He couldn’t imagine George wasn’t slated for a Heavenly destination, but you never knew. He thought he knew everything there was to know about Georgina Denise Maverick after observing her for close to a year, but surprises still happened.
Titus stared at him with dull eyes. “You’ve watched her for a year, Dex. How could you think otherwise? This is Georgina Maverick we’re talking about, after all. Goofy AF, clumsy, puts her foot in her mouth sometimes, is way too nice, eaten up by guilt…but evil? Only if puppies and kittens are evil, my friend.”
Also true. If her fate tonight had been death, she definitely would have landed upstairs. Apparently, his paranoia was getting the better of him.
However…
Dex looked around at the empty street, watching a lone plastic bag drift along the sidewalk in the wind. “That still doesn’t explain how you’re going to slip her in without anyone knowing, Titus. Accounting is a brutal mistress. They know everything. They’ll know there’s one extra body roaming around that isn’t supposed to be there. And her wings? How can she earn her permanent wings without setting off alarms? Permanent wings are a big deal, T. A big damn deal. Getting them is like graduating from Harvard summa cum laude. There’s a ceremony and everything. She can’t get wings if she doesn’t exist, Titus,” Dex hissed.
“And neither can you. If they find out you saved her, no matter what her intended fate was, you’ll never get your perms, buddy. They’ll assign you something twice as hard. George is a walk in the park compared to, say, a career criminal or an addict. Do you want to start over again? Or do you wanna let me think?” he asked.
But Dex shook his head. “Look, I screwed up. It’s not fair she should miss the pomp and circumstance and the privileges that come with permanent wings because I kept her from her destiny. Especially if I interfered and saved her and she’s going to miss a shot at learning from an expert guardian. I’ll do the right thing and hand myself over to Frank. It’s the only way. I’ll just tell the truth. It’s what we do, Titus.”
And then he’d beg to be kept on his earthly duties with someone else.
Damn. He felt like a real heel right now. Not thinking things through was how he’d landed where he was right this second, but that he’d been so careless with someone he’d come to…
He felt like a dick.
Just then, Titus’s phone chirped his favorite song by Tavares, “Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel.” With an agile arm and the strength of an ox, he repositioned George, flicked the butt of his cigarette, and dug his phone from the pocket of his robes to read the text.
“Okay, I’m gonna have to hit the pave,” he grated on a sigh, tucking the phone back in his robes. “I’ve got my own sitch, pal. You know that numbskull Gianni Giannelli?”
Dex nodded, his eyes still fixed on George’s face. “Yeah. The one who works in Outgoing with the greaser hair and thick Brooklyn accent?”
“That’s the one. I swear on a gilded harp, I can’t believe Frank hasn’t shipped that buffoon off to a job that doesn’t involve human beings.”
Dex winced. “What’d he do this time?”
“He delivered the wrong baby to the wrong couple. One Mickey O’Sullivan is gonna be very disturbed to find Hanson Wang’s baby pushing her way out of his wife’s—well, you know. I have to git and hit up that live birth before World War Three breaks out at Cedars Sinai. Both mothers-to-be are in labor right now.”
Putting a hand on his friend’s arm, worried he was putting too much on his shoulders, he said, “Listen, Titus. Let me fess up to Frank. You have enough on your plate.”
Titus repositioned George in his arms and grated a sigh, his chiseled face a mask of uncertainty. “Just wait, okay? Please. You’re a damn good guardian, Dex. Your heart and your intentions are in the right place. You have the potential to be an amazing guardian.”
He tried. He really did, but sometimes…sometimes he thought he knew better than the establishment, and it always got him into trouble.
Titus slapped him on the back. “Before you go sticking yourself with some job you hate for eternity, wait. Let me worry about this, all right? I’ll figure something out. We’ll worry about perm wings and all the perks when we have to. For now, I’ll figure out how to get her on the books while you teach her to be a props guardian. For the time being, that’s your focus, and you have your work cut out for you, buster, but don’t jump the gun. Not yet. I can’t afford to lose you. Please promise me you’ll wait to tell anyone until I can figure this out. Do it for me?”
Dex gave him a sheepish glance. “I’ll wait. I promise. And I owe you one, Titus. I owe you one big.”
Titus handed George to him and nodded dismissively. “Yeah, yeah. Forget that for now and let me go figure this out. I’ll be in touch.”
Titus glowed for a moment, his ethereal beauty almost too magnificent to bear, bathing them in warm light before he disappeared, off to right a possibly devastating wrong.
Dex gazed down at George in his arms and winced at her legs dangling in the cute dress she’d bought, hoping it would cheer her up after her breakup with douchecanoe Darren.
She’d only just tonight gushed over how pretty it was while he’d helped her set up the party for the seniors before she left to her own New Year’s Eve festivities.
His eyes roamed over her pretty face, her raspberry-colored lips, the dark fringe of lashes sweeping across her cheek…and Dex sighed.
How the hell was he going to teach this woman, this infuriatingly insecure, people-pleasing, need-to-be-perfect, gullible woman to learn her self-worth, buck up, and teach other people how to make sound choices when she couldn’t make them herself? He hadn’t made much leeway at all in nearly a year of trying.
Why would that suddenly change because she was an “accidental” angel?
Still, what choice did he have?
Choices aside, before he did anything else, he had to tell her who he really was and convince her he was actually an honest-to-goodness angel.
That was always a party.
Worse, he had to do it under the radar of the crew upstairs so they wouldn’t find out she existed until Titus could squeeze her in somewhere she wouldn’t be noticed.
Then, on top of everything else, he had to teach her how to be an angel.
And he had to do it before his time ran out or he was going to lose the privilege of being a guardian and instead, become a janitor.
As in, clean toilets.
Every day.
All day.
Chapter 2
“Do you believe me now?” Dexter looked at George, who currently sat on his friend Marty’s tufted beige couch, holding a throw pillow in her lap.
George blinked at handsome Dex, who was no longer the Dex she worked with and had seen every day at the coffee shop in the cute little senior living village she worked for as events coordinator.
No. He wasn’t that Dex at all. He said he was Dex the angel, who’d been charged with keeping her safe for almost a year. Her guardian angel…
Which was lovely and kinda nice. Who didn’t want to know someone from on high was watching out for them?
If you believed in that sort of stuff, that is.
But when George wasn’t totally convinced what he was telling her was true, when she’d scoffed and giggled hysterically from her couch, where he’d taken her after he claimed she’d “fallen” off the rooftop at a New Year’s Eve party (tripped right over a Schlitz Malt Liquor bottle, he said. Unfortunately, that part of his outlandish tale, she totally believed), he’d shown her he was an angel.
Boy, had he shown her. Man, she’d seen. Yes. Yes, she had.
He’d lit himself up like a Christmas tree, all glowing with a pulsing white light around him—a warm, welcoming, breathtaking light that, if possible, made him even more swoon-worthy than he’d been when she thought he was a mere mortal like the rest of ’em.
Then he’d unfurled his strap-on wings, wings not nearly as big as she’d expected them to be;
nor had she expected them to appear out of nowhere when he snapped his fingers, but they’d appeared out of nowhere regardless and he’d had to physically put them on.
She’d found the idea of strap-on wings ludicrous. In fact, she remembered giggling a little harder.
Dex said they almost always weren’t necessary. Showing people your angel glow should be enough to prove what you were, but sometimes, the wings made a broader, more convincing point. So he liked to have them as a just-in-case, and it was important she know how to summon them for just that reason.
Thus, he’d slung those wings over his broad shoulders, which only added another complex layer to the onion of a story he was pedaling.
Fluffy, feathery, white as newly fallen snow angel wings.
When she’d laughingly dared him to prove it, and he’d actually produced those strap-on wings, she’d expected them to be like the ones Tom Ellis had on the Netflix show Lucifer. But they weren’t quite that impressive, and he seemed almost disappointed she wasn’t more enraptured.
What kind of rinky-dink show were they running upstairs anyway? Who had strap-on wings?
Though, she had to admit, Dex was probably as handsome as Tom Ellis, the actor who played Lucifer, with his midnight-black hair, deep chocolate eyes, tightly angled face and kissable lips. He was very attractive and, as it happened, not gay after all.
Another huh for the books.
That confession had made George pause. She’d spent months reminding herself he was gay anytime they were together so on top of the million stupid things she’d already done in her lifetime, she wouldn’t fall in love with a guy who wasn’t available to her.
Despite the strong pull of her initial attraction, when she’d made a presumption, she’d managed to keep her desires in check. For once in her life, she’d avoided making a complete ass of herself, all to find out he was straight.
Not that it mattered. Angels didn’t date. Or did they? Either way, it didn’t matter. Her life was a dumpster fire. Dating was the last thing she should consider, especially after Darren, and she’d never want to ruin her perfectly good friendship with Dex by dragging sex into the mix anyway.
That never failed to ruin everything for her.
Anyway, that’s what she got for binge watching too much television. An obviously unrealistic expectation of what an angel’s wings looked like—or that they might actually be attached to his body.
The moment he’d hauled those beastly feathers over his broad shoulders had been awkward with a capital strange. She didn’t understand why he had strap-on wings or if that was significant at all in the scheme of things. Maybe they all had strap-on wings and movies and television had it all wrong.
That aside, Dex then set about trying to convince her it wasn’t just him who was an angel. She was an angel, too.
Of all the things he’d told her that had given her pause, this was the most pause-ish of them all.
She, too, was an angel.
To which she’d yelped a rousing, “Hah!” before dissolving into another fit of giggles.
Now, due to her skepticism, here they sat, at Dex’s paranormal buddy Marty Flaherty’s amazing and sprawling mini-mansion slash farmhouse, with her gorgeous paranormal friends, on her puffy beige sectional couch, after putting on a show like no other, waiting to see if George was going to have a meltdown.
Yet still, she couldn’t summon up an ounce of surprise, and even she didn’t understand what was going on with her or why she didn’t feel at all hysterical. They should terrify her. These people were terrifying.
Every scary movie she’d ever seen had come to life in front of her very eyes. Teeth, fur, growling, howling, skin morphing and melting away, clothes ripping, all of it should have left her in fear for her life, and yet…
Dex tipped her chin up, peered at her and asked again, “George? Do you believe me now?”
She looked into his eyes—dreamy whiskey dark eyes you could get lost in, if she were truthful. But she’d never allowed herself to get lost in them because she thought they were gay, and again, if there was anything she wasn’t, it was one of those women who was convinced she could turn a gay man straight.
She’d done plenty of embarrassing, clumsy things in her life, but that particular foolishness would not be on her life’s resume.
George accepted everyone as they were. And while Dex had never told her he was gay, in fairness, she’d never asked. She’d simply assumed because he’d never made a move on her. He’d never even flirted with her, so…
She’d not only jumped to the conclusion that because she didn’t appeal to Dex in that way, he was gay. Rather than simply considering she might not be his type. Either way, she’d jumped to stereotypical conclusions she was deeply ashamed about now.
“Is she high?” the astoundingly gorgeous, dark-haired woman in jeans and a sweatshirt by the name of Nina asked. “Because for fuck’s sake, what else does she need to see, Dex? I lifted a damn SUV over my head with one hand, Marty’s shed every last damn furball on the planet, Wanda’s spinster shirt is ripped to shreds after that monumental-ass shift, and this trick’s sitting here like she just watched us fucking play golf.”
Wanda—clear-skinned, bright-eyed, and beautifully elegant—made a face at Nina, wrinkling her nose.
Her finely boned hand went to the modest opening of her silky seafoam-colored shirt. “My blouse is not spinsterish, thank you very much. You’ve got a lot of nerve saying that while wearing that disgrace of a sweatshirt, Elvira.”
George glanced up at Nina’s black sweatshirt that read, On your mark, get set, go fuck yourself, and fought a giggle…until she remembered Nina thought she might be high.
Frowning, she looked directly into the vampire’s eyes. “I most certainly am not high, Lady Vampire. My job requires drug testing every month. I don’t do drugs. Ever.”
There were several reasons that particular question offended her—and that was no one’s business but George’s.
Marty of the long blonde hair with zillions of strategically placed highlights, sapphire-blue eyes, and a makeup job you could only get from a Sephora employee, took George’s hand, her skin warm and soft.
“George, I feel like none of this is registering. Are you okay, honey?”
George stared back at her, amazed at how perfectly her false eyelashes lined up on her eyelid. She could never get hers to do that.
Blinking again, she said, “I’m fine. Really.”
“And you’re not at all upset about what you just saw?” Wanda asked, peering at her with an intense yet strangely sympathetic light blue gaze.
Upset obviously had varying shades. She must still be in the lighter shades because she wasn’t upset at all. “Why would I be upset that you guys are vampires and werewolves? In today’s day and age, you can be whatever you want to be. I want everyone to be happy, and if being vampires and werewolves makes you guys happy, then I’m happy, too.” She tacked on a smile for good measure in case they thought she didn’t mean it, folding her hands in her lap.
Nina looked to Dex, her coal-colored eyes narrowed in skepticism before scooping up Marty’s dog Muffin from the floor and setting her on her lap. “You sure she’s not high, Dex? Drunk, maybe? You like to drink, George? Maybe a little Pinot at night before you curl up with your cats?” she asked with a salacious wink.
George made a face at the woman and rolled her eyes. “I don’t have cats. I have a dog. Her name is Gladys. She’s a big oaf of a senior, part Golden Retriever, part Cane Corso. She’s a huge and goofy one-hundred and twenty pounds. I love cats, I just don’t have one. And for future reference, I don’t like Pinot. I like Merlot. And why do you keep asking me that? I’m going to say this one more time before I get really offended, Vampire Lady. I’m not drunk or high,” she insisted.
She didn’t get irritated often, but that question was starting to really bug her.
One drink too many the second time in her entire life and she was suddenly a substance abuser? Jeez
.
Nina leaned forward on the couch and flashed her fangs antagonistically at George. “It’s my job to check and be sure you’re fucking grounded in reality—not buzzed on cush or booze. And if you’re not one of those things, what the fuck are you? You should be in a ball in a corner, rocking back and forth because now you know the truth about the paranormal.”
George suddenly giggled again, giving the cute poodle named Muffin a scratch. “This feels like an episode of The X-Files. The truth is out there,” she said in her best booming, spooky narrator’s voice. Then she paused from running her fingers under the poodle’s chin. “Hey, hey. Hold on. What do you mean it’s your job to make sure I’m not high? Are you a narc and a vampire?”
The beautiful woman rolled her eyes. “Ain’t you fuckin’ Law and Order hip? No, I’m not a narc, halfwit. I’m a paranormal counselor or some such sensitive malarkey. Ask the other two nimrods what our job title is. I’m only here because they force my ass to be here.”
Wanda frowned in a matronly way, disapproving and sour. She scooted over on the sectional sofa and pinched Nina’s arm. “That’s absolutely not true. This was and always has been a group effort. Stop making George feel unwelcome. We’re here to help. Not hinder an already tenuous situation.”
Dex took her hand from Marty’s and smiled his gorgeously handsome smile. The smile that had, at one time, made her shiver, until she thought he wasn’t available. The one she’d fought hard not to tingle about. The one with the deep grooves on either side of his face that made his ruddy skin crinkle up at the corners of his eyes.
“George, I told you why we’re here. Because these ladies are my friends and they have paranormal abilities just like I do…like we do. I thought if you saw you’re not alone, it might help with the transition. Also, they’re women who can understand the emotional upheaval I might not be sensitive enough to pick up on, because I’m a clunky man who wants to cover all the bases and assure you I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe but, above all, heard.”
Accidentaly Divine Page 2
