Page 23 of Gabriel's Angel

“Not well. Barely. He was more—” More Michael’s age, he’d started to say. “He was younger. I met him once or twice when he came to the Coast.” And what he had seen hadn’t impressed him enough to have him form any opinion. “I read that he had been killed in a car accident, and I suppose a wife was mentioned, but this past year has been a little difficult, and I didn’t pay attention. My family has socialized with the Eagletons occasionally, but they aren’t well acquainted.”

“Then you know they’re an old, well-established family with old, well-established money. They consider this child a part of their... holdings. They’ve had me followed all across the country. Every time I would settle in a place and begin to relax I’d discover that detectives were making inquiries about me. I can’t—I won’t—let them find me.”

He rose, to pace, to light a cigarette, to try to organize his thoughts and, more, his feelings. “I’d like to ask you something.”

She sighed tiredly. “All right.”

“Once before, when I asked you if you were afraid, you said no, that you were ashamed. I want to know why.”

“I didn’t fight back, and I didn’t try hard enough to fix what was wrong. I just let it happen to me. You have no idea how difficult it is to sit here and admit that I let myself be used, that I let myself be beaten, that I let myself be driven down so low that I accepted it all.”

“Do you still feel that way?”

“No.” Her chin lifted. “No one’s ever going to take control of my life again.”

“Good.” He sat on the hearth. The smoke from his cigarette disappeared up the draft. “I think you’ve had a hell of a time, angel, worse than anyone deserves. Whether you brought some of it on yourself, as you choose to think, or if it was just a matter of circumstances, doesn’t really matter at this point. It’s over.”

“It’s not as easy as that, Gabe. I don’t just have myself to worry about now.”

“How far are you willing to go to fight them?”

“I’ve told you I can’t—”

He interrupted her with a wave of his hand. “If you had the means. How far?”

“All the way. As far and as long as it takes. But that isn’t the point, because I don’t have the means.”

He drew on his cigarette, studied it with apparent interest, then tossed it into the fire. “You would, if you were married to me.”

Chapter 5

She said nothing, could say nothing. He sat on the hearth, his legs folded up, his eyes very cool, very calm, on her face. Part of the enormity of his talent was his ability to focus on an expression and draw the underlying emotions out of it. Perhaps because he did it so well, he also knew how to mask emotions when they were his own.

She could hear the logs sizzling behind him. The midmorning sunlight sparkled through the frost on the windowpanes and landed at his feet. He seemed totally at ease, as though he’d just suggested that they have soup for lunch. If her life had depended upon it, Laura couldn’t have said whether it meant any more to him than that.

Using the table for leverage, she rose.

“I’m tired. I’m going in to lie down.”

“All right. We can talk about this later.”

She whirled around, and it wasn’t anguish or fear he saw on her face now, it was fury, livid and clear. “How could you sit there and say something like that to me after everything I’ve told you?”

“You might consider that I said it because of everything you’ve told me.”

“Oh, the Good Samaritan again.” She detested the bitterness in her voice, but she could do nothing to stop it. “The white knight, riding in full of chivalry and good intentions to save the bumbling, inept female. Do you think I should fall on my knees and be grateful? That I would blindly let myself be taken over again, fall back into the same pitiful, destructive pattern a second time, because a man offers me a way out?”

He thought about controlling his temper, then rose, deciding to let her see it. “I have no desire to control you, and I’ll be damned if you’re going to stand there and compare me with some weak-minded alcoholic wife-beater.”

“What then—the knight on a white charger, selflessly rescuing damsels in distress?”

He laughed at that, but his anger was still on the edge. “No one’s ever accused me of that. I’m very selfish, which is another reason for my suggestion. I’m moody—you’ve been around me long enough to know that. I have a temper and I can get angry. But I don’t hit women, and I don’t use them.”

With an effort, she pulled her emotions back in and forced them to settle. “I didn’t mean to imply that you did, or to compare you with someone else. It’s the situation that’s comparable.”

“One has nothing to do with the other. The fact that I have money only works to your advantage.”

“I didn’t marry Tony for his money.”

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