They sat for a while in companionable silence, watching the show, leaning against one another. Emma curled her fingers around his arm. His lips brushed the top of her head and rested there for a moment as he inhaled her scent. “Ye dinna tell me if Elspeth was able to tell ye about yer sister, Lizzy, and her husband.”
A double heart-shaped firework exploded above their heads. “She did,” Emma said. “She told me she remembered them. It was not what we thought.”
“Her memory about her file work is almost photographic. What did she tell you?”
“We all assumed someone had boarded their boat—pirates, maybe, or someone who knew what they were hunting for. Maybe they set them out to sea or murdered them outright, we guessed. But Elspeth says a storm was to blame. Lizzy was blown off the deck and her tether broke. Daniel went in after her. But the sea was impossible and she’d blown too far for him to reach her with his tether, so he unhooked himself. He would have done that. I can’t imagine him doing anything else to be honest. So, they died together. They left this Earth together. If there’s any comfort here, it’s knowing they died doing what they loved.”
“At least ye know now.”
She nodded. “Elspeth is very kind. I liked her. I think we would be friends if…” She looked up at him as a singer with the orchestra in the gazebo struck up a song from Katy Perry about fireworks as the show cranked up the volume. She rested her head back on Connor’s shoulder. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Depends.”
“On whether you trust me enough to answer?”
“I trust ye,” he said, surprising her raising her knuckles to his lips, pressing a kiss there. “But tell me the question.”
“Was Elspeth happy as a Celestial?” She hesitated. “Are you?”
Connor looked up at the sky, as if he could somehow find an answer there. “Happinessis a relative word, isn’t it? I canna compare mine to hers. Nor yours to mine. ’Tis subjective, aye?”
“That, Farm Boy, is a nonanswer.”
“Fair enough.” He braced one wrist on his bent knee. “’Tis a word I ken I havna thought about for a verra long time. Content, I’d say. Mostly. Though if you ask Marguerite, she’d probably say otherwise.” His fingers tightened around hers. “I canna do this there.” He leaned closer. “Or this.” Inhaling the scent of her, his mouth traced the outline of her cheek without quite touching. “Or, especially, this.” He took her mouth with his and slid his hand through her hair, pulling her closer.
He tasted of the sweet night air and some indefinable flavor that belonged to him alone. Maybe it was the flavor of an angel. Maybe all angels tasted this good. She doubted it. But most of all, she didn’t want him to stop.
Explosions burst above their heads. Fans of color and icicles of white fell from the sky, then burst a second time into balls and flags of red and blue. In the distance, the crowd oohed and aahed over the show. Emma almost forgot where she was as he deepened the kiss, stealing away every bit of her self-control just before she felt the nudge of a cold nose against her arm and the appearance of a dog beside her, wagging his tail.
Connor broke the kiss at the sight of him, but the dog settled his curly little self against her knees, untroubled by the fireworks going off overhead or the fact that Connor had been kissing her.
“Enoch?” Connor said, sounding exasperated.
Emma reached out tentatively and scratched the pup behind his ears. “How did you get up here?”
But Connor was not looking at the dog. Instead, his focus was on the woman who had settled herself on the rooftop nearby them. “Marguerite?”
Marguerite?Had Connor somehow conjured her up by speaking her name a few moments ago?
“What a night for a fireworks show, no?” she responded, smiling slyly at Connor. “Bonjour, ma fille. Emma, is it not?”
She nodded warily. Emma glanced past the woman to notice others now, sitting on the roof, faces turned up to the sky. More were perched in branches of nearby trees and sitting by twos atop telephone poles. All—
“Guardians,” Marguerite confirmed. “Mais oui. You see? There’s Henry. I think you ’ave met.” She pointed to a play structure Henry was standing atop beside several others. Henry nodded to her but pulled his attention immediately back to the exploding lights in the sky. The more she looked, the more she spotted—angels seemingly drawn here to the spectacle like moths to a flame.
Connor tightened his fingers around Emma’s. “There must be a thousand fireworks shows tonight. What can we do for ye here?”
His tone suggested there was nothing she could want that he could give her, but she smiled at him nonetheless. “We?” she repeated. “Non, mon ami. Not you both. You have done all you can do—and a good job of it, too. I’m afraid, though, it is time for Emma to go.”
Emma inhaled sharply, turning to Connor, wide-eyed with fear. She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t prepared herself. Adrenaline rocketed through her like the explosion of lights above them.
He tugged her closer to him. “No.Not yet. She’s no’ ready.”
“But then, who is, eh?” Marguerite asked, her gaze on Emma.
Enoch licked her hand comfortingly, and Emma knew with absolute certainty that dogs were true angels on Earth. She blinked back the sudden tears that filled her eyes. “Connor? I—I’m afraid.”
Emma watched him glance down at the dial on his wrist: +94 percent! He held it out to show Marguerite as if to prove that his task with her was incomplete.
