Alex and the Angel (Silhouette Desire)

by Dixie Browning

  Turning, Angel caught sight of her audience. “Oh, no,” she groaned. “I heard the door—I thought you’d gone to take Carol home.” A study in shades of red, pink and orange, she shot Alex a mortified look.

  “You mean you wouldn’t have minded if Gus had caught you?”

  “Oh, well...he’s seen me before. It, um...it’s a great way to polish the banister.” She looked guilty as sin and cute as a baby duck. In the yawning silence, she blurted, “But I won’t do it again if you don’t want me to. I never—I mean, almost never—and really, I only did it because I’ve never had access to a curved one before. Most of them are too short and too steep, and then there are those jig-a-jag ones with posts and corners every few feet. You can’t get up any momentum at all on those, and besides, they’re downright dangerous.”

  She looked from one to the other. “Gus? Alex? Say something!”

  “Is she always like this?” Not a flicker of expression marred Alex’s bony features, although inside he was grinning from ear to ear.

  “Yep. You don’t want to see her at the fair. She’ll wear you plum to a frazzle. I’ve seen her fight little kids for the last place on one of those whiz-a-ma-gizmos.”

  “That’s a lie!” Angel marched forward to confront the pair of them, hands on her hips.

  Alex couldn’t recall when he’d enjoyed anything quite so much. Or when anyone had looked so completely out of place in the somber foyer with its faded Oriental rug, its gray Venetian mural and its stiff-backed side chairs with their drab tapestry seats.

  She made it come alive. She made him come alive. And while he didn’t wish his daughter a prolonged recovery, he wished to hell he could think of some excuse to keep this small, amazing woman from walking out of his life again.

  At least until he could figure out why he wanted her in it.

  “Did you need something from downstairs, or was this just a dry run?” Three shades of red, he mused, still struggling to keep from laughing. Although to be precise, her face was more of a deep pink.

  “Sandy’s still hungry. The chicken was tough and the cake was, um, pretty dry.”

  It had been stale. Alex had eaten it anyway. He’d never been particularly interested in food, as long as it appeared at regular intervals without his having to go to too much trouble. “Be my guest,” he said, with a gracious gesture toward the back of the house.

  A motion at the head of the stairs caught his eye. “What the devil—? Dammit, Alexandra, you’re not supposed to stand on that ankle!”

  “But, Daddy, I’m not standing on my ankle, I’m standing on my foot.”

  “Don’t be impertinent!”

  “Sorry. You guys were like, talking so much, I thought I’d join the party.”

  Scowling, Alex headed for the stairs. Gus brushed past him. “You handled Carol. This one’s mine.” Sweeping her up in his arms, he turned and carried her down the stairs. “Okay, brat, you’re invited, but no food fights, y’hear? And no dancing on the kitchen table.”

  Suddenly it really was a party. Alex was reminded of his high school days, and the impromptu gatherings at the Wydowski household. He remembered feeling vaguely guilty because he’d never encouraged his friends to gather at his home. The Wydowskis had been a noisy, cheerful, gregarious bunch, including Gus’s Aunt Zee, who did things with cards and Ouija boards, and was always guessing someone’s sun sign—usually correctly.

  His own home, while it had been pleasant enough, with his mother, a gracious, lovely lady setting the tone, had always been quiet, orderly...

  And dull.

  They found ice cream in the freezer, which went a long way toward resurrecting the last of the stale pound cake. Angel chopped what was left of the cold baked chicken and added a few more ingredients, and they heaped the resulting curried chicken salad on split toasted rolls and washed it down with Gus’s high-test coffee.

  “You know you’re never going to get to sleep again, don’t you, young’un?” Gus teased. “I can see you perched in your rocking chair fifty years from now, your hair all stringy and gray, your beady eyes still staring like a pfoo bird, your—”

  “What’s a phoo bird?” asked Sandy as she absently scratched the single spot of poison ivy that had erupted the day after her fall.

  “Gus, don’t you dare!” Angel exclaimed.

  Alex grinned. And then he chuckled. “Good Lord, is that old joke still around? I haven’t heard that one in twenty years.”

  “Tell me, tell me, tell me!” Sandy squealed.

  “I’m afraid it’s not for mixed company, princess.”

  “Da-addy! I’m practically grown-up! I bet I know jokes that would make you blush!”

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute, but I’d just as soon not hear them.”

  “An-gel! Make him tell me! It’s not fair!”

  Angel, busy scraping the last smidge of ice cream from the bottom of her dish, shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, hon. I don’t make the rules, I only follow ‘em. Rules say you have to be sixteen before you can share scatological jokes with a parent. It’s one of those dumb authority things.”

  “What’s scata-whatsis mean?” Sandy whined.

  “Look it up,” said Alex.

  “Since when did you ever obey anyone’s rule, witchlette?” Gus wanted to know.

  Angel shot him an offended look, then spoiled the effect by laughing, which sent Sandy off into a gale of giggles, and the moment passed.

  “Oh, wow, this is fun,” Sandy exclaimed, beaming around the scrubbed maple table. “Why don’t we eat in here all the time?”

  “In the first place, I don’t think Mrs. Gilly would appreciate it. Not to mention that we’d be in Flora’s way.”

  Somewhere in the house, a clock struck eleven, just as Angel did her best to cover a yawn.

  “Are we keeping you up?” Alex inquired politely.

  Sandy promptly took the blame. “I couldn’t sleep last night, and Angel sat up with me and told me all these stories about when you were a little boy, Daddy. I never knew you were, like, um...”

  “Like what? Like young? Like human?” He reached over and tugged a limp hank of pale blond hair. “I thought the doctor had given you some pills to help you get to sleep.”

  “Angel doesn’t think I should take them.”

  In a moment of silence, the temperature dropped several degrees. “I wasn’t aware that Angel had a license to practice medicine,” Alex said in that controlled tone of voice that instantly shattered the party mood.

  “If I goofed, I’m sorry. Sandy assured me she wasn’t in great pain, and staying awake isn’t going to hurt her ankle as long as she rests it. I just don’t happen to approve of popping pills for every little ache and pain. It’s a—” Alex raked back his chair. “Gus, Sandy—will you excuse us, please?” He didn’t precisely lift Angel out of her chair by her arm, but the effect was largely the same.

  Sandy protested. When Gus placed a staying hand on her arm, she cried plaintively, “But why is he upset with Angel? She was only trying to help.”

  “Shh, don’t sweat it, kid. Angel can hold her own.” He only hoped it was true. Gus wasn’t sure whether or not Alex was even aware of the unfair advantage he had where Angel was concerned.

  Angel had heard of being frog-marched. Now she knew how it felt. When the marcher was six foot two, and the marchee was only five foot two, a helping hand under the elbow took on an entirely different meaning.

  By the time they reached the study, she had stoked up a full head of steam. “Hightower, if you don’t let go of my arm,” she said with quiet sincerity, “I’m going to clobber you.”

  Alex released her abruptly. She staggered a few steps, rubbing her arm and searching his face for a clue. It would have helped if she could figure out what she’d said to set him off. One minute they’d all been laughing. The next moment it was bombs away.

  “Well?” Crossing her arms over her chest, she began to pat one foot rapidly. Her warning rattle, Gus used to call it. Unfort
unately, when one was barefoot and standing on a rug, the effect left a lot to be desired. While she waited, Alex began to pace. Oddly enough, the more he paced, the more her anger faded. “Alex, she’s fine. The swelling’s gone down a lot. I’m pretty sure no damage was done, but if you’d like, I’ll pay for the doctor to—”

  “I owe you an apology,” he said quietly, knocking the wind right out of her sails.

  Damn right, he did! Smugly she waited to hear it. “Well?” she prompted when it appeared as if that were all the apology she was going to get—the promise of one.

  “Sorry.” His bleak smile was almost worse than no smile at all. “You never really knew Dina, did you?”

  “Your wife?” Angel was confused. She’d thought they were talking about Sandy—about her own countermanding the doctor’s orders. Was he going to apologize after all these years for breaking her schoolgirl’s heart by marrying that gold-plated bimbo?

  “For some women, children are probably the chief raison d'être.”

  “They are? Look, would you mind speaking English? The only foreign language I know is a few Polish swearwords and some Latin plant names.”

  “Sorry.”

  That was her apology? Big deal.

  “The thing is, Dina wasn’t what anyone could call maternal. Sandy was born prematurely. She was sick a lot as a child. Dina had trouble finding a satisfactory nanny, so the poor kid ended up spending a lot of time in day-care, where she picked up everything going around. I guess they all do.”

  Angel nodded, wondering where this monologue was headed.

  “She was especially prone to ear infections. Once they got started, they were the very devil to cure. We had drops to use both before and after she went in the water, but if those didn’t work, it took antibiotics to knock it out.”

  At the far end of the paneled room he braced his hands against the wall of books, and Angel stared at his back—the narrow hips, the long, tapered torso, the wide shoulders. He looked as if he might be in pain, which was crazy, because Sandy was the one with the sprained ankle.

  Angel ached to go to him and offer whatever comfort she could, but she didn’t dare. The Hightowers of this world had always been a touch above, and Alex was definitely above her touch.

  “I was usually at work all day. Then, too, I traveled a lot in those days, and Dina...didn’t always remember. Either the drops or the antibiotics. She assured me that earaches were a natural part of growing up, and like a fool, I believed her.”

  His hands fell away from the shelves. He raked back his hair, and his bitter parody of a smile drew her across the room like a magnet. She wasn’t conscious of having moved until he reached out and rested his arms across her shoulders.

  If it wasn’t an embrace, it was the next best thing. Angel closed her eyes and breathed in the essence of wool and starched cotton, of some crisp, light cologne, and the heady scent of warm male flesh.

  “Dina was always popular.” His voice was a soft rasp.

  Forget Dina, she’s gone. I’m here now.

  “She had a lot of friends, and she enjoyed their company. Certainly she preferred it to spending her evenings with a sickly child and a dull stick of a husband.” Again Angel caught a glimpse of that bleak smile. “But sometimes she forgot to leave instructions with the baby-sitter about Sandy’s medicine, and I wasn’t always there when I should have been to see that the doctor’s instructions were carried out.”

  “But you worked. You traveled.”

  “True, but that’s no excuse. Sandy should’ve been my first priority.”

  “Did Dina have a job?” Women like Dina Hightower didn’t have jobs, they took positions.

  Alex shook his head. His arms still rested heavily on her shoulders. For all his leanness, he was tall and big boned, yet she bore the weight joyfully. “She stayed pretty busy with charity auctions, bridge tournaments, committee work—you know the sort of thing.”

  Angel didn’t. In the Reilly and Wydowski families, when a man had a job and a woman didn’t work outside the home, it was his responsibility to support them, hers to look after the children. Which was pretty simplistic in this day and age, she’d be the first to admit. Even so...

  “And that’s why you got upset about Sandy’s pain pills?”

  He nodded, his forehead coming to rest on the top of her head, almost as if by accident. As if he were too tired to hold it up any longer. “I guess you could call it a knee-jerk reaction. Still, if Sandy doesn’t think she needs them, who am I to say she does?”

  He began idly toying with her hair, which was tied back with a ribbon. It always had to be restrained after her nightly hundred strokes. “Cal took pills for everything,” she said, feeling a need to explain her position. “To speed him up, to slow him down—to make him feel good when he had every right to feel lousy. When he ran out of pills and we couldn’t afford more, things could get pretty grisly. Sometimes he—”

  Her lips tightened. The last thing Alex needed now was a recital of her own dismal marriage. Not even Gus knew the worst of it. She wondered if anyone who hadn’t experienced it could understand what it was like to live with someone who existed on a different plane half the time.

  And then he said, “Sandy has eighty percent hearing in her left ear, but only fifty percent in her right.”

  “Oh, no! I didn’t realize...”

  “It happened when she was three. I was in New York on business for nearly a week. Dina let the baby-sitter take her swimming at the club every day, but she forgot to instruct her to put in drops before and after. Before the baby-sitter realized what was wrong, an infection had set in.”

  “Oh, poor baby—the pain...”

  “I’m afraid Dina wasn’t as diligent with the antibiotics as she might have been, either.” He would never forgive her for it. That had been the beginning of the end of their marriage. “By the time I got home, things were pretty rough.”

  What had been up until then a casual embrace—hardly an embrace at all—changed subtly as Angel slipped her arms around his waist, wanting to take away his hurt, his daughter’s hurt, and bear it all on her own narrow shoulders. “Poor Sandy,” she whispered. “Being fourteen is tough enough, without that.”

  “She covers well, but yeah—she’s self-conscious. Sometimes I wonder if that’s not the reason she wears all those god-awful earrings. Maybe she’s subconsciously trying to call attention to her problem, trying to force the world to accept her as she is.”

  “I guess in a crazy sort of way, it makes sense. I never studied psychology.”

  Sharing burdens brought on an imperceptible lightening in the atmosphere. “What did you study, Angeline Wydowski? Forestry? Witchery?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “Try me.”

  She couldn’t think of anything she’d rather do than try him, only she didn’t think they had the same sort of trying in mind. “I was planning to go into politics, starting out small, like maybe city councilwoman, and working my way up to a state level, and maybe—well, who knows?”

  “Good God,” he said reverently. He was still holding her. She wondered if he’d forgotten where he’d left his arms.

  “Only I got sidetracked. And anyway, I never got any further than my second year. College takes more time when you’re working a couple of jobs.”

  She thought he sighed. At least he didn’t offer any wisecracks about her choice of careers.

  Several moments passed in silence. “Angel?” he murmured, and the low pitch of his voice set off tremors along every fault line in her body.

  She tilted her head to stare up at him, still hanging on to his waist, trying to pretend she’d forgotten where she’d left her arms. “What?” she whispered, and her eyes went out of focus just as he lowered his mouth to hers.

  Eight

  On any seismograph in the world, the kiss would have registered a resounding eight. On Angel’s personal meter, the conclusion was painfully clear. She was head over heels in love, and this time she
was no impressionable teenager. This time she was an experienced woman who should have known better than to stray too close to the edge.

  If she had spent practically her entire lifetime wondering what it would be like to kiss Alex Hightower—and she had—nothing she could have imagined would possibly have come close to the reality.

  The taste of him—the incredibly intimate feel of his lips—the scent of his skin. How could something so soft be so firm?

  When the tip of his tongue touched her own, she moaned, and as if the sound of that one small whimper drove him wild, he crushed her against his hard, straining body, his mouth grinding against hers as if he could never get enough of her.

  His urgency was contagious, sparking back and forth between them like a newly exposed live wire. Catching bunches of shirt in her fists, she tugged, uncovering his back so that she could slide her hands over his naked skin.

  He rolled his mouth over hers, his breath as ragged as her own. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he rasped, his breath hot on her face.

  “Yes, it was.” Her hands slid down the bunched muscles on either side of his spine, and she let gravity have its way with her. Her small palms slipped past his belt, and as they cupped his taut buttocks, she felt him surge against her. Her knees buckled. She might have fallen if he hadn’t been holding her so tightly.

  He was taller than she was. Squirming against him, she rose to her tiptoes. His arousal thrust aggressively against her belly, but that wasn’t where she ached. She wanted him there!

  She wanted him everywhere.

  The subtle scent of a masculine cologne slipped into her consciousness—something warm and sensual and intensely personal. In the outer fringes of her mind, she was vaguely conscious of the background aroma of coffee, furniture polish and leather. The resulting blend was an incredibly intoxicating aphrodisiac.

  As if she needed any help.

  His lips lifted, brushing back and forth, moving slowly over hers so that she barely felt the pressure, only the heat and the sweet, dragging texture of moist skin on moist skin.