caused entirely by cold or nerves.
It was caused by him.
Chapter Two
They abandoned the Jeep where it was mired in the mud and proceeded on foot.
It seemed to take hours before they managed to climb their way up the steep, slick mountainside.
The wind swirled around them, carrying the rain in sheets that were nearly horizontal. Angeline felt grateful for Brody’s big body standing so closely to hers, blocking a fair measure of the storm.
She lost all sense of time as they trudged along. Every step she took was an exercise in pain—her thighs, her calves, her shins. No part of her seemed excused until finally—when her brain had simply shut down except for the mental order to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving—Brody stopped.
He lifted his hand, and beat it hard on the wide black plank that barred their path.
A door, her numb mind realized. “They won’t hear,” she said, but couldn’t even hear the words herself over the screaming wind.
His fingers were an iron ring around her wrist as the door creaked open—giving lie to her words—and he pulled her inside. Then he put his shoulder against the door and muscled it closed again, yanking down the old-fashioned wooden beam that served as a lock.
The sudden cessation of battering wind was nearly dizzying.
It was also oddly quiet, she realized. So much so that she could hear the water dripping off her onto the stone floor.
“Señora.” A diminutive woman dressed in a full nun’s habit held out a white towel.
“Thank you.” Angeline took the towel and pressed it to her face. The weave was rough and thin but it was dry and felt positively wonderful. She lowered it to smile at the nun. “Gracias.”
The woman was speaking rapidly to Brody in Spanish. And though Angeline hadn’t spoken the language of her birth in years, she followed along easily enough. The nun was telling Brody that the Mother Superior was not there to welcome the strangers.
“We’re not strangers,” Brody told her. His accent was nearly flawless, Angeline realized with some vague surprise. “We’ve come to collect our children.”
If Angeline had held any vague notions of other children being at the convent, they were dissolved when the nun nodded. “Sí. Sí.” The nun turned and began moving away from the door, heading down the middle of the three corridors that led off the vestibule.
Brody gave Angeline a sharp look when she didn’t immediately follow along.
She knew she could collapse later, after they knew the children were safe. But just then she wanted nothing more than to just sink down on the dark stone floor and rest her head back against the rough, whitewashed wall.
As if he could read her thoughts, Brody wrapped his hand around her wrist again and drew her along the corridor with him in the nun’s wake.
Like the vestibule, the hallway had whitewashed walls. Though the wash looked pristine, it didn’t mask the rough texture of the wall beneath it. There were no windows, but a multitude of iron sconces situated high up the wall held fat white candles that kept the way well lit. The few electrical sconces spread out less liberally were dark.
Angeline figured they’d walked a good fifty feet before the corridor turned sharply left and opened after another twenty or so feet into a wide, square room occupied by a half-dozen long wooden tables and benches.
The dining hall, the nun informed them briskly. Her feet didn’t hesitate, however, as she kept right on walking.
“You catching all that?” Brody asked Angeline in English.
She nodded. She’d come to English only when Daniel and Maggie Clay had adopted her after her family’s village was destroyed. And though Angeline had deliberately turned her back on the language of her natural parents, she’d never forgotten it, though she’d once made a valiant effort to do so.
She’d already been different enough from the other people in that small Wyoming town where she’d gone to live with Daniel and Maggie. Even before she’d been old enough to understand her actions, she’d deliberately rid the accent from her diction, and copied the vague drawl that the adults around her had possessed. She’d wanted so badly to belong. Not because any one of her adopted family made her feel different, but because inside, Angeline had known she was different.
She’d lived when the rest of her natural family had perished. She’d been rescued from a poor Central American orphanage and been taken to the U.S., where she’d been raised by loving people.
But she’d never forgotten the sight of fire racing through the fields her cousins had tended, licking up the walls and across the roofs of their simple houses. And whatever hadn’t been burned had been hacked down with axes, torn apart with knives, shot down with guns.
Nothing had escaped. Not the people. Not the livestock. Not the land.
Only her.
It was twenty-five years ago, and she still didn’t understand why she’d been spared.
“Sophia.” Brody’s voice was sharp, cutting through the dark memories. Angeline focused on his deep blue eyes and just that abruptly she was back in the present.
Where two children needed them.
“I’m sorry.” How easily she fell back into thinking in Spanish, speaking in Spanish. “The children,” she looked at the nun. “Please, where are they?”
The nun looked distressed. “They are well and safe, señora. But until the Mother Superior returns and authorizes your access to them, I must continue to keep them secure.”
“From me?” Angeline didn’t have to work hard at conjuring tears in her eyes. She was cold, exhausted and entirely undone by the plot that Brody had drawn her into. “I am their mother.” The lie came more easily than she’d thought it would.
The nun’s ageless face looked pitying, yet resolute. “You were the ones who made the arrangement with Mother. But now, you are weary,” she said. “You and your husband need food and rest. We will naturally provide you with both until Mother returns. The storm will pass and soon she will be here to show you to your children.”
“But—”
Brody’s hand closed around hers. “Gracias, Sister. My wife and I thank you for your hospitality, of course. If we could find dry clothes—”
“Sí. Sí.” The nun looked relieved. “Please wait here. I will send Sister Frances to assist you in a moment if that will be satisfactory?”
Brody’s fingers squeezed Angeline’s in warning “Sí.”
She nodded and turned on her heel, gliding back along the corridor. Her long robes swished over the stone floor.
The moment she was out of sight, Brody let go of Angeline’s wrist and she sank down onto one of the long wooden benches situated alongside the tables. She rubbed her
