Alex And The Angel. Dixie Browning

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