Fallen Angel (2 page)

"We’re an unconventional family, Nicholas."

Geneva. Not a run–of–the–mill name, but Thomas already realized that she wasn’t your run–of–the–mill kind of woman. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Nicholas leaned down, gathered her close, and pressed a kiss to her forehead. "You’d better get into the store. The tourists are here en masse, and this is your peak season. I’ll see you soon."

He grazed her cheek with his fingertips in a final parting gesture that made Thomas stiffen. Pure reflex, he realized a heartbeat later. He didn’t understand his response, although he recognized the irrational nature of his resentment because he wasn’t the one offering comfort to this woman. He blamed his reaction on the thin mountain air of northern Nevada, and then felt like a fool.

"I love you, Nicholas," she signed. "I wouldn’t have survived if you hadn’t…"

Nicholas interrupted her. "I love you, too, but you would have survived. You’re a woman of many talents. Anyone who has ever known you realizes that."

Thomas again debated the wisdom of revealing himself. In the end, though, he hesitated.

The woman named Geneva exhaled shakily as she watched Nicholas make his way down the hallway that led out to the rear parking lot assigned to tenants of the converted Victorian mansion. She then walked the final few steps to a door marked
PRIVATE
. Sagging against the door, she bowed her head and pressed fingertips to her temples.

When she straightened and glanced down the hallway, Thomas saw her face for the first time. The face of an angel. His gaze dipped, and he took in the contours precisely defined by the fitted jumpsuit she wore. An angel with the body of a centerfold. A fallen angel?

He felt his insides tighten with tension. His heartbeat accelerated, and his senses, every one of his male senses, went on full alert. Unexpected desire flooded his bloodstream, shocking him with its force.

She swayed suddenly, and he watched as she steadied herself by placing a hand placed against the doorframe. Genuine concern leaped to life within him. Oblivious to her audience of one, tears spilled from her eyes to trace damp paths down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. She cursed very softly.

Thomas heard the sound. No stranger to disappointment, he grasped the blend of frustration, shock, and emotional defeat in her curse, even if he didn’t understand the reasons. He experienced a sudden longing to touch her, to hold and comfort her.

What, he wondered, would it be like to feel her warmth and softness? He suddenly wanted to breathe in the fragrance of her skin and hair. And he wanted a taste of her. An endless taste.

He wanted—he wanted
her
—and with a depth of hunger that rocked him. Stunned, Thomas Coltrane didn’t move for a long moment. This woman whose last name he didn’t know, this woman who was a stranger, touched a chord in him in an achingly familiar way that baffled him.

Turning to face the door, Geneva reached into her shoulder bag with one hand and dried her cheeks with the other.

Thomas moved out of the shadows and approached her. He momentarily forgot that she might not be able to hear him when he said, "Miss?"

She didn’t answer.

He spoke a second time, then realized that it was
her
ability to hear, not Nicholas’s, that was impaired. She employed sign language out of necessity. Her voice, in particular the absence of tininess, prompted him to conclude that, like his mother, she’d been a part of the hearing world before losing one of the key senses that most people take for granted.

He reached out. Thomas Coltrane knew the instant he touched her shoulder that he’d made a serious error in judgment.

** ** **

Geneva rummaged through the contents of her leather shoulder bag, oblivious to the fact that her conversation with Nicholas Benteen had been observed. More important, she wasn’t alone. Her emotions swirled in turmoil, her thoughts jumbled, her mind filled with images from the past.

Images of joy and sadness. Images of destruction. Images of people and places she would never see again. And some images normally consigned to nightmares undiminished by the passage of time. They were not muted now, however. They played vividly through her mind.

When a heavy hand settled on her shoulder, Geneva’s survival instincts kicked in—instincts honed in her late teens and early twenties during a brief but formidable career as an explosives expert for hire. She jerked free, raised her arm in a smooth arc as she turned, and knocked aside the hand of the person who’d come at her from behind. She simultaneously released her shoulder bag, allowing it to crash to the floor.

Geneva failed to conceal the fear that flashed in her large blue eyes. Fear that was real, the kind of fear that cannot be feigned. Her expression quickly changed to fury, though—fury barely tempered by her fluid physical transition into a defensive stance. Balancing on the balls of her booted feet, she extended both hands, ready to ward off an attack. Her body and her facial expression telegraphed a clear message about a self–defense capability that far exceeded standard training.

"Stop!" the man shouted. "I didn’t mean to frighten you."

She watched his lips, her expressive eyes filled with caution and anger. Then, she met his gaze, and she stared up at him with skepticism.

"I apologize," he said.

"Do not touch me." She enunciated each word, not bothering to sign the command. "Not ever."

He nodded.

"Move away from me. Now," she ordered.

Stepping back and keeping his hands, palms up and open, within sight, Thomas slowly said, "You’re safe. I wouldn’t ever hurt you."

Bending at the knees without taking her eyes from him, Geneva dipped low to rescue her purse from the hallway floor. She located her key chain as she straightened, slung the leather bag over her shoulder, and quickly inserted the correct key into the lock. Shoving open the door, she slipped inside without a backward glance.

Thomas stood in the hallway long after she slammed the door in his face. He wondered again about the now deceased Jamal. He wondered, too, why she’d appeared so stunned by the news of his demise. And, finally, he wondered why she had chosen to live what sounded like a solitary life.

What kind of woman was she?

Have you lost your mind? a voice in his head inquired. Have you forgotten that you’re trying to simplify your own life?

He
had
forgotten, he realized as he walked out of the building and climbed into his Jeep. Driving down the snow and ice–encrusted streets of Cedar Grove to his hotel, Thomas Coltrane couldn’t stop thinking about the woman called Geneva.

She remained with him throughout the day and far into the night that followed, her image still lodged in his mind when he awakened the next morning. She intrigued him to a degree that no other woman ever had.

Although Geneva Talmadge had been accosted by strangers more than once in her life, that fact provided little consolation to her rattled emotions. Once she secured the deadbolt lock on her office door, deposited her purse on her desk, and sank into the nearest chair, she struggled to reclaim her composure. She’d always made sure the world never saw her as anything but totally poised.

Geneva knew she could have moved past the startling encounter with ease had it not come on the heels of learning that the contract on her life, in force for nearly ten years, was no longer viable. She still found it difficult to believe that the threat of assassination was over or that the malevolent creature admired by terrorists across the globe and known to the world as Jamal was, in fact, dead.

Other than the few close friends whom she trusted with her life, neither the residents of Cedar Grove nor the seasonal visitors to the surrounding ski resorts knew anything about her past. People speculated, of course. Geneva suspected that they always would. She’d long ago resigned herself to that particular fact.

As had the other men and women who lived within the protective confines of the extensive acreage owned by ex–mercenary–turned–bestselling author Nicholas Benteen. Friend and mentor, he vigilantly shepherded his flock of retired warriors. Geneva knew he would until he drew his last breath.

She sighed, the sound ragged in the early morning silence of her Talmadge, Inc. office. Her pulse rate slowed to normal, and her hands finally stopped shaking.

Geneva wasn’t paranoid, just cautious. Despite being urged by Nicholas to embrace a future that included a relationship with a man, she wondered how one discarded more than a decade of self–protective behavior.

It didn’t really matter that the life she’d once lived had been nothing more than an accident of fate. Neither did it matter that the missions she’d been a part of had been sanctioned by a clandestine arm of the U.S. government. She felt certain that what would really matter was a man’s reaction to her life and the choices she’d made. A sane man would reject her.

After all, what man could be expected to deal with the reality that the woman in his life had once been an explosives expert? And what man who learned she’d spent her childhood as the companion of a vagabond, soldier of fortune father known for his bomb–making skills would want her? Few, if any. Damn few!

Geneva recalled the tumultuous days of her youth following her mother’s funeral. Her father had appeared from out of nowhere like some modern day Pied Piper.

While most young girls her age attended high school, she had traveled the world, experiencing diverse cultures and customs. As her peers gossiped about boys and experimented with make–up, she’d seen loyalty tested and lives sacrificed, often violently. She had learned all of her lessons at her father’s knee, from several languages to the artistry of constructing a bomb.

Patrick’s friends, who’d become her friends and protectors whenever a crisis occurred, had been an eclectic assembly—men and women who took life–threatening risks on a daily basis.

They had challenged fate, laughed in the faces of their adversaries, and lived life on the edge—of society, of acceptable norms of behavior, of conventional perceptions of right and wrong—but always within the framework of a rigid code of conduct. Always.

Regardless of the world’s disdain for them, Geneva considered these men and women her family. They’d comforted her in her grief when Patrick had succumbed to a heart attack in Tehran on her nineteenth birthday. Nicholas had assumed the role of older brother, taking her under his wing and granting her membership in his band of highly–paid and extremely lethal mercenaries.

A few years later these same men and women had carried her damaged body to safety when an explosive device malfunctioned at some remote hell–hole in the Middle East. They’d guarded her during a lengthy recuperation while her broken bones and shattered spirit mended. Allies in friendship, they had all learned sign language—some even going so far as to supplement their skills with finger–spelling—as a means of facilitating her ability to adapt to a seventy–five percent hearing loss.

When the time to retire finally arrived, they did so as a group in a carefully orchestrated manner. The former warriors struggled with the adjustment required of them as they settled into new lives and identities in northern Nevada. But they had struggled together, their loyalty to one another, and in particular to Nicholas Benteen, absolute.

Geneva knew now what she’d always known. She couldn’t change the past, even though she desperately wanted to. Neither could she conceal it and still maintain her integrity if she welcomed a man into her heart and life. The truth wasn’t a negotiable commodity. It never had been, and it never would be if she hoped to sustain her self–respect.

She surged up from her chair and made her way to the stockroom adjacent to her office. Donning a smock, she forced herself to calm down by doing a simple chore: resupplying the display shelves of her specialty shop with jars of homemade jams and preserves. The simplicity of the task reminded her that she’d come a long way from the Middle East battlefields she’d once walked.

As was her habit, Geneva greeted each person who walked into Talmadge, Inc. that day with a welcoming smile. The melancholy she felt remained concealed from everyone. The only person who sensed the truth was her reclusive business partner, Sean Cassidy, Nicholas Benteen’s brother–in–law. He didn’t press her, though, because he carried his own burdens from their shared past.

** ** **

Memories and thoughts about the past kept Geneva awake that night. That and the face of the rugged–looking man who had so thoroughly frightened her. She abandoned her bed well before dawn the next morning, showered and dressed, and then drove twenty miles in the dark to her office at Talmadge, Inc. She dealt with invoices and mail order forms as she sipped hot coffee and indulged in one of Sean’s newer creations—wild raspberry muffins.

She noticed the blinking light on the electronic panel atop her desk a few hours later while she lingered over a collection of documents that she’d received from the attorney who handled her business affairs. Wired to a state–of–the–art motion sensor, the red light alerted her to the presence of customers. Nicholas, ever vigilant about her safety, had installed the device prior to the grand opening of the shop.

Glad for the distraction, she set aside the documents and got up from her desk. Geneva glanced at her watch and smiled. She expected to find her only employee, Rose Treadwell, arriving for her first day back to work following a four–week vacation.

Geneva stumbled to a stop in her office doorway when she spotted the tall, dark–haired man with Rose—the same man who’d almost startled her into next week in a shadow–filled hallway and then proceeded to invade her dreams. Shocked to see him again, she moved out of their line of sight and watched Rose, a sixty–five year old widow and Cedar Grove resident, embrace the man.

Shifting her stunned gaze to their faces, Geneva concentrated on their expressions and the movement of their mouths as they communicated.

"It’s about time you paid me a visit, young man," chastised Rose.