Alex And The Angel. Dixie Browning

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.