Alex And The Angel

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.

Two

The rock concert option settled to his satisfaction—he’d bartered two weeks at a riding camp for a single wild, unsupervised weekend that would have been hard on her eardrums at the very least—Alex had dealt next with an even more ticklish matter.

Boys. Or rather, one boy in particular.

How did a father explain to a daughter who was wavering painfully between childhood and womanhood that just because a boy was considered the choicest guy in the whole school, just because his father had given him a Corvette for his sixteenth birthday, that that was no reason to allow said daughter to go roaring all over creation with said choice guy?

What was it Gus used to call it? The 3-H Club?

Hooch, hormones and horsepower. It had been a threat then. It was no less a threat now, but it damn well wasn’t going to threaten his daughter. Not if he could help it!

It occurred to Alex that what he needed was another trade-off, only what did you trade a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old girl for the sixteen-and-a-half-year-old jerk she thought she was in love with? Bubble gum?

“Daddy, guess who I saw in the park today?” Sandy slammed into the room, her lanky five-feet-ten-inch frame inadequately covered by a leather miniskirt and an angora sweater that only emphasized her lack of curves.

“Elvis?”

She rolled her eyes. “Daa-addy! The plant lady! You know—your old friend?”

Angel. “The plant lady? You mean the woman who reads meters for the power plant?”

“Daa-addy! Ms. Perkins! The woman you introduced me to last week? She had on these real cool coveralls with her name and everything on the back, and she owns her own company and everything. I think that’s real cool, don’t you?”

“Cool,” Alex agreed. Things had been cool when he was a kid. Later on cool had been decidedly uncool. Good had been boss, or neat, or bad, not necessarily in that order. Now they were cool again. Mini-skirts were back. He’d even spotted a pair of bell-bottoms last week.

Mark it down to the recycling craze.

“So anyway, I told her about the trees that keep gunking up our pool, and she said she’d come take a look while she was in the neighborhood, only you need to call her first. She won’t come unless you do.”