Page 93 of Baking and Angels

“Rafferty, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’tmean to.”

“I can’t do this,” he repeated softly, knowing this time she would accept it, now that she understood what she had done. “I’ll keep your secret. I won’t let BDI know, but I have to go. Please. Let me go.”

Tears streamed down her face, and even though her head shook a little, he could see from the pain painting her form that she was relenting. “But where would you go?” she asked, her voice squeaking out of her.

He had only one thought. “I have a friend I can call. I do not… I cannot tell you any more than that.”

“Rafferty…” She openly wept now. “I love you.” Her last desperate argument; her last plea for himnot to go.

He turned to leave the room, before it became too hard. “Good-bye, Helena.”

“Hey, there he is,” Éliott called as he pulled up to the curb. Rafferty sat upon a bench a few blocks down from Helena’s house, his head resting in the palms of his hands. It had been all he could do not to grab his bag and turn back, to beg Helena for forgiveness and take back everything he had said. He knew that what he was doing was right, and he understood he wouldn’t feel it. Not with a demon playing with hisemotions.

Éliott reached across from the driver’s seat to open the door. “Come on, get in. It is goingto rain.”

Rafferty obeyed, throwing his bag into the backseat before climbing intothe front.

“Dog weather, all of it,” Éliott muttered as he looked through the windshield up at the clouds.

“Un temps de chien,” Rafferty agreed, letting the French fall from him, though he wasn’t really speaking of the weather.

A few moments later, Éliott pulled away to the chorus of thunder and the flashing of lightning. “I picked you up just in time,” Éliott commented, just as water pounded onto the car.

“Thank you,” Rafferty managed to say, though he barely heard the other man as he wrestled with his own internalmaelstrom.

“Do you wish to tell me whathappened?”

Rafferty couldn’t even say “no.” Only silence stretched between them.

After a minute or so Éliott nodded. “I understand,” he said softly. “Don’t worry, my friend. It will all be alright inthe end.”

“I just broke the heart of the woman who saved my soul,” he said. “I don’tdeserve…”

Éliott’s phone went off, interrupting. A strange feeling slipped down Rafferty’s arms, making the hairs stand up straight.Whatwas that?

“Sorry,” the other man said, picking it up from inside one of the cup holders to glance at the screen.“Oh dear.”

He set the phone down and hit a button on a little screen on hisdashboard.

“Oui, hello,Eleanor?”

“Éliott,” Eleanor’s voice came over the speakers. “I need your help.”

“Anything, belle. What doyou need?”

Eleanor growled.

There was a crashing sound overthe phone.

“Eleanor? Are youalright?”

“Just get over here before I destroy the whole kitchen!” Then she hung up.

Éliott swore beautifully in French, a phrase that made the corners of Rafferty’s mouth lift. That phrase had apparently withstood the test of time. “Do you wish to be dropped off at my place first?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” Rafferty said. He didn’t really care one way or another anymore.

“Good, because we are here,” he said, pulling up in front of another house. Rafferty had no idea where they were, and he blinked as he stared at the two-story building. It looked like someone’s idea for a castle if it were a house. “I live in the second-floor apartment, but my landlady, she lives on the first.”

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