Angel of the Morning

by Judith Arnold

  Sometimes, Gwen believed she was living in a fairy-tale. Dylan really, seriously, wanted her to move into his mansion by the beach. He requested her input on new appliances for the kitchen, new cabinetry, rugs and lighting fixtures and landscaping around the patio. He spent every evening with her and Annie, and every night with her alone.

  “Are you doing this because you feel obligated?” she asked him one night as they sat in the living room, a catalog of plumbing fixtures spread open between them. He wanted to install new vanities in the bathrooms, and decisions had to be made on the basins and faucets.

  “Well, the sinks are pretty old,” he said. “I want to put in those low-flow toilets, so I might as well put in new sinks, too.”

  “I mean me,” Gwen clarified. “Are you including me in your plans because you feel obligated? Because you weren’t around for the first five years of Annie’s life?”

  He set the catalog on the coffee table and arched an arm around her shoulders. “I hate that I wasn’t around for those first five years,” he admitted. “But no. I wouldn’t ask you to share the house with me if I didn’t want you to.”

  “But it’s all so...so fast.”

  “Five years isn’t fast.”

  “We haven’t known each other five years.”

  “Funny.” Dylan gave her a sweet, crooked smile. “I feel as if I’ve known you forever.”

  “But last time—six years ago—we went our separate ways. We were strangers whose paths had crossed by chance.”

  “How do any two people meet? Sometimes it’s by chance.” He stroked his hand through her hair, then sketched a line down her cheek with his fingertips. “We were both on the same wavelength then. We both wanted to go our separate ways. We did what we did and walked away.”

  That was true. They’d understood each other then. They’d come together because they’d both wanted to, and walked away because they’d both wanted that, too.

  And now... She could believe she’d never want to walk away. But she wasn’t sure she could believe the same of Dylan.

  She loved him. She imagined he had genuine feelings for her, too. But she couldn’t get past the fact that he was Captain Steele, a movie star, and she was just plain Gwen Parker, a shop owner and a single mother. If he was staying with her only because of Annie, that would never be enough for her.

  “What if you leave?” she asked. “What if you decide you want to walk away again?”

  “I won’t walk away, Gwen,” he vowed. “I’ll have to travel sometimes for work. If I’m making a film, I probably won’t be able to get home for dinner every night. You go off on location for a few weeks. And there are promotional gigs. Meetings. Press junkets.”

  “I understand that.”

  “At least right now, though, we’re good. I won’t have to go anywhere until we start filming the new Galaxy Force episode. I’d have to check with Brian, but I’m pretty sure I’m scheduled to report to the set on January fifteenth.”

  That was more than two months away. In two months, she and Dylan could solidify things a bit. Annie could feel secure about her father’s presence in her life. They could establish their rhythm, find their groove. Create a family.

  Of course, he could go off to the set in January and have an affair with one of the actresses who’d be sharing the screen with him. As Gwen recalled, two actresses in the Galaxy Force were traffic-stopping beautiful.

  But a man didn’t have to travel to a film set in Hollywood to have an affair. Men had affairs all the time, even if they didn’t find themselves in close proximity to breathtakingly gorgeous actresses. Men had affairs even in Brogan’s Point.

  “I know it’s rushing things,” he went on, “but if you want to get married, we could do that. I’m thinking it might be good for Annie’s sake.”

  Another woman might consider that proposal lacking in romance. To Gwen, it was the sweetest proposal she could imagine. That he cared so much about Annie made her love him even more.

  The thought that he’d suggested marriage out of a sense of obligation troubled her, though. “I don’t want a shotgun marriage,” she said.

  Dylan chuckled. “It’s too late for that. You’re way beyond pregnant.”

  Gwen laughed, too. Then she grew somber. “It would be nice if love were a part of it,” she said, opting for honesty. “But I was once engaged to be married, and I was crazy in love with the guy, and he left. I don’t want to go through that again.”

  “Then we won’t get engaged. Joke,” Dylan added. “We can get engaged, we can get married, whatever you want. I like you, Gwen. I think you like me. I can’t say we’re crazy in love, but the sex is pretty damned great. And we both love Annie. We can make this work.”

  Definitely not romantic. Yet maybe this was the only kind of marriage that would suit them. They were compatible, and they both wanted what was best for their daughter. And as he said, the sex was pretty damned great. As a basis for marriage, that wasn’t bad.

  She could only hope that a marriage would create the foundation they needed, the solid ground on which they could build their family. Annie deserved that. She needed it.

  Gwen had survived a heartbreak, and she could survive it again. But if this marriage didn’t work out and Dylan went away, it would break Annie’s heart. And Gwen simply couldn’t bear to let that happen.

  *

  “Are you crazy?” Brian squawked through the phone. “Marriage?”

  “She’s the mother of my daughter,” Dylan said. “Why shouldn’t I marry her?”

  “Let me count the ways,” Brian said. “First of all, it’s not like she’s some poor, helpless chick. She’s been raising the kid on her own for, what, five years? She doesn’t need you to step in and make an honest woman out of her.”

  “True,” Dylan conceded. But he’d never considered that he was marrying Gwen to make an honest woman out of her. She already was an honest woman—one of the most honest women he’d ever known. This was the twenty-first century. Unmarried women who had children didn’t need the legitimacy of a marriage to make them respectable.

  “Second, the tabloids will have a field day. You don’t exactly have the reputation of a boy scout, but you come pretty damned close. You’ve never had a scandal attached to you—which makes the vultures doubly eager to smear you. It’s a lot more fun to throw dirt on someone who’s clean than on someone who’s already dirty.”

  “I don’t see how marrying Gwen would create a scandal.”

  “Because she’s the mother of your child,” Brian explained, enunciating each word as if he were addressing an idiot. “Your five-year-old child.”

  “Not a big thing,” Dylan insisted. As long as Gwen and Annie didn’t get dragged through the dirt along with him, he wouldn’t care what the tabloids said. If necessary, he’d preempt them by arranging a few interviews himself. “I found the love of my life,” he’d tell the journalists and talk-show hosts. “I found her, and I lost her, and six years later, I found her again. I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”

  “Besides,” Brian continued, and then listed the names of half a dozen pretty actresses. “All available. All stunning. All interested.”

  “In me? Doubtful.”

  “I’m telling you, Dylan—you’ve got a lot of romantic opportunities here in Tinsel Town. You get married, and you’d be throwing all those opportunities away. Unless you plan to cheat on your wife, which brings us back to the subject of the tabloids.”

  “I’m not going to cheat on my wife,” he said, thinking about how strange the word wife felt on his tongue. Wife. Could he really go through with this?

  He recalled his thoughts about preempting the tabloids by scheduling his own interviews. I found the love of my life. Somehow, that thought didn’t seem anywhere near as weird as wife.

  Gwen couldn’t possibly be the love of his life, could she?

  Why not? She was kind. She was smart. She worked hard, kept her word, devoted herself to her daughter. She was pretty. She was
sexy. She asked so little of him—which made him want to give her so much.

  “We’re not rushing into anything,” he promised Brian. “We’re just laying the groundwork. But I feel good about it. I think this is the right step to take.”

  “We’ll talk more about this.” Brian’s statement sounded like a warning. “Let me run it past my partners. If you go through with it, we’ll need to find a way to massage your image so it doesn’t hurt you.”

  “It won’t hurt me,” Dylan said. “I’m a boy scout—your word. Boy scouts get married. Boy Scout values are about honor and responsibility and all.”

  “Yeah, right,” Brian muttered. “Meanwhile, sign a pre-nup. These grand romantic gestures can wind up being seriously expensive.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Dylan said, then ended the call, knowing he wouldn’t think about it at all. If Gwen had craved his money, she would have gone after him when he was pregnant. She could have hired an attorney. She could have gone to the tabloids herself, or threatened to.

  Not once had she acted like a gold-digger.

  Joking aside, he was hardly a boy scout. But Gwen... Yeah. She was the very definition of honorable.

  Wife. He mouthed the word, whispered it, held it on his tongue. It still felt weird. For some reason, the love of my life didn’t.

  Chapter Twenty

  The day after he’d raised the subject of marriage, Dylan checked out of his room at the Ocean Bluff Inn and moved into Gwen’s house. The snug little Cape-Cod seemed awfully crowded with him in it, even though his relocation entailed a minimum of clothing and equipment: jeans, shirts, sweaters, his laptop—just whatever he’d fit into his carry-on bags when he’d flown from California to Massachusetts a couple of weeks ago. When his house was ready, he told Gwen that evening as they cleaned the dinner dishes, he’d return to California to move the stuff he had in storage and drive his Porsche back east. “Maybe we can make the trip together with Annie during her school’s holiday week at the end of December,” he suggested.

  “The end of December is a busy time at the store. People have Christmas money to spend.”

  “Early January, then,” Dylan said. “Or I can hire someone to drive the car across the country. Although I’m not sure anyone I hired would treat my baby as well as I do. I love my Porsche.” He shot her a quick grin as he scraped the uneaten string beans from Annie’s plate into the trash. His smile seemed to acknowledge that love wasn’t a word he’d used when he’d proposed marriage. “I could arrange to have the moving company put the car in a truck and drive it across the country with my furniture. They’ll do that.”

  Gwen smiled back, although the fact that he could discuss love in the context of his car but not in the context of their marriage sparked a rueful twinge in her chest. She understood the situation. She accepted it. She and Dylan would enter into this marriage with the understanding that it was all about Annie, giving her the security and stability of a two-parent family. As he had said, they could make it work.

  Seeing him, a world-famous movie star, scraping plates like a normal human being, made it hard for her not to love him, though. “You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked.

  “Do what? Help you with the dishes?”

  “Move to Brogan’s Point. Live with Annie and me.”

  “I’m sure,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t look so worried. It’ll be great.”

  “Will you even be able to drive your car in New England? Can a souped-up sports coupe handle winter weather?”

  “It was built in Germany,” he reminded her. “They get snow there.”

  Have faith, she ordered herself. Have faith that he’ll bring his car to Brogan’s Point, that he won’t arrive in California, realize he doesn’t want to drive in the snow, and decide not to come back.

  He seemed sincere. But he was an actor, Gwen reminded herself. Actors could say anything convincingly. Dylan’s entire career was built around getting people to believe he was the commander of an interstellar military force a hundred years in the future. If a viewer could believe that by watching his movies, it was no wonder Gwen could believe him when he said he really wanted to be the father Annie deserved, the father she needed.

  Gwen could also believe he wanted her for his wife. Not just his words but his deeds indicated that he was serious about marrying her. She reminded herself that before he was Captain Steele, savior of the universe, he was a small-town boy from Nebraska. No doubt he’d scraped a lot of plates as a kid. He hadn’t forgotten how to do mundane chores.

  Annie bounced into the kitchen, carrying the book Dylan had given her. “I read one of the poems all by myself,” she boasted. “I got most of the words. Can Dylan read the rest to me? I mean, Daddy.” She was still getting used to the idea.

  “Sure,” Gwen said, motioning with her head that Dylan should join Annie. “I can finish up here.”

  “Let me just help your mom with these last few dishes, and then I’ll read to you,” Dylan promised Annie.

  “Can you drive me to swimming tomorrow?” Annie asked him. “I have swimming lessons on Friday after school. Sometimes Mommy has to leave the store to drive me to the community center. But you don’t work, so you can drive me instead.”

  Gwen started to correct Annie, but Dylan was laughing, so she didn’t leap to his defense. “I do work, Annie,” he told her. “But at the moment, I’m between projects. I would consider it an honor to drive you to your swimming class. It’ll make your life easier,” he added, addressing Gwen.

  “We’ll need to move Annie’s car seat from my car to yours.”

  “I can’t wait until we move her car seat into my Porsche,” he said. “Put down the top, tear down Atlantic Avenue... I’ll show Annie what a real engine can do.”

  Gwen grinned and shook her head. “She’ll just sit there shouting, ‘Faster, faster!’”

  The dinner plates done, Gwen waved Dylan and Annie off. Then she settled at the table with a stack of mail. Bills and junk, as usual. Still, it was a luxury to be able to sit quietly after dinner, slitting the envelopes open and perusing their contents without having Annie tugging at her, begging for a story or a game.

  She’d rarely thought about how exhausting raising a child alone was. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about it. If she had, she would have become depressed or resentful. The last thing she ever wanted was to resent her magnificent daughter.

  Just to have a few quiet minutes in the evening could make marrying Dylan worth it. He didn’t have to love her. He could aim all his love at his car. But to be able to check her mail before nine o’clock at night? It might not be the most romantic reason to tie the knot, but Gwen would treasure the chance to let someone else take care of Annie for a few precious minutes while she took care of everything else.

  She finished sorting the mail, tossed the junk into the recycling bin and slid the bills into neat stack. Then she went off in search of Dylan and Annie.

  She found them downstairs in the playroom, cuddled up on the couch with the A.A. Milne book spread open across their laps. A few Mr. Potato-Head pieces lay strewn across the floor, brightly colored plastic lips, an ear, a bowler hat. Dylan read to Annie, his voice low and soothing, with just the right inflections. Of course he would read poetry—even children’s verses—beautifully. He’d probably taken a class in poetry reading as part of his acting curriculum.

  She hovered at the foot of the stairs, not wanting to interrupt. The scene was so tranquil, a father and daughter sharing a book. This, she thought. This is what marriage to Dylan will be.

  Annie noticed her mother just as Dylan reached the end of the poem. “Dylan’s going to take me to swimming,” she chirped. “I mean, Daddy.”

  “I know, honey. I was there when he agreed to do that.”

  “He’ll be the best daddy there. No one else has a daddy taking them to swimming.”

  “Then I guess I’ll be the only daddy there,” Dylan joked. “Am I supposed to stick around for
the entire class?”

  “You don’t have to,” Gwen said. “It lasts about forty-five minutes.”

  “You could watch if you wanted to,” Annie invited him. “We’re learning breathing. You blow bubbles with your nose.”

  “That’s pretty exciting,” he said, shooting Gwen a wry smile. A jingly bell sounded, and he shifted on the couch to pull his cell phone out of his hip pocket. He eyed the screen, then sighed. “I have to take this call. I’ll be right back,” he added to Annie, scruffing his fingers through her hair as he stood and lifted the phone to his ear. “Brian? What’s up?”

  Gwen stepped aside, allowing him to sprint up the stairs as he listened to his caller. She scooped up the scattered bits of Mr. Potato’s anatomy and tossed them into their box. Then she settled on the couch next to Annie, who was gazing at the stairs, a moony, dreamy expression on her face. “I like having a daddy,” she declared.

  “I’m glad he’s in our life, too,” Gwen told her.

  After a minute, Dylan descended the stairs. He looked shell-shocked. “That was Brian,” he said.

  Gwen wanted to ask him if everything was all right—from his expression, it was hard to tell. But she didn’t want to be nosy. Instead, she asked, “Isn’t it kind of late to be conducting business?”

  “He’s in California,” Dylan reminded her. “It’s three hours earlier there. Gwen... I have to go.”

  “Go?”

  “To L.A. I got the part in The Angel.”

  “What?”

  “The director decided the guy they’d hired wasn’t working out. They want me. I’ve got to go.”

  “When?”

  “Now. They need me out there for some rehearsals with the director and the co-stars, and then we’ll fly to Toronto for the shoot. If everything times right, I’ll be able to have a few days off before I have to start work on the new Galaxy Force movie.”

  “By now, you mean...tomorrow?”

  “Tonight. Brian’s arranging a private jet for me. They’ve already started work on the film. This director likes at least a week of rehearsals before he brings in the cameras. They already had one week with the other actor before dropping him from the project, so they’re behind schedule.” He must have noticed Gwen’s frown, because he added, with a helpless smile, “I’m sorry. But this—you know how much this part means to me.”