Alex and the Angel
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Dixie Browning
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One
He felt old. Old, dammit, old! Where had it all gone—the dreams, the raw, idealistic ambition, the joyous excitement of being a rutting male animal in his prime? The trouble was, a man’s prime was over almost before he realized he was in it. After that, it was all downhill.
By the time he left the office, Alex Hightower was hot and tired. Thinking of the woman he’d be seeing in a couple of hours, he tried to drum up a moderate degree of lust. He was only thirty-eight, for God’s sake—there had to be a viable hormone somewhere in his six-foot-two, one-hundred-seventy-three-pound carcass!
Think lust, man. Think long, silken limbs, sweet, pouting lips, soft, full breasts. Think tangled sheets, twisting bodies, explosions of passion that leave a man weak and trembling and hungry for a return engagement.
“Think sex, dammit,” he muttered, pulling into his driveway. “Forget the damned furniture market!”
He let himself in the front door of the whitewashed brick house he shared with his fourteen-year-old daughter, Sandy, his thoughts focused on a cool shower, a tall drink, and a good excuse that would get him out of his dinner date. He was on his way to securing the first of those when he heard his daughter on the phone.
“—said I couldn’t, but he always changes his mind. Oh, sure, I mean, just because Daddy is straight out of the Crustacean period, that doesn’t mean—what? Okay. Huh? Oh, sure, don’t worry, I can twist him around my little finger.”
Feeling an ache in his midsection that was one part irritation, one part indigestion, and three parts love, he passed the half-open door of his daughter’s bedroom without calling out a greeting.
Fifteen minutes under a pounding shower did little to ease his tension, nor did the drink he sipped as he got dressed to go out again. Morosely Alex adjusted his gray-striped tie in front of his bureau mirror, wondering if somewhere among the more obscure laws of nature there was one that decreed that fourteen-going-on-twenty-five-year-old daughters and thirty-eight-going-on-a-hundred-year-old fathers couldn’t speak the same language.
No wonder he couldn’t drum up the strength to do something about his dismal social life. Being a single father sapped all his energies.
“No,” he’d said just that morning to her request—more like a demand—to be allowed to go to some camp-out, rock concert affair.
“But Daddy, everyone in the whole wide world is going,” Sandy had wailed. “I’ll be laughed out of school if I’m the only one whose parent won’t let her go—and besides, I promised!”
“And I said no. No is a complete sentence, Alexandra. It requires neither modifiers nor explanations.”
“Oh, God, I hate you!” she’d cried, rushing from the breakfast table in tears. Which was a more or less natural state these days.
After that had come the earring thing. Alex would be the first to admit he knew very little about the female of the species—which was quite an admission from a man who’d been sought after by women from the time he turned fifteen. He did know, however, that girls of fourteen had no business wearing half a pound of hardware dangling from one ear. It wasn’t even balanced, for Pete’s sake!
“But Daddy, everybody does it! I’ll look naked without my jewelry!”
“A fourteen-year-old girl—”
“Fourteen and a half, which is practically fifteen, and that’s almost sixteen, which is old enough to drive and get married and do almost everything! I know three girls my age who’re already pregnant!”
He’d aged ten years right then.
“Just because you’re too old to remember what it’s like to have any fun, that’s no reason why I have to live like a five-year-old in a convent.”
“I’m not sure, but I don’t think they accept five-year-olds in convents, Sandy. Now, go wash your face.” She’d been experimenting with makeup lately. “Quickly, please—I’m already late for an appointment.”
He’d inspected her face, refrained from further comment on her earrings, one of which was a stud that didn’t bear close examination, the other a barbaric arrangement of jangling spare parts that grazed her bony little shoulder.
Was he being too judgmental? She accused him of it on the average of three times a week, but at least she’d stopped calling him a WASP. Now she called him a DWEM, something she’d picked up at school. It meant Dead White European Male. Which was hardly reassuring. Especially the dead part.
From the mirror, Alex’s gaze fell to the silver-framed photograph of Sandy on her eleventh birthday. They shared the pale blond hair and the clear gray eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Sandy had inherited Dina’s oval face and flawless features instead of his own bony, angular face, his high-bridged nose and aggressive jaw. Thank God. While he’d never had any problem finding women, he had never deluded himself that his looks were the great attraction. Money was a powerful aphrodisiac.
Devil take it, he was running late again! Mrs. Halsey had been late getting here, and then he’d had the usual dustup with Sandy over having a baby-sitter in for the evening whenever he went out. She’d flounced off to her room and turned up what she referred to as her music until he could practically see the prisms on the chandelier in the dining room below jumping off their hooks.
Before heading downstairs, Alex rapped on his daughter’s door. “Sandy? I’ll be in before midnight.” Time for drinks, dinner, a dance or two, the drive back and perhaps a nightcap if he didn’t linger over it. “If you need anything, I’ll be at the club.” Long pause. “With Carol.” Silence. If one could call the death throes of a flock of electric guitars plus the collision of two freight trains silence. She knew better than to assault her ears that way, but neither he nor the doctor could convince her. “Sandy? I’ll see you in the morning, sweetheart. And by the way...the word is cretaceous, not crustacean.”
With a defeated sigh, he descended the elegant curving staircase, glanced into the study, where Mrs. Halsey was engrossed in watching a lineup of bare-chested male cover models on TV. She didn’t even look his way. Shrugging, he set off for his dinner date.
Maybe he should ask Carol to have a little talk with Sandy. Maybe she could get through. It might be worth a try.
But was it worth the risk?
Carol English was everything any man could want in a woman. Attractive, intelligent, well-bred, refined. She’d gone to an all-female academy, graduated from an all-female college. Hell, she was female herself. Which meant that at least she spoke the language. So why not give it a shot? Things could hardly get worse than they were now. His daughter was on the verge of disowning him. She kept dropping hints about this group of social do-gooders somewhere or other who encouraged children to divorce their parents.
On the other hand, he’d been suspecting for some time that Carol saw herself as the next Mrs. Alex Hightower, III. He wasn’t quite ready to commit himself to that. He’d sent Sandy out shopping with her a couple of times, but if he let things go much further than that, he just might find himself on a steep and slippery slope. He’d be the first to admit that he needed help. He would even admit that his life had been flat for so long that even trouble was a relief...of sorts.
No, it wasn’t. Not when that trouble involved his daughter. No way on earth would he ever see her hurt, not as long as he was above ground and breathing.
But marriage?
On the other hand, why not? They were compatible enough, he and Carol. It wouldn’t be like taking a chance with a stranger. He missed having sex on a more or less regular basis. Thirty laps around the pool could only go so far to make up for it. He also missed the companionship of being married, not that Dina had ever been much of a companion.
Or all that exciting a sexual partner, come to that, but then, he was older now. More settled. Ready to accept the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot of joy in everyday life for the average man.
So why not give it a shot? It would be good for Sandy, having a woman in the house besides Mrs. Gilly, the housekeeper, who was more of an institution than a help. He’d known Carol since kindergarten. They had grown up in the same set, belonged to the same clubs, rebelled briefly at about the same time against the establishment before they’d inevitably become a part of it.
Negotiating late traffic on University Drive with unconscious skill, Alex decided he wasn’t quite ready yet to give in. Not for the sex or the companionship, both of which he could probably have had anyway, if he’d insisted. Not even for Sandy’s sake. Sooner or later, Sandy had to grow up.
Besides, Carol reminded him too much of Dina. His ex-wife. His unlamented ex-wife, now married to some third-rate title in one of those tiny European principalities known for its skiing, its gambling and the whimsical uniforms of its palace guards.
A Trans Am roared past in the right-hand lane, barely making the light. While the Jag purred quietly, waiting for green, Alex thought back again to his college days. Back in those days he’d been bubbling over with the sheer joy of rebelling. Of kicking over the traces. Full of piss and vinegar, as Gus’s mother used to say.
Good old Gus. Gus Wydowski. They’d been an invincible team back in the old days—Alex, Gus and Kurt Stryker. High, Wyde and Handsome, they’d been called by some. Tall, dark and handsome by others.
Alex, last of a long line of textile and furniture barons, and an only child, had been spoiled rotten, to the point where he’d even managed to get kicked out of the school endowed by his grandfather, which was no small achievement. His first few weeks in public school had been sheer hell, until a tough kid named Gus Wydowski, son of a diesel mechanic, had come to his defense and taught him a thing or two about fighting. Including the dangers of tucking his thumbs inside his fists before he busted some jerk on the jaw.
Taught him to play high-passing, hard-hitting, tough-as-nails football, too. Both him and Kurt. In high school, they’d been the invincible three. Gus had gone on to earn a college scholarship, and because both Gus and Kurt had enrolled at N.C. State, Alex had broken ranks with three generations of Duke alumni and followed them there.
The old trio. God, how many years had it been? He wished he could put in a call for Gus’s tough common sense and Kurt’s overgrown sense of responsibility to help him out of the fix he was in right now, but he doubted if either one of them could offer much advice to a man who was being slowly bent out of shape by his own adolescent daughter.
Pulling into the parking lot of Carol’s plush garden apartment complex, he lingered a minute before locking the car, remembering the other part of the old threesome.
The tagalong. The pest. The kid sister from hell.
Now there was a trunk full of trouble, he mused. When it came to trouble, Sandy was a nonstarter compared to Angeline Wydowski. A redheaded, freckle-faced peanut, her folks had called her Angel, but everyone else who knew her called her Devil. With just cause!
“H’lo, darling.” The door opened silently, and Carol, looking cool and elegant in a three-piece beige silk outfit, leaned forward and brushed a kiss half an inch from his left cheek.
Alex breathed in the familiar scent of hair spray and Chanel. Like the woman, herself, her scent was classic, nonthreatening. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Baby-sitter got hung up in traffic.”
“Oh, Lex, when are you going to get smart and send that poor child off to boarding school? It would be the making of her, I assure you.” Carol stepped back to collect her tiny purse, handed Alex her key and waited while he locked her door. “After all, I’m a product of boarding school, and I turned out reasonably well, didn’t I?”
She waited for the requisite compliment, which Alex produced with practiced ease. Attractive, intelligent, he reminded himself—well-bred, refined.
And boring. Unfortunately, Carol was about as exciting as stale croissants.
* * *
It was three days later when Alex hurried out of his office. If his mind hadn’t been racing six blocks ahead, and at the same time trying to come up with a reasonable excuse to lock his daughter away in a safe place for roughly the next forty years, he probably wouldn’t have tripped over the pair of size-five combat boots.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry as—”
“Watch it, Hightower!”
“Do I know you?” The woman had been kneeling—actually, she’d been crawling out from under the massive magnolia that overhung the walkway, feet first. Feet and butt first. Feet and coverall-clad, shapely, sweetly rounded butt first.
“Devil?” he said, disbelievingly. “Devil Wydowski? Great Scott, I was thinking about you just the other day, wondering where Gus was now.”
Reluctantly Angeline rose to her full five feet two inches, dusted the knees of her coveralls—not even her designer jeans! Wouldn’t you just know she would be hot and sweaty and wearing her oldest pair of coveralls the day she finally, actually, came face-to-face with the man who had broken her heart nearly twenty years ago?
“Root bound,” she growled, her thin skin glowing like a stoplight.
“He’s bound for where?”
“Not Gus, the magnolia.” God, he was gorgeous! He didn’t possess a single perfect feature—unless it was those dark, clear gray eyes that could look right through a woman’s skin and see the lust in her heart.
“Angel, I—”
A car slid into a no-parking zone a few yards away, behind a van with a sign that said Perkins Landscaping & Nursery. The passenger side door swung open, a glowering teenager wearing too much eyeshadow and a miniskirt that was barely decent lurched out, and the car pulled away.
Alex swore silently, angry at being put on the defensive again. He’d been on his way to collect her, with every intention of collaring someone in authority and demanding to know how the counselors in what was supposed to be the best school in town dealt with adolescent females who didn’t want to be dealt with.
“Sandy, I was on my way to pick you up, if you’d just—”
“Just been patient. Yeah, yeah, I know. I was patient until I got sick to my stomach, okay? So when Mrs. Toad said she’d drop me off at your office, I figured I’d save you the trouble.”
“Mrs. Todd,” he corrected automatically. “You know I never mind—ah, what’s the use? Angel, this is my daughter, Alexandra. Sandy, Miss Wydowski. You’ve heard me speak of Gus Wydowski?”
“Nope.”
“It’s Perkins now,” Angel said coolly, as if daring him to make something of it.
“Oh. The van?”
“Mine.”
So she was married now. Little Angel-Devil Wydowski. What kind of man would take on that challenge, he wondered in slightly distracted amusement. One glance at her small, square hands revealed nothing more than a layer of dirt and a nice set of calluses. No rings. Evidently gardeners didn’t wear jewelry while they worked.
“You haven’t changed,” he murmured, feeling the need to say something. She hadn’t, not really. While her hair might have darkened somewhat from the flaming orange he remembered, her wide open smile hadn’t changed a bit. It was almost impossible not to smile back, and the last thing Alex felt like doing at the moment was smiling.
Come to think of it, he couldn’t remember the last time he had felt like smiling. Another thing that seemed to have withered with age was his sense of humor.
“Pleasetameecha,” Sandy said, looking curiously from the woman in the pool-table green coveralls to her father and back again. Sandy towered a good eight lanky inches above the diminutive redhead, Alex a full foot. Watching the color fluctuate in Angel’s thin skin, Alex felt for no reason at all as if the sun had suddenly come out after a season of rain.
“Yeah. Me, too.” Angel upped the wattage of her smile, extended her hand, grimaced and withdrew it. After wiping it on the seat of her pants, she tried again. “Real neat earring. Did you get it at that new place in Chapel Hill?”
“On Franklin Street? Yeah, it’s cool, isn’t it?”
Alex looked from one to the other as they exchanged information about where to find the coolest, the baddest, and the cheapest good stuff, totally mystified by the inner workings of the female mind.
But then, what else was new?
* * *
Angel had just locked up for the night and was looking forward to a long, hot soak, an entire kielbasa pizza with polski wyrobs, onions and feta cheese, all to herself, plus the first of the new books that had come in the mail just that day.
Plain brown wrapper stuff.
Her favorite reading.
Romances.
At thirty-four, Angel had endured a few too many snide looks from size-zilch bookstore clerks half her age, who were barely literate enough to punch the buttons on a cash register, whenever she plopped down her stack of favorite authors on the counter. One look at her utilitarian-style body, her unmanageable hair and her generic-type face, and they figured her only shot at romance had to come from between the covers of a book.
It was nobody’s business that she had been in lust twice and actually married for almost a year, all of which had nothing to do with the fact that she’d been in love practically all her life with that blasted Prince Charming her brother had taken up with the year she’d turned thirteen.
Thirteen-year-old girls don’t fall in love?
Ha! This one had.
Not that she’d ever told him. Him or anyone else. But what was even worse than watching him from a distance over the years as he married that stuck-up twit with the finishing school accent and slowly turned into a stuffed shirt, was the fact that throughout the entire course of her own less than illustrious love life, she had never quite managed to get over the jerk.
She knew about his divorce. Not the reason, but the fact that it had happened. She knew about his daughter, and the fact that he had complete custody of her. Around these parts, when a legend like Alex Hightower III even changed barbers, it was fodder for the gossips.
She also knew he’d gradually dropped all his old buddies. Gus hadn’t heard from him in ages. Not that she’d come right out and asked—she had too much pride for that—but there were ways of finding out these things.
It was disgusting. It was a blooming disgrace, the way that man affected her metabolism! And it wasn’t his precious pedigree she’d fallen for, either. Both the Reillys, her mother’s people, and the Wydowskis went all the way back to Adam and Eve. How much farther could a Hightower go?
Nor was it his money. She’d been stiffed by too many in his tax bracket, both waitressing her way through school and more recently, in the landscaping business.
She just wished she could figure it out. Wished even more that she could come up with a cure. Over the years since she’d first been bitten by the Alex-bug, during several minor crushes, including a brief affair with another member of the country club set, who had relieved her of her virginity and then had the gall to laugh when she’d naively expected a commitment from him—even throughout her brief marriage to Cal Perkins—Angel had never quite managed to forget Alex Hightower.
She knew very well—she had always known—that she was beer and he was champagne, and beer suited her just fine, it really did. It was just that she had this crazy addiction. No matter how long she went without a fix, she could never forget what it was she’d been addicted to.
She should have moved to California. Or maybe Australia. Living in the same town, she’d been forced to watch from the sidelines as the years passed. As her own brief marriage to a man who was too handsome to be true—quite literally—had crashed and burned. Watched from a distance, once she’d pushed her own pain into the background, as all the old joy, all the old sweet, wholesome sexiness that had been so much a part of the Alex Hightower she had once known, had slowly withered away.
Oh, yes, she’d seen him, all right. Only he hadn’t seen her for the landscape, which she was usually a part of. At least she had been ever since Cal, her too-good-to-be-true husband, had run off with a bar waitress and wrapped his pickup truck around a scalybark hickory south of town.
Which was when she’d become owner, along with the bank, of a small, marginally successful landscape nursery north of town.
Somehow the business survived her early incompetence. Friends had helped. Gus had helped. He’d fenced in the whole area, put in an alarm system, which she usually forgot to set, modernized her tiny office, and then he’d taken a crew and headed for the coast, where he had a contract to build three cottages, leaving her to sink or swim on her own.
Having been born with neither a life raft nor a silver spoon anywhere on her person, Angel had known what she had to do, and she’d set about doing it. The area north of town, where her place was located, was in the process of being rezoned and developed. Less than a month after his father had died, Cal had started talking about selling out the family business and moving to California.
They had never gotten around to it, which was probably a good thing, because after Cal was killed, Angel had desperately needed something solid to hang on to. Even now, seldom a month went past without an inquiry from some real estate agent or developer.
It wasn’t the changing zoning that was the threat. Small farms like hers were grandfathered in. But all the developing that was going on, that was another matter. Actually, it was both good and bad. Good business. Bad taxes.
Which made it only sensible that she refocus her meager advertising budget and go after business in the more affluent sections of town, one of which just happened to be the Hope Valley, Forest Hills area.
Was it her fault if that also happened to be the area where Alex’s home and office were located? Was it her fault that occasionally she happened to catch a glimpse of him driving by in that well-bred car of his that probably cost more than she grossed in a year?
Actually, it really wasn’t her fault. She’d been advised by someone at the bank, acting strictly in an unofficial capacity, that if she wanted to succeed in business, she had to follow the money. And the money was definitely not in her particular neighborhood. At least not enough of it to pay her ever-increasing property taxes.
Which was why, over the years she’d been treated to several glimpses of Alex on horseback, where the bridle trail meandered close to one of the streets she used regularly as a shortcut. Angel’s knowledge of riding was strictly limited. She did know, however, that on that big gray monster of a horse, Alex looked nothing at all like the grizzled cowboys she’d seen on “Lonesome Dove.” For one thing, she couldn’t picture any one of them wearing shining armor and carrying a lance. Alex easily filled the bill.
But then, he always had.
Even in tennis shorts. Back when she’d first met him, she sometimes tagged along to watch him play just so she could admire his legs and his trim behind, which she would have died if anyone had ever caught her doing.
It hadn’t taken much in those days to fuel months of daydreams.
Unfortunately, it still didn’t. Talk about a case of arrested development!
“Compost,” she muttered. Coming out of the fog, she started hacking at the pizza, which was already cold. One of these days she was going to grow up and accept the fact that Cinderellas who wore combat boots never ended up with the charming prince.
Where was he right now? In his plush office, with his plush secretary? Playing tennis at his plush country club? Having supper with that cute-funny-sad daughter of his?
Not this early. Besides, people like the Hightowers didn’t eat supper, they dined. And not while they watched the six-o’clock news, either.
She remembered the first time he’d come to their house for supper. She’d been about fifteen—about the same age as his daughter was now. Pop had died just a few months earlier and she and Gus, Mama and Aunt Zee, had moved into Mama’s old house with Grandma Reilly.
Grandma had made one of her boiled dinners. Cabbage, corned beef, potatoes and carrots. Angel could’ve died. She had prayed for roast beef at the very least, pheasant and caviar being too much to hope for. She’d wanted to open up the dining room that no one had used for a hundred years, but Grandma had said if the kitchen was good enough for the cook, it was good enough for the company, and Mama and Aunt Zee had agreed.
So they’d sat around the kitchen table with an electric fan swiveling noisily on top of the refrigerator, and eaten off the dishes that had come from Krogers with coupons. Alex had asked for seconds and then thirds, and cleaned off his plate each time, and once she’d realized that he wasn’t just being polite, she had fallen another few miles deeper in love.
Not that he’d ever suspected it. He’d been kind to her in those days, but only in an offhand way, the way Gus was kind to her. Ignoring her, for the most part. Occasionally teasing her absentmindedly, but invariably coming to her defense whenever she got in over her head, which she was very good at. Polish and Irish was an explosive combination, even third generation.
Alex Hightower. Oh, my. To think she had actually talked to him face-to-face again after all these years.
