She sat on the floor and the girls joined her. She waited until Angel had settled next to her before opening the bag of bracelets and passing them out.
“You’ve earned your first bead,” she said with a smile. “For friendship.”
Angel shook the small wooden beads into the palm of his hand, and then each girl took one. They strung them onto the leather bracelet, then began helping each other put them on.
“Aren’t you going to wear one?” Angel asked with a grin.
She batted her eyes at him. “Only if you are.”
“You have to,” Char told him. “All the Keepers wear the bracelets.”
Suddenly eight little girls were looking at him. Taryn saw the tightness in his jaw and knew there was an internal battle going on. Reluctantly he took the thong she held out and strung a bead into place. The girls cheered as he secured the thong around his wrist.
Taryn noticed it barely fit and there was no way he was going to be able to get more beads on it and keep circulation to his fingers.
“We’ll have to talk to someone about getting you a bigger bracelet,” she murmured.
“Could we?”
She laughed. “Sarcasm in front of your Acorns?”
She glanced at the clock on the wall. “We still have about fifteen minutes,” she said, and reached for her backpack. “Who wants me to braid her hair?” she asked as she pulled out her brush.
“Me!”
“Me, too.”
The girls scooted over so they were sitting in a line. Allison sat with her back to Taryn and waited. Taryn gently brushed her hair, then started to braid it.
“I have some ties in that outside pocket,” she told Angel as she motioned to her bag. “Would you get them?”
He looked at her as if she’d asked him to stick his head in an alligator’s mouth, then collected the ties.
Taryn worked quickly, French-braiding Allison’s hair, then securing it with a bright pink tie.
“You could do some,” Taryn told him.
Panic flashed on his face. “I don’t know how,” he said quickly, tucking his hands behind his back as he spoke.
“I’ll teach you.” She had a feeling there were going to be lots of meetings where there was a bit of time to fill, and this was an easy activity.
Taryn looked at the girls. Her gaze fell on Chloe, who sat more on the edge of the group rather than in it.
She smiled at her. “Chloe, are you feeling like you could be patient while Angel learns on your hair?”
Chloe’s eyes widened in surprise. “Okay,” she said softly, and moved to sit in front of Angel.
Taryn grabbed a second brush from her bag. She was always losing them, so she made sure she had a spare. After today she would make sure she had two or three and lots of extra ties.
“You know how to braid, right?” she asked Angel.
“Of course.”
“Then this will be easy.”
As the other girls watched and Chloe sat without moving, Taryn talked him through the process of French-braiding the girls’ hair.
Angel’s fingers were clumsy, but he kept at it and eventually had a reasonably straight braid.
“Not bad for a rookie,” Taryn told him. “What do you think, Chloe?”
The girl touched her braid and offered Angel a slight smile. “Thank you,” she whispered.
The door to the hut opened and the first of the parents arrived. The girls scrambled to their feet and started to talk about their afternoon. The new bracelets and beads were shown off. Taryn rose and introduced herself to some of the parents. Angel did the same. Fifteen minutes later, they were alone.
“We survived,” she told him as she collected her brushes and the rest of the ties.
“I need a drink.”
She glanced at him and saw he looked shell-shocked. He was kind of pale and there was a glassy expression to his eyes.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I’ll never be able to do this.”
“You were fine. The girls loved you.”
“I French-braided hair.”
She couldn’t tell if he was proud or horrified.
She grinned. “See? Your first rite of girl passage. Soon you’ll grow breasts.”
“Funny.”
She walked toward the door. “Tell you what. You stop at Hunan Palace and get us Chinese and I’ll head by the bakery for cupcakes. We’ll have a celebratory dinner at my place.”
“What do you have to drink?” he asked.
“Plenty of beer.”
When he raised his eyebrows in question, she laughed. “You’re forgetting about the guys I work with. I always have beer in the refrigerator and steaks in the freezer. It’s in my employment contract.”
“I gotta get that in mine.”
* * *
GETTING DINNER TOOK a little longer than Angel had planned. There was a line to get takeout at Hunan Palace. Apparently a kids’ baseball game had just ended. But he placed his order and waited, then drove over to Taryn’s.
He parked in front of her small one-story house and made his way up the front walk. She opened the door before he got there and he nearly dropped the food when he saw her.
She’d traded dark washed jeans and boots for pale, worn jeans and bare feet. Her silk blouse was gone and in its place was an L.A. Stallions jersey with Sam’s number on it. Her long hair was loose, her face free of makeup. She looked young enough that if he hadn’t known her actual age, he would have told himself to keep moving without stopping.
“A transformation,” he said as she approached.
She smiled as her violet eyes brightened with amusement. “The real me.”
“I like.”
She moved aside to let him into her house. There was a nice-sized living room with a leather sofa and two big chairs. A huge flat-screen TV sat above the fireplace, and to the left was an Andy Warhol–style painting of Jack.
Angel stepped toward the piece of art. The subject was dressed for a game and had taken a knee on the field. His helmet was beside him. Jack looked straight out, as if into the viewer’s eyes.
He turned back to Taryn, who was watching him. “Nice,” he said.
“It was a gift.”
Like her shirt? If he’d had any doubts that the guys she worked with were an important part of her life, seeing all this had made the situation clear. For a second he paused to wonder if he was bothered, and then he remembered what she’d told him about her past with Jack. They’d been married before. They were friends. But they weren’t together. He could relate to that—after all, he lived with Consuelo. Although the situation was slightly different—he and Consuelo had never been married, or romantically involved—the principle was the same.
He smiled at Taryn and held up the bag. “Hungry?” he asked.
“Starving.”
She pointed through the doorway. He saw the table in the dining room beyond had been set. There were beers in place, along with plates. Music played in the background.
They sat down and started passing containers of food back and forth. Taryn reached for an egg roll.
“You survived your first meeting,” she said with a grin. “That has to make you happy.”
“It was tough,” he admitted. “I’m glad you were there. The hair braiding was brilliant.”
“It can become a tradition.”
He wasn’t sure he was ready for that. “Little girls aren’t my area of expertise.”
She looked at him. “You would have preferred boys?”
A simple question to which he should have said yes. Because he’d assumed his volunteer position would be with boys. Only now, after the fact, he wondered.
She set down her fork. “Angel?”
Her voice was soft, questioning. He had a feeling that if he brushed off the question, she would go with it.
“I had a son,” he said slowly, leaning back in his chair. “Marcus.”
She continued to study him but didn’t speak. As
if letting him find his way.
“I went into the army right after high school. My dad died a few weeks before graduation. The coal mines did him in and he made me promise I would get out. I didn’t want to leave the town where I’d grown up, but I knew he was right. If I stayed, I would be trapped. So I left.”
“That must have been hard.”
“It was. I got through boot camp and ended up in Louisiana of all places.”
Where he’d met a girl, Taryn thought, sensing where the story was going. She briefly wondered what Angel had been like when he was younger—before he’d met the man who’d tried to slit his throat. Maybe even before he’d begun the kind of work that had put him in that position in the first place.
“What was her name?” she asked.
“Marie. She was beautiful. Tiny and Cajun, with a stubborn streak.” He flashed a smile. “She terrified me as much as she intrigued me. Luckily the love-at-first-sight thing happened to both of us. We were married within a couple of months.”
Love at first sight? Taryn wasn’t a big believer. She’d never seen it in action. She knew that lust could blossom from almost nothing—if the women who showed up in the boys’ hotel rooms were anything to go by. But that was different. That was about power by association. The bragging rights.
Love was different. There were—
She reached for her beer, then leaned back in her seat as the pieces all came together. Angel had loved his wife and now he wasn’t married. He’d said he’d had a child, but it hadn’t been real until now.
“Then you and Marie had Marcus.”
He nodded.
She watched the emotions chase across his face and wondered what he was thinking. Love was clear, as was pain and a sense of loss.
She waited, knowing he would answer the most important question when he was ready.
“They died,” he said at last. “Marcus was fourteen and Marie was driving him to a baseball game. There was a storm. From what the police could figure out, it was a single-car rollover. The coroner said they went quickly.”
Because Angel would have asked. He knew about suffering and wanted to make sure those he cared about didn’t. She realized there weren’t any words and instead reached across the table and lightly touched his hand.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he admitted. “I buried them, sold the house, put everything in storage and walked away.”
“Did that help?” she asked.
“No.” He squeezed her fingers once, then pulled his hand out of reach. “I spent a few months drinking. Quit my job and gave serious thought to ending it all.” He shrugged. “But I knew how much Marie would hate that. So I went back to work. But my heart wasn’t in it. Then one day, Justice showed up and talked to me about coming here. Once I visited the town, I knew it was the right decision. Fool’s Gold reminds me of where I grew up. I can get involved.”
And stay disconnected at the same time, she thought.
The idea of tragedy in Angel’s past didn’t surprise her. She’d been pretty sure he couldn’t do what he had done and not be exposed to loss. But the type of loss was unexpected. A wife and a son. A woman he had loved for years. What must it be like to be able to give your heart so completely? She’d never done it. No one close to her had done it successfully. The boys had tried. Well, not Jack, but Sam had, and Kenny... Okay, Kenny’s situation was unique. But Sam had been in love when he’d gotten married. And since then, he’d made more than one attempt to find genuine love.
“Then the girls are a good choice,” she told him. “Similar and yet different. It might have been difficult to work with teenage boys.”
He nodded slowly. “If they reminded me of Marcus. You’re probably right.”
“And now you know how to French-braid hair.”
He relaxed in his seat and smiled at her. “A necessary skill for a Grove Keeper. They should put that in the handbook.”
She grinned. “The handbook is pink. I’m thinking they assumed you already knew.”
Conversation shifted to the various girls in the grove. How a few had stood out and others would require a bit more time to get to know.
“Chloe was sweet,” Taryn said. “I hope the group can help her open up more. I think she wants to participate. I saw flashes of that, but it was almost as if she didn’t remember how to make friends.”
“She might feel guilty about having fun,” Angel told her. “If she laughs, she’s not missing her dad.” He paused. “It took me a while to recognize that in myself.”
“You must miss both Marie and Marcus.”
“I do. I think about them every day. I’ll never not think about them. But the ache isn’t there all the time, even if the guilt is. I should have been there to protect them.”
She wondered if that was about the driving or something more. “Because you would have done better navigating in a storm?”
“Because there’s no point in saving the world if you can’t save the people you love.”
An interesting twist, she thought.
She studied the man across from her. The scars, the cold gray eyes. He was dangerous and appealing. Knowing about the sadness in his past only made him more sexy. And yet...
To quote him, this wasn’t her area of expertise, but if she had to guess she would say that for Angel to heal, he needed to have faith, and she was the last person to help him with that. Trust was an overrated commodity. She’d learned that the hardest way possible.
They were a couple of broken souls, she thought, passing him the spare ribs. A man who had loved and lost and a woman who didn’t believe in romantic love at all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TARYN SPENT A restless night, which didn’t make for a good morning. The night before she’d been worried about her first meeting with the Acorns. Last night she’d been thinking about what Angel had shared with her about his past. She told herself that they all had ghosts to wrestle with, but somehow Angel’s seemed more tangible than hers. Or maybe the difference was he’d met his as an adult, while hers were all left over from childhood.
She got into the office, still confused about what had happened or not happened. Their conversation didn’t exactly lend itself to a romantic interlude. But somehow learning what she had about Angel had added dimensions to an already intriguing man. The safest and most sensible course of action seemed to be to cut and run. Not exactly an option.
She got to the office and turned on her computer. A few seconds later her calendar appeared with a large red block right in the middle of her day.
“Why didn’t I know this before?” she asked out loud, even as she remembered entering the date herself. But it had been a few weeks ago and somehow she had forgotten.
Taryn called over to the graphics department and got one of the guys to set up the main conference room. Then she put a call in to Isabel and explained the crisis.
“I’m going to need food and beer,” she said. “Do I call Jo? Does she deliver?”
“Call Ana Raquel,” Isabel said. “Dellina’s sister. She and her fiancé do catering. They wrote the Fool’s Gold cookbook that was out last year. Just tell her what you need and she’ll bring it to you.”
Taryn took down the number, then made the call. Ana Raquel promised to have the spread there on time. Just as she hung up, Larissa walked in with a couple of DVDs in her hand.
“For later,” the blonde said.
“You remembered?” Taryn asked.
“Sure. All the guys have been talking about it for a couple of weeks. You know how it bothers them.”
“No one reminded me.”
Larissa’s eyes widened. “We’re not ready? You know how they get.”
“I’m very clear on how they get, and it’s handled. Sort of. We’ll have plenty of food and beer in place when it’s time.” She looked at the DVDs her friend held. “Let’s get those into the player.”
They went upstairs to the large viewing room. There were oversize, comfy sofas and chairs, a massive TV
and posters of the boys everywhere. There was also plenty of room for food and beer. Larissa loaded the first DVD and pushed Play. After a couple of seconds of blackness, images filled the giant screen.
A very young Jack stood in front of a reporter. Jack’s suit looked painfully new and the jacket pulled across his broad shoulders.
The reporter, a seasoned veteran used to rookies, guided Jack through the interview.
“The L.A. Stallions made it clear they wanted you,” the reporter said. “That must have helped you get through the process.”
Taryn watched as twenty-two-year-old Jack tried not to smile too brightly on camera. But what the hell—he’d just been a first-round draft pick for his dream team. The man deserved to celebrate.
He said all the right things, because someone had taken the time to give him a few pointers. Back then he’d been seen as a way for the losing team to finally start to win some games. But the older, more experienced quarterback had made a comeback, benching Jack for nearly three years. What the impatient young player hadn’t realized was he’d needed the time to refine his game and mature physically. When Jack was given his first shot at starting, he’d already been tested in safe situations and was ready for the responsibility. He’d taken his team to the play-offs six years in a row and had won the Super Bowl.
Taryn had met him the summer between his first and second winning seasons. He’d been hot, in every sense of the word.
Now she looked at the young man he’d been and wondered at the differences.
“He was a baby,” Larissa said with a laugh.
“That he was.”
The DVD played on. The scene switched to Kenny and then Sam having the same conversation, although Kenny hadn’t gone until the second round and Sam had been right after him. Rare for a kicker.
Taryn had seen the interviews dozens of times, but they were still fun to watch. Sam, not wanting to give anything away, and Kenny both excited and concerned. The former because he was going to be a star and the latter because of what was happening at home.
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