Mary Sullivan - Beyond Ordinary

She had always been too pretty for her own good, or for the good of his peace of mind. Damn, she’d been away for four years and he still had it bad.

He reached a hand to her face and she pulled back. “Hold still.” He wiped a spot of foam from the corner of her lip. Her peach-soft skin burned beneath his thumb.

There wasn’t a square inch of her body he hadn’t fantasized about touching over the years. She was even softer than he’d imagined and an urge rose in him—to stake his claim on the playground of her body like the worst neighborhood bully.

He shook his head, snapping out of the daze Angel always inspired, disappointed that his reaction to her hadn’t changed.

He was supposed to be a smart man. He owned and edited the largest newspaper for miles around. But it seemed that when it came to Angel Donovan, he was as brain-dead as every other man in Ordinary.

Assuming she would want the saddlebags lying on the side of the road, he picked them up and led her to his truck with a hand under her elbow.

“Neil,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” He glanced at her to make sure she hadn’t mistaken him for someone else, but she was talking to herself. What was driving her to burn what looked to be a fairly new bike? Any bike, for that matter?

As they approached the truck, she stiffened and resisted his hold.

“Who are you?”

Not one trace of recognition shone in those brilliant eyes. He might as well have been a stranger.

It shouldn’t bother him.

It did.

He’d always suspected he was invisible to Angel. He’d been invisible to everyone in his teens. Since then, he’d become a force to be reckoned with in town, but Angel hadn’t been in Ordinary to witness it.

“I’m not getting into a truck with a stranger,” she said with a pugnacious jutting of her jaw.

Tough and unafraid, the Angel he’d known could slice the balls off a man with the sharp edge of her tongue. Looked like she hadn’t changed.

“I’m not a stranger,” he answered. “I grew up in Ordinary.”

“Never seen you before in my life.”

Like he said, it shouldn’t hurt, but it did.

“Get in the truck, Angel. I’m driving you into town.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“There’s a bad element hanging around these days.” Beneath his fingers, her pulse thrummed and that heartbeat warmed her perfume—patchouli—and it swirled around him, heating his blood. Angel would have made a great hippy—free love and all that.

“I’m not letting you walk two miles into town,” he said. “It will be dark by the time you get there.”

She stared at him with her full lips pinched into a flat line. “Who are you?”

“Timm Franck,” he said, hoping like crazy his name would spark a hint of recognition. It didn’t.

“How do I know you?” Her gaze strayed to the top of his shirt, to the collar buttoned to his throat, and her eyes widened. “You’re the guy who—”

“Yeah,” he muttered, resigned to the fact that she remembered him for the wrong reason. “I’m the guy who—”

He released her.

“Get in and close the door,” he said, quietly.

She blushed and slid into the truck with her eyes averted. Timm wished he didn’t have this big sign stuck around his neck that pretty much said, This Guy Isn’t Normal. When You Look At Him, Be Embarrassed. Be Very Embarrassed.

He hadn’t been treated as normal in nearly twenty years.

He tossed her bags at her feet, left her to close the door and then walked around the front of the truck, in and out of beams of the headlights.

When he climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed his door, her face came alive. Her blue eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open.

“Wait a minute,” she said, and Timm saw the moment full recognition of exactly who he was hit her.

“You.” She lunged out of the truck.

Timm prevented her escape with a hand on her arm.

So she finally remembered what he had written about her mother. It had been more than a dozen years ago, but she’d reacted badly then and she was reacting badly now.

“Stay in the truck, Angel,” he said. “I’m driving you into town.”

“Over my dead body.”

“If I have to.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“Look, there’s a new bar that’s attracting bikers. They’re tough and itching for trouble.”

Her expression was mutinous, but she remained where she was. “Why did you interfere?” she asked, crossing her arms. “What I was doing was none of your business.”

“If the gas in that bike’s tank had ignited…” Imagining the destruction to the land around them, he shook his head.

Why hadn’t life beaten even a modicum of common sense into the brain lurking behind that perfect face, or a soul into that stunning body?

Once a shallow beauty queen, always shallow.

“I ran out of gas,” she mumbled, staring out of the open window as they drove past fields fading in the dying light.

That stopped him for a minute. “Why were you burning the bike?”

“Never mind. If I told you, you’d tell your father and he’d publish it in tomorrow’s paper.”

She did remember him, and his family.

“My father died last year,” he said.

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said, her tone laced with sadness uncharacteristic of the Angel he knew. “I hadn’t heard.”

He nodded, but didn’t respond.

“How did he die?” she asked.

Timm faltered—he still couldn’t talk about Papa. Finally, he responded to her accusation of a few minutes ago. “I don’t publish the Ordinary Citizen on Tuesdays.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.” In a split second, she reverted to sharp-tongued Angel. “Your paper is a rag full of nothing but gossip and innuendo.” Yeah, she remembered him, and definitely for more of the wrong reasons.

“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.