Gabriel's Inferno (Gabriel's Inferno, #1)

by Sylvain Reynard

She heard anguish and sorrow rip out of his chest. And she felt compassion. She wanted to go to him, to offer condolences and comfort and to put her arms around his neck. She wanted to smooth his hair and tell him that she was sorry.

And when all her tears were gone and the stores had closed for the evening, Julia walked back to her apartment slowly and began to beat herself up for having been a bad surrogate daughter, a lousy friend, and an insensitive twit who didn’t know better than to check a scrap of paper to see if it was blank before she left it behind with her name on it for someone whose beloved mother had just died.

The term brown-eyed angel seemed oddly familiar, but since he couldn’t think of the source for that reference he put the thought aside.