Mary Sullivan - Beyond Ordinary

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.

She reached down to pull the lever that pushed her seat all the way back. Then she slipped off her red cowboy boots and leaned her feet on the dashboard, the vinyl warm under her soles, and wrapped her arms around her knees.

She caught Timm staring at the red polish dotting her toenails. Let him look. No way would he ever get to touch.

She used to like the jocks—big dumb boys who wanted nothing more from her than hot sessions in the back of their trucks. That was no longer true. She’d known some great guys at college attending on athletic scholarships—ambitious and self-disciplined guys, smart men who didn’t try to grab her in dark corners.

But then, Bozeman hadn’t been Ordinary. No one there had known her as Missy Donovan’s daughter.

“When you wrote that story,” she said, “you pretty much said Mama was too stupid to get a man without using sex.”

“We’re still on that subject?” He sighed. “Listen, I like Missy. She’s sweet and generous.”

“Did I hear a but at the end of that sentence?”

“Yeah. She isn’t too bright. Men have taken advantage of her over the years.”

Angel knew how…simple…Mama was, knew that she only wanted a man to take care of her and love her. Too bad so many of them had wanted only sex.

Then Timm said, “She took advantage of them, too.”

“And why not?” Angel went on the offensive. “She had no skills. She was poor. She had to survive.” So why did the way she chose to survive embarrass Angel so much?

“The town decided the second I was born to Missy that I was as cheap and easy as she was. Boys started sniffing around me before they were able to tie their shoelaces.”

What would sanctimonious Timm Franck know about growing up in poverty? About growing up in a town that saw only what it wanted to see about a girl? His family had been respected pillars of the community.

What if she gave in to the urge to grab his glasses from his face and crumple them in her fist? Man, she felt wound up, all of her emotions strung too tightly.

“Illegitimate, trashy Angel Donovan. That’s all the town ever thought of me.” She didn’t want a brainiac like Timm telling her there was no escape for a girl born into poverty to a woman who knew how to live off men, but not much else.

Angel needed to escape.

She’d tried to change while at college, in a new place where no one knew her, or her mother, or her mother’s reputation. Where there were no preconceived notions about her.

Neil had treated her like gold. He’d seen who she wanted to be, not who she was expected to be.

That hadn’t lasted, had it? She’d tried to be a better person. She’d failed. When you try so hard to change and it doesn’t take, it hurts so damn much. After Neil died, she’d felt vulnerable and uncertain. But here in Ordinary, she knew exactly who she was, who she was expected to be and how to act to get through every day.