Angel of the Morning

by Judith Arnold

  He ran a hand through his hair, wondering whether he should have worn his baseball cap. Or his sunglasses. Not that he could conceal his identity from Gwen. After they’d shared that song in the bar yesterday—if you could call staring at each other across a crowded room sharing—she’d recognize him.

  He distracted himself by studying a collection of scrimshaw pieces displayed on a shelf to his right. Each piece was unique—delicate seascapes painted in thin black lines on polished bone. His parents might like one of these. Scrimshaw wasn’t exactly ubiquitous in Nebraska. They’d be the only folks in town to own a painted whalebone.

  He lifted one of the pieces and studied it more closely. The whaling ship depicted on the smooth white surface could have belonged to Ahab. Dylan had read Moby-Dick in college and hadn’t liked it much, but he’d loved the idea of living on the ocean. He still loved the idea.

  “Dylan.”

  He hadn’t heard her approach, but her voice reached him, velvet-soft. He didn’t remember her voice being so muted. She’d been pretty loud in bed. When she’d come...

  Don’t think about that. He placed the scrimshaw piece back on the shelf and turned.

  Gwen’s voice might not match his memory, but her face did. She was still pretty in a fresh, unadorned way, her features delicate, her eyes a sweet pussy-willow gray fringed with thick lashes a shade darker than her hair. She wore a burgundy sweater and beige slacks, and her hair hung tousled past her shoulders. Bed head, he thought as his body clenched with another memory of her in bed beside him, beneath him, taking him in.

  He sucked in a sharp breath, then smiled. He was an actor; he could do this. “Hi, Gwen.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Shopping?”

  She struggled to return his smile. “I mean in Brogan’s Point. Aren’t you supposed to be in Hollywood?”

  He shrugged. “I have a few months free before we begin shooting the next Galaxy Force movie. I thought I’d...” He hesitated before saying he’d thought he’d buy a house in Brogan’s Point. Gwen seemed less than thrilled to have him standing in her store. That he was planning to buy a house in her town might send her screaming—and not in ecstasy. “Looks like the store is doing well,” he said instead. “It’s about double the size I remember.”

  “It’s doing fine,” she said tersely.

  Screw this. They’d gotten along beautifully the last time he’d seen her. Why was she treating him as if he were contagious? “Look. I didn’t come here to cause you problems, okay? I came because...you know. We had a good time together six years ago. That’s all.”

  Her cheeks flushed a delicate pink. Evidently she remembered just how good a time they’d had together. She turned her attention to the scrimshaw, shifting the piece he’d been admiring as if he’d put it back in the wrong place. “I’m sorry. It’s just—” She fidgeted with Ahab’s whaling ship a bit more, then lifted her face to meet his gaze. “That song. Yesterday, at the Faulk Street Tavern...”

  So he hadn’t imagined that the song had affected her as strangely as it had affected him. “Yeah. That was pretty weird, wasn’t it.”

  “Supposedly, that jukebox is magic.”

  He laughed. She allowed herself a faint smile, but apparently she wasn’t joking. “Magic?”

  “Just an old wives’ tale.” She pulled her hand back from the shelf. She seemed to be struggling to add some warmth to her smile, but she wasn’t doing a good job of it. Her eyes were glassy, focused not quite on his face but on something behind him, something only she could see. “Well. I’ve got to get back to work. It was nice of you to drop by. I hope you enjoy your visit.”

  He was about to tell her—to warn her, really—that this wasn’t just a visit, that he was hoping to move to town. But before he could speak, a child’s voice rang through the store, happily shrill: “Mommy! Look at the picture I drawed!”

  The color drained from Gwen’s complexion. She spun away from Dylan and squatted down in time to greet a fireball of a girl racing through the maze of aisles, chased by another girl who appeared to be in her late teens. The child wore jeans, a bright pink sweatshirt with sparkly stars on it, and sneakers with more sparkly stars glittering across the toes. Her hair was a mess of chestnut curls, her eyes big and dark, her cheeks adorably round and punctuated by deep dimples. She clutched a sheet of paper in her hand.

  “Look, Mommy! It’s Mr. Snuffy!” she shouted, shoving the paper at Gwen.

  Gwen took the paper and studied it intently. Dylan studied the girl just as intently. She looked a lot like Marissa, his nine-year-old niece.

  In fact, she looked almost exactly like Marissa when Marissa had been in kindergarten.

  Five years old? Was that the age of this little girl who was calling Gwen Mommy?

  “I’m sorry,” the teenage girl said, then giggled. “I tried to stop her, but she was so excited—”

  “That’s a wonderful drawing,” Gwen said, her affectionate tone a sharp contrast to the ice in her voice when she’d spoken to Dylan. “It looks a lot like Mr. Snuffy.” Dylan glanced at the drawing and concluded that Mr. Snuffy, whoever he was, was exceedingly brown and misshapen, with a fat tail and uneven ears. A dog, maybe, or a fox. Possibly an obese squirrel. “But I’m with a customer right now, sweetie, so you’ll have to go back to the office. I’ll be in in a minute, okay?” Gwen ruffled her fingers through the little girl’s curls, kissed her brow, and then stood back up. She remained with her back to Dylan, watching the older girl escort the child back through the store and away.

  Dylan watched them, too. He watched that little girl with her dancing curls and her dark eyes, eyes nothing like her mother’s.

  Eyes like his niece’s.

  Eyes like his.

  Holy shit.

  Before Gwen could turn back to him, he was out of the store, his heart racing, his fingers numb, his scalp tightening around his skull as if it wanted to squeeze the possibilities out of his brain. But there were only two possibilities he could think of. Either Gwen had adopted that little girl at some point after Dylan had left Brogan’s Point and moved on with his life, or...

  Holy shit.

  Chapter Four

  He was gone.

  Gwen supposed she should have expected as much. She’d tried to tell him way back at the beginning, and he’d blown her off. If he’d cared, if he’d had half an ounce of responsibility in his gorgeous body, he could have responded, taken steps, behaved decently. But he hadn’t done a damned thing—except to ignore her.

  That was then. This was now. He’d been confronted with the truth. He might make a different choice today than he had six years ago. That possibility scared the hell out of Gwen.

  He’d seen Annie. He’d figured things out. Maybe the sight of her jarred his memory of the emails Gwen had sent back then, pleading with him to get in touch with her. He was six years older and more mature. Maybe he would think he ought to honor the obligation he’d so blithely dismissed when it might have made a difference.

  If he wanted to pay child support, Gwen wasn’t too proud to take it. The extra money could mean a lot to Annie.

  But if Dylan Scott wanted to become a part of Annie’s life, to be her father...

  Forget it. That ship had sailed.

  Gwen moved the piece of scrimshaw Dylan had been examining a fraction of an inch to the left, as if by repositioning it she could nullify his having touched it. Her gaze drifted to the store’s entry. He sure had bolted fast. Not the behavior of someone who wanted to bond with his long-lost daughter.

  A vague queasiness overtook Gwen, and she turned away from the door. Who knew what he’d do? He had millions of dollars. He was Captain Steele, after all. He could hire lawyers. He could demand custody. He could take Gwen’s daughter from her, and change her name from Annie Parker to Annie Scott.

  No, he couldn’t. He might have money, but Gwen had Annie. She had five amazing, challenging, love-filled years as her daughter’s loving mommy. No court could ta
ke Annie away from her.

  Even so, she probably ought to hire a lawyer. Just in case.

  More queasiness. She was getting along okay, the store profitable, the monthly mortgage payments on her house covered without too much hardship, Annie well dressed and adequately supplied with crayons, books, and stuffed animals. But hiring a lawyer was expensive. Gwen wasn’t sure she had enough of a financial cushion for that. Especially if she would be battling a Hollywood star.

  Then again, what could a Hollywood star possibly want with a demanding five-year-old daughter? Dylan was probably halfway back to California already, running for his life. Gwen would never see him again. They were nothing to each other, nothing other than victims of one long-ago night.

  Where had that notion come from? She’d never thought of herself as a victim before. Yet the phrase resonated inside her head: Victims of the night.

  She realized it was a line from that song, the plaintive ballad the jukebox had played yesterday when she’d spotted Dylan at the Faulk Street Tavern. Weird that she’d never heard the song before, yet some of its lyrics had imprinted themselves on her memory. Victims of the night. Gwen wondered what the phrase referred to, what it meant.

  Giving her head a resolute shake, she hurried through the store to the staff rooms in the back. The hallway at the rear of the building led to several storage rooms that held her inventory, an employee restroom, a snack room barely large enough to contain a mini-fridge, a microwave, and a coffee maker, and her office. She’d devoted a significant chunk of that office to Annie.

  Running a store as a single mother was tougher than anything Gwen had ever done before. Some mothers worked weekdays from nine to five and were able to spend their entire weekends with their children. For Gwen, though, Saturday was the Attic’s busiest day of the week. She had an excellent assistant manager who oversaw things from noon until closing time on Saturday and all day Sunday, but Gwen felt she owed it to her staff and her customers to spend Saturday mornings at the store. Fortunately, she’d found the perfect employee in Jenny, who didn’t mind babysitting Annie in the morning as long as Gwen let her work the cash register in the afternoon. She was a sophomore in high school, barely old enough to work legally. But she loved the store, and she’d started pestering Gwen for a job even before her sixteenth birthday. As soon as Gwen could hire Jenny without breaking the law, she had—as a part-time babysitter and a part-time cashier.

  Gwen found them in her office, where they usually spent their Saturday mornings. Annie sat at a tyke-size school desk Gwen had rescued from one of the estate-liquidation hauls her friend Diana Simms had brought her a few months ago. The surface of the desk was covered with paper and crayons. Mr. Snuffy, Annie’s bedraggled stuffed dog, was propped up on another chair. He was the ideal artist’s model, sitting perfectly motionless while Annie captured him with her box of sixty-four colors. The drawing Annie had raced into the store to show Gwen was one of about eight; across the desk top lay several lesser efforts. Gwen hoped Mr. Snuffy appreciated being the subject of so many portraits.

  “You know who that guy looked like?” Jenny said as she picked a couple of crayons up off the floor.

  Gwen nodded. “Yes. He’s the actor who stars in those silly space movies.”

  “Really? That was him? Are you sure?”

  Gwen nodded.

  “Oh, my God! I would have taken his picture. I don’t know—maybe he wouldn’t have let me. He’s so cute!”

  More charismatic than cute, Gwen would have argued, but she let the comment pass.

  “The Galaxy Force movies aren’t silly,” Jenny said. “They’re allegories.” She must have been paying attention in her English class.

  Gwen allowed that the movies weren’t that silly. But the only movie of Dylan’s that had truly touched her had been Sea Glass, the film that had brought him to Brogan’s Point. Sea Glass hadn’t survived long in the theaters. It was too quiet—a family drama without a single car chase or explosion in it. A month after the cast and crew had decamped, the first Galaxy Force film had been released, and it had been such a huge success, Sea Glass went all but forgotten.

  Gwen hadn’t forgotten it, however. She’d bought her own copy as soon as it had been released on DVD, and she’d viewed it more times than she’d care to admit. She’d sat in her darkened living room, long after tucking Annie into bed, and watched the sweet, moving story of a modest family in a seaside town, struggling in the aftermath of the patriarch’s death. He’d been a fisherman, and he’d drowned at sea. Dylan had played his son, determined to take his father’s place at the helm of his fishing boat, the Sea Glass. His mother wanted any other future for him but that. The ocean had claimed her husband, and she couldn’t bear the possibility that it might claim her son, as well.

  It was a beautiful film. A small film, as the critics liked to call arty, subtle movies like Sea Glass, filmed on a shoestring budget with a bunch of then-unknown actors. No one had predicted that the space opera Dylan had filmed just before joining the cast of Sea Glass would be so enormously successful, launching a blockbuster franchise. No one had foreseen that the handsome, sensitive actor who’d played Tommy in Sea Glass would suddenly become famous as Captain Steele.

  If that movie’s an allegory, Gwen thought with a sniff, it’s an allegory about gaining fame while losing your humanity.

  Had fame and fortune changed Dylan Scott? She had no idea. She hadn’t really known him then, and she knew him even less now.

  She’d be a fool to believe he hadn’t changed, of course. Look at how much she’d changed. Back then, she’d been...well, the sort of woman who’d spend a night in bed with a near stranger. No promises, no professions of love. No strings to bind your hands.

  She caught her breath. Another line from the song she’d heard yesterday at the Faulk Street Tavern. How had it taken root in her mind? Why?

  “Can we have lunch at Riley’s?” Annie asked, gazing up hopefully at her mother.

  Gwen was startled by how much Annie resembled Dylan. She had never really thought about it before. Possibly that was because in his incarnation as Captain Steele he was clean-cut and polished, and Annie never looked clean-cut or polished, even after she climbed out of the bath. Mostly, however, it was because Gwen thought about Dylan as rarely as possible. True, he was her daughter’s father, and his name appeared on Annie’s birth certificate. At some point—in the distant future, Gwen had always assumed—she would tell Annie about him.

  But not now. Not when she and Mike were finally figuring things out, and he was easing gradually into the role of Annie’s step-father. He’d already proposed to Gwen, well aware that marrying her meant accepting Annie, too. Gwen hadn’t said yes to him, but she planned to, once she felt Annie was ready to share her mother with Mike.

  The last thing Gwen needed was Dylan Scott barging in and screwing everything up.

  “I think we’ll go home for lunch,” she told Annie. What she really thought was, if she was going to have to hire a lawyer, she’d better start counting her pennies. Riley’s offered big portions at small prices, but still, Gwen could feed Annie for less at home. “I’ve got peanut butter and bananas. You know what that means, right?”

  “Ice-cream!” Annie said, then broke into laughter. “For dessert, Mommy.”

  Gwen laughed, too. The hell with Dylan. He’d had his chance to laugh with his daughter, and he’d blown it.

  ***

  The Faulk Street Tavern was packed that night. Everyone in town had loved having the film folks around, adding a little glamor and stardust to their sleepy seaside town, and everyone wanted to party with them. The Hollywood people weren’t really “Hollywood” people. They’d always behaved down-to-earth and modest, making few demands and apologizing when they had to block off a street or a wharf for filming, even though they’d gotten permissions and licenses from Town Hall. Really, they were very nice.

  Besides, they’d spent lots of money in town. During the summer, Brogan Point bustled with b
each people, but things tended to quiet down in the autumn, especially after the foliage had peaked and the leaf-peepers had departed. Except for December, when holiday shoppers packed the place, the Attic generally saw about half the amount of traffic in the off months as it did in the summer.

  A woman named Linnette, who’d been introduced to Gwen as the movie’s artistic designer, had wandered through the Attic several times, buying items she thought would give the actors’ costumes and the scenery an authentic New England feel. Gwen didn’t understand movie stuff, but she understood what Linnette was looking for and helped her to choose items that would add that authenticity. Like a film designer, Gwen was an expert at creating appealing atmospherics. A store had to look inviting. It had to be arranged in a way that made customers want to come in and browse—and buy. She imagined that adorning a film with the right candles or clocks or umbrellas was just as important as arranging a store’s merchandise.

  On a few of her shopping sprees, Linnette had brought other people from the film to the Attic with her. Gwen had met the director, a big, bearded bear of a guy in rumpled jeans and T-shirts with a variety of political slogans printed across them. Linnette had also introduced her to a couple of the cast members. When Dylan had accompanied Linnette on one visit, he and Gwen had had a fine time talking about the Midwest. He was from Nebraska and she’d grown up in central Illinois. They’d both appreciated the sight, the scent, the feel of the ocean in a way people who’d grown up near the coast never would. Unlike Brogan’s Point natives, they didn’t take the salty fragrance, the humid breezes, and the constant lullaby of waves breaking against the beach for granted.

  So she’d headed to the Faulk Street Tavern on the crew’s last night, when they were celebrating the wrap of their location filming. She’d broken up with Adam just a couple of weeks earlier, and she’d been feeling lonely and vulnerable. Partying with the film people seemed like a good distraction. She needed to learn how to have fun as a single woman, now that she was no longer one-half of a couple.