Earth Angel (17 page)

Gwynne ignored the report and pushed to her feet and put her arms around her. She didn’t know what else to do, and physically touching people in pain was such an ingrained response that she didn’t think twice. Abby tightened her arms around her before it could turn into an awkward dance of oh, wait…okay…I guess I could…hug. It was a real hug, with Abby’s head at her shoulder and her chest pressed close. Thank God.

“What else didn’t they tell me?” Abby said near her ear.

“Why don’t you ask them?”

“I can tell you what they’ll say. Gramps will say ‘Ask your grandmother’ and Grams will say she doesn’t remember, that’s what they’ll say. I should ask the officer who wrote up this report—maybe she remembers what happened.”

Abby was still clinging to her, and her body heat felt way better than it had any right to. This hug was supposed to be for Abby’s sake, not her own. Gwynne pulled away before she gave in to the temptation to close the miniscule gap between their lower bodies, but as they pulled apart, she trailed her fingers down Abby’s arms, tracing her forearms and lingering at her wrists, not sure she was willing to let her go.

The police report fluttered from Abby’s fingers to the ground. There was desire in Abby’s flushed face, and her nipples were hard. They hadn’t been…visible…before, had they? She was pretty damn sure she would have noticed.

* * *

Abby reached for her again. Gwynne’s hug had been…too polite. She wanted to press into her with the full length of her body. Needed it. She pulled her close and her curves felt exactly the way she knew they would, warm and yielding and irresistible.

She had to kiss her. She wanted to kiss her. She wanted…

And one more thing. Don’t go out with Gwynne. I don’t want any other complications.
Elle’s bizarre warning flitted through her brain and made her pause. Besides, her grandmother was downstairs. She let her arms drop. “I’d better not.”

“Better not what?” Gwynne asked softly, but it was clear from the gruffness of her voice and the invitation in her lips that she knew exactly what Abby meant.

Abby shivered. “Kiss you.”

“Kiss me. Is that what you were planning to do?”

Gwynne had a great voice. They were standing so close she could feel it thrum through her body.

Abby strained closer, as close as she could get without touching. “Couldn’t you tell?”

“Of course I could tell. I thought
I
was going to kiss
you
.”

“Only because I was going to kiss you first.” And God, she still really wanted to.

Gwynne brushed her thumb over her cheek. “Are you always this verbal? Usually people don’t talk about this, they just do it.”

Abby closed what distance was left. Their lips touched, and a spark of static electricity zapped her with an audible pop. They jumped apart. Abby banged her heel into a packed cardboard box.

“Ow!” they both said simultaneously.

Gwynne rubbed her mouth and laughed with what sounded like disbelief. “Why are you so staticky?”

“Me? Maybe it was you!”

“I’m not staticky.”

“Not anymore, you’re not, not after that.”

Gwynne traced the outline of Abby’s body, her hands an inch away from her skin the way she’d seen her do during her healings. There was no touching, but watching her pay such careful attention to her shape—even if it was to avoid accidental contact—heated her skin. She wasn’t sure what Gwynne was doing—maybe checking her for static?—but whatever it was, it felt intimate and caring and not as bizarre as she would have thought.

Gwynne pulled away, apparently finished with whatever she’d done. “I’m guessing that’s not what people mean when they say they met someone and sparks were flying.”

“Probably not.” Abby rubbed her arms, soothing her frazzled nerves, and suddenly she wondered how natural the shock’s natural causes had been. If it was Elle interfering, she was
not
going to help her with her pesky little engineering problem. But there was no sign of any angel.

“Elle warned me not to date you,” Abby said.

“Don’t listen to her.”

In general, Abby agreed with her on that. Still, as much as she wanted Gwynne, there was a part of her that couldn’t shake the feeling that if Elle had told her not to date Gwynne, there might be a good reason for it. Sapphire always gave her good advice. She told her which patients to play for, gave her job ideas like Candace’s successful open house, and helped her avoid car accidents. If she trusted Sapphire, maybe she should trust Elle too. No angel had ever betrayed her.

“You think she caused the static?” Gwynne said.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think she’s here.”

“I don’t either,” Abby said.

“So that leaves—”

“A natural repulsive force?”

Gwynne ran her hands through her hair and fluffed it into fresh spikiness. “So much for my attempts at seduction. Making you recoil from my touch has to be a new low.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Yes it was.”

“Okay, it was pretty bad,” Abby admitted. Who’d want to kiss again after an electric shock? She certainly didn’t. Except it could have been so good. She moistened her lips. Maybe if their lips weren’t dry…“Want to try again?”

Gwynne’s expression softened. “You’re fearless.” She smiled, angling her head. “I like that about you.”

Abby went for it. Gwynne moaned, and Abby decided that kissing her again was a really, really good idea. She smelled like sunshine and kissed like a goddess and being with her made her feel less alien than with anyone else. Their bodies strained against each other, joining everywhere, and her nerves lit up from the contact, dancing with sensory overload.

Gwynne tugged on Abby’s sweater and pushed it up like she had every intention of undressing her, mere moments into their first kiss. Second kiss. Whatever.

“Not here.” Hazy with desire but still able to remember where she was, Abby grabbed her hands. Her grandmother had probably returned to the kitchen, but the attic’s floorboards were squeaky and the trapdoor was wide open. “Grams might hear us.”

She twined their fingers together and raised their arms overhead, safely away from the hem of her clothing, creating a gap between their bodies that Gwynne immediately closed.

“Gwynne!”

“I’m no good with rules.”

“Neither am I, but—”

“Perfect.” Gwynne leaned forward so their foreheads touched, too charming for her own good.

Abby’s heart thumped. This was how Gwynne would sound when she made love, like she was laughing inside and having fun, right up until the point where her breathing would become erratic and her voice would drop and that sexy voice would crack with a harsh cry. Abby desperately wanted to hear that.

Gwynne’s gaze heated as if she sensed what she was thinking, and she kissed her, sweetly and not particularly apologetically. Abby melted into her and kissed her back because it was too wonderful a kiss not to. And it was no longer just her heart that ached, but lower, everywhere, because Gwynne’s desire threw sparks that lodged in her core and burned inward and upward through to the filaments of her unprotected soul. She wasn’t going to be able to walk away from this unscathed, and she didn’t want to.

But Grams would never recover if she heard her granddaughter groaning and figured out it was not from lifting heavy boxes, so she reluctantly drew back an inch and tried to catch her breath. “Grams still has her hearing.”

Gwynne lowered their joined hands and brought her elbows behind her own back, drawing Abby’s arms forward to wrap around her waist. “We’re being quiet.”

“Not really.”

Gwynne kissed her again. “Yes, really,” she mumbled against her mouth between kisses, gentle but determined. “Unless you’re planning to have sex with me up here. That might get loud.” She pressed her lips to hers in another brief, addictive kiss. “I tend to scream.”

Abby’s mouth opened wider at Gwynne’s confidence and Gwynne pressed her advantage, meeting her lips mid-gasp and deepening the kiss.

Abby finally came up for air to say, “That’s very optimistic of you.”

“You don’t think you’d make me scream?” Gwynne said seriously. “You totally would.”

Abby flushed. “What I
meant
was, it’s very optimistic of you to think we might, you know…” She lowered her voice and hissed, because her grandmother taught her to be a good girl and she could barely say the words out loud, especially in this house, “…
have sex
…”—she returned to her normal volume—“…in the attic.”

“You’re right. That was more like wishful thinking.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.” She curled her fingers around Abby’s triceps and caressed her with a gentle but persuasive touch.

Abby’s legs weakened. She wasn’t that good a girl. “We have to stop.”

Gwynne’s fingers trailed down her arms and clasped her hands. “Because of Grams?”

“Yes.”

Gwynne squeezed her hands and let go. “I can wait.”

Abby shook her head. She’d been the one insisting they stop, but…Gwynne didn’t have to sound so calm and reasonable about it.

Gwynne could wait? Good thing one of them could.

* * *

The icy clouds below were thin and wispy, as if the winds at this nosebleed altitude high above Baltimore had screamed through and torn the clouds apart in their wake.

Don’t look down
, Elle admonished herself as she unfurled her wings and soared higher. Not that she could see Abby from this height anyway, so there was no point in looking—logic that ought to work but somehow didn’t.

One of the other angels swept in on the wind and joined her. “Why did you tell her not to date Gwynne?” asked the angel.

“You know why,” Elle said.

“She’s not going to listen to you.”

“Probably not. Does she listen to me about anything?”

“She used to.”

“Did she?” Elle’s heart ached for the friendship she and Abigail had put on hold thirty-one years earlier. Abigail never listened to her, but Elle loved her anyway. It was the acting like they’d never met that hurt, even though it was unavoidable.

And Gwynne…

Not unexpected. Abigail had a weakness for smart, psychic women. Always had. Once Gwynne showed her her heart, it would be impossible for Abigail to resist her.

She’d be happy for them except, well…Gwynne saw too much. Which was also not unexpected.

Elle let the wind carry her higher, away from the city and the two women searching through boxes in the attic. Leave it to those two to have found each other.

Chapter Eleven

It turned out the police officer who rescued Abby when she was a baby was still on the force, and when Abby told her she was planning to visit the apartment building where she’d spent the first three years of her life, Officer Mawson offered to meet her there. Then Gwynne insisted on driving, and now here she was, standing on a glass-strewn sidewalk next to Gwynne as the smell of sewage wafted their way, and saying screw it to the socially-appropriate-for-outdoors amount of space between them and holding hands, leaning into her, staring up at a pair of eight-story buildings fronted by a circular driveway and an anemic holly tree.

She didn’t recognize the building. Somehow she’d thought that seeing it again would help her remember.

Gwynne pushed back Abby’s sleeve to check her watch. “When did she say she was coming?”

“She’s coming,” Abby said.

She let go of Gwynne and ventured onto the dirt inside the circular driveway, keeping a careful eye out for dog poop, catching herself just in time before she stepped on a tiny green luminescent fairy dancing in a patch of weeds.

And then she remembered.

There’d been more of them when she lived here—hundreds of them—and angels too. A shiny neighbor in a long, white nightgown had led her out of her apartment and out the front door of the building to play tag with her friends and race around the holly tree. It couldn’t be the same tree, could it? Maybe. She had followed the lady, leaving her mother sprawled on the bathroom floor.

“I played here the day my mother died,” she told Gwynne, disgusted with herself. She’d been so callous. She should have sat and cried about her mother, not abandoned her and let Sapphire and the others distract her with a game.

At the sound of a car slowing, she turned. A police cruiser pulled up to the entrance and parked under a “No Parking” sign. As the uniformed officer got out, Abby rushed toward her, running from what she didn’t want to see. The officer’s hand went to her gun.

“Abby!” Gwynne said sharply, but Abby had seen her movement too, and pulled up short.

“Abigail Vogel?”

“That’s me.”

“Look at you, you’re all grown up.” The officer let go of her gun and shook her hand with a motherly grip. “Jackie Mawson.”

“I’m surprised you remember me. It was a long time ago.”

“I’ll never forget it.”

“Really? Why?” With all the crime she must deal with, an unsupervised little girl didn’t seem memorable.

Officer Mawson clasped her hands together and looked past her, into the distance. “It was the darnedest thing. I’m driving around, patrolling the neighborhood, when all of a sudden I see this female in a white nightgown jump in front of my cruiser and put her hands up for me to stop. I stop, all right. I thought I was going to flatten her.” She looked away, then down at her feet. “I did smash into her. I slammed my foot on the brake, but the way she darted into the road, there was no way I could stop in time. I’m telling you, I hit her. But the weird thing was, when I get out of my cruiser, she’s standing there like everything’s fine.”

“She must have jumped out of the way at the last minute,” Abby said.

“No, I swear I hit something. I’m telling you, I felt the impact. I couldn’t understand it until I noticed her feet weren’t touching the ground.”

Gwynne drew in a sharp breath.

“The female was floating a few inches off the pavement.” Officer Mawson cleared her throat. “I ask her if she’s okay, and she doesn’t say anything, just points to this toddler who’s about to walk into traffic. I run after the kid and grab her, and the lady disappears. I never saw her leave. She was just…gone.”