Angel of Desire, page 17
"And we're going to be married and have lots of kids and I'll teach them to fish in the creek behind the house, and we'll all take long walks in the woods. We'll even get a dog. What would you say about a golden retriever? They're supposed to be good with kids…"
"Shade." Conlan put his hand on Shade's shoulder. "It's too late."
"No!" Unaware of the tears streaming down his face, Shade pulled her more tightly against his chest, as if protecting her from harm. "It's not too late, dammit! She's going to be all right, Con. She has to be."
"I'm sorry." Conlan's own gentle eyes were wet. "But she's gone, Shade. Rachel's dead."
Immersed in their own grief, neither Shade nor Conlan noticed Joshua, dressed in the navy blue uniform of a Yaznovian train conductor, watching soberly from the sidelines.
Chapter Thirteen
RACHEL WAS BURIED in Vermont.
In a centuries-old cemetery not far from his house. Shade visited every day, bringing bouquets of lilacs and daffodils and tulips.
The flowers were a harbinger of spring. They promised days of sunshine and warmth. But inside his heart, except for that small pocket where Rachel continued to dwell, Shade could feel only cold.
In an attempt to work off his lingering depression, anger and sorrow, he spent his days clearing his overgrown land, wielding saw and ax and shovel until he could barely lift his arms. Then he fell into bed, into a sleep tortured with dreams—vivid, wonderful, horrible dreams of his too-brief time with Rachel.
The only bright spot in his life was the news report out of Yaznovia of an earthquake near the village stronghold of the general. Although the civilians miraculously escaped injury, the general's car, the report continued, was buried beneath tons of rock that had fallen from the Alpine cliffs.
Remembering what Rachel had said about letting others do the judging, Shade knew the general finally had gotten his well-deserved comeuppance.
There were also reports that the partisan leader had taken over the palace and declared that free elections would soon be held.
"I suppose that's good news," Shade said. He was sitting beside Rachel's grave.
Although he knew some people might think him crazy, Shade talked to Rachel often—when he first got up in the morning, during the day while he worked, at night when he lay in his too-lonely bed.
Unable to forget the story she'd told him, Shade traveled to Salem, to the Charter Street cemetery. The burial ground was a dark and moody place with weather-beaten granite headstones dating back to the seventeenth century. On the other side of the iron fence, tucked into a small site beside the cemetery, surrounded by a rustic stone wall that was erected as part of the city's tercentenary commemoration in 1992, was what he'd come to see.
A small park had been created as a memorial to the twenty people executed for witchcraft in that crazy, bloody summer of 1692.
The park was both serene and disquieting at the same time. Inscriptions had been carved into the stone threshold, futile protestations of innocence made during the trials, poignant prayers, desperate pleas that disappeared beneath the wall, just as the truth had been crushed that long-ago summer. The trees planted amid the spring-green grass were black locusts, the kind, Shade read from his guidebook, from which some of the victims had been hung. The ground dipped down at the far end of the grassy space so that the grave markers in the cemetery appeared to be peering in through the iron bars of the fence, as steadfastly silent as those citizens of old Salem who had stood by and allowed their neighbors to die.
Along the wall were twenty cantilevered stone slabs, meant to act as benches. Into each slab had been carved the name of one of the witch-hunt's victims.
His heart pounding in his throat, Shade walked slowly around the perimeter of the park, reading each name and the date of the victim's death. On the other side of the small grassy area, a teacher was telling a class of eight-year-olds all the reasons it was important to remember what had happened on Gallows Hill.
Years ago, Shade had visited the Vietnam memorial in Washington and had been struck by the mute power of all those names. This small memorial was proving no less potent.
Then he saw it. Rachel Parrish. Midwife. Hanged. July 25, 1692.
"Oh, my God." Shade groaned and closed his eyes.
"Excuse me." A soft voice beside him asked, "Are you all right?"
Startled, he glanced down, half-expecting to find Rachel smiling up at him. But instead it was the young teacher, concern visible in her eyes.
"I'm fine. This is all just a little rough to take."
"It is a bit overwhelming, the first time," she agreed.
"You come here often?" How could she stand it? Shade wondered. He could almost hear the victims' cries. Rachel's cries.
"I'm a historian of the trials." She gestured toward a neighboring bench. "Susan Martin was an ancestor of mine. She was murdered for trying to overturn her father's will," she revealed in a dry tone.
"What do you know about Rachel Parrish?"
"Ah, Rachel." The woman ran her fingers over the carved name just as Shade had done. "Poor Rachel committed the terrible crime of being ahead of her time. She had the audacity to believe that childbirth was something natural, and not a punishment from God brought down on women because of Eve biting into that forbidden apple. That was, of course, a heretical idea to the Puritan establishment.
"When she attempted to ease the pain of labor, she was declared in league with the devil. She could have confessed and been freed, of course—"
"But she was too damn stubborn to recant," Shade interrupted brusquely.
The teacher glanced up at him, clearly curious at the mix of frustration and anger in his tone. "Rachel was innocent," she said quietly. "There were a great many people arrested that summer. The only victims killed were those who refused to 'confess.' I admire them for that, even though I'm not certain I'd have the nerve to stand up to torture myself."
"Rachel Parrish was a remarkable woman."
She smiled. "Was she a relative?"
"Close," Shade answered. God, they'd come so very close.
A commotion beneath one of the trees, as two boys, tossing a Red Sox baseball cap belonging to a third back and forth in a game of keep-away, halted the conversation. The teacher returned to her class, leaving Shade to stand beside Rachel's bench for a long, thoughtful time.
Although the idea flew in the face of everything logical, everything he'd been taught during those long, dry sermons in the chapel of the Vermont boys' home, Shade knew that the woman he'd loved then lost, and the brave, stubborn woman who refused to swear a false oath even to save her own life, were the same person.
He'd known she was special.
He just hadn't realized how special.
A soft spring breeze began blowing off the harbor, ruffling the leaves. Shade felt something brush against his cheek. Something that could have been the wind.
But he knew that it was his angel. Comforting him as she'd done that icy Vermont Christmas Day.
He shut his eyes hard and realized that until now, he'd never known that it was possible to feel both joy and sorrow at the same time.
THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY dawned bright and gloriously sunny.
Shade was out in the yard, planting a tree beside his deck. An oak, in memory of Rachel, the only woman he'd ever loved. The only woman he would ever love. The woman, as irrationally as it might sound to others, he knew he would someday be with again.
He was tapping the earth around the roots, when he looked up and saw her. Running toward him, wearing a somber dark dress so like the one she'd been wearing when they'd first met.
"Rachel?"
At first he believed she was a dream. Born of his aching need.
"Oh, Shade!"
As Rachel flung herself into his arms, he realized, with a burst of pure joy, that she was unbelievably, wonderfully real.
"How? Why? What are you doing here?" he asked between kisses.
"There's so much to tell, I don't know where to begin."
"I want to hear everything. Later."
Crying and laughing at the same time, Rachel citing to him as he carried her into the house. "Later," she agreed breathlessly.
Afraid she would be taken away from him again at any instant, he took her directly to the bedroom and laid her atop the patchwork quilt with reverent care. The room was washed with warm, buttery spring sunshine.
Rachel drew him down beside her and wrapped her arms around him, seeking the solid feel of him, the warmth, the lightness of his body against hers. She laughed breathlessly, then kissed him deeply, revealing a boldness, a confidence that allowed her to come to him freely with her own needs and demands.
Because it seemed an eternity since they'd been together, because their mutual, desperate need was so strong, they undressed each other hurriedly. Shade whisked away Rachel's dress, tearing first it, and then her underwear, before she could catch her breath. Just as quickly, she stripped him of his jeans and shirt and cotton briefs.
Her lips raced over his throat. Her breasts pressed against his chest. Her need was incendiary. His was equally hot and every bit as urgent. In one strong move, Shade lifted her as if she were weightless, which indeed at this moment she felt she was, then brought her swiftly back down, plunging into her.
Rachel cried out in rapturous pleasure. His long fingers dug into her waist, holding her tightly. Her knees pressed against his body as she moved with him, harder and faster, pushing each other to a place they'd never gone before. A place beyond the normal realms of time and space, where love and desire ruled.
Through the thunder in his head, Shade heard Rachel call his name. They'd reached the pinnacle and were hovering on the razor's edge between reason and madness.
Holding her tightly, gasping her name, Shade closed his mouth over hers, let himself go and welcomed the madness.
Afterward, he lay with her atop the rumpled quilt and prayed that if this was just another of the erotic dreams he'd been having lately, he'd never, ever wake up.
"That was," she murmured, "beautiful." She pressed her lips against his damp chest. "Almost as beautiful as that tree you just planted."
"Beautiful," he agreed. Tearing his eyes away from her lush, warm body, he followed her gaze out the window, toward the leaves of the newly planted tree—bright green leaves signifying promise. He ran his hand down her hair, playing with the thick blond strands that were still moist from their frantic lovemaking.
"Tell me you're not a dream. Or a mirage."
"I'm most definitely real." She wiggled teasingly against him and slanted him a dangerously seductive smile. "Can't you tell?"
"It's hard to believe. When I brought you in here, for a moment, I was almost afraid to touch you. I was afraid my hand would go right through you."
She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed each fingertip. "But it didn't."
"No."
"Surely my coming back can't be harder to believe than everything else you've had to accept lately?"
That was, Shade decided, the understatement of the millennium. "I went to Salem."
"I know." She'd hoped he would and had cried when he had.
"It's true, isn't it?" He lifted a few more strands of hair, arranging them over her bare shoulders, her breasts. "Everything you tried to tell me. About Salem. The trials. Joshua. All of it."
"Yes."
"God." He shook his head. "I thought I'd lost you forever."
The pain in his voice tore at Rachel's tender heart. She sat up and wrapped her arms around her bent legs.
"That was a terrible mistake." She looked into his eyes. Dark green eyes that revealed the deep wounds her death had inflicted. "I was only supposed to be wounded."
"But you died, dammit. I was holding you in my arms. I felt your breath slip away."
"I know. And I'm so horribly sorry you were hurt, but you see, although it was totally against policy, Joshua responded with pure emotion, rather than logic, and plucked my spirit out of my body to prevent me from suffering."
"Dammit, if it was all a mistake, if you were supposed to stay here with me, where the hell have you been all these weeks?"
His gritty tone didn't disturb her. Rachel much preferred Shade's irritation to his earlier pain. "I wanted to return sooner, but Joshua and I were brought before a judicial review board for having broken so many celestial rules."
"You had to go through another trial?" he asked unbelievingly. "After everything you went through the first time?"
"It wasn't at all the same," she hastened to assure him. "In fact, as soon as the board decreed that Joshua wouldn't lose his angelic ranking, I was given permission to return to you."
His fingers slid into her hair as he framed her face, holding her gaze to his. "For how long?" he asked cautiously, trying to tell himself that he'd be grateful for any brief time they'd been given, but wanting an eternity.
Reading the concern etched onto his ruggedly handsome face, Rachel's heart went out to him. "I was thinking," she said, her silver eyes laughing, "of seventy or eighty years. If you think you can put up with a stubborn, headstrong wife for that long."
Shade began laughing, as well. He'd never felt so good. So free. "I'll give it my best shot."
She pressed her hand against her chest. "Such a romantic proposal." She sighed dramatically. "It makes my heart go all pitter-pat."
"Give me a few more minutes to get my strength up again and I'll see to it your entire body goes pitter-pat," Shade promised.
Rachel knew from experience that he could and it would. She glanced down at her clothing, scattered across the floor, knowing that her dress was ripped beyond repair. Not that she cared. If the truth be told, she hated the ugly dark dress Joshua had sent her back to earth in.
"I don't have anything to wear," she murmured.
"We'll go shopping," Shade promised. "In a few days."
She arched a brow. "That long?"
"We have a lot of catching up to do," he reminded her. "And it's ten miles to the nearest town."
She smiled. "You just want to keep me naked."
"That, too," he said agreeably.
Rachel laughed, as she was supposed to. "You know," she said, suddenly serious, "I probably should have warned you that I'll only agree to marry you on the condition that you promise to stay out of trouble. No more running off to all the world's hot spots and leaving your wife and children at home."
Children. After Rachel's death, Shade had thought he was destined to go through life without ever knowing what it would be like to be a father. Because there'd only been one woman he'd ever wanted to have children with.
"You've got yourself a deal. As it happens, Caine O'Bannion is opening up a New England branch of his security company. And you're looking at the new regional vice president."
"I hadn't known." Incredibly, the deal must have come through while she'd been arguing Joshua's case before the judicial board.
"It isn't dangerous work," Shade assured her. "It's strictly white-collar, business-oriented stuff. I won't have to travel, the hours are routine, and the vacation benefits are more than generous.
"Which will give me," Shade promised as he kissed Rachel, "plenty of time to spend with my angelic wife and all the children we're going to have together."
"Oh, I do like the idea of a large family," Rachel agreed happily as the kisses grew longer. And deeper.
"Speaking of progeny—" his lips plucked at hers as his hands moved between them"—what would you say to spending the rest of the day making a baby?"
His clever, wicked touch was making her melt all over again. To think she'd been granted a lifetime of such glorious lovemaking! Twining her arms around his neck, Rachel surrendered to the pleasure. To Shade.
"I'd say yes," she agreed breathlessly.
As he pulled her down beside him and began to make love to her again, a thought occurred to Rachel. A wonderful, brilliant, thrilling idea.
"Shade, darling?"
"Mmm?" He ran his thumb over the rosy tip of her breast and felt her breath quicken.
"May I ask you a question?"
She was so soft. So sweet. He lifted his head, looked straight into her laughing, loving eyes and knew that he'd just discovered paradise on earth.
"One question. But you'd better make it quick." Although he'd vowed to make things last this time, explosions were already bombarding his system, from his brain to his loins.
"Quick," Rachel agreed on a gasp as his teeth captured a sensitive nipple and she felt herself rapidly slipping back into that smoky world she'd only ever known with Shade.
"How does one go about getting a midwife's license in Vermont?"
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