Love in the WINGS (6 page)

Corbin's offer to make the twenty-minute drive with her had come as a welcome surprise. They'd closed the church office early, hopped into his pickup and driven out of town. Within the first mile past the town limit sign, the sticky weightiness that had choked Angel Falls for weeks simply dissipated. Aria's window was down, and she stuck one hand outside, startled to find the air cool and pleasant. She whipped her head around to look at Corbin, whose elbow rested on his own window frame. He nodded.

That was the only acknowledgment she'd needed. She hadn't wanted to spoil the pleasure of getting out from under the oppression for a time.

On their way back to Angel Falls now, Aria leaned her head against the seat behind her and thanked God for her neighbor's steady support. Without it, she wasn't sure she'd have made it through the past two very difficult weeks.

They pulled under the big Heart's Haven sign and Corbin reached across the seat to give her hand a squeeze. “You've been amazing through all of this.”

“So have you.” She returned the pressure and pulled free of his hand just as he parked in front of his cottage. “I'd like to walk later, after I get a chance to rest a bit. Would you—” She paused, and gnawed at her lip. Was she being too forward? Oh, well, she was too tired to care about propriety. “Want to come along?”

He winked and one side of his mouth tilted upward. “Sure.”

She nodded. “I'll call when I'm ready to go, but don't hold your breath. I'm planning on a good, long snooze.”

As she walked across the lawn to her own gate, she grinned. Corbin Bishop's smile could make most girls' hearts do a triple time quick step.

Two hours later, she rolled out of bed, groaning. Would she never be allowed to sleep again without seeing that poor, beaten boy in the barn? She was beginning to wonder if there really was a boy somewhere close who needed help. Were the Heart's Haven angels trying to tell her something with these unrelenting dreams?

She splashed cold water on her face and dried it with a hand towel, then leaned against the sink and looked around the room. No harps or haloes. Not even a feather in sight. “Well, if you're there, and you want me to know something, I sure wish you'd just tell me. If I don't get some sound sleep—and soon, mind you—I'm going to become the first zombie with an actual beating heart.”

She grabbed a scrunchie and pulled her hair back into a ponytail at her neck, then rolled her eyes at her pale reflection. “Now I'm talking to myself. Enough already.”

Hurrying into the kitchen, she punched Corbin's number into her cell phone and grabbed a bottle of water while she waited for him to pick up. “Hey, I'm headed down the trail. You coming?”

 

****

 

“You look tired.”

Corbin slanted a glance toward Aria. They'd walked in silence for a good quarter mile. Every few minutes, she heaved a sigh, one he was pretty sure she wasn't even aware of. Faint circles of darkness shadowed her eyes. In fact, Aria's overall appearance this afternoon bespoke total weariness.

“I am tired.” She pulled in another deep whiff of the fresh Angelina air, and looked his way just long enough to give him a ghost-smile that did weird and wonderful things to his heart. “I'm not sleeping much.”

“I thought you were going to get some rest this afternoon.” He didn't mention his own spotty sleep. Those crazy dream-memories threatened to drive him straight over the edge, but Aria didn't need to know that.

“I did lie down. I even slept. But—” She broke off and gave a sharp little shake of her head. “Sleep isn't the most restful place for me lately.”

“No?” He grabbed her hand and tucked it under his elbow, deliberately slowing their pace. Aria seemed determined to outrun something, and it didn't seem to be working. Letting it catch up might help—at least she could get it off her chest this way. “Want to talk about it?”

She shook her head, and then nodded. He almost teased her about the contradictory body language, but something stopped him. Her uncertainty was anything but funny.

“I might. But be warned—it's going to sound crazy.”

Now he allowed himself a bit of a chuckle. “Trust me, little songbird, I know ‘crazy.' Intimately. Spent more time in its company than I care to think about.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “You're not crazy. Not even close. But something's bothering you, and…well, sometimes talking about it helps. I've been told I'm not a bad listener.”

He didn't dare mention that he had two broad shoulders she was welcome to cry on. She'd probably bite his head off and spit it at his feet.

Another lengthy silence ensued, during which he could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. She was clearly trying to decide whether to trust him.

“Aria, I know we kind of got off to a rough start, you and I. But these past couple of weeks…it's been better, hasn't it? I think Pastor David's decision to have us pray for each other was a good one.”

“I agree.” Her voice was soft, almost shy. “And I'm still praying for you, Corbin.”

Surprised, he turned to look at her, glad the sun was still up so he could see her face. A soft blush stained her cheeks. Long, thick lashes framed her eyes and created lengthy shadows beneath them. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail like a little girl, and her face fresh and clean, without even a hint of makeup, she seemed the picture of innocence. Sweet, candid innocence, tinged with a shadow of something sad…something he wanted desperately to erase.

Corbin swallowed hard, shaken to the core by a sudden desire to pull her into his arms and kiss her until she couldn't even remember her name—much less whatever was bothering her.

She spoke then, breaking the moment, and he eased a breath of relief between his lips.
Thanks, God.
You sure know when to step in.

“I've been having dreams.”

“Well, dreams can be good…or they can be really, really bad. Which is it?”

“It's awful!” She tossed her ponytail over her shoulder and swiped at her cheek.

If she cries, I won't be responsible for my actions, Lord. Just sayin'…

“I keep having the same dream—well, various versions of the same dream—over and over again. When I wake up from it, I fight going back to sleep because I don't want to go back to that place. I've prayed and cried and tried to decide if it's something from God or just something weird in my brain, but it keeps coming, and—” Her voice broke. “It's on my mind every moment of the day.”

“I'm sorry. That kind of thing can be torture.” He knew that to be true, but his mind-movies were more memory than dream, and they were his cross to bear. Not hers.

“Torture is the perfect word. You sure you want to hear this?”

“Well, now that you've piqued my curiosity, it wouldn't be nice to leave me dangling, would it?”

She laughed softly. “OK. You asked for it.” And she dove straight into her dream world. “It's always in this big building—a barn, I think.”

Corbin's mouth went dry. “A barn?” he croaked. He hadn't intended to interrupt, but dreams about barns struck such a painful chord, he'd spoken without thinking.

“I think so.” She frowned. “Corbin, are you OK?”

“I'm fine. Keep talking, I want to hear.”

She held his gaze for a few seconds that felt like forever. Was she looking into his soul? He breathed a silent sigh of relief when she finally broke that eye-hold and walked on.

“Well, OK, I guess. Where was I? Oh, the barn. Sometimes I enter from outside because I hear voices. Other times, well, I'm just
there
, inside the barn. The scenario is almost exactly the same every time; I just see it from different perspectives. Once it was like I was looking down on it from above—maybe the hayloft or something, I don't know.”

“So the dream setting is the same. Your entrance varies.”

She offered a wan smile. “You
are
a good listener.”

“OK, whatever.” He rolled his eyes. “What's inside the barn?”

“A boy. He's maybe—”

“A boy.” Again, Corbin broke in without meaning to. “There's a boy in the barn.”

Was Aria having dreams about him? The thought galled him. It was bad enough that she witnessed his humiliation and abuse in his own dreams. God, please, don't let her dreams go there too!

She nodded, apparently not hearing the horror in his croaky voice. “Yeah. He's about thirteen, I think. Could be fourteen or fifteen, though—I'm not much good at guessing ages.” She paused to send him a cute little self-deprecatory twist of her lips. “He's dressed only in his underwear, and his wrists and ankles are bound—tied with a rope, and they're scraped raw. His back—” She stopped and covered her face with both hands. Her shoulders heaved with silent sobs. “His back is an angry mess of raw, bleeding flesh.”

Corbin tried twice before his voice worked. “Let's take a break.” He took her elbow and guided her off the trail toward a picnic bench in a small clearing nearby. Once seated, he wrapped one arm around her shoulder and tucked her close to him. “You don't have to keep talking if this is too hard.”
Please stop.

“No, I…I need to talk about it, I think.”

God, give me strength. I can't believe what I think I'm hearing.

“All right. Then just take your time.”

“OK. So I'm in the barn, watching this all play out. There's a man standing over the boy. He's drunk—he has a bottle in one hand and some kind of leather strap in the other, and he's…” Her voice hitched, and she closed her eyes, as if to block out the hideous vision. “He's beating the poor kid and yelling awful things about—” She broke off, and her shoulders grew still beneath his arm.

He'd told her he didn't believe in angels. He knew what she needed to say, and why she hesitated.

“About angels.” He said it for her, and her surprised, tearful gaze widened and fixed on his own. “He says the angel told him to beat the devil out of the boy.”

“H—How…?” She raised a trembling hand and touched his cheek. “Corbin? How do you know that?”

 

****

 

The raspy prickle of a five o'clock shadow tickled her fingers, made them want to dance across his face, to become intimately at home with the strong curve of his jawline, and the precise shape of his lips. The bottom one, a little fuller than the top, begged to be caressed.

Aria pulled her hand back and slid it under her leg for safekeeping. But she held his gaze, probed it with her own, searching for…she wasn't sure what. The clear azure of his eyes whirled and coalesced into a deep, smoky gray. How had she not already noticed that Corbin's eye color changed with his mood?

The world went still around them. Leaves that had swayed in a gentle breeze only seconds before no longer stirred. Not more than a heartbeat ago, a glorious symphony of birdsong had filled the air, but neither chirp nor tweet nor warble broke the heavy silence of the here-and-now.

Corbin's jaw flexed…relaxed, then flexed again. He returned her questioning gaze with the trapped expression of a man on the wrong end of a loaded gun.

And something else. Pain. Raw, heartbreaking, mind-shattering pain. The same agonizing torture she'd seen in her dreams every night for the past week.

In those very eyes.

No.
Her soul shrank from facing the truth that stared back at her in Corbin's broken expression. The abused kid in her dreams was real. He had survived that torture, grown to manhood, and now sat beside her in an agony of mortification.

She shook her head. Her eyes burned with tears that overflowed and streaked down her face in hot rivulets. When she spoke again, the words ripped from her throat in a painful, hoarse whisper.

“Oh, no, Corbin. No.
You?
”

 

****

 

Scathing humiliation seared his soul and rushed in head-spinning waves into his face. The thought of Aria seeing him spread-eagled on those hay bales like a helpless fish waiting to be fileted went against everything his masculinity stood for.

“I, uh—I think I've been having the same dream.”

She narrowed her eyes and peered into his soul, then shook her head.

“Your eyes…I can't believe I didn't recognize them. You're the boy in the barn.” She placed a soft hand on each side of his face and leaned close so she could press her forehead to his. “Oh, Corbin. I'm so…
so
sorry!”

His arms were around her before he gave them permission to be. He tucked her close, reveling in her sweetness, hungrily absorbing the elusive scent of jasmine that floated around her. Something about the soft fragrance heightened his senses, and he couldn't tell if the pounding in his ears was the sound of his heartbeat or hers. Her arms went around his waist in a tight hug and she rested her head against his chest.

Corbin forced himself to breathe, and willed his pulse to slow. Could a heart pound so violently and not explode? Aria was offering comfort. That's all. She barely tolerated his existence, and yet her soft heart couldn't handle what he'd gone through.

For Corbin, though, the moment changed everything. His world would never be the same. Because now that she was in his arms, he never wanted to let her go.

 

 

 

 

7

 

As they walked back to the complex, Corbin's introspective mood twisted Aria's already raw emotions and squeezed her heart in a painful, unrelenting grip. His obvious embarrassment burned into her soul. She longed to ease his pain, but found herself battling an inexplicable shyness. Every ounce of courage she possessed came into play when she slipped a tentative hand into Corbin's.