Alex And The Angel - Dixie Browning

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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.”

      Alex unfolded himself from the deep leather chair, a frown gathering as he took in his daughter’s words. “You told her what?”

      “Well, you did say they probably needed pruning back, didn’t you? And she does things to trees and all, so I thought...”

      So she’d thought she could distract him by dragging a red herring—or in this case, a redheaded herring—across his path, and while he was looking the other way, she could run wild with Kid Corvette.

      “No way.”

      “But Daddy, you have to!”

      One of the advantages of having dark brows with blond hair was the effectiveness of the scowl. Without even trying, Alex had perfected it to an art. He didn’t have to say a word.

      “But, Daddy, you’ll embarrass me! I gave my word!”

      “Your word is your own to give, Sandy, but the grounds are my concern. If I think the trees need pruning, I’ll have Mr. Gilly contact the proper people.”

      The trouble was, they probably did need pruning. This time of year, the kid he hired to clean the pool spent more time raking the leaves out than Phil Gilly spent raking the yard in a season. Only he didn’t see any need to call in Angel Wydowski or Perkins, or whatever her name was now.

      After Sandy flounced from the room—her favorite form of locomotion these days—he forked a hand through his hair and sank back into the chair where he’d been reading The Wall Street Journal. The stock quotations forgotten, he stared at the pattern of sunlight and shadow that danced across the faded Chinese rug.

      Angel Wydowski. Trouble in a pint-size package. She used to hang around after games and wait until they’d each hooked up with a girl, and then ask for a ride home. Somehow, when they’d all crammed themselves into Alex’s Mustang, she’d usually managed to install herself between him and whatever cheerleader he happened to be dating at the time.

      Devil Wydowski. Little Angel. Once she’d found his sweater after he’d left it on the court after a tennis game and taken a cab all the way to his house to return it.

      His mother had not been amused.

      Neither had hers.

      Neither had she when he’d tried to reimburse her for the cab fare.

      For nearly forty-five minutes, Alex sprawled in his favorite chair in his favorite room in the twelve-room house in which he’d grown up, and thought back to the days of his brief rebellion. In some ways—hell, in all ways—they’d been the happiest days of his life. He’d been alive then, really alive—aware of all the possibilities, of the promise that had sizzled in his bloodstream

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