Tied With a Bow

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    These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for authors’ or third-party websites or their content.
     
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    PRINTING HISTORY
    Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / November 2011
     
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
     
    Tied with a bow / Virginia Kantra . . . [et al.].—Berkley Sensation trade paperback ed. p. cm.
    ISBN : 978-1-101-54759-5
    1. Love stories, American. 2. Paranormal romance stories, American. I. Kantra, Virginia.
    PS648.L6T54 2012
    813’.08508—dc23
    2011033825

     

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Upon a Midnight Clear
     
    VIRGINIA KANTRA
     
    To Carolyn Martin, who knows a thing or two about angels.
     

Chapter One
     
    PARIS, FRANCE, DECEMBER 1792
     
    The angel came down in the long gallery of the Conciergerie prison, the notorious antechamber to the guillotine.
    Stone walls could not keep him out. Stench and darkness offered no deterrent. He was a child of the air, elemental, immortal, one of the First Creation. As long as he did not materialize completely, he could go anywhere.
    Cold seeped through the blocked grates and up from the flagstones along with the miasma of human misery. The corridor was alive with sighs and sobs and vermin. In the bloody wake of revolution, the prisons of Paris were filled to bursting with the ci-devant aristocracy and their suspected sympathizers. Few had the money or influence to secure the comforts of a private incarceration, a bed, food, firewood, perhaps a chamber pot. Cells intended for one or two prisoners held four, six, a dozen men, women, and children, packed together on the filthy straw like so many bottles of wine.
    In the stone blocks adjoining the exercise yard, some poor soul had scratched BIENVENUE EN ENFER. Welcome to Hell.
    But this was not Hell. There were still those here who called on God in their distress. So the angel had come, drawn by a dying mother’s prayer to provide . . .
    Not escape, the angel acknowledged. He felt the brush of some unusual emotion, threatening his angelic detachment. Frustration, perhaps.
    The children of air were forbidden from interfering directly in worldly affairs. With rare exceptions, humans must work out their own fate, their own salvation. But the angel could offer comfort to ease the woman’s soul from this life to the next.
    His frustration—if that’s what it was—deepened. Tonight, solace did not seem enough.
    He flexed his shoulders at the admission, feeling a prickle between his shoulder blades. He was an angel of God. Comfort was his stock in trade. It must suffice.
    A woman’s hoarse Latin slipped through the bars to hang like frost in the air. “ Sancta Maria,