Miss Emmaline And The Archangel Part 19

"Which are now buried beneath the snow," Nate growled.

"Unfortunately. But it'll probably calm Jeff a little to know Micah's back on the case."

"I don't think anything short of a hanging is going to calm Jeff," Nate rumbled.

"Maybe not. What can you tell me about Don Fenster?" The sudden change of subject took Nate by surprise, and it was a moment before he responded. "Don Fenster? What the h.e.l.l has he gone and done now?"

"You mean he's in the habit of doing things?"

"We sent him up the river a few years back for armed robbery. Before that there were a couple of other things, but he always got probation. Anyhow, the armed robbery was the worst thing he ever got up to. He came back to live with his granny almost two years ago, and as far as I know he's been quiet. Why?"

Gage didn't answer. "What other things did he get up to?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l, let me think. It was a long time ago, Gage. Joyriding. He 'borrowed' Jill Cranston's pickup when he was still a senior in high school. Judge Conard gave him a week in the county hoosegow and six months' probation, I think. He got picked up a time or two for shoplifting in his younger days. I don't know. He was a thorn in my side back then, but until the armed robbery he was just like any of a dozen other troublemakers his age. I don't recall that I worried unduly about him, just that I tried to keep him from annoying everybody else in the county. About the only thing that really strikes me in retrospect is that n.o.body liked him. In fact, most people felt an out-and-out aversion toward him. Why?"

"I don't know, really." Gage hesitated and then sighed. "h.e.l.l, yes, I do. Emma told me a little story this afternoon about how she beat Fenster to a pulp when they were both twelve because he wouldn't stop torturing a dog."

"d.a.m.n, I never knew that." Nate sounded disturbed. "I don't suppose anybody but Emma and Fenster ever did. He wouldn't want anyone to know, and Emma's not the type to tell anyone much of anything. She did say that Fenster hasn't talked to her once since then. And that strikes me as being ... a little odd. It's been at least eighteen years."

"Yeah."

For a long time neither man said anything. Between them, the line echoed with silence.

"Let me think about this," Nate said presently. "Let me think, and maybe ask a few questions. I'll call you back, but probably not before tomorrow."

After he hung up Gage rocked back in the chair, trying to ease the growing ache in his back. He was relieved, he realized, to have shared his uneasiness about Fenster. It wasn't much to go on, a fight between two kids nearly twenty years ago, but it was the first motive he had seen anywhere for why anyone on earth would want to torment Emma. Of course, crazies didn't need motives. The worst of them had absolutely no rhyme or reason to what they did. Someone like that might be involved, but his gut didn't believe it.

It was a crazy, all right. One with a motive. One with a grudge that hadn't died in at least the ten years since he'd attacked Emma in Laramie.

There was a quiet knock at the door, and Gage looked toward it. "Come on in, Emma."

The door opened slowly, and Emma peeked around its edge. "I'm sorry to disturb you..."

"Hey, I'm sorry I closed the door. It's your house, Em. I just needed a moment to make a phone call."

"That's all right." She stepped into the room, and the way her hands were clasped before her gave Gage an uneasy feeling.

"Is something wrong?" he asked.

"I'm not sure," she admitted. "Gage ... I think someone was in the house while we were gone."

Chapter 12.

"I told you, I only think somebody was in the house," Emma snapped a short while later. "If I could absolutely pinpoint the reason, I would!"

"Something had to give you the feeling," Gage argued.

"I know." Emma threw up a hand and nearly glared at him. "Quit badgering me. It's nothing I can exactly put my finger on. I just know. As if ... as if I caught a whiff of an odor and can't quite place it."

Gage frowned. "Maybe that's it. Maybe you did catch a whiff of someone else's odor. It'd be subtle enough to elude you, but definite enough to give you this feeling..."

Relieved that he was evidently going to give up pressuring her to show him something that was out of place, Emma leaned back against the foot of her bed and unfolded her arms.

"You didn't get the feeling anywhere but here?" he asked.

"Here and in my bathroom. I haven't been upstairs, and now I doubt if I could tell anything for sure. My imagination is going hog-wild right now."

"Let's go up anyway," Gage said grimly. "Together. I don't want you out of my sight, Emma. "

Emma was agreeable. She didn't want to be out of his sight, either. There was little, she thought, quite as horrible as the feeling that someone had invaded your home without your permission. The sense of violation was inescapable.

"I don't think anyone's in the house now," he said as he took her hand and began to climb the stairs, "but stay behind me anyway."

"Why don't you think anyone's here?"

"Because, as long as we've been back, either he'd have taken some action or we'd have heard something." That wasn't necessarily true, but for now he was counting on it.

Emma realized he was trying to rea.s.sure her, but she didn't overlook the way he kept close to the wall as they climbed and encouraged her to do the same.

There was little light at the top of the stairs. All the doors were closed, shutting out the last of the evening sun. When Gage flipped the wall switch, yellow light cascaded from the overhead fixtures.

The hall was L-shaped, and Gage led her swiftly past the closed door of his bedroom on one side and the closed door of the bathroom on the other. Rounding the corner, he headed for the bedroom at the very back of the house. There he opened the door slowly and peered in. Nothing in sight. The bed concealed nothing; stripped of any concealing fabrics, even the shadows beneath it were in plain view. A hazy golden evening light filled the room, brightening it. Gage drew Emma in with him and kept her to one side while he investigated the walk-in closet.

"Nothing," he said.

"This was my parents' room when I was little," Emma remarked. It seemed so barren and empty now, she thought a little sadly. She hated to come up here, because every time she did, she remembered when it had been decorated in the bright, primary colors her mother had so loved. "No one has been in here," she said with conviction. "Whatever it is that caused me to feel uneasy in my bedroom isn't here."

"Maybe he didn't come upstairs at all, then. Maybe he found out what he wanted to know in your room."

Emma raised troubled eyes to his. "Maybe," she agreed. "Let's check the other rooms to be safe."

The next two rooms were the same, empty, barren of anything except Emma's memories of her childhood and her brother. The front bedroom, the one Gage had taken as his, had always been the guest room.

It was there they found the evidence that someone had indeed been in the house.

The bottom drawer of the dresser was open, one side tugged out a little farther than the other. On the floor beside it lay the heap of jockstraps Gage had intended to deter Emma from snooping. And there, in plain sight, lay the item he had been hiding. A word escaped him on an anguished breath, a word that might have been a curse or a prayer.

Emma's breath stuck in her throat as she saw the framed color photograph. Gage-a younger, dark-haired, unscarred Gage-looked up proudly from a position behind two grinning little girls and a woman who held an infant. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, this was Gage's lost family.

For an endless moment Emma thought she would never breathe again. Pain seemed to swallow her, reminding her that he had lost what she would never have. His heart had gone to the grave with this woman and his children, and even if it hadn't...

Somehow she took a breath, and then another. Her heart began to beat again, a painful, throbbing rhythm of loss and compa.s.sion. Turning, she looked at Gage and saw the stark agony of his expression as he looked down at the photo.

And then something in his face stiffened, and his shoulders straightened. He looked at Emma. "I'm calling in the crime-scene team."

"For an open drawer?" For a violation of his privacy, his sanctuary, his grief? "What will they do?"

"Ransack this place looking for fingerprints or anything else."

"Oh. But I didn't notice anything else-"

Gage interrupted. "Emma, that man didn't come in here just to drag out a photograph of my family. He wanted something. We need to find out what."

Three hours later the last of the sheriff's crime-scene team trailed out the door. They'd found what the intruder had come for, and now Emma stood in her living room, staring blindly at the Christmas tree and trying not to think about the crude doll they had found hanging in its branches. A voodoo doll, badly mutilated, with unmistakably red hair. And no fingerprints. Not a one but hers and Gage's.

Shuddering, she flipped the switch and turned off all the lights. She hadn't seen Gage in the last hour, and suddenly she needed desperately to see him. He made her feel incredibly safe even when he was trying to keep her at a distance.

Thinking he must still be upstairs, she climbed wearily and turned into his open bedroom. He was there, standing by his dresser, looking down at the open drawer that held the photo of his family, a photo now dusted with black fingerprint powder. Her whole d.a.m.n house was covered with the stuff, but this disturbed her as the rest didn't. It upset her, somehow, to see Gage's memories of his family tangled up in her mess.

Coming to stand beside him, she looked down at the photo. And then some instinct seized her, driving her to bend and lift the photograph into the light where it belonged. Gently, she dusted the black powder away with her sleeve and set it on the dresser.

For a minute, perhaps longer, there was no sound in the room save Gage's ragged breathing as he tried to absorb his own pain.

"They're beautiful," Emma said finally, the words painful on her lips. "Your wife was lovely. So pretty."

He said nothing, but she heard him stop breathing. "And your daughters," she continued gently, "look so much like you. How old is your son in this picture?"

She thought he might not answer, that he might be so locked in his grief that he didn't even hear her.

But then, every syllable rusty, he answered in a low voice. "Two weeks. Just two weeks."

"You must have been so happy. So proud."

"We were." But suddenly he turned toward Emma, recognizing that his loss was not the only sorrow in this room. She was looking at the portrait, staring fixedly as if she could grow used to what it implied. And then her gaze lowered to the drawer, to the stacks of photo alb.u.ms he kept but was never able to look at.

"You must hurt so badly," she whispered unsteadily. "So badly."

"I was lucky," he said, in that instant realizing the truth of it. The understanding was suddenly there as if it had always been there, feeling as if he had known it all along. "I was luckier than most people ever get to be."

Jerkily, Emma lifted her head and looked up at him. "Lucky?"

"It didn't last long," he said roughly. "Just seven years. But for seven years I had it all, Emma. I had it all. Some people don't ever get even half that much."

Like her, Emma thought, turning her attention back to the picture.

Like her, Gage thought, her loss piercing him as violently as his own had. All of a sudden he was very much in the present and the past was very much in the past. Emma was here, in need of things he didn't know if he could give her. But there was one thing he could definitely give her, one thing that would drive reality away for a little while. One thing that would make her forget her own sorrows. Reaching out, he took the photo and put it back in the bottom drawer. Then he shut the drawer and straightened, facing Emma.

"Come here," he said. Before she could object, he pulled her into his arms and bent his head until his mouth was pressed to her ear. "I want to make love to you," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely and felt a ripple of response pa.s.s through her as she caught her breath. "I want to kiss you all over, taste you all over. I want to feel you come alive beneath my hands, and I want to come alive beneath yours."

Each word set a spark loose in Emma, and together they ignited a conflagration.

Her emotions soared from sorrow to pa.s.sion in an instant, and a shiver of hunger ripped through her, driving everything beyond the moment into a dark dungeon where it belonged.

"Stay here," he said raggedly. "Right here. I just want to make sure everything is locked up. Wait for me, Emma. Promise."

She opened heavy-lidded eyes and met his intense, stormy gaze. "I promise," she said huskily. "I promise."

He checked to make sure all the doors and windows were locked before he rejoined her in his bedroom. Native caution, learned from hard years on the streets and in the DEA, wouldn't let him forget such details.

a.s.sured that the house was as secure as it could be, he stepped into his bedroom and caught his breath.

The yellowing shades held the night at bay, and she had turned on the bedside lamp. Her jeans made a dark puddle on the floor, a puddle topped by her sweater. Emma lay waiting for him in navy blue lace and satin, in a camisole and bikini panties that were an incitement, an enticement, he hadn't expected from her.

"G.o.d, Emma!" He drank her in with eyes that felt starved. "Did I tell you how lovely you are?"

Those were his hormones talking, she told herself, but her skin flushed under the warmth of his gaze, and she felt herself beginning to smile and relax, even as a deeper tension began to grow at her center.

His black sweater, jeans and briefs quickly joined the heap on the floor. He came down on his side next to her, propping himself on his elbow so that he could fill himself with the sight of her. She had freed her hair for him, and he wasn't shy about scooping up handfuls of it and sifting it through his fingers.

"Like fire," he whispered huskily. "Sweet, sweet fire ... ah, Emma..."

At last, at long last, his mouth settled on hers. She was thirsty for him, thirsty for his taste and touch and smell and feel. It hadn't been that many hours since they had risen from her bed, but Emma felt as if she had spent months in a desert.

Her arms closed snugly around him, holding him as he needed to be held, as she needed to hold him. Her palms settled on the scars on his back, feeling the shiny smoothness of the grafts, the ridges of the keloids. A map of his pain and loss, she thought, and felt a wild, almost agonizing need to comfort him somehow, some way.

"Tighter, Emma ... oh, G.o.d, tighter..."

So she tightened her arms until they began to ache, holding him as if she could squeeze the pain away. His tongue plunged deeply into her mouth, taking possession of her with a hunger that revealed a need far beyond simple wanting. And she needed him every bit as desperately. The aching, yearning need went deeper than anything physical could have. She loved him, and loving him, she needed him more than she needed to breathe.

"Gage ... oh, Gage..." She was incapable of silence, yet unable to say anything but his name. When his mouth closed over her breast, through the satin, she arched upward, begging for more. When he gripped her wrist and drew her hand down to his aching manhood, she curled her fingers around him greedily and relished his smooth, hard heat.

A husky laugh, almost a groan, escaped Gage suddenly, and he moved away from the breathtaking, maddening inexperience of her touch. Suddenly her arms were caught above her head, held easily in one of his large hands. Startled, she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

"You make me crazy," he told her. There was an astonishing warmth in his gray-green eyes, in the faint smile that tugged the comers of his mouth upward.

"Good," she said breathlessly.

"It's good, all right. But things happen too fast that way. I want to go slow. Easy. I want to take my time with you."

She thought she would never breathe again. Every inch of her responded to the lazy promise in his voice, his words, his eyes. Last night had been cast in a web of complex emotions, she realized, colored by so many things from outside. This time it was going to be simple. There were no shadows in Gage's eyes right now, no glimpse of the chilly wastes of h.e.l.l. All she could see was heat. He was totally absorbed in the moment, totally awake to the s.e.xuality that was steaming between them. For this little while, Gage Dalton wasn't going to be anything at all except Emmaline Conard's lover.

The understanding kicked her heart into overdrive and caused white heat to pour through her veins.

"This blue is a great color for you, Em," Gage said quietly. He continued to hold her arms above her head, but now his free hand came to rest on her satin-covered midriff, halfway between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and her thighs. The touch seemed to shoot sparks through her. "It makes your skin look so creamy I want to lick it. But not yet."

Not yet. Instead he trailed a fingertip up the valley between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and smiled as she undulated helplessly in response. "I want to touch you, Em," he said huskily.

"Touch me," she begged breathlessly.

"Where?" He looked up at her, a wicked sparkle in his gray-green gaze. h.e.l.l's own archangel was out on a weekend pa.s.s, and he was in a mood to play devilish games.

She caught her breath, and then a soft, whispery laugh escaped her. "Oh, Gage ... you know I can't say those things..."