Angel of Desire (21 page)

When Rachel chose not to respond to his sarcasm, Shade raked a frustrated hand through his hair. "And before you were an angel, you were a witch."

"I wasn't a witch." Both her tone and her back stiffened. "I was a midwife."

"In Salem. In 1692."

"Yes. I know it's a little difficult to take in, all at one time, but—"

"How about impossible?"

He was honestly sorry that Rachel had such serious mental problems. But he was getting tired of this game, tired of humoring her when what she needed was a lot of therapy, and some heavy pharmaceuticals.

"Nevertheless," Rachel continued, "it is all true. I
was
a midwife. But I made the mistake of adopting a new method of childbirth. Rather than the traditional method of tying a woman's hands to the bed frame and giving her a birthing stick to chew on during contractions, I advocated breathing exercises."

"Natural childbirth isn't exactly new."

"It was in 1692," Rachel pointed out evenly. "You have to understand, Shade, Puritan Salem was a very rigidly controlled society."

"So I've read."

"Any new ideas were suspect. New ideas from a mere female, well…" She shrugged her shoulders.

"So when your fiance, the Reverend Dimmesdale—"

"Demming," she corrected quietly. Even after all these centuries, her former beloved's betrayal still hurt. "Roger's name was Demming."

Shade ground his teeth. "So, when
Roger
found out what you were doing, he turned you over to the council."

"He believed I had come under Satan's influence. As a minister, he had no choice but to save the rest of the community from my supposed moral corruption."

That was it. Shade stopped pacing long enough to squat in front of her and take her hands, which were, he noted, ice-cold in both of his. "Rachel. Sweetheart," he coaxed, "do you have any idea how impossible all this sounds?"

Her gaze was solemn. And immeasurably sad. "Do you have any idea how impossible it felt? To be accused of such things by the man you had planned to marry from childhood? To be subjected to such horribly personal interrogation."

Her voice had risen, she'd begun to tremble. "Do you have any idea how it feels to be ridiculed. Then scorned. Then ultimately…"

Now her entire body was encased in a block of ice and her eyes were no longer focused on his face but were looking past him into the dark and horrible nightmare of her tortured past.

No, Shade corrected, not her past. Only her tortured mind.

"The smoke from the torches burned my eyes," she whispered tremblingly. "And there was thunder. And lightning. Then Roger put the rope around my neck and—"

"That's enough, dammit!" He took hold of her shoulders and shook her. Hard. "It didn't happen, Rachel . There wasn't a trial, there were no torches. There wasn't any rope. You didn't hang. You're here, with me."

Her gaze returned to the present. To Shade. "I know where I am. And who I'm with. I also know where I have been, And where I am from."

"Now we're back to heaven."

"Some people call it that."

"What do you call it?"

"Home."

The single word was spoken with absolute conviction. Not that what she was saying was possible, he reminded himself. But it was readily apparent that she believed her out-of-this-world story to be the truth. In that respect she wasn't a great deal different from all those people who believed themselves to have been beamed up from cornfields by alien spaceships, he decided.

"So why don't you tell me about home?"

"All right." She was about to break another rule, but special circumstances, Rachel reminded herself, called for special actions. "I will."

But as she attempted to describe her more recent life, she found her memory strangely fogged, as if she were recalling some distant dream.

"I can't," she admitted finally.

"Now why aren't I surprised?"

"You don't have to be so sarcastic."

"If you're really an angel, where are your wings?"

"We don't have wings. That's merely artistic interpretation. And as attractive as they appear in all those paintings, it has always seemed to me they'd be highly impractical."

"Can't have impracticality in heaven," he drawled.

Rachel knew he didn't believe her. Though she was sorely tempted to drop the subject and spend the scant time they had on earth together at more pleasurable pursuits, she couldn't do it.

If nothing else, she knew how much it had cost Shade to admit that he loved her. When she was gone—and about this she had no choice—she wanted him to believe that she had loved him back. With ever fiber of her being. She couldn't bear the idea that he'd believe her capable of abandoning him. As his mother had so many years ago.

"One of those scars on your back was not caused by the general's men," she said, trying yet again to prove her case. "A woman stabbed you. A double agent you were working with in Germany,"

"You could have found that in my files."

"Does it say in those files that the injury was sustained in the shower?"

His eyes hardened. As did his jaw. Shade gave her a long, probing look. "No. But there were people who knew the truth." like the woman's cohorts who'd succeeded in bugging the supposed safe house. After the incident, Shade had viewed the videotape. It hadn't been pretty.

Rachel took a deep breath and tried again. And again. But every time she revealed knowledge about his various dangerous, near-death experiences, he countered she could have gotten the information from his government files.

"All right. If this doesn't prove my claim, I don't know what will." She sighed and folded her hands together in her lap. "One Christmas, when you were eleven, you and Conlan became blood brothers. It snowed that day. Conlan was wearing blue, you wore gray.

"Afterward, you both returned to the hockey game. You were a strong skater, the best player on the team. You trapped the puck with your stick, then took off across the lake."

Shade remembered the December wind howling in his ears; the snow had been falling in a thick white curtain, obscuring his vision. He imagined he could hear the sound of the fragile ice giving way beneath the serrated steel runners of his skates.

"You fell through the ice."

"The accident is undoubtedly in my school files," he argued. "If you knew where to look." His voice, even to his own ears, lacked its earlier strong conviction.

"You didn't give up," Rachel continued softly, as if she hadn't heard his rebuttal. "You kept searching for an escape route."

"But I couldn't find one." The day, long forgotten, came flooding back.

"No. And when you couldn't, you realized you were going to die."

Their minds linked, both focused on that long-ago day.

"And then I saw her," Shade murmured. Reality slammed home, like a fist to the jaw. He stared unbelievingly at Rachel. "Swimming toward me, surrounded by a warm golden light. At first I thought she was a mermaid, but that didn't make any sense.

"Her hair was streaming behind her and her eyes were as gray as the ice overhead, but I remember knowing, when I looked into them, that I was going to be all right."

"And you were."

"Yes." He dragged his hands through his hair again and realized they were shaking. "Everything went black about then. But later, back at the infirmary, even when I was telling myself that my mermaid had been a hallucination, I felt something brush against my cheek and I knew."

Silent tears made silver ribbons down Rachel's cheeks. "That you weren't alone."

"Yes." With trembling fingers he reached out and brushed the moisture away. "My God," he rasped, "I remember it all so clearly. It was you." He shook his head in one last try at denial. "But that's impossible."

"Nothing's impossible."

Shade had not lived an uneventful life. He'd thought there was nothing left that could surprise him. He'd been wrong.

"I thought from the beginning you reminded me of an angel, but this is ridiculous."

Her smile, as she framed his frowning face between her soft palms, gave him an insider's glimpse of the heaven he'd never believed in.

"You made me a woman," she reminded him.

Her lips were only a whisper away, inviting him to paradise. But old images, learned in the chapel of the rigidly run Calvinist boys' school, died hard.

"Hell, Rachel, you can't expect me to accept the wild idea that you're an angel, then be able to, well, you know, be that way with you ever again."

"Be what way?" She brushed her smiling mouth against his teasingly. Tantalizingly. "This way?" One hand slid down his neck, across his shoulders, settling against his bare chest. Her lips followed. "This way?" she whispered. Beneath her mouth, his heart trebled its beat. The sound of his zipper lowering was unnervingly loud in the suspended hush surrounding them. "How about this way?"

Her lips continued their sensual, erotic journey as Rachel proved to Shade that they could, indeed, still be
that way
together.

And as the hours passed, each time, in every way, their lovemaking grew more exquisite. More profound.

Because it was an expression of a love so deep and so strong it transcended the normal realms of time and space.

IT WAS TIME FOR their meeting with the general. Luck appeared to be with them as they drove to the village of Karikistan without running into any more sniper fire.

Unfortunately, Rachel still had not accomplished her mission: to keep Shade from assassinating the general. Because though she argued heatedly against his plan during the drive away from the city, she could not lessen his resolve.

"You cannot kill another human being," she argued for at least the tenth time in as many minutes.

"I have. And I can."

"You've never committed murder," she said, reminding Shade once again that Rachel knew him as well as he knew himself.

"He deserves to die."

"That's probably true," she surprised him by agreeing. "But it's not your place."

He shrugged. "If not me, then who?" He shot her a sideways glance as they drove to the square in the middle of the village, where they were to meet the general's guards. "You?"

"Of course not!" She may have broken a great many rules during her brief time on earth, but some commandments remained inviolate.

"Then I guess it's up to me." He reached over and patted her on the knee. "Besides, don't forget, I've got an ace in the hole."

"And that is?"

"You." His brief smile lacked the warmth she'd grown accustomed to during these love-filled hours. "It never hurts to have pull in high places." This time his smile almost, but not quite, reached his eyes. "And if you're telling the truth, we're talking about as high as a person can get."

"You still don't believe me."

"I don't want to." A shadow moved across those unsmiling eyes. "But I'll have to admit, angel, you've definitely piqued my interest."

She sighed. It had seemed so easy in the beginning. Make a brief sojourn to earth, save Shade's soul, then return to work, as she had so many years ago after pulling him from that icy grave. Unfortunately, nothing about Shade was proving to be simple, least of all her feelings for the man.

"You know," she insisted, "you're not nearly as bad as you think you are."

"Nor nearly as good as you think I am," he countered.

She opened her mouth to argue, when she saw the armored personnel vehicle blocking the roadway up ahead. "Looks as if we've reached our destination." Shade retrieved his hand from her knee and returned it to the steering wheel. His expression was calm, but Rachel couldn't help noticing that he was gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles had turned white.

Shade left the car and spoke with one of the guards, who insisted Rachel get out, as well. The stars on his shoulder attested to his high rank. His expression, as he instructed his men to check Rachel for hidden weapons, attested to his cruelty.

From the way he was watching Shade watch the man whose hands moved intimately over her body, Rachel knew that the soldier was waiting, hoping, even, for Shade to make a move so he could respond with brute force.

"I'm sorry," Shade said after the search was completed and they were back in the car.

"There wasn't anything you could do without risking getting us both killed."

"I know. But when that bastard's hands—"

It was her turn to place her hand on his knee. "Don't think about it. He didn't hurt me."

"I wanted to kill him." A muscle jerked ominously in his jaw.

"But you didn't." And for that, Rachel was immensely grateful.

"No." This time his smile revealed the warmth his earlier ones had been missing. "Maybe you're right, Sister Rachel. Perhaps I'm not quite the hired gun I pretend to be."

"You're the man I love."

In the beginning, that idea had proven even more unbelievable than her claim about being his guardian angel. Never, in all his thirty-plus years had Shade ever thought of himself as the least bit lovable.

"And you're the lady I love." He covered her hand with his and linked their fingers together. "Forever."

"Do you love me enough to do one thing for me?"

Her innocent tone didn't fool him for a second. Shade cursed. "Like forgoing the pleasure of killing the general?"

"Yes."

"Exactly like living with Jiminy Cricket," he muttered, repeating his earlier accusation. "How about I promise to think about it?"

It was a start. Rachel's heart soared hopefully. "That would make me very happy."

"Once this is over and we've got Conlan out of the country, I'm going to spend the rest of our lives making you happy."

It was a promise Rachel knew Shade would never be able to keep. But, unwilling to ruin their brief time together, she'd not told him of her deadline, so she could not mention it now.

"You always make me happy," she murmured instead.

They followed the procession of armored trucks to the compound located approximately five kilometers outside the village.

Inside a former farmhouse, surrounded by heavily armed guards, they found the general. "Hello, Shade," the older man greeted his enemy with a smile that belied the torture that had taken place last time the two men had met. "I had not expected to see you again."