Not Quite an Angel (Harlequin Superromance No. 595)

by Bobby Hutchinson

  Adam went into the bathroom, pulled off his shorts and shirt and stood under the shower spray a long time. He fought against memories, but they flickered through his mind unbidden.

  Myles, driving all night to pick him up the third time he’d run away from the academy.

  Sameh, exhausted and sweaty, asking him to try just one more street, one more hangout, one more alley, in case the boys were there.

  Myles, standing beside Adam’s wheelchair at the veterans’ hospital, telling him he was taking him home.

  A letter in Sameh’s handwriting, sent to the office and addressed to Troy and Cougar.

  Cursing, Adam roughly dried himself, pulled on sweat-pants, picked up the phone and stabbed in the numbers. “Detective Lopez, this is Adam Hawkins.”

  IT TOOK AN HOUR and a half to reach downtown San Diego, another twenty minutes to locate the juvenile detention center where the boys were being held.

  “They were picked up for shoplifting, boosting candy bars and bread out of a convenience store,” Lopez told Adam. “If you pay the fine and take responsibility for them, I think the owner’ll waive charges. They didn’t have any weapons or drugs on them, and they’re not members of any gang that we know of. Not yet, anyway,” he added with a tired sigh. “It’s only a matter of time before they get recruited, though, and then they’re headed for big trouble.”

  Adam had to visit a bank machine, hand over a substantial amount of cash, and slash his signature across innumerable forms promising God alone knew what before Troy and Cougar were at last released into his custody. They were filthy, their clothing ragged, and they were trying to hide how really frightened they were behind a thin veneer of bravado, but the look in their eyes and their trembling gave them away.

  The first thing Troy said after Adam loaded them into the car was “So, man, where’s Sameh? Why didn’t she come with you?”

  The blatant need in the boy’s voice struck a raw nerve. Adam didn’t answer. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about Sameh to anyone. He rolled the windows down—the two of them smelled disgusting—and he turned on the car radio and let music fill the silence, all the while telling himself how furious he was at them for putting him through this, how furious he was at himself for letting them do it.

  “Are you gonna take us home, Adam? To your house again, I mean.” Cougar’s voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “I mean, like, your portable stereo and all the CDs got stolen, man, and we sold all that booze we took. I lost that knife of yours—we were getting chased by the cops one night and we jumped a fence and it fell outa my pocket. Man, you gotta be nuts to take us home with you again, right?”

  “You got it, in spades,” Adam snarled. He deftly negotiated the late-night traffic and took the most likely route to the freeway. “I’m a goddamn certifiable lunatic to have anything to do with you two again. There’s just one thing I want to know, and after that the both of you shut up and stay shut up till we get back.” He spaced the words out. “Why—did—you—run—away? What the hell were you running away from, for God’s sake? You had jobs, a place to stay, the chance at some training. Why did you run?”

  Neither boy seemed to have an answer. After a long, charged silence, Troy sighed and leaned forward from the back seat, resting his arms near Adam’s shoulder. “Like, it was just too good, man. We just got scared, ’cause it was way too good.”

  Adam thought of Sameh, of the night he’d been so afraid of her leaving him he’d said things he knew would drive her away, and he knew what Troy was talking about. He had to force himself not to think of her. The boys’ presence made it marginally easier. “You guys hungry?”

  “We’re starving.”

  He pulled off at the next exit and headed for a fast-food outlet.

  MORE MONTHS PASSED. Cougar and Troy stayed with Adam during the long interval it took to get them reaccepted at Phoenix Ranch, and during the time they were with him, he found he was finally able to talk about Sameh.

  The letter she’d written them had promised he’d explain all about her, and in a halting monologue, waiting for their hoots of derision, he related exactly what she’d told him about herself, where she’d come from and returned to, and why. He found they accepted what he said without a second of doubt.

  They asked a lot of questions, intelligent questions that he sometimes had trouble answering, and in their way, they mourned her leaving just as he did, but they didn’t disbelieve any part of her story. Adam remembered his own disbelief and was ashamed.

  “You loved her, huh?”

  Adam nodded. “I still do. I always will.”

  “Well, maybe she’ll come back,” Troy said.

  Adam shook his head, but Cougar nodded. “Sure she will. She done it once, she can do it again,” he stated with the perfect faith of the young.

  After that, they came to trust him enough to talk about what their lives had been like on the street.

  With a casualness that sickened him, they discussed the incest and physical abuse they’d endured before they finally ran from the parents who were supposed to love and protect them. They told stories of their friends on the street, children who chose street prostitution over sexual abuse at home, who became involved with drugs and pimps and murder. They talked about young people who banded together in street families. It was clear to Adam that these “families” of abused, lost children were trying to care for one another with far too few resources to help them.

  He thought of his own mother often, and, not for the first time, wondered what influences had made her choose a life of prostitution. He searched his early memories for any mention Gina might have made of her family, of a mother or a father. As far as he could remember, she’d never once mentioned any relative, and he wondered why. What nightmares had she concealed behind the beautiful face, the loving smile she’d always had for him? He wished that she’d lived, because now he knew that they could have been friends as well as mother and son.

  And always, day and night, Sameh’s memory stayed with him. Her face was stamped on his inner eye with indelible detail, her voice echoed in his ears, and the remembered sound of her irrepressible giggle brought a sad smile to his lips.

  “The hope for the future lies with the children,” she’d repeated so often.

  After Troy and Cougar had been safely settled at Phoenix Ranch, Adam found himself cruising the streets of downtown L.A., watching the street kids and wondering what future there could possibly be for them. A few more months passed before he took action.

  Celebrity security had made him familiar with many of Hollywood’s influential people. Wrestling with his own distaste for publicity, he began to use his contacts in efforts to raise money for shelters, counselors and training programs that would get more kids like Troy and Cougar off the street. Janice soon became involved; she was the one who named the organization the Samaritan Foundation.

  WITHOUT ANY CONSCIOUS effort, an internal clock in Adam’s head kept track of how many days, how many months, and finally, as the seasons came and went and came again, how many years had passed since Sameh had gone away. It was October, and the total was two years, three weeks, four days.

  It was Saturday, and he had a benefit to attend that evening. Blue Knights was doing security for a fund-raising dinner. Some of Hollywood’s most famous stars would be there, and a healthy portion of the money raised would go to the Samaritan Foundation. Adam planned to make a short speech on behalf of the foundation, outlining what they’d accomplished in the past few months. Bernie had begun kidding him about needing Blue Knights bodyguards himself, he was becoming so well-known. Adam still hated doing anything of a public nature, but he’d gradually become more at ease in his role as spokesperson for the organization.

  He’d shopped for groceries that morning, changed the sheets, washed a couple of loads of clothes, picked up his tux from the cleaners and bought a birthday present for Troy’s sixteenth birthday. He got him a mountain bike, something that Troy had been hinting at for weeks
. Adam had promised him a car at the end of the semester if his marks stayed as high as they’d been all year. Both boys already knew how to drive; Adam had taught them himself, getting his first gray hairs in the process.

  He liked to get the chores out of the way so that Sunday was clear to spend with Cougar and Troy. He’d bought a sailboat a few months ago, and the three of them were learning how to sail. The boys had filled a huge, empty space in his life, all too often with hair-raising emergencies, but also with laughter and energy and youthful exuberance.

  And love. How the hell had he come to love a couple of gawky teens so much, anyhow?

  At noon, he made himself a thick ham and cheese sandwich, generously smearing on mayo and mustard, the way he liked it. He took it and a beer out to the deck, looking through the haze to watch the waves licking the shore. A man and woman stood locked together at the edge of the water, his arms crossed on her back, hers twined around his neck. They weren’t kissing, but they looked as if they either just had been or would begin at any moment.

  Adam watched for a moment, a nostalgic ache in his throat as he remembered how it had felt to hold Sameh that way. Would it ever go away, this soul-deep, endless longing for her?

  He bit into his sandwich and took a slug of beer. It amazed him sometimes to realize he’d been as celibate as a monk since she’d left. It was getting tougher as the months passed, though. He was, after all, not a monk, and he supposed that as time went by, sooner or later he’d find some pretty lady or other who made interesting conversation and make an effort to get to know her. So far, it hadn’t happened.

  Not even close. Women still came on to him, the way they always had, but he’d grown adroit at letting them know he wasn’t interested. Now why that should be a challenge to some women, he really had no idea, but it often seemed to work that way. He grinned ruefully and shook his head as he took another slug of beer, thinking of the one particular situation which was getting more and more difficult for him to sidestep.

  Bonnie French was one of Hollywood’s new crop of stars, a sensual and intelligent woman, aggressive as hell about her career and, Adam was finding out, aggressive as hell about the men she chose to sleep with. He’d met her through Samaritans. Bonnie had adopted the foundation as her pet charity, which made for wonderful publicity for her and benefited the street kids. Unfortunately she seemed to have decided Adam should show his gratitude for the money she raised by ministering to her in bed.

  Up to now, he’d neatly deflected Bonnie’s advances without insulting her—God knew the foundation needed the visibility she provided—but it was getting tougher all the time for him to gracefully slide out of her grasp. The woman was like an octopus or, as Bernie said, maybe more like a barracuda. He glanced at his watch. She was going to be at tonight’s benefit. He’d have to make sure she didn’t get him alone.

  He was finishing the last bite of sandwich when the phone rang. It was Bernie. “Everything in place for tonight, Hawk?”

  “I called Janice and she’s got everything under control.” Janice was now a full partner in Blue Knights. She was a good investigator—hell, she was better than good, she was exceptional. She kept Bernie and Adam on their toes. The only investigation she hadn’t gotten to first base with was the disappearance of Tyrone Wallace and Violet Temple, but neither had Adam and Bernie. Those two had disappeared without a trace.

  “Fran blew the bank account on a new dress for this one, Hawk. Her mother’s gonna baby-sit.”

  “Tell the kids hi from me.”

  “Will do. See ya about six.”

  SAMEH RUBBED HER HIP as she headed for the pay phone.

  Before she’d left this time, she’d put the four quarters she’d taken back with her two years before inside her sandal to use for calls when she got here. She leaned against the side of the phone booth, hopping a little as she retrieved them.

  She’d probably have a gigantic bruise on her bottom for weeks, the way the techies had landed her this time. For a newly qualified but clumsy Adept, landing in a heap on the sidewalk outside Giorgio’s on Rodeo Drive was demoralizing.

  Her simple tunic wasn’t exactly haute couture, and the elegant woman she’d knocked into had screamed and made a terrible fuss, even though Sameh had apologized profusely as soon as she’d come out of delta and realized what had happened.

  Passersby gave them both a wide berth for the hectic few moments it took to untangle herself and get to her feet. The woman hadn’t even said thank-you when Sameh teleported all her parcels back into the elegant shopping bag she carried. “Disgusting,” she’d hissed, instead. “Drunk in broad daylight, here of all places. Where are the police when you need them?”

  You’d think the techies would get better at landings. Maybe by the time Delilah arrived next year, they’d have learned to do a better job.

  Sameh dropped the quarter twice before she finally managed to reach Fran and Bernie’s number and her heart did a mad, skipping dance when Bernie answered. “It’s Sameh” was all she had to say. She gave them her exact location, and within a few ecstatic moments, her friends were on their way to pick her up.

  She plopped down on a bench at a bus stop to wait, and she thought about Adam and wondered for the zillionth time what his reaction would be when he found out she was back here in the nineties. She’d spent untold hours before the trip trying to figure out if she should call Adam first when she got here, but shyness and insecurity had stopped her.

  She knew he wasn’t married to someone else, she knew he still thought of her, she knew—oh, she knew all sorts of delightful and secret things about Adam. Kendra and Gamma had insisted on checking him out, a rather thorough and invasive mind, body and reincarnational check that was probably as illegal here in the nineties as it was in 2502.

  The thought of Kendra and how far away she was brought a lump of homesickness to Sameh’s throat and tears to her eyes. It had been harder than she’d imagined it would be, leaving her great-grandmother, even though Kendra had promised she’d come for a visit when—Sameh’s face flushed. When Sameh got pregnant with her first daughter, Kendra would come. Sameh’s obligatory sterility had been reversed a few days before in a landmark decision by the Fertility Commission, even though they hadn’t interrogated Adam beforehand as they always did with prospective fathers.

  Kendra and Gamma had produced all the data they’d collected on Adam, and the commission had accepted it in lieu of a personal interview. Sameh’s case had been the first of its kind, and the romantic aspects had won over even the phlegmatic hearts of the twenty-four female commission members.

  She was the first Adept to ever apply for and receive permission to emigrate to the past on a permanent basis. The official reason, of course, was that she was coming back to continue her work with Delilah, to help that lady accelerate the spread of information and awareness in order to facilitate the progress toward the New Age. The Fertility Commission suspected, though, that the main reason she was returning was because she’d fallen in love with an old-fashioned man, and they were right.

  Of course, Sameh also planned to teach anyone who wanted to learn all the disciplines she herself had now mastered, like telekinesis, hypnosis and teleportation. And, most important of all, healing. It was the discipline she was most proud of attaining, the one that had been the hardest for her to master, and was now the dearest to her heart. With Gamma’s help, she’d spent the past months researching cerebral palsy, and Kendra had helped her learn the exact techniques she’d use to heal Corey.

  She couldn’t wait.

  “Sameh, Sameh, is it really you?” The sound of Fran’s jubilant voice brought Sameh to her feet. Bernie had parked illegally in the bus zone, and he and Fran were breathlessly racing toward her. A moment later, engulfed in their arms, their happy tears mingling with her own, Sameh felt all traces of her homesickness disappeared.

  She’d come home.

  All she needed to make her happiness complete was the man she loved.

  HE
WAS BACKED FLAT against the green concrete wall of a dressing room backstage. Bonnie’s lavish breasts were all but erupting from the top of her silvery dress, and they were pressed so tightly against his chest he could feel her nipples right through the fabric of his tux.

  “You’re sooo strong, Adam. So sexy.” Bonnie French was doing her best to undress him. Her nimble fingers kept tugging at his zipper.

  “We’d better get back out front. Aren’t you introducing one of the entertainers, that country singer—” Adam’s breath caught sharply as her other hand cupped him. He groaned, which encouraged her. He finally managed to grab both of her wrists in his hands and he held on for dear life.

  Where the hell was his own security company when he needed it? Janice had assured him that every inch of this place was covered by Blue Knights, so where was the muscle—his well-paid muscle, at that—who were supposed to be working backstage?

  Bonnie writhed against him. “There’s lots of time, baby.” Her voice was husky, her skin flushed. “I’m a quick study. There’s a couch right over there—wouldn’t we be more comfortable lying down?” She stood on tiptoe and pressed her full lips to his, pushing her tongue between his teeth, demonstrating graphically what she wanted from him.

  He could taste lip gloss and booze. He tried to break off the kiss without insulting her, but there was a narrow line there, one he wasn’t sure how to negotiate with her tongue stuck halfway down his throat.

  Damn. If she kept this up much longer, he was going to have to tell the lady where to go, and then Samaritan would be looking for another sponsor. On the other hand, months of abstinence were taking their toll, and in spite of himself he could feel his body beginning to respond to the bundle of eager, perfumed, writhing femininity now tugging her skirt up and undulating her shapely hips against his crotch.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think of Sameh.