grinned. "Quite a
spendthrift, isn't he?"
She decided to relax and bask in being the reason Kiel was so oblivious
"Michael Massie is one of the most generous people I've ever known,
actually. Not just with his money, either He spends probably twenty
hours a week helping kids in juvenile detention centers."
"I wouldn't have guessed," Kiel admitted.
"Not many people do at first blush." She looked up at Kiel. "I
thought angels had instant insight."
A waiter stopped to offer them champagne and mushroom caps stuffed with
steak tartare. "We don't. We're not mind readers, Robyn .... Well,
sometimes." He adjusted his statement at her skeptical look.
He thought about his mentors in the ranks of the DBAA. Only little
Ariel was more a rookie at this in all the DBAA than Kiel, but between
them, Sam and Dashiell had centuries' worth of experience. Kiel gave
Robyn Dash's take on darkness lurking. "Evil exists. No way around
it. The thing is, even with our powers, even with higher powers than
all the angels, there are these dark crevasses in the human heart no
one can see into."
Balancing her cocktail plate and glass, Robyn polished off a mushroom.
"All that free will stuff?"
Kiel nodded solemnly, drinking champagne from his crystal stem. "That's
what makes you human, you know? The ability to choose for yourself, to
decide right from wrong."
"The absolute right to screw our lives up all by ourselves, you
mean."
He laughed. "Yeah. Anyway, Mike grilled me the whole time you and
Jessie were getting dressed. Scott pretty much let him do the
honors."
Robyn polished off a mushroom. "Jessie was dying of curiosity, too.
What did they want to know?"
"Everything. Whether or not you were closer to proving his theory that
Keller was killed to scuttle the trial. Where I came from. Massie
wanted to know what my intentions toward you are."
She choked on a sip of champagne. Kiel had to pat her on the back, and
she drew lots of concerned looks. It was funny on one hand, Kiel being
an angel being questioned about his intentions, and not funny on the
other. She wanted Kiel to have intentions an angel could never have.
"What did you tell him?"
"To mind his own business." Kiel grinned, but the look in his eyes
told her he knew what was funny and what was not.
"Good for you," she managed to say. "Although, if I were to guess, I'd
say that only made him more nosy."
"I just went on telling him what we'd been doing. He had to settle for
that or be an ass. He might get there yet." He touched a tendril of
the softly curling hairs at her nape. "If he does, it's because he
cares about you, Robyn. You--" He broke off and took his hand away
from her hair, away from the heat of her. "You have good, caring
friends. That's important."
"For when you leave, you mean."
Small muscles at his jaw tightened. "Yeah. For when I have to go. But
for all time, Robyn. Good friends, in the end are t best testament to
one's
Her chest tightened. In the end, Keller had been as much her best
friend as her lover, the one who brought her back to earth when she
went off on some tangent, the one who strung her Christmas lights and
brought her flowers and drew her funny little cartoons.
Keller was the best testament to her life in that sense, but he was
gone. She had to go on alone being the testament to his life, the
better person she had become because of him.
She drew a deep breath and drank down all her champagne. The fizz, the
warmth, emboldened her, and she kissed Kiel, bold and naughty, with
tongue and teeth.
He growled deep in his throat at her, took her by the elbow and
propelled her. along until someone he didn't know she knew might stop
them and say hello.
The local newspaper editor, talking shop with Scott Kline, proved to be
the one. Margaret, an older woman, born and raised in the valley, a
woman Robyn knew to be absolutely allergic to exploiting celebrity in
her paper, threw her arms around Robyn. "Robyn Delaney, how wonderful
to see you! You look positively stunning!"
"Thanks, Margaret," she answered warmly. "I am fine. I'd like you to
&nb
sp; meet a friend of mine, Kiel Alighie-ri."
Out came the thousand-candle smile Robyn knew to be totally sincere.
Margaret, like all the women before her, tumbled to it. Kiel spent a.
couple of minutes talking about what a relief it was to have such h
fine party in the off-season. As if Kiel would know ... but he made a
great listener, which was all Margaret ever really wanted, second only
to an avid reader of her newspaper.
Margaret turned back to her. "Robyn, I'm sorry we never got the chance
to keep our appointment. I was just telling Scott that I wished I'd
thought to send him those papers I copied for you. The Hallelujah
caved in, and then naturally, you were not here."
"I don't remember now if we were just going to meet to talk shop,
or--"
"Oh, no! Well," she amended, "that too, but you had a very specific
agenda. Something to do with Jerome Clarke. The day he died. About
the avalanche, that sort of thing--at least, that's what I understood
you to mean. I went through rolls of film from the newspaper accounts
and made printouts for you."
Robyn gnawed gently at her lip, trying to think back. "I haven't even
looked at my notes for the Smithsonian article since the... accident."
She didn't want to get into her theories about the collapse not being
an accident. Not tonight, especially. It was looking less and less as
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