Dark Angel (Casteel 2)

"You haven't forgotten my name," I said in a pleasant way, swinging my foot and making my high heel a threatening weapon. "No one ever forgets my name. Heaven Leigh has its own distinction, wouldn't you say?"

And all that coughing had done something tor my throat, something that made it different, slightly hoarse, and my time in Boston had given my voice a certain sophisticated sexiness that surprised even me. "Fanny is very well, thank you for asking, Reverend Wise. Fanny sends her best regards."

I smiled at him, feeling a kind of power growing just because I could tell he was taken with my youth and beauty. I suspected he'd been an easy foil for Fanny's seduction, even though he was a man of the cloth. "Fanny is very appreciative to both you and your wife for taking such good care of her daughter, but now that she has given up a stage career and will soon settle down to married life, she wants her child back."

He didn't blanch or blink an eye, though behind me I heard his wife gasp, then sob.

"Why isn't Louisa here to speak for herself?" he asked in a soft purr.

I tried to find exactly the right words. "Fanny trusts me to say what she cannot say without crying. She regrets her hasty decision to sell her unborn child. She knows now that a woman can never be the same after giving birth. Her arms ache to hold her little girl. And she isn't asking that you take a great loss, for I have come prepared to repay you the ten thousand dollars." His smile stayed pasted on. He even managed to talk while still smiling. "I really don't understand what you mean. What ten thousand? What do my wife and I have to do with Fanny's baby? We realize, of course, that dear Louisa was free with her sexual favors, being hill-born and hill-trained, and wild as a bitch in heat, and if she sold her baby and regrets it, indeed we are sorry . . ."

Standing, I strode to his desk and picked up a silver-framed studio portrait of a child about four months old. The baby smiled into the camera lens with Fanny's own dark eyes, true Casteel Indian eyes. The little girl's mop of hair was not straight and coarse like Fanny's, but soft and curly, as the hair of the Reverend must have been when he was an infant. And oh, she was lovely, this baby that Fanny had so heedlessly sold. Plump, dimpled hands, a tiny little ring on one finger. Sweet little white dress with lace and embroidery. A cherished, pampered, beloved daughter.

Suddenly the portrait was snatched from my hands!

"Get out of here!" screamed Rosalynn Wise. "Wayland, why do you sit and talk to her! Throw her out!"

"I came prepared to pay for Fanny's child," I stated coldly. "You can accept twenty thousand dollars. Ten thousand for your care of the child. If you don't I will call in the police, and tell them what you did when you drove to our cabin and paid my father five hundred dollars for Fanny. I will tell the city authorities that you used Fanny as your slave to do housework. I will tell them that their good minister molested and sexually abused a fourteen-year-old girl, and forced her to have his child because his wife was barren . . ."

The Reverend stood up.

He towered above me, his eyes turning into cruel, dark river stones. "You have threat in your voice, girl. I don't like that. A hill-scum Casteel can't threaten me, not with your tone, not with your fierce glare and your silly words. I know all about you and your kind." His confident smile came back as he sought to intimidate me. "Louisa has not called or written to us, after all we did to make her happy and comfortable. Yet it's often that way with our Lord's chosen , . . to try and be the good Samaritan, and in turn be given nothing but malice from those who should be grateful."

He intoned other words, quotes from the Bible that were apt, as if in a million years I could never disturb his equilibrium.

"Stop!" I yelled. "You bought my sister from my father." I named the day and the year. "And my brother Tom and I were there as witnesses to swear this took place in our cabin." I paused, watching him slip his large feet out of the velvet slippers and into loose loafers before he moved to sit ponderously behind his immense desk, kept exceptionally neat. When he settled back in his swivel chair, he tipped it far back, then templed his fingers beneath his chin. He held his hands clasped like that very high so his mouth was hidden. It was only then I found out the lips combined with the eyes made for the best mindreading abilities. Now I had only his eyes, and they were hooded.

"You can't come to me and make demands, girl. You may wear diamonds, and costly raiment, but you are still a Casteel. And between your word and mine . . who do you think those in authority will believe?"

I found my own confident smile. "Darcy looks like Fanny."

His smile turned oily and evil. "Let's not debate a proven fact. We have papers to prove my wife gave birth to a baby girl on the third day in February of this year. What legal proof do you have to indicate that Fanny has even had a baby?"

My smile wavered, then grew strong. "Stretch marks. Does your wife have those? Fingerprints. Footprints. We Casteels are not quite as dumb as you think. Fanny stole a copy of her daughter's birth certificate. On that certificate she is named as the mother, not your wife. You had a forgery made--how will that sit with those in authority?"

Behind me Rosalynn Wise groaned.

The Reverend blinked his eyes once or twice. And I knew I had them! And I had lied! As far as I knew Fanny didn't have any proof. None whatsoever.

"No man would ever need go to the trouble of seducing your promiscuous sister!" yelled Rosal

ynn Wise, her face gone paper white as she backed toward the door.

My head jerked higher. "That is beside the point. The point being, Reverend Wise took advantage of a fourteen-year-old girl. He, a man sworn to the cloth, fathered Fanny's baby when she was a minor! A baby that this honorable minister now tells everyone was conceived in his wife's own womb! It can easily be proven by a physical examination that your wife has never given birth. Fanny wants her little girl. I want her to have her daughter. I have come to take Darcy home to her mother."

Rosalynn Wise whimpered like a beaten dog.

But the Reverend hadn't finished his battle.

The Reverend's eyes turned harder, colder. "I know who you are. Your maternal grandmother married into the Tatterton Toy clan. And so you have millions behind you, and you think that gives you power to wield over me. Darcy is my daughter, and I will fight you tooth and nail to see she stays here in my house and not in the home of a tramp. So get out, and stay out!"

"I will go to the police!" I cried with my own anger growing.

"Go on. Do everything you say. See if anyone believes you. There isn't one soul in this city that doesn't know what Fanny Casteel is, and was, and will always be. My congregation will sympathize with me. Knowing that in my own home that wicked, sinful girl did steal into my bed and with her lewd, naked body that she pressed against me, she seduced me, for I am only a man, and human . . . pitifully, shamefully human."

It was his scornful winning smirk that made me say without hesitation, despite his clever plea, "You either give me Darcy so I can take her to Fanny, or I will enter your church tonight and stand in front of your congregation and tell them exactly what transpired on the day you bought Fanny for your own sexual gratification! And I believe they will be shocked and outraged. You could have left her alone! You have just admitted that you knew what Fanny was before you brought her into your home--and still you did it! You deliberately put temptation in your home, and you failed to resist that temptation! In the case of the Devil versus Reverend Wayland Wise, the Devil won. And I know your congregation. They will not forgive you!"

The Reverend thoughtfully eyed me as if I were still only a white pawn on his chessboard, and if he could but move his black queen he'd find a way yet to thwart me.