The unexpected storm of emotion drove other thoughts from her mind. She wondered if this might be why she had just that morning changed the color of her hair from a bright violet to platinum blond that down the length gradually changed to pale pink that became darker until it was a vivid red at the tips, as if her hair had been dipped in blood. Signs sometimes came to her in such subtle ways.
Under the lone streetlight, she could see that the man was wearing a hooded, camo rain slicker. He paused momentarily to glance around in the drizzly darkness. The rain slicker gave him a hulking appearance. His gaze went from the bar’s sign, BARRY’S PLACE, to the neon beer sign, and then to the door.
She suspected he wanted a drink in the hopes of keeping a high from fading as the distance of days dulled the rapture.
They sometimes did that.
His indecision was brief. When he came through the doorway, his dark shape made it seem as if he were dragging the night in with him.
Seeing him standing in the dim light inside as he paused to glance around at the patrons, Angela felt a sickening mix of hot revulsion and icy fear laced with a heady rush of lust. She let the feeling wash over her, euphoric that she could feel something, even this.
It had been too long since she had felt anything.
Her hand with the towel slowed to a stop at drying a glass as she waited to see how long it would take him to notice her—her fear hoping he didn’t, her inner need hoping he did.
That dark, awakening desire won out.
Out of the corner of her eye she watched as he started toward the bar. Slowly rotating flecks of colored light from the ceiling fixture played over his camouflaged form, almost making him look like part of the room. Behind him, out beyond the window, the headlights of a passing car illuminated the murky drizzle. Fog was moving in. It was going to be a nasty night to be out in the mountains.
Other than a couple of older local men down at the end of the bar arguing baseball, and four Mexicans she had never seen before at a table near the front chattering in Spanish over their beers, the bar was empty. Barry, the bar’s owner, was in back checking stock and paperwork.
The man pushed his hood back as his gaze took in her platinum-blond hair tipped in red, her black fingernail polish, the row of rings piercing the back of her right ear, the glitter on her dark eye shadow, and her bare midriff. As he hoisted himself up on a stool, his gaze played over her low-rise, cutoff shorts and down the length of her long legs to the laced brown suede boots that came up almost to her knees.
Barry, the owner, liked her to wear cutoff shorts because it brought in men and kept them longer to buy more drinks. It made her better tips as well. When she’d cut the legs as short as possible, she left the pockets so she would have a place to put her tips. They hung down below the frayed bottoms of the legs. But, with the late hour, there weren’t many customers left or tips to be had.
And then, for a fleeting second when he lifted his face and looked up into her eyes, she stopped breathing.
In that instant, looking into his dark, wide-set eyes, she saw everything. Every horrific detail. The flood of it all was momentarily overwhelming. She thought her knees might buckle.
Angela finally leaned in on the bar to steady herself and so that she could be heard over the pounding beat of the rock music. “What can I get you?”
“A beer,” he called back over the music.
He was youngish although older than her, maybe in his late twenties, with shaggy hair and scraggly stubble on his doughy face. She noted that he looked strong. When he took off his dripping wet slicker and tossed it over the next stool she saw that she had underestimated how powerfully he was built—not bodybuilder strong, but sloppy, stocky strong, the kind of man who didn’t know his own strength until it was too late.
To others his features might appear ordinary, but Angela now knew for certain that this man was anything but ordinary.
After she drew the beer, she set it on the bar in front of him. She licked foam that had run over the glass off the back of her hand and then from her red lipstick as she glanced past him to the clock on the wood-paneled wall to the right. It was less than an hour to closing. Not much time. She pulled a bowl of corn chips from under the counter and set it beside his beer.
“Thanks,” he said as he took a chip.
She turned back to drying glasses, but not so far as to let him think she was spurning his obvious interest in her. “If you want more just ask,” she said without looking at him, giving him the opportunity to stare down the length of her body.
He took a long drink along with the long look and then made a satisfied sound. “That hits the spot.”
“You live in the area?” she asked, looking back over her shoulder.
“Not really.”
She turned toward him. “What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been staying just up the road at the Riley Motel.” He deliberately glanced down at her legs. “But I may stay for a while longer, find some work.”
The Riley Motel wasn’t the kind of place tourists visiting the upper reaches of the Appalachian Mountains or the Finger Lakes region would likely stay. The Riley was used mostly by the hour by prostitutes and by the week by transients.
“Oh yeah? What kind of work? What do you do?”
He shrugged. “Whatever needs doing that pays the bills.”
Angela poured a shot and set it down in front of him. “On me—for a first-time new customer who may be staying for a while.”
He made an appreciative face and tossed back the shot. As he plunked the shot glass down on the bar, his gaze again drifted down the length of her.
“Kind of a dumpy place for a girl like you.”
“It pays the bills.” She had to deliberately slow her breathing. “What’s your name?”
He held her gaze as he took another corn chip. “Owen.”
She had trouble looking away from his eyes and all that they told her.
“And yours?”
“Angela. My grandparents were Italian. Angela means ‘angel’ in Italian.” With a flick of her head, she tossed a disorderly shock of red-tipped hair back over her shoulder. “My mother named me Angela because when she was pregnant with me my grandmother said that God was sending her a little angel.”
Angela’s grandfather told her once that the meaning of the name Angel was “messenger from God,” and that while the messenger had come, Angela’s mother clearly hadn’t gotten the message.
Owen’s gaze moved from her eyes to the tattoo across her throat. “Is that some kind of joke?”
Angela flashed him a cryptic smile. “Maybe sometime you’ll have the opportunity to answer that question yourself.”
His expression darkened. “You fucking with me?”
She leaned in on an elbow so no one else would hear over the music and looked at him from under her brow. “Believe me, Owen, if I ever start fucking with you, you’ll know it.”
He didn’t quite know what to make of her answer, so he drank the rest of the beer. It was obvious that he was more interested in leering at her legs than trying to figure out what she’d meant.
Rather than wait for him to order another as he set down the empty glass, she set a fresh beer in front of him. She took the empty away and put it in the bar sink.
“Attentive little thing, aren’t you?”
She put on a flirty smile. “Someone needs to take care of a man like you,” she said as she poured another shot and dropped it in the beer.
He returned a grin and drank it all down, almost as if showing off.
“Maybe,” he said as he set the glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, “you could take even better care of me? What do you say?”
Her smile turned empty. “Sorry. You’re not my type.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
She placed both hands wide on the edge of the bar as she leaned in and spoke intimately. “I like dangerous guys who take what they want and do
n’t take no for an answer. Know what I mean?”
He frowned. “No. What do you mean?”
She paused for only an instant to invent a story. “I started going with my last boyfriend after he killed a guy.”
“Killed a guy? Straight-up killed him?”
“Well,” she drawled, “not like murdered him for the rush of doing it. I don’t think he had the balls for that. He killed the guy in a fight.” She gestured to the door. “Some drunk jumped him out in the parking lot when he left here. He broke the guy’s neck.” She winked as her smile returned. “Turned me on no end, know what I mean?”
“Sounds like a badass.”
“He was.” She shrugged as she pulled back. “That’s my kind of man. You don’t have what it takes.”
He weighed her words as he studied her face, her wild shock of red-tipped hair, the tattoo across her throat, the piercings. “I have my rough side.”
Angela huffed a laugh to dismiss his claim before turning to reach in and replace the whiskey bottle on a shelf in front of the smoked mirror on the back wall.
In the mirror she could see him looking at her ass.
She knew what he was thinking.
In a million years he would never be able to guess what she was thinking.
Trouble's Child Page 7
