“That’s not true and you know it,” Timm said. “I’m not apologizing for that story I wrote when I was a teenager. If you didn’t like it, tough, but it was neither libel nor gossip.”
At the time, he couldn’t write about Angel without the whole town figuring out he had a crush on her a mile wide, so he’d written about her mother. And what was the difference? They were two peas in a pod.
He watched her stare out the window. One strand of hair had snagged on a silver hoop earring and he wanted to tuck it behind her ear, so he gripped the steering wheel.
“It was a story,” he pressed. “Fiction.”
In his irritation, his foot came down heavily on the accelerator and he picked up speed. He forced himself to relax. It was weird to have Angel in his truck, sexy and smelling of retro perfume.
“Everyone in town knew the story was about Mama.”
That’s because it was. “I never called her by name.”
“You didn’t have to. Everyone knew it was Missy Donovan.” Her laugh sounded brittle. “You all but called my mother a slut and you were right.”
A slut? He shot her a glance. “I did not.”
“Yeah? What exactly did ‘she can take a man anywhere she wants him to go’ mean?”
He smiled. “You can quote my story?”
She paused a moment before saying, “I only ever saw the one written about Mama.”
“I meant that she was sexy and knew how to use it to her advantage, that she knew how to get whatever she wanted from men.”
She drummed the fingers of one hand on her thigh. Timm wondered how it felt to be the daughter of the town’s…for lack of a better word, slut. “Missy brags about how you’ve changed your life. Your mom is proud of you.”
So was he. During his adolescent years, while everyone else had been out doing things, he’d been at home sick, sitting at his bedroom window, watching people, studying human nature, wanting to believe the best of people. They didn’t always measure up.
Angel had fascinated him. Most of the time she’d risen only as far as her trailer-trash background would allow, but he’d thought there might be more to her than she let people see.
Then, four years ago, at twenty-four, she’d left for college and Timm had thought, Yes! Surprise us all!
If she had indeed turned her life around, why was she here pulling a stunt like burning a bike on the side of the road?
In the barely visible light, her lips twisted. “Mama needs to get a hobby and stop talking about me.”
“In high school, you were voted Most Likely to Succeed.”
“I remember,” she answered, her tone a trace bitter. “As an exotic dancer.”
“No one ever expected you to end up at college, studying math of all things.”
She didn’t say anything. If silence could be qualified, this one was heavy with significance.
Had he gotten it wrong? He usually had a sharp memory. “You did study math, right?”
She nodded.
What was up? Why wouldn’t she look at him or answer his questions?
He flipped on the interior light. She faced him with a stunned expression then, just as quickly, turned away. He noticed a mottled blush on her neck. She was hiding something.
What had happened to her at college?
A sharp flash of disappointment flooded him. He’d thought that, given half a chance, Angel would have used college to break out of the mold fate had pressed her into. Too bad he’d thought too highly of her.
He shut off the light. “You didn’t do well at college, did you?”
“I excelled,” she snapped.
In some weird way, he thought he knew Angel too well. “You didn’t finish, did you?”
With her thumbnail, she worried a hangnail on her index finger. “No,” she mumbled almost too low to hear.
The intensity of his reaction took him by surprise. He’d made the ultimate sacrifice after Papa’s death, had left college early to come home and take over the family business, to think more of others than of himself.
“So you threw away the education Missy paid for.”
“I didn’t throw it away.”
“Then what?”
She shrugged. “None of your business.”
Angel hadn’t changed one iota.
“Figures,” he said under his breath. “You really didn’t change one bit while you were gone.”
She jabbed a finger against her chest. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am.”
Stupid? “I’ve never thought that, Angel. Not with the way you had the boys dancing to your tune in high school.”
She turned to look at him. In the dim illumination cast by the dashboard, he could barely make out her expression, but it might have been self-mocking. Or was she mocking him?
She’d never invited him to any of her metaphorical dances.
Unblemished beauties like Angel had no use for scarred beasts like Timm. They preferred the athletes of the world, the movers and shakers, the doers, not quiet, thoughtful boys who were forced to watch life pass them by. Who figured out the problems of the world and some of the solutions and wrote about them.
Who had learned, by watching, exactly how imperfect his fellow man was.
He’d changed since then, had become successful, was well respected in town. His scars were a fact of life that he didn’t think about most days.
He no longer considered himself a beast. Angel, on the other hand, was still an unblemished beauty.
How lowering to find himself, all these years later, still mooning over a shallow beauty queen.
He wanted her.
ANGEL DIDN’T WANT TO be here with brainy Timm Franck. She hadn’t recognized him at first, but she remembered him now. She had almost blurted, “The guy who’d been burned.” So stupid.
Timm would never have left college before finishing his degree. He would never torch a bike on the side of the road during a burn ban. He would never screw up as badly as she had.
Too smart to be human, to indulge in human mistakes, Timm was a robot, with a mind and no feelings.
She studied him. He’d grown into his height. His shoulders looked broader, his biceps bigger. His cheekbones stood out more than they used to now that his face had become lean and strong. He’d grown up well. So well.
Yeah, she remembered him now.
At a guess, she’d put him just over thirty years old. He’d been three grades ahead of her in high school. When he came. When he wasn’t having an operation, or recovering from one. In the later grades, he’d been around more often, because the doctors had done all they could for him by then. That’s what she guessed, at any rate.
Wire-rimmed glasses rested on his straight nose. With his quiet, thoughtful gaze, he looked like he chewed encyclopedias for snacks.
How could a girl like her compete with a mind like his?
He’d perfected that brainy look to a fine art. For the first time, she found it attractive.
Damn, that bothered her.