Page 20 of Calling All Angels
“How do you know about him?”
“I was standin’ right beside you that night after the crash.”
Emma’s lips parted in surprise. He’d seemed to appear from nowhere that night, but he’d been listening to everything. To those men talking on the hillside. That, she remembered. “You were?”
“Aye. Though I didn’t show myself to ye right away. I was waitin’ to…” He hesitated.
“To what?”
“To hear ye speak.”
She frowned. “And when I did?”
“Ye sounded like her.”
“Like Violet.” Not a question. She already knew the answer.
“Aye,” he said, pocketing the necklace. “Just like her.”
“And I look like her, too?”
He nodded, scanning her features and lifting his fingers to her face, touching a spot near her eye. “Mostly. A modern version. Except here. And here,” he said, pushing a strand of hair from her eyes. With that, he walked up the hillside partway, and she followed.
“That’s quite a coincidence.”
He shrugged but said nothing. Instead, he scanned the ground again nearby.
“Maybe I should be asking a different question,” she said, following him. “Maybe I should ask how I became your person? Why are you assigned to me if you have such strong feelings abouther? Bad feelings, that is.”
“’Tis a punishment, I ken,” he said but sent her a side-eye.
Emma sniffed and echoed his words under her breath.
What might have passed for amusement twisted his mouth, which also might have been the first time he’d nearly smiled at her.
“So, this Violet person. Was she an angel, too?”
He barked a humorless laugh. “Hardly.”
“So, then, before you were an angel, you were…?”
“A Scot,” he growled—rather proudly, it seemed to her.
“I was going to say human.”
He shrugged, acknowledging it. Reaching down into the long grass, he picked up something else that caught his eye.
She gasped. “My shoe!” She reached for the other half of her way-too-expensive brown-and-blue Gucci sandals, only to have her fingers pass through it. She let out a growl of frustration. “That’s just wrong. I can’t even put it on now that I’ve found it!”
“I suppose I’ll just have t’ keep judgin’ ye, then, for yer poor wee bare foot.”
Emma clapped a shocked hand to her chest. “Wait. Was that a joke?”
He made a face. “No.” But he still grinned as he turned away from her.
“I think we’re making progress, don’t you?”
For his part, Connor wouldn’t give her that. Yet. He looked up as a still-dappled fawn stepped into the meadow just beyond where they stood, her wet black nose in the air. She took a few tentative steps toward Emma.
