Alex And The Angel

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.