Chapter Eight
When he returned to stand in the middle of his apartment and don his earthly body, the pounding on his front door was frantic and incessant.
“Michael. Where are you? Are you in there? You never lock your door and…I went back into my apartment to collect myself and tell you that I wouldn’t marry you, but when I returned, your door was locked. Please let me in.”
Michael opened the door, stopping Leslie’s frantic words in mid-sentence.
“You are here. I had this terrible feeling that you’d gone away for good.”
He took her in his arms. “I would never go and leave you, Leslie, without saying goodbye.”
She pushed herself out of his arms. “So you were thinking of leaving.”
“No. Why would you think that?”
“You wouldn’t be the first man to take me to your bed and then disappear.”
“I’m here to stay, Leslie.”
“I should have known better,” she said. “I should have known you weren’t the kind of man to just…take your pleasure and then cast me aside like an old shoe.”
He smiled at her with that wonderful smile. “You could never be taken for an old shoe. You’re far too pretty.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr. O’Malley.” She colored, a faint pink blush. “I guess it already has.” She leaned toward him and sniffed. “You smell wonderful.”
Michael knew it was the scent of heaven she was smelling, the scent of purity. This was possibly the last time he would wear it. “It’s a special soap from Ireland. After we are married, you may borrow it, if you wish.”
“After we’re married,” she echoed. “How strange that sounds.” And how very wrong.
He needed to distract her. He had frightened her badly by leaving so abruptly, but Gabriel had not given him a choice.
Michael began talking, telling Leslie about the antique store and that together they owned it now. She tried to interrupt him, tell him that she hadn’t agreed to marry him, but he went on sharing his ideas about how they would work together to make the store a success. What he didn’t share with her was the fact that Bernard had a relationship with a crime syndicate.
“How is this possible, Michael? You don’t have any money. How could you buy Bernard’s store?”
“What made you think I was not possessed of funds?”
“Well, you didn’t have a job and you stepped in for me at Moniker’s. I thought you did that because you needed the money.”
“I did that not because I needed the money, but to help you, dear heart.”
“Oh, Michael. Sometimes I think you’re just too good to be true. You do have faults…don’t you?”
“I am afraid that, after we are married, you will soon discover my faults.” He went to the coffee maker. “Would you like that cup of coffee now?”
She let the remark about being married go. “Yes, Michael, I believe I would.”
He wore a t-shirt that clung to his muscled torso lovingly. He moved around the kitchen, plucking two coffee mugs from his cupboard and setting them out on the counter with the assured grace of a man who is in control of his body. Why did I derive such pleasure just from looking at him? I supposed it was because, in addition to being nearly flawless physically, there was a peace about him that seemed to flow outward and envelope me. If I were crazy enough to marry him, he would have no peace at all.
He poured the coffee and handed me one of the cups, while he leaned against the counter on the other side of his small breakfast bar. I should feel ashamed of myself for how quickly I had given him my body. But standing here, gazing at him over my cup, I didn’t feel ashamed. I felt…complete.
“How is the script coming?” he asked.
“Quite well. Harvey liked my changes and has incorporated them. Now I’ll have to do the second act so that it’s compatible with the first. Of course, the guy who wrote the script originally hates me. He throws daggers at me from his eyes every time he looks at me.”
Michael set his coffee cup down. “My dear. Does Mr. Melville allow that?”
I smiled at him, loving his concern. “It’s just a saying, Michael. I meant that he gives me dirty looks.”
“Dirty looks?”
“You know. Mean faces. Like this.” I drew my brows down and glared at him.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Caught again. Would he ever really learn the English language? Evidently one hundred years of listening to stage dialogue wasn’t quite good enough to keep up to date with today’s speech.
She set her coffee cup down and glanced shyly at him. “I should go.”
“Would you like to stay the night?”
“Would you like to have me stay?”
“Yes,” he said, and waited with that quiet patience he had.
“Then I’ll stay.” I wasn’t going to marry him. But what harm could there be in staying one more night. Just one more night to feel his presence, to feel the peace he brought me.
It felt strange walking into his tiny bedroom with him behind me. There was barely enough room for me to stand. “Do you have a preference for one side or the other?”
“No,” he said. “You pick the side you like.”
I opted for the outside of the bed, thinking that if my newly pregnant bladder decided I should get up and head for the bathroom two hours from now, I wouldn’t disturb Michael. He went to the foot and crawled up the bed on all fours and lay down on his side so he was facing me.
I lifted the covers and stretched out in the bed with my back to him. Without saying a word, he reached for me and brought me into his body spoon fashion. He had an erection. “Michael…”
“Shush, Leslie. It’s all right. Go to sleep.”
The faint light coming in from the window lit a different wall here than it did in my bedroom. I thought that would keep me awake. That was not nearly as disturbing as Michael’s strong, bare body warm at my back and ready for action. I should turn round and do something about that erection, but I was too tired. My eyelids drooped.
“Sleep well, my love,” Michael murmured. When he was sure she was sound asleep, he used his great strength to crawl backward out of bed so he wouldn’t disturb her. He thought about a cold shower to relieve his erection, but decided against it. The running water might wake Leslie. Instead, he went out into the kitchen to research starting up an antique store.
He opened up his laptop and visited many different places on the Web. By the time he was finished, it was five o’clock in the morning, and he was more frightened than he’d ever been in his life and his erection was gone.
When Leslie woke and went out into the kitchen, Michael was standing against the breakfast bar, a mug in his hands, his eyes on his lap top.
“Good morning.” He looked up and gave her one of his beautiful smiles, as if nothing momentous had happened between them. “I hope you slept well.”
“Surprisingly well…considering. I expected to lie awake all night, asking myself what I had done, having sex with a man I barely know.”
He set his coffee cup down and came around to her to draw her into his arms. “You will soon know me better than anyone on earth.” He held her back to look into her eyes. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
“I could never be afraid of you, Michael. What I am afraid of is hurting you without knowing that I’m doing it.”
“I know your heart, Leslie. You will never hurt me.”
“There you go again, giving me that feeling that you don’t really know what life is all about. It’s human nature for people to hurt one another without really meaning to. It happens all the time.”
“It won’t happen with us.”
“I wish I could be as sure as you are, Michael.”
“We have much to discuss.” He brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. “Will you be free to go to the store with me? I’d like to give you some idea about the changes I want to make and see if you have any ideas of your own.”
She had
to make him understand. “Michael, we can’t go ahead with this mad scheme. I can’t marry you.”
“I thought things were settled between us.”
“I’ve told you that I can’t marry you.”
“Yes, that’s what your words say. But your heart says something different.”
“You’ve already bought the store. What about business permits and taxes?”
“All that was expedited the day of the sale.”
“You certainly work fast, Michael.”
He got that impish gleam in his eye that every once in a while peeked out from underneath his angelic exterior. “I do, don’t I?”
“Michael, this is serious.”
“Buying a new business is very serious. Now how about you hop next door and get dressed and we will go take a look at our store.”
“It’s not our store. But I should go with you to see how badly you were cheated.”
In my apartment, being careful to move around quietly as I dressed so I wouldn’t wake Marion, I pulled on my jeans and t-shirt quickly, thinking that I was glad the nausea had subsided. Funny. It seemed to have disappeared at the same time Michael appeared. I felt as if I were in a dream.
I suppose it wouldn’t hurt me to go to the store with Michael. Even if we aren’t married, I could certainly continue to work there.
The smell in the store had intensified. “Oh,” I groaned, waving my hand in front of my nose.
“It’s been closed up for a few days. I am going to install an air cleaner as soon as we can get someone in here.”
“I suppose we’ll have to take inventory.”
“We can do that, but it should be at the bottom of the list of our priorities. The first thing we need to do is the display window. I assume you can do that, Leslie?”
“I can.” She looked so eager and happy this morning that he’d decided he would not tell her about the little problem with the crime syndicate. She went dancing through the store, looking at the collection of Ming vases, two sets of Chippendale chairs, one with a classic Gothic arch, one a shellback armchair, and the collection of miniature angels reposing on a shelf toward the back.
“Oh, look at this one, Michael.” She plucked a figurine from the bunch and clutching it tightly, held it up for Michael to see. His blood went cold. Out of over a hundred figurines, she’d picked up the one Bernard had told him was his good luck charm. It was the figure of a male angel, about twelve inches high. His face was lifted up to the sky and his wings were spread. His countenance had a dark, tortured look about it, not the expression one expected to see on an angel’s face.
“He hardly seems angelic.”
“But don’t you see,” Leslie said excitedly. “That’s what makes him so unique. He’s enveloped in this heavenly body, but he looks as if he’s going through hell.”
Oh, no. That’s the angel Bernard said reminded him of me.
“It’s such a wonderful contrast.” Leslie tipped the figurine up to examine the base. “There’s no artist credited. It’s perfectly blank.” She studied the figurine again, and then brought that discerning gaze to his face. “In fact, Michael, he looks a lot like you. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Very strange, indeed,” Michael murmured. “Heaven knows I’m no angel.” Wasn’t that the truth?
“Oh, Michael,” she said, laughing. “You are to me.”
“Don’t you think you should return it to the shelf before one of his wings bumps into something and breaks off?”
Leslie hugged the figurine to her chest. “I’ll take very good care of him.” Her face lit up like a kid at Christmas. “I’ll use him for the window display. I’ll make the whole display look like a bit of heaven and he’ll be the centerpiece.”
“Leslie, it’s almost Thanksgiving. Don’t you think a harvest theme would be better, pumpkins and leaves and Pilgrims and all that evokes Thanksgiving?”
“Every antique store in the city will have pumpkins and leaves and Pilgrims. Ours will be different.”
“Indeed,” he muttered, having second and third thoughts about bringing Leslie into the store to work beside him. It might be more difficult than he thought to maintain a businesslike attitude with his bride-to-be. Then it hit him. He wasn’t an angel anymore. He’d have the normal urges of a human male, the urge to protect, which was tied to the belief that his way was the best way. “So when people come in and ask to buy your centerpiece angel, will you sell him?”
“Most certainly not.” She clutched the figurine to her chest. “He’s not for sale. He’ll never be for sale.”
“Then it is probably not wise to use him as a centerpiece.”
“I’ll post a sign on him, a very small sign,” she added, smiling, “that he is not for sale. People understand that stores often use things for display that they aren’t selling.”
“Seems an odd bit of business to me.”
He put sliders under eighteenth century curio cabinets so he could move them without Leslie’s help, and positioned them together on one side of the room. When he finished that, he began to stack a collection of primitive items, wooden buckets, brooms and woven blankets on the other side. Leslie hummed a little tune while she gathered together a blizzard of angel figures and began giving each one a home in the store window.
By five o’clock, Michael discovered another new feeling. He was exhausted and dirty. Leslie was just as ecstatic as she had been when she started. Were pregnant women gifted with an inexhaustible energy supply? Shouldn’t she be as tired as he was?
“Come see, Michael.”
She dragged him out onto the street in the waning light of day. He stood gazing in amazement at her window display. Clustered around the male angel, she’d placed a myriad of cherubs gazing up at him adoringly. On the right side a full-sized female angel stood, dressed in a simple white dress Leslie had found in the used clothing section. She’d outfitted her with paper wings, cut so precisely Michael could hardly tell them from the real thing. On the other side of the window, Leslie had placed the Chippendale arm chair and draped it with gauzy fabric to make it look like a throne. The crowning touch was a scepter she’d unearthed in a dusty back room. For the backdrop, she’d hung fishnet and covered it with the same gauze. She attached cherubs so they looked as if they were floating on a cloud.
“What do you think?”
“I think you have a gift, Leslie.”
She leaned over and gave him a smacking kiss on the cheek. “That’s for admitting how wrong you were about my angel. I’ve named him after you. He is now Michael. Without the O’Malley of course. Are you pleased?”
“About the window, yes, very pleased. About naming your angel after me, no.”
“Why not?”
“I do not know. It makes me feel…silly, somehow. I am not an angel, and you must not think that I am. I am an ordinary human being.”
“I’m sorry you’re not pleased. But I’m not going to rename him. Let’s lock up and go home.”
They walked along the street together, Leslie chattering happily about the store window and the process she’d gone through in creating it.
“…I’ll tell Harvey tonight that I’ve done everything I can on the script. I think he’s ready to let me go anyway. Now about the window. I got to thinking I needed to represent a heavenly being who reigned over us all and I realized I could only do that with an empty chair…Michael, are you listening to me?”
Another normal male reaction to female chatter. He didn’t think it could happen to him with Leslie, but it had. He really wished she would be quiet so he could think. The noise of the city, constant chatter from passersby, occasional car horns honking, a man carrying a cardboard sign offering free hugs, a strange creature with a blue complexion waving at him, overloaded his senses. On top of all the city noise, his mind was still on the store.
The store’s books hadn’t been put on computer but instead were entered in an accounting book. The better to hide money, he supposed. From somewhere he conjur
ed up the male response that men have given women since the dawn of time. “Yes, my sweet, I heard every word you said.”
She wanted to challenge him on that, but “You look worried. I’ve never seen you look worried before.”
“Now that I am a businessman, I think I have the right to look worried.”
“I suppose you do,” she conceded. “What did you do before you came to New York, Michael? I know you didn’t work in a pub. How did you make your living?”
It almost made him sad to think there would be no more pinging for his telling of lies. He must keep as close to the truth as he could. “I was a…guardian for a powerful family.”
“It wasn’t dangerous, was it?” Leslie was wide-eyed with concern. “You didn’t…carry a gun?”
“No, I didn’t carry a gun. I was…a benign kind of guardian.”
“I’m not sure I know what that means.”
“Me, either.” He opened the door of the apartment building and stepped back for her to precede him up the stairs.
Inside the apartment, Leslie cried, “Oh, no. What was I thinking? I should have bought something for our dinner. I guess I’m not used to being a working woman responsible for our dinners.”
“Since I am not used to being a business man, we are a pair. Shall we go out to eat, then?”
“By the time we both get cleaned up, it will be quite late. I think Marion might have some left-over pizza in her refrigerator. I’ll go check. Why don’t you shower first?”
“I believe I will. Thank you, Leslie.”
At the door, she turned. “For what?”
“For being you,” he said.
She gave him a dazzling smile and left.
He showered and dressed and picked up a pair of slippers Leslie had left in the bedroom. Then he stood and looked out the window, wondering what was keeping her so long.
After an hour and a half, she came through the door, her wet hair hanging in dark strands around her head. “I decided to shower over there where my soap and shampoo is and then Marian had to hear all the details about the store. I’m sorry, Michael. Are you starving?”
“I’m a little hungry, yes.”
Some Kind of Angel Page 9
