Alex and the Angel (Silhouette Desire)

by Dixie Browning

  What he wasn’t used to was the pair of combat boots parked on the second step, their tops flapped over, with one worn rawhide lace dangling through the banisters. Or the shabby canvas and leather shoulder bag that was draped over the back of one of the side chairs his mother had bought in France on her honeymoon.

  Or the sound of giggles and splashes drifting in through the open windows.

  He followed the sound to the pool and halted in his tracks, struck by the sight of a lanky beanpole and a small, hippy woman, knees bent in launching position at the far edge of the pool, both laughing too hard to dive.

  They’d probably sink like a pair of rocks if they went over now, he thought, half amused, half exasperated. The water was really too cold to swim in. Sandy had been after him to close it in and heat it, and there was no real reason why he shouldn’t. He just kept putting off a decision. Lately it was as if his whole life was on hold.

  Which was about as crazy a notion as he’d ever had, and he’d had some pretty bizarre ones. Especially over the past few days.

  Without conscious thought, he wheeled around, unbuttoning his shirt as he climbed the stairs. Five minutes later, he was down again, wearing trunks, a towel and a pair of sandals.

  They were just coming inside. Not even to himself would Alex admit his disappointment. “All done?” he asked with a smile that had to be forced.

  “Oh, hi, Daddy! We washed the dirt off in the shower before we went in, so don’t worry about the filter. And we got barbecue and stuff for supper, so I told Flora she could go early. She’s got an appointment with her chiropractor, but Angel showed her this neat thing you can do with a tennis ball, and about shoes and all, so maybe she won’t grunt and groan all the time.”

  Not a whole lot of this made sense, but Alex was so busy trying to swallow his disappointment, not to mention trying not to goggle at Angel in a faded blue tank suit, that he hardly noticed.

  Dina was a beanpole. Carol was a beanpole. His own daughter was a beanpole. Was there something desirable about being skinny? For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why any woman would starve herself and spend half her life sweating in a gym in order to attain beanpole status when small breasts, a tiny waist, flaring hips and well-rounded thighs were so damned lip-licking delectable that one glimpse of them was enough to derail a man’s entire train of thought.

  “Yeah...what? That is, sure—okay. Whatever you want, sugar.”

  He did fifteen laps, telling himself he was working the kinks out. When a man spent hours bent over a desk, his neck muscles tended to tighten up.

  Right. And when he lay awake half the night imagining the way a certain woman looked underneath a pair of hideous coveralls, a few other muscles tightened up.

  Thank God for a swimming pool. First thing tomorrow, he decided, he was going to call in a contractor and see about having the thing heated and enclosed. Now that Angel was back in his life, he had a feeling he was going to be swimming a lot of laps.

  Five

  It wasn’t going to work, Angel told herself. With Gus there to act as a buffer it hadn’t been quite so bad, but once he’d left she’d felt like such an outsider. She couldn’t do anything right.

  For instance, the barbecue. At least once a week, she’d been in the habit of taking home a sliced plate for supper. It was cheap, it was easy, it was delicious. So when Sandy had mentioned the delectable smell of hickory smoke as they’d driven past Charlie’s on their way home, she’d pulled in and ordered three plates without giving it a second thought.

  It had seemed like a good idea at the time—a token repayment for Alex’s hospitality. Only, one did not eat barbecue from plastic plates in a formal dining room, under the snooty noses of a flock of ancestral portraits.

  So they took the three plates to the breakfast room. Starved from having worked hard all day and then come home and swum the kinks out of her muscles, Angel opened hers up and dug in.

  It occurred to her belatedly to wonder if Alex even liked barbecue. She could remember a time when he hadn’t been too proud to eat cabbage and corned beef at a kitchen table, but that had been then and this was now.

  Another impulse gone awry, she thought resignedly as she salted her fries.

  They were discussing the making of fine compost when Alex joined them, his hair still dark from the shower. Evidently he hadn’t stayed in the pool very long.

  “And then, about every third layer, I add some well-rotted...” Angel glanced up guiltily. “Uh...we didn’t wait. I thought you’d be longer.”

  “No problem.”

  “I probably should have asked first. About the barbecue, I mean. We drove right past Charlie’s Pig Pit and it smelled so good....” The expression pleaded understanding. “I didn’t know what you wanted to drink. Sandy said beer. I probably should have left it in the fridge until you finished your swim.”

  “It’s fine. Thank you.”

  Angel watched his hands as he lifted his heavy stein. He had beautiful hands, long fingered, square tipped, dusted with golden hair. Hands that had figured in more than one of her fantasies. She had more calluses than he did, and his nails were in better shape, but she suspected that there was more strength than was apparent hidden in those hands of his.

  The stein had been Sandy’s doing. On the rare occasions when Angel drank beer with a meal, she drank it straight from the bottle to save washing a glass. Under Alex’s roof, she wouldn’t dare do anything so crass. Just one more difference between them. He had probably never in his well-ordered life discussed manure at the dinner table.

  But then, she wasn’t used to discussing anything over dinner. She usually took hers in the kitchen with the six-o’clock news, her only conversational offering a few rude comments on the political gaffe of the day, plus the occasional prayer to the weather gods.

  Thinking of Flora’s baked salmon, asparagus and au gratin potatoes, all shoved hastily into the refrigerator, she could have kicked herself for acting so impulsively. Alex had probably been looking forward to it. Not that Flora was such a wonderful cook, but then, anything would taste good served on paper-thin china, with hemstitched linen napkins and sterling flatware that weighed in at five pounds a place setting.

  Besides, Angel thought self-righteously, it was her civic duty to support the local economy. Charlie’s pig was probably homegrown, and while she didn’t know exactly where the salmon had come from, she was pretty sure it hadn’t swum up the Eno River.

  With that thought tucked firmly in place, she scraped the rounded corners of her foam plate with a plastic spoon and then popped the last sweet hush puppy into her mouth, telling herself she had earned every bite. Potting forty-seven Little Princess spirea, seventeen Purpleleaf sand cherries, and heeling in a row of Spring Snow crab apples was hungry work even without the added exertion of plunging into a chilly swimming pool and trying to keep up with a teenager who swam like an eel.

  Tomorrow she was going home, roof or no roof. Alex didn’t owe her anything, and now that Gus had left, there was no one to talk her out of it. As soon as he finished his supper—or his dinner, or whatever—she would tell him so before he disappeared to get dressed for the evening. He probably had a date with his blue chip Barbie doll.

  Bracing herself to tell him she was moving back home, Angel carried the remains of their dinner out to the kitchen. If she irritated Flora into quitting, Mrs. Gilly would bear the brunt, and the elderly woman, while largely useless, was a dear.

  Twenty minutes later, she located Alex in the study. Arms crossed over her chest, she made her announcement from the doorway. “I’ll be leaving in the morning. For good, I mean. To go home. Um...thank you for your hospitality.”

  He studied her silently for a moment, making her feel as if she ought to apologize. “You weren’t comfortable here?”

  “Of course I’m comfortable here, that’s not the point!” she snapped, irritated at being put on the defensive. Damn him, why couldn’t he have lost his hair or developed a paunch? Why d
id he have to look so damned beautiful, with his bony, elegant face and his lean, fit body?

  “I take it the carpenters have finished up, then?”

  She shrugged. “All but. The electricians will be in first thing tomorrow, but it shouldn’t take them long to finish up. It can’t be that big a job just to replace a little wiring.”

  “Why not stay until Gus gets back to town?”

  She could have told him why. That the more she was exposed to him, the harder it was going to be to work him out of her system. That certain childhood afflictions—measles, mumps, love—were far more dangerous when one succumbed as an adult. Any woman with the brains of a thumbtack would cut her risk of exposure.

  * * *

  At odd times during the day, Alex would catch himself thinking about Angel Wydowski instead of the business at hand. About the way she had of laughing. Her laugh hadn’t changed much in all these years, yet coming from a woman, the effect was different. Every nerve in his body registered the pitch of that husky little giggle.

  When had he memorized the way her eyes crinkled, the way her lips slid over her teeth just before that slow, infectious laughter broke out? Yesterday?

  Or twenty years ago?

  When had he begun to wonder what her mouth would feel like? What it would taste like? When had he begun to wonder if she would taste the way she smelled, like green, growing things—like flowers and freshly cut grass?

  Swearing softly, he jammed his pencil into the electric sharpener. This was crazy! She was nothing to him! The kid sister of an old friend, nothing more. Not even a kid any longer. She had to be somewhere in her early thirties, although she didn’t look much older than she had the time she’d gotten hold of a pack of cigarettes, made herself sick and thrown up in the back seat of his new Mustang.

  He’d had to clean her up and then talk her out of drowning herself in Jordan Lake.

  Angeline Perkins. He wondered what her husband had been like—wondered what had happened to him. Wondered what she’d been like in bed, and then cursed under his breath, buzzed his secretary and told her he’d be out all afternoon.

  “Take any messages—tell ‘em I’ll get back to them. I won’t be near a phone for a few hours.”

  He kept a couple of horses at a boarding stable a few miles out of town. His own gelding and Dina’s mare, which Sandy and Carol rode occasionally. He could have kept them on his own property—he had enough acreage—only it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

  That was the trouble, he thought with bitter amusement. These days, nothing seemed worth the trouble.

  * * *

  Galloping across the wide dry pasture later in his shirtsleeves and a set of old jodhpurs and boots he kept there for times like these, Alex found his thoughts veering back to the woman he’d come out here to escape.

  Angel. Little Devil Wydowski. Was it the novelty that fascinated him? The fact that she was completely unexpected—completely unlike any other woman he knew? Instead of being involved in some respectable white-collar profession, or even dividing her time between volunteer work, the golf course and the club gym, Angel got down and dirty. Quite literally.

  He’d come home the second day she’d been there to find her grubbing about in his backyard while old man Gilly held forth on the merits of Mepps spinners versus plastic worms for catching bass. Phil Gilly’s idea of heaven included a bass boat, a trolling motor and an endless supply of cheap fortified wines.

  Angel. She invariably kicked off her shoes the minute she got into the house. He would find them later on the steps, under the coffee table or tumbled beside a chair, the leather laces sprawled in tangled abandon. She took her diet cola straight from the can, ate French fries with her fingers, and read romance novels without even bothering to hide the covers. And she giggled like a schoolgirl, setting off a lot of crazy impulses that were totally out of character for a dull, middle-aged man with a half-grown daughter.

  Although, come to think of it, even Sandy had fallen under her spell, and that was even harder to figure. Sandy didn’t make friends easily, especially not with adults. She’d always been shy and a little self-conscious, yet she’d laughed more and sulked less in the few days Angel had been in residence than she had all year.

  Feeling the hot September wind in his face as he galloped across the dry pasture, Alex gave up on trying to work the woman out of his system. Like poison ivy—like any other itch—this one would just have to run its course. Meanwhile, he’d do well to remember that scratching an itch could sometimes lead to complications.

  Angel. He wondered if she still yelled her head off at baseball games. Gus’s life had been football. She’d been a baseball nut. It figured.

  Think about something else, man!

  The furniture market was coming up in less than a month. He was in the middle of a buy-out, and all he could think of was what it would be like to lay a certain redhead down in the tall grass and rock her bones until they both went up in flames.

  The gelding shied as a rabbit darted across the path. Alex managed to stay in the saddle, but a glance at his watch told him he’d already stolen far too much time. He swore with surprising fluency. For all the good it had done him, he might just as well have stayed at the office.

  * * *

  She was gone. He would have known it the minute he walked through the door, even if she hadn’t warned him she’d be leaving. The house had that familiar drab, dull, empty feeling he hadn’t even noticed before she’d come back into his life. No cola cans on the coffee table. No boots on the stairway. No lumpy canvas shoulder bag slung over the newel post.

  No giggles.

  For Gus’s sake, he should have insisted on driving her home to see if her house was safe for habitation before he let her go. But then, what did he know about such things? Even if he’d put his foot down and insisted she come home with him until Gus got back to give the all clear, she would have just laughed in his face. Small she might be, but the lady had the determination of a diesel locomotive.

  Sandy was back to normal. Blaming him for everything that was wrong in her life. “At least you could have begged her to stay,” she flung at him over dinner.

  “I told her she was welcome here as long as she cared to stay. The choice was hers to make, Sandy.”

  “Well, it was a rotten choice! And it’s all your fault, I don’t care what you say, because Angel and me got along just great! She really liked me, too, not like some people I could mention, who want to have me locked up in some cruddy old girls’ school until I’m a hundred years old!”

  “Angel and I.”

  She glared at him, her lower lip thrust out in a manner reminiscent of her mother. Dina had always been good at sulking. “Angel and you what?”

  “I was correcting your grammar,” he said tiredly, wishing that for once he’d had the good sense to let it pass.

  “Oh, crud, that’s all you care about!”

  “Don’t be crude, Alexandra, and grammar certainly isn’t all I care about. I care about you. Only I can’t seem to get through to you these days. Is it all my fault, or are you deliberately trying to be difficult?”

  Which drew precisely the response he should have anticipated. Sandy flung down her napkin, raked back her chair and raced from the room in tears.

  Alex stared unseeingly at his untouched dinner of cold salmon, stringy braised asparagus and cheesy potatoes that tasted as if they’d been reheated. He wondered what would happen if he simply allowed her to curse, butcher the language, dress like a floozy and run wild with the rest of the pack. He wondered if heredity would eventually overcome peer pressure.

  He was still wondering a few hours later when Gus showed up.

  “Am I glad to see you! Come on in—drop your bag by the stairs. As it happens, I’m in the mood to tie one on for the first time in years.”

  Gus slung his bag toward the stairs. The Wydowskis were never big on formalities. “If I remember correctly, I nursed you through your first binge. Wanna talk about it
before your tongue goes numb?”

  “Not to you, old man. Nothing personal.” Alex’s lips twisted in a bitter smile as he led the way to the study. “Have you had anything to eat? Did you run into any problems? I thought you were going to be gone until the middle of the week.”

  “Yes, yes and no, in that order. By the way, you sure you don’t want to reconsider the binge? You were always a lousy drunk. Better than old Kurt, but neither one of you was much fun on a toot.”

  “It’s cheaper than a shrink. More private, too. How’d the trip go?”

  Gus sank down into one of the deep leather chairs that had helped build the reputation of Hightower Fine Furniture, flexed his shoulders and sighed. Alex had always valued privacy. Something to do with being an only child, he figured.

  Or maybe not. “The trip went fine. The job is pretty much like one I did up in Kinnakeet Shores last year. I found a place to stay, leased it through December, checked in with a few suppliers who deliver to the Outer Banks and came on back. I had a funny feeling Angel might be getting restless, am I right?”

  “Restless and gone. She left this morning. Is it a problem?”

  Gus stroked his beard, which was somewhat shaggier than when he’d turned up a little over a week ago. “Not really. I figured she wouldn’t stay away too long. Structurally, I guess the place is sound enough. She probably could have moved home after the second day, but I kind of wanted to get a cleaning crew in first. Not that I wouldn’t have had a fight on my hands. One thing the witchlette’s never been good at is accepting help. The older she gets, the worse she is in that respect.”

  Which didn’t come as any great surprise. She’d always had a stiff-necked pride that had been amusing when it hadn’t irritated the hell out of him. “What about her wiring? Is it safe?”