Angel of Desire (3 page)

"If you are correct," he said finally, putting the glasses back on and giving her a sagacious stare through the clear lenses, "you know what that means."

"Of course I do," Rachel flared. Realizing she'd just broken the rules—again!—she closed her eyes, pressed her generous lips together and prayed for composure.

"Why don't you explain the circumstances to me again," Joshua suggested. This time his voice softened with honest affection.

She'd been assigned to Joshua Brand her first day. Disoriented and distressed, she'd found his calm, steady demeanor instantly comforting. He was a kind and gentle man. An intelligent man. A good friend and an even better teacher.

The one thing he hadn't been able to teach her was patience.

As the years passed, others—those for whom tranquillity came easier—moved on, rising higher and higher in the hierarchy. Rachel's temperament continued to cost her any promotion.

Not that she really minded. She honestly couldn't imagine being any happier than she was, doing work she loved.

Today, however, she was far from happy. Frustration surged through her. Didn't he understand that time was of the essence? Although it took every ounce of self-restraint Rachel possessed, she managed to keep from suggesting that they save the lengthy, drawn-out explanations for later.

She took a deep breath. "Shade never knew his father," she began, schooling her voice to a calm she was a very long way from feeling. "His mother drank. Heavily. He became a ward of Vermont State when he was seven years old."

"An unfortunate beginning," Joshua allowed.

"Very." She remembered how she'd cried for the abandoned young boy. "When he was eleven, he became friends with another boy who'd been orphaned."

"Conlan O'Donahue," Joshua's long, perfectly manicured fingers tapped across the computer keys. "His parents were killed in a car crash. Since there were no relatives to take him in, he was placed in the Vermont boys' home."

Rachel wondered why she need go over this when Joshua had the information right there in his all-knowing computer.

"That's right. Although Shade was a loner, even as a child, the two boys hit it off. They even became blood brothers."

"That was the day Shade almost drowned," Joshua recalled.

Soft color drifted into Rachel's cheeks. Trust her superior to remember that. She wondered if Joshua also remembered their heated argument afterward and knew that he did.

"That's right," she murmured reluctantly.

Rather than remind her of her greatest indiscretion, Joshua returned his attention to the computer. "Conlan O'Donahue appears to have been a mirror image of his friend. Where Shade ran away from school with distressing regularity, Conlan enjoyed his classes and earned straight
As
."

"Shade was every bit as intelligent," Rachel interjected loyally. "He merely had trouble with rules and regulations."

"A problem that seems to continue, even now," the older man mused. Rachel didn't respond. "They both went to college."

"Shade went to Notre Dame on a football scholarship, Conlan went to Harvard as a merit scholar."

"Yes." Joshua nodded his silver head. "That's exactly what it says. After graduation, your man went to work for the government. In intelligence." His slight frown suggested his distaste for any career that required a talent for prevarication.

"The major part of Shade's salary went to help pay Conlan's way through medical school," Rachel said.

Shade's hefty contribution to his friend's lean financial coffers had been an extremely generous act. And right now, Shade needed all the points he could earn. His life's slate, seemingly filled with more bad than good, did not reveal the true man Rachel knew him to be.

"A generous gesture," Joshua allowed.

"Very generous." Her emphatic tone earned another quick, probing look from the man who'd begun as her teacher and had become her dearest friend.

It was, of course, against the rules to become emotionally involved with Shade. He was, Joshua had reminded her on more than one occasion, merely an assignment. A very important assignment, granted, but when the time came to move on, as it always did, she would be required to direct all her attention to her new subject.

"Without the enormous debt most doctors have when they finish school, Conlan was able to follow his dream to use medicine to help others."

"His work for the International Rescue the Children Fund has been quite impressive," Joshua murmured as the list of Conlan O'Donahue's achievements flashed across the screen. Page after page of them.

Seeing them in black and white like this, Rachel understood why, on those rare occasions when Shade compared himself with his blood brother, he felt he came up depressingly short.

She had never believed that, of course. But Rachel understood all too well that emotions and truth were not always the same thing. Her own life had been proof of that.

"Conlan is a wonderful doctor. And a wonderful person," she agreed. It was true. "Not to mention being a loving and demoted husband." He'd married a pediatrician he'd met during residency, Rachel remembered.

"Who's about to become a father."

"Really?" She leaned forward in an attempt to read the screen. "I didn't know that."

"Neither does he. For that matter, neither does his wife." More tapping on the keys. The screen changed. "She will find out today."

Rachel let out a long breath. "The same day she learns her husband's been taken captive by government troops in Yaznovia." Talk about your good news, bad news, she considered. "According to the anonymous letter Shade just received, Conlan has been arrested and accused of working with the rebels."

She didn't add that those same rebels were being called freedom fighters by every legitimate government in the free world. Joshua had never been at all political. And, of course, it was against policy to enter into disputes between the world's battling nations.

"That's only the military government's excuse," he said, surprising her with his knowledge of the actual situation. "In truth, they have a far more sinister agenda."

Four years ago, General Rutskoya, president-for-life of the eastern European Alpine country, had orchestrated a series of massacres in remote, mountainous refugee camps.

The battalion in charge of the massacre, led by the general's brother, was eventually infiltrated by Shade. And although his actions had not resulted in the downfall of the brutal military regime, it had brought the atrocities into the world spotlight, resulting in immediate economic sanctions.

After months of oppressive rule, Yaznovia was finally viewed in its true colors: an outlaw nation, run by outlaws.

That had been Shade's last official assignment for the U.S. government. He'd been gravely wounded in an ambush and had lingered in that smoky netherworld between life and death for weeks. Afterward, when his cover had been blown by a traitor, he'd been tortured by the general's henchmen while the ruler himself watched.

Eventually Shade had escaped his tormentors. But not before being forced to kill the general's brother.

"A brother for a brother," Rachel whispered as the evil enormity of the situation sank in.

"Exactly." Joshua's rewarding smile was grim. "Except in this case, General Rutskoya plans to lure your Shade into his snare, using Conlan as bait. Then he intends to kill them both."

Dear Lord, this was even worse than she'd thought. "Please, Joshua, you must let me go to Shade. To help him." Bright color waved like scarlet flags in her delicate, too-pale cheeks.

"You know I cannot allow that. Your place is here, Rachel." Harsh lines carved their way across her superior's aristocratic brow.

"My place is helping Shade." Her gray eyes, fringed by a row of long smoky lashes, pleaded. Her normally throaty voice was husky with pent-up emotion. "You chose him for me, Joshua, from the moment he took his first breath."

Rachel, formerly Rachel Parrish of Salem, Massachusetts, an outspoken, untraditional midwife who'd been unjustly hanged in 1692 as a witch, had been Shade's guardian angel for all of his sometimes stormy, always rocky thirty-five years.

She'd pulled him from the freezing water that long-ago winter day when he'd fallen through the ice, and although it certainly hadn't been easy, given Shade's unfortunate and reckless lack of concern for his own life, she'd rescued him from innumerable dangerous situations.

And although she hadn't been able to keep him from being severely wounded during that ambush in the mountains, and she'd been forced to watch as he'd been brutally tortured, she had managed—just barely—to keep him alive.

"You've saved the man's life many times without taking on earthly bonds," Joshua reminded her needlessly.

She was grateful when he didn't bring up that one time—when Shade was eleven—when she'd panicked and taken matters into her own hands by returning to the mortal world without first seeking the required permission.

"You have to understand." Unable to sit still another moment, she sprang to her feet and leaned over the desk, desperately pressing her point. "It's not Shade's life I'm worried about saving, Joshua."

Rachel shivered as she thought of the intent she'd witnessed in Shade's eyes to commit premeditated, cold-blooded murder.

"It's his soul."

Chapter Two

AS SOON AS HE ARRIVED in the city, Shade went straight to the Capitol Hill town house of his best—and only—friend. He was relieved when Marianne O'Donahue, Conlan's wife, displaying the grit that Shade had always admired and Con had loved, did not succumb to hysterics upon learning of her husband's capture.

"After all," Marianne reminded him in the smooth round tones that betrayed her Boston roots, "Con and I both knew and accepted the risks involved."

The Rescue the Children Fund was an international, nonprofit agency, famous for operating in places that the average SWAT team wouldn't dare go. Working together as a team, Marianne and Conlan had dispensed medical assistance, as well as comfort and love, in many of the same hot spots where Shade had worked undercover. The national offices of the Rescue the Children Fund were in Washington, as was Marianne and Con's home, but they only returned to the States for a few weeks every year.

"The thing I find frustrating," Marianne told Shade, "is that I can't be with Con when he needs me the most." She shook her head. "I returned to Washington to shore up some needed funding and support for our relief work in Yaznovia. Perhaps, if I'd stayed with him…"

"If you were with Con, I'd have to figure out some way to get two people out of prison instead of one," Shade answered.

She smiled at that, a sweet, brave smile that only wobbled slightly. "Dear Shade." She covered his dark hand with her own. "Con couldn't have asked for a better brother." Mutinous tears filled her eyes. "I'm sorry." A single tear fell; she brushed it impatiently away. "Dammit, I'm not usually so weepy."

"Hey, you're entitled."

Marianne sighed. "Perhaps it's better I did come back here to the States last week," she mused out loud. "Because even though he's a brilliant doctor, I have a feeling that Con would waste precious time and mental energy worrying about my condition. And Lord knows, he certainly has enough to be concerned about right now."