Johanna Lindsey - Angel

“Didn’t you ever try to escape?”

“A few months after we got to that cabin up in the mountains, I wandered off too far from it. When Old Bear found me, he chained me out in his yard for three weeks.”

Cassie was having a difficult time accepting what she was hearing. The last appalled her. “He left you out in the elements?”

“I guess I can be grateful it was summer at the time,” Angel said offhandedly, as if the subject weren’t bringing back terrible memories. “But I didn’t wander off again after that. And it was nearly five years before he let me go with him to the settlement where he sold his furs. It took a week just to get there.”

“You didn’t tell anyone there?”

“He’d cautioned me to keep my mouth shut. By then I was used to obeying him. Besides, those folks knew Old Bear. Wasn’t anyone there who would have gone against him to help me get back to St. Louis.”

Cassie wished she’d never asked him about his name, yet she couldn’t seem to drop the subject it had opened up. “Do you know why he took you? Did he want a son?”

“No, just company. Said he got tired of talking to himself.”

Just company. A small boy had been taken from his family in order to keep an old man company. She’d never heard of anything so pathetic and sad — and outrageous.

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“Dead.”

“Did you—?”

“No,” he replied, explaining, “He got his name because there was always one or two bear hides in the furs he sold. He loved pitting himself against bears, the bigger the better. But he was getting too old to go after ‘em anymore. The last one survived, he didn’t.”

“And you left?”

“Soon as I buried him,” Angel said. “I was fifteen — or thereabouts.”

“Did you go back to St. Louis to find your folks?” Cassie asked next.

“First thing. But no one remembered my mama, or anything about a missing boy. ‘Course, St. Louis wasn’t my real home. I remember a train ride to get there, and Old Bear took me soon after that.”

“You don’t mention a father.”

“Don’t recall much about one. There was a man who called himself my pa, but I only remember seeing him once or twice. Whatever job he had, it kept him away from home for long stretches at a time.”

“But didn’t you ever find them?”

“Didn’t know where to look.”

He said that so indifferently, like it no longer mattered. Cassie was having as much trouble with his attitude as she was with his tale.

“Chase Summers never knew his father, either,” she told him. “But he knew his name, which made him easy to find when Chase went to Spain to search. But there are men trained to find people, who know how to go about sifting through clues long buried or thought forgotten. We could hire one to find your folks, if you’d like.”

“We?”

She blushed and reached for the wine bottle to refill their glasses. His had hardly been touched. She should have had Maria try to locate a bottle of whiskey for him, she supposed, if there was any in the house — her papa didn’t drink — though the thought of Angel intoxicated was a frightening one to contemplate.

“I guess my meddling instincts are showing,” she admitted, hoping her pink cheeks weren’t showing, too. She didn’t think she’d ever blushed so much in her life as she had since he’d shown up. “You’ll have to forgive me. I can’t help it if I like to help people.”

“Even when they don’t want it?”

That should have shut her up, but she wasn’t done making excuses for her irritating habit. “Sometimes people need a little help figuring out what they really want.”

Angel conceded that point by saying no more. He wished he could find his folks. He’d never had anyone love him, and they were about the only two people who might. Love was something he’d missed in his life, and not just the parental kind. Since the time he’d seen Jessie and Chase Summers together, the way they touched frequently and looked at each other, the way their love blazed between them, he knew he’d like to have that for himself, that closeness with another person, the caring, the tenderness, things he’d never had, or had experienced so long ago he had no memory of it.

But he had given up finding it for himself. Good women shunned him because of his reputation. Bad women liked his reputation and welcomed him to their beds, but got scared at the first sign that he might want something more serious than a good time.

Now, what was it about Cassandra Stuart that made him think of that? No, not her, but her dredging up all his years of loneliness.

“I’m sorry,” she said, drawing his eyes back to her. “I think you just — well, surprised me with your revelations. I thought I knew a lot about you, but I’d never heard anything about your early years before.”

He’d told Colt about Old Bear, but he’d never told anyone else — until now. And for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why he’d told her. Possibly because she was disconcerting him, sitting there looking so prim and proper, and prettier than she’d looked at any other time. And that didn’t make sense, because there was nothing different about her.

She was even wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing earlier.

However, it was the first time he was seeing her without a coat, jacket, or shawl covering up her figure, and he had been somewhat surprised to find that she had a nicely shaped body, with well-rounded breasts that would be a handful, and a sharply curved waist. In the candlelight, she was soft and creamy-looking, her gray eyes like liquid silver. And those lush lips…

He couldn’t count how many times tonight his eyes had kept returning to that mouth of hers as she talked and ate and pursed her lips to sip her wine. He’d barely had a taste of her when she’d bestowed that kiss on him, but what he had tasted had been so incredibly sweet.

There was no use denying it any longer. He wanted another taste. And as his eyes dropped down to her breasts, then slowly lifted to her soft mouth, his body started telling him he wanted more than that.

Angel’s unexpected reaction to her so startled him, he reached for his wineglass and drained it. When he lowered the glass, he saw Cassie staring at his scarred jaw. He knew she’d seen the scar before, though she hadn’t asked about it. It ran just under his jawline, so you saw it only when he tilted his head back or at a certain angle. And the way she quickly looked down at her plate told him she wasn’t going to ask now, either.

He wondered why not, when every other subject seemed fair game for her. Perhaps it was seeing the result of actual violence that intimidated her. But her squeamishness annoyed him for some reason… no, it was his suddenly wanting her that annoyed him, and the urge he had to reach over and haul her onto his lap for a more thorough taste of her.

So he volunteered an explanation. “A man thought to sneak up on me from behind and cut my throat. His aim was off.”

Her eyes came up to lock with his dark ones. “Is he still living?”

“No.”

Angel tossed his napkin on the table as he said it and abruptly stood up. He had to get out of there, away from the candlelight, the wine, and her looking prettier to him by the second.

“Thanks for the dinner, ma’am, but don’t feel obliged to repeat the invitation. Truth to tell, I’m more comfortable eating alone, I’m so used to it.”

He wished he hadn’t added the last. The sympathy that suddenly entered her expression twisted at his insides something fierce. He left before he was tempted to accept what she had to offer. Whatever it was, he didn’t need it. He didn’t need anyone.

Sleep seemed to elude Cassie that night. She tossed and turned in her bed. She got back up and tried to walk herself into exhaustion. The exhaustion didn’t come, but she managed to agitate Marabelle so much that she finally had to put the cat out of her room and hope her prowling through the house wouldn’t wake Maria downstairs.

Her own room was upstairs at the back corner of the house. One of the windows overlooked the bunkhouse, and each time she passed it in her pacing, she saw a light still burning. She wondered if Angel was having the same problem she was. Uncharacteristically, she hoped so, since her problem was because of him.

That wasn’t fair. It was her own fault that she knew what she did about him now. She’d pried and poked and got him to admit things she would have been better off not knowing. She had liked it better when he was just the Angel of Death. Now he was also Angel the little boy, and Angel the man who was more comfortable eating alone.

More than once tonight she had wanted to wrap compassionate arms around him. She could be grateful she wasn’t the spontaneous sort to act on impulse, or she’d be mortified now if she’d done so. She would have been abruptly rejected, of course. He wasn’t the kind of man who would take to being comforted, no matter the reason.

It was absurd to want to comfort a man like him, a ruthless gunfighter, a killer… She wasn’t being fair again. Angel wasn’t just a killer. He helped people in what he did. He also had a profound sense of justice. It might be only barely inside the law, but he still felt he was on the side of right, and maybe he was. Who was she to judge?

When she finally saw his light go out, she tried her bed again and surprisingly went right to sleep this time. It seemed only moments before she was awakened by a hand pressing firmly over her mouth.

The terror of those first moments abated somewhat when Cassie realized it must be Angel. Why he hadn’t knocked to wake her, instead of frightening her by just suddenly being there, she couldn’t guess. It was too dark to see his face; the small fire she had started earlier had burned down too low. So he couldn’t see, either, that her eyes were open, which was probably why he still hadn’t let go of her mouth.