Wounded Angel (The Earth Angels) (9 page)

“She’s dead?” It was amazing, how the light could leak out of the world without anyone else noticing. For an instant it was as though she was back in Charles Rainier’s mountain cabin of horrors with the hand of despair closing a fist around her soul. “That’s... I don’t understand. Jasmine’s my age. I know she was catatonic, but that was from a severe psychological break, not physiological damage. She should have lived for decades.”

“Apparently there was a medication mix-up and she was overdosed with insulin. I know Jasmine’s family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit, but it’s expected to be settled out of court.”

“So that’s it? She’s just...dead.” Ella looked at his large hand gripping hers and wondered why she couldn’t find the strength to pull away from the engulfing warmth and reassuring solidity of it. “Well. I guess there was no point in my carrying her out of there.”

“Shut up.”

Her gaze bounced up to his, surprised at the fire burning through his tone.

“That was a dumbass thing to say. You saved her. You saved yourself. You fought for life at every turn and on every level, and you never once gave in or gave up hope. Don’t you dare give up now.”

Ella sat frozen, for once at a loss for words. But she couldn’t help it. It was as though Nate somehow knew that an almost maddened determination to not be another one of Charles Rainier’s victims was the only thing that had kept her going through those two nightmarish days. She’d never shared her belief that she’d managed to survive through willpower alone, so it unsettled her that this man seemed to instinctively know that about her. Unsettling, because most of what she knew about him had been built on the foundation of a lie. If that wasn’t being at a disadvantage, she didn’t know what was.

“I’m not giving up. I never give up.” Her chin came up, her gaze going to war with his. “And you’re right, that was a dumbass thing to say. Forget I said anything.”

“Said what?”

She snorted and slipped her hand from his on the excuse of making room for the waitress, who deposited their matching orders of espresso in front of them. “At least I can take comfort that it wasn’t Charles Rainier who took Jasmine’s life,” she said when they were alone once more. “I couldn’t save Lana Dever or Brooke Swenson. They were too far gone by the time I was abducted and chained to a wall. But his evil didn’t take Jasmine. Not completely. I made sure I got her out.”

“And yourself.” One of his massive hands closed over the espresso cup that appeared doll-like by comparison. His other hand rested on the edge of the table, bunched into a fist that looked like it yearned to find something to smash into a bloody pulp. “Damn. If only I could reach into hell to get to that son of a bitch.”

“Why? It’s over. He’s gone.”

“I want to make him more gone.” Then he shook his head and seemed to force himself to calmly sip his drink. “You’re going to have to think about how you want to do this, Ella. If you accept what that Pierpont-Rainier woman wanted to give you, you won’t have to worry about a paycheck ever again. More than that, it’ll ensure that this money is kept from the remaining relatives of Charles Rainier. I’m sure you remember them—they’re the compassionate souls who wanted you arrested for murdering their so-called
misunderstood
little scamp.”

Ella’s upper lip curled. She’d never forget or forgive how the Rainier family and their hired PR machine had tried to drag her through the mud. “I shudder at the thought of that entire family tree. I think it suffers from root rot.”

“Apparently Claudine wasn’t too bad, but then she wasn’t a blood relation. I’m not surprised it was a non-Rainier who tried to put things right.”

“No one can put it right.” Then she shook her head and pushed her untouched drink away. Self-pity was the one trap she’d never allowed herself to fall into. “Only I can make things right, and I do that a little more each day when I find something that makes me smile, or laugh. So while I’m still rattled I was found so easily, I’m not going to let it drag me down.”

“You weren’t easy to find, trust me on this.”

“So I was a challenge?”

“You have no idea.”

That pleased her no end. “Forgive my ear-to-ear grin.”

“Brat.” A corner of his mouth curled even as he huddled over his cup as if it were the only source of heat in the known universe. “If you hadn’t been in Chicago, I don’t know where I would have looked next. As far as I could tell, this was the only city outside of Asheville that had any personal significance to you.”

“That’s pretty much it.” She wrinkled her nose. “How sad that I’m so predictable.”

“You’re not. I really just followed a deep-down hunch, and it led me to you.” For a moment a preoccupied frown darkened his brow. “And other than Archibald, no one knows I’m looking for you in this city. Your anonymity is intact.”

“Will that continue to be the case if I decide to take the money?”

He shrugged while finishing his espresso. “You can hire an attorney to act as an intermediary. That way you won’t have to reveal your new name or whereabouts to anyone.”

“I need to think about it.” She slid out of the booth, all the while telling herself it would be crazy to become too comfortable with his company. Crazier still to acknowledge a part of her that craved his company even now. “I’m not sure if I should thank you for any of this.”

“I wouldn’t.” Nate came to his feet as well. To her surprise, he caught her hand in both of his and brought it to his mouth. The Old World gesture was so out of play in the twenty-first century her heart nearly strangled her at the lingering, warm-velvet brush of his lips over her knuckles. “I know bringing this back into your life was a kick in the teeth, but there was no other way to do this. I’m counting on you to be strong enough to handle it.”

“I am.” Ella knew she should step away. End it. They were done now, so letting go of his hand would be the next logical step. Wishing he’d kiss her hand again fell into the thoroughly not-logical category. “Since you found me, do you have any suggestions on how I can make sure no one pulls a repeat performance?”

“Nope.” That slow, crooked smile of his appeared, and it was so blatantly masculine she almost forgot she didn’t trust him. “I’m just that good at everything I do.”

She could imagine. “Now, now. No need to swagger.”

“I’m not, I’m merely stating the...” Without warning, his head snapped toward the TV over the bar, a strange, frozen expression carving into the lines of his face. Startled, Ella followed his gaze to the screen flashing with the
Breaking
News
banner and tried to understand what it was that had caught his attention.

“
Again
,
for
those
commuters
who
take
the
eastbound
950
Metra
from
Union
Station
,
your
train
has
been
shut
down
until
further
notice
.
Police
say
a
young
woman
,
identified
by
her
co
-
workers
as
Briella
Fields
,
somehow
fell
onto
the
tracks
and
was
struck
by
an
inbound
train
.
Medical
crews
have
declared
the
twenty
-
five
-
year
-
old
medical
assistant
dead
at
the
scene
,
but
have
been
unable
to
extricate
her
body
from
the
train
itself
.”

“No,” Ella heard Nate whisper, and it chilled her blood. His voice sounded like it had crawled out from the darkest depths of hell. “Not again.”

Chapter Seven

The light of the stove’s clock cast a pale glow over the tiny, dated kitchenette.

12
:
57

Alone, wrapped in a bulky pink robe and llama-covered blanket socks to ward off the chill, Ella stuck her tongue out at the clock before reaching for the light switch. One in the freaking morning. She wasn’t stupid enough to believe she’d never have a sleepless night due to Charles Rainier, but she’d thought all the worries over his hideous family were a thing of the past. It was enough to make her consider banging her head against the wall to knock herself out.

If only she’d hidden herself better, she’d be sleeping like a baby right now.

A grimace wrinkled her nose as she got the gas burner going under a kettle. Maybe relocating to Chicago hadn’t been the brightest move she’d ever made, but she doubted it would have changed the outcome. Nate da Luca was the kind of man who would have found her even if she’d buried herself in a subterranean lair, under a glacier, at the very ends of the earth. Maybe it was the unwavering intensity of his gaze, or his confidence that bordered on swagger. Whatever it was, she was certain about one thing—nothing would have stopped him from finding her. Nothing.

As she snagged a box of chamomile tea out of the pantry, Ella paused to glance at her hand. It appeared as it always did—winter pale and fragile-boned. Yet long after Nate had held it, the nerves continued to tingle as if branded by invisible fire. The reaction baffled her now as much as it had when his lips had first touched her skin.

Those lips. Amazing, how they could look so hard yet be so mesmerizingly seductive.

She flicked her hand as if shaking off water droplets, trying to erase the phantom sensation. The ugly truth behind his attention was no longer a secret, so she shouldn’t still be hung up on him. He hadn’t been interested in her in any way other than finding Gabriella Littlefield. It didn’t matter that she’d liked the way his dark eyes lingered on her, and she sure as hell shouldn’t be wondering what his mouth might feel like beneath her own. If she had an ounce of sense, she’d shove Nate da Luca out of her head with the rest of yesterday’s news.

Yeah. If she had an ounce of sense. Talk about a mighty big
if
.

The fretful whistling of the kettle pulled her around to the stove. But even as she curled up with her mug on the living room’s floral couch with its comfortable, secondhand sag, her brain refused to let the image of Nate stray too far. Maybe it was because thinking about him was easier than tackling the thorny subject of what Claudine Pierpont-Rainier had left her. Or maybe she was simply lonely. Whatever the case, the stubborn man refused to disembark her train of thought. Which was stupid; she wasn’t even sure she’d see him again.

Her brows pulled together, and she absently rubbed a hand at the nagging hollow deep in her chest. He was probably gone now, winging his way back to Atlanta and chalking up another win in his career column and no doubt already forgetting she existed. That was exactly what she should do instead of sitting there mooning over him. Aside from probably never seeing him again, the man was a virtual stranger. True, she knew he’d had corrective surgery on his back as a newborn, he’d worked as a cop in Atlanta before becoming a private investigator, and he was an unabashed fan of the University of Georgia Bulldogs. But she had no idea if he was a fan because he’d attended college there, or why he’d left the police force to join the private sector, or what his birth defect had been.

But...she wanted to.

Starting bright and early tomorrow morning she’d find out, she decided, draining the mug and setting it on the wobbly coffee table she’d rescued from the garbage man. Life had taught her some hard but invaluable lessons, and one of those lessons was to make sure at the end of the day there were no regrets. If thoughts of Nate da Luca were enough to keep her awake at night, then he was a regret waiting to happen.

And besides, he owed her, damn it. She wasn’t about to let him go after he’d dropped the poisoned name of Rainier back into her life after all this time. She’d thought that after years of training, she was now better equipped to handle anything, but in a heartbeat he’d proved that was a pie-in-the-sky fantasy. Another curveball full of crazy had come her way, and this time Nate was the pitcher who’d thrown it. The least he could do now was let her find out if this reawakening to life was the real deal, or if she was still frozen in her cocoon of benumbed existence. She’d call him to see where he was, she decided, slipping lower on the sofa cushions. If he was still in town, she was more than happy to return the jacket he’d wrapped her in so long ago, and from there...she’d cross that bridge if and when she ever came to it.

Ella wasn’t aware of falling asleep until the ringing of the phone jerked her awake. Weak rays of the morning sun leaked through the blinds veiling the front windows. With a yawn she forced her body, stiff from spending the night curled up in a fetal position to avoid the worst of the couch’s lumps, to a vaguely upright position and grabbed for the phone.

Habit had her looking at the readout before her eyes were capable of focusing. At last the message made sense—unknown. Stupid telemarketers calling at seven in the freaking morning had to be breaking some kind of harassment law, she thought, slamming the phone back into its dock. Calls this early were positively obscene.

The answering machine clicked on. Instead of the expected hang-up or the sounds of a busy boiler room churning away, faint strains of twangy, tears-in-your-beer music whispered over the line.

Again?

She shook her head and huddled deeper into the couch cushions. She seriously doubted she was being stalked by a serial musician, bent on bugging her with country music. No doubt someone had slipped up and accidentally hit the Hold button instead of the Talk button and now she was stuck in Muzak purgatory. With an irritated sigh she prepared herself to ignore the message until it did its automatic disconnect, when the tune finally sank in.

Smoky
Mountain
Rain

Keeps
on
fallin’
.

I
keep
on
callin’

Her
name
.

Invisible ice cascaded over her while her heart squeezed and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t do anything, except revert to what she’d been two years ago.

A
victim
.

The Smoky Mountains meant home for the woman she once was, the woman she’d struggled so hard to grow out of and recover from. Charles Rainier had used his family’s millions to hide his well-fortified cabin of horrors deep in the Smoky Mountains. They were a part of a past she sure as hell didn’t want to be reminded of through some cheesy song. She jerked back up to grab the phone out of its dock and disconnected it, only to change her mind a second later, but it was too late. Nothing but blank dial tone greeted her as she brought the phone back to her ear.

“Damn it.” More shaken than she cared to admit, Ella dropped the phone back in its dock, then pretended not to see the tremor in her hand. It was nothing more than a song that reminded her of home, that’s all. Just a stupid little tune sent to her no doubt from a sleepy telemarketer who accidentally hit the Hold button. If she allowed something as harmless as elevator music to shatter her reconstructed self-confidence, she might as well shove all the furniture in front of the doors, dig a bunker in the basement and never poke her head outside again.

One thing Nate had said about her was true; she was a fighter. Early on after her escape from Charles Rainier, she’d made herself go through intensive therapy called PE, or Prolonged Exposure therapy, a type of therapy that war veterans went through in order to deal with traumatic memories. Breathing techniques, coupled with confronting memories that brought about anxiety through descriptive talk therapy, helped diminish the power that trauma-induced anxieties had over her. Avoidance of painful things only made the wound sink deeper, so as she lay there she deliberately hummed the tune to herself until her heart rate settled and it became nothing more than a dated bit of sentimental noise.

Ella, one. Nightmares of the past, zero.

A sudden pounding on the front door through the security bars loosed a startled yelp out of her before she hopped to her feet and grabbed the nearest weapon, a baseball bat she kept leaning in a corner by the door. Logic insisted no one intent on doing her harm would knock, but since logic had nothing to do with potential attacks, she figured better safe than sorry. Another pounding on the door boomed through the small house before she peered through the peephole.

What
the
hell
...?

“Ella!” With his dark hair mussed as if he’d raked his fingers through it and his eyes red-rimmed and sleepless, Nate bellowed as if trying to cave the door in through the sound of his voice alone. “Ella, damn it, open the door! Be alive and open this fucking door!”

* * *

Nate was too big for her kitchen.

The scent of coffee perfumed the air, and the microwave dinged to announce the day-old cinnamon rolls were now warm. With a quick peek to see if the pats of butter on the rolls had melted into a uniform gooey goodness, Ella took them out and placed them on the dinette table. Nate sat there, unmoving and out of the way, but he was just so damn big it felt like there wasn’t enough room for the both of them.

Then again, dressed in a bathrobe and llama socks, it was no wonder she was wishing the man was anywhere but there. But no matter how horrified she might be over her appearance, her grannies on both sides of the family tree would rise out of their graves to haunt her if she didn’t remember her manners.

“Feel free to help yourself, Nate. Those rolls come from the bakery by the gym. Ironically they do a brisk business, thanks to our clientele rewarding themselves for working out. Do twenty reps and give yourself a cookie.”

“Thanks, but I didn’t come here to bum a meal off of you.”

“Coffee and a roll could never be called a meal.” As she spoke, she placed a mug of steaming coffee at his place and settled down across from him with her own mug, then forked a gooey roll onto his plate when he didn’t serve himself. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but considering how you were trying to demolish my door, I have a feeling you didn’t drop by to see if my Southern hospitality muscles were rusty.”

His face was the grimmest she had ever seen it as he took a fortifying sip of coffee. “I thought I’d find you dead.”

“I gathered that from what you were yelling, so that doesn’t surprise me.” Surprise, no. Alarm, yes. On every possible level, her instincts were on red alert and she was ready to bolt into the nearest hole she could find. “The question is
why
you thought this. It’s not like I’m in any danger of spontaneously keeling over. Don’t I appear to be in relatively decent shape?”

“Whatever goddesslike shape you’re in has nothing to do with suffering a sudden accident.”

Her mind veered off into two radically different directions—the irrelevant and the ominous. “Goddesslike? You think I’m in goddesslike shape?”

Funny, how the irrelevant was so much more appealing than the ominous.

He gave her a look designed to make her quake in her llama socks. “This isn’t a joke, Ella.”

“Then what is it?”

“One woman is dead with parts of her body still being teased out from under a train at Union Station, and another didn’t show up at the Wrigley Building for work this morning when she’s the type you can set your watch by.”

“Okay.” Ella looked down at the hand gripping her mug and was amazed how her fingers could feel so cold while holding onto something so hot. “I’m sorry to hear someone died. I just don’t see why someone getting hit by a train and another disappearing would make you think I was in danger.”

“Briella Fields, Gabrielle Litte and Ella Little. These were the three names I pinpointed in Chicago who could possibly be Gabriella Littlefield. Briella Fields is the one who got knocked into a train. Gabrielle Litte is the one who didn’t show up for work. And you...”

“And me.” Ella put the coffee down, untouched. “Nothing’s happened to me.”

“Yet.”

She stifled a shiver and focused all her energy on boring holes into him with her stare alone. “You’re doing a bang-up job of freaking me out.”

“That’s not my intention. My only goal is to keep you safe.”

“I’m not sure what your intention is, and that’s a problem. See, two years ago I would have fallen for a line like you’re trying to feed me now—”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. This isn’t a
line
—”

“I also would have taken it for granted that a stranger on the street wasn’t really a sick bastard waiting for me to pass him so he could grab me, knock me out and throw me into his van,” she went on, talking over him until he came to a curse-laden halt. “The point is, it’s
not
two years ago. It’s now, and I’m not the gullible person I once was. There’s no way in hell I’m going to blindly accept whatever you say as gospel and let you into my life so you can protect me from what might be figments of your—”

“This has happened to me before, Ella.”

That stopped her. She watched him wrestle with words that didn’t seem to want to come, but eventually the crushing weight of the room’s silence popped them free.

“Up until six months ago, I was a detective with the Atlanta Police Department. And if you don’t even believe that about me, I’m more than happy to give you my badge number and captain’s name so you can check me out. I have a clean service record, several commendations and I was one of the youngest in the department’s history to earn the rank of detective. I was born with a certain talent for finding things—it didn’t matter what it was, where it was, or whether it had been lost or stolen or hidden. Whatever it was, there was a good chance I’d be able to find it. I found you in the mountains,” he added, and it was his turn to try and pin her to the spot with an unblinking intensity that stole her breath. “Though technically speaking you’d already saved yourself, so you didn’t really need me. The same couldn’t be said for the man who came to the police with the claim that his estranged wife had kidnapped his two daughters. He needed me to find them.”