Kitabı oku: «Beyond Ordinary»

Timm felt her breath warm on his neck

Angel’s soft hair brushed his chin, tantalizing him, reminding him of his adolescent hopes and dreams, always of her. He experienced a moment of disbelief that the one he’d wanted was here, now…with him.

She gripped his biceps, her hands warm through his cotton shirt, her fingers tight. Her nails bit into his skin, bringing him firmly back into the moment.

He pressed closer. Her hip, firm beneath his other hand, burned his palm. With his eyes closed, he feathered the skin above her jeans, and it was softer than anything he’d ever felt.

He was drowning in her scent and her heat. He had to touch her more.

Dear Reader,

Most people wander this earth wearing hard outer shells to protect their vulnerable cores. But those exteriors don’t reflect who they really are. The problem is that the world assumes what they see on the surface is all there is. What a shame. I wanted to explore this idea and look at what kinds of problems it can cause.

Angel Donovan has been forced into a certain role by fate and, no matter how hard she tries, can’t get her hometown to see her differently, to recognize that she is not the same person on the inside as the beautiful face and killer body lead people to believe. I liked the idea of a woman breaking free of preconceived perceptions to show the world that she has depth, that the person on the inside is every bit as beautiful as the one on the outside.

Timm Franck has the opposite problem. He is a decent, smart, nerdy guy who was burned and still carries the scars. He has no problem showing people who he really is on the inside. He just doesn’t want to show them his chest full of scars.

I know of too many people who worry about their outer shell not being beautiful enough and fail to show that what they have in their cores is much more worthy than surface beauty. Revealing ourselves to others can turn out to be the best thing we’ve ever done! May you find the courage to do it.

Happy reading,

Mary Sullivan

P.S. I do love to hear from readers! Please contact me through my website at www.marysullivanbooks.com.

Beyond Ordinary
Mary Sullivan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary likes to break through the shells of new people she meets, discovering the pearls of their personalities. We all seem to have so much to give to each other. She has enjoyed meeting so many great people through her writing career, especially readers. This is her fourth Harlequin Superromance novel. Mary loves being part of the Harlequin family!

To my mum,

who enjoyed reading her daughter’s books.

Love always.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

ANGEL DONOVAN LIMPED home to Ordinary, Montana, on her wounded Honda Gold Wing, pulling to a stop on the shoulder of the highway a couple of miles shy of town.

Out of gas.

She’d been gliding on fumes for the past quarter hour.

She tugged off her helmet and brushed sweat-dampened hair from her forehead, then dismounted.

The hot breeze outrunning nightfall across the prairie feathered her hair around her arms and her back, in the space between her vest and the waistband of her jeans. She should cut off every last black inch of it.

With one strong swing of her arm, she heaved the helmet into the closest field where it rolled across dry soil beneath yellow wheat, its red gloss disappearing under the dirt it picked up.

She unhooked her saddlebags and laid them down a few feet away, took out the can of lighter fluid she’d bought in Bozeman and sprinkled it over the bike.

It glowed golden in the horizontal rays of the setting sun, its chemical scent a counterpoint to the dry, earthy aroma of the fields.

When a pickup truck flew past, its rush of air pushed her toward the bike. Farther down the road, it slowed.

Whoever you are, keep moving. I don’t need you meddling.

Striking a wooden match on the tight denim across her thigh, she threw it onto the bike and the lighter fluid ignited with a satisfying whoosh.

It crackled and whispered, spoke of things best laid to rest, smoked like a demon and obliterated the scratches and dents on the nearly new bike.

Neil, baby, this is for you.

The heat rising off the burning bike distorted the horizon in shimmering waves.

The pickup reversed down the road and came to a stop ten feet away. A man exited the vehicle with a fire extinguisher in his hand.

“No,” Angel screamed, and tried to head him off, but he scooted around her.

He sprayed the bike and the fire sputtered, the flames hissed then died. Acrid smoke swirled into the air, choking her.

“Stop.” She threw herself at the man and sent him staggering. His finger slid off the trigger, but not before he sprayed both of them.

Angel coughed. Her eyes watered.

“You want this to burn?” he asked. She didn’t recognize him, or care who he was.

“Go away,” she cried. “Mind your own business.”

“I can’t.”

“Leave,” she ordered. “I have to do this.”

“The county’s under a fire ban.” He pressed the trigger to spray the bike and Angel launched herself at him again. She scratched his neck above the collar of his shirt and slapped his face.

He pushed her away, but she attacked again. His arms busy with her, he dropped the extinguisher and it rolled into the ditch.

It could rot there.

“What the hell? Back off, woman.”

“You back off,” she cried. “You’re ruining everything.”

“You haven’t changed a bit, have you? Still as self-centered as ever.”

He knew her?

He grabbed her arms, wrapped them across her body and hauled her back against his chest. Her struggles were useless. The guy was stronger than he looked.

“Listen to me,” he said close to her ear. “We’re in the middle of a heat wave.”

He thought she didn’t know that, with sweat dripping down her back?

“I don’t care why you need to burn a perfectly good bike,” he said, “but we’re under a fire ban. You think the ranchers want you starting a wildfire, burning up their crops and their homes?”

He was right, damn him. She’d come close to screwing up again.

She’d failed.

TIMM FRANCK HAD ALWAYS dreamed of holding Angel Donovan, but not like this. Not with anger and frustration. Not as though they were wrestling.

She breathed hard.

The full breasts that probably half the men in town had had wet dreams about at one time or another rested on his forearm where he’d wrapped it across her ribs to hold her still. The other hand cupped her stomach and held her steady against him. On her abdomen, above her jeans, his thumb touched a strip of bare skin that felt like velvet.

She squirmed. Air hissed between his teeth. “Stop it.”

An erection threatened. Thirty-one-year-old men weren’t supposed to behave like randy teenagers. He wasn’t a trigger-happy guy. But then, this was Angel.

When enough of the fight left her that he thought he could let her go, he eased his grip and stepped away. There was only so much he could take.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you home. I assume you’re heading to your mother’s?”

She nodded, her attention on the foam-covered bike.

For a minute, Timm could only stare.

Disheveled dark hair fell to her waist. Red spots rode on her cheeks. One pale blue vein at her temple beat beneath her translucent skin. The deep V of her black leather top showcased a mile-long neck and the sweetest cleavage this side of the Rockies.

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.

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.

In Ordinary, she was confident and tough.

She would deal just fine here until she could get grounded, get clear about who she wanted to be. Then she’d head out of town and reinvent herself again.

She wasn’t ready to quit. She’d come out of her mother’s womb a fighter. This was a temporary setback. Ordinary, Montana, the second I have enough money to leave, you can kiss my butt goodbye.

She felt Timm’s gaze on her as palpably as a touch.

“Why were you burning that bike?”

“Never mind.” She couldn’t talk about it. The words were too big, too enormous in their dark intensity, and clogged her throat.

She wanted to yell, to act out, to smash something.

That’s why she liked cool, logical math so much. It didn’t have miles of shit-kicking emotion attached to it the way everything else in her life did.

They traveled the length of Main Street, then turned and stopped in front of her mother’s house. What should she say? Thanks for stopping the only thing that could have eased my pain?

She slipped her feet into her cowboy boots. Offering him a terse “Thanks” she stepped out of the truck, dragging her saddlebags with her.

Behind her, Timm sped away.

She trudged toward the bungalow. The rosebushes that lined the walkway were well cared for, the green cushion on the wicker chair on the veranda well used.

Mama had done well for herself in the past five years. She’d nursed her former boyfriend until his death. Hal had left everything to her—the house and enough money to leave Missy secure for years. The first thing she’d done was pay for Angel to attend college.

Mama no longer had to depend on men—she had security. Yet she was on the verge of throwing it all away on another man. Somehow Phil Butler—a slimy example of the worst of his gender—had convinced Missy to marry him.

“Angel,” Mama had said in yesterday’s phone message, “Phil and me are getting married.”

Maybe that’s all Donovan women were good at—squandering their advantages when so close to success.

But Angel couldn’t figure out why Missy was so dependant on Phil. Why did she defer to him in her own house?

Angel knocked so she wouldn’t scare Mama, then used her key to enter.

“Is that you, Phil?” Mama called, her voice huskier with age.

“No. It’s me.” So Phil wasn’t home? Perfect time to confront Mama about him.

“Angel?” Mama rushed from the living room with a broad smile creasing her face. “Oh, honey, I wondered when you’d get here. You didn’t call.” She pulled Angel into a hug.

Angel filled her lungs with Mama’s scent—Avon’s Sweet Honesty and cigarettes. She’d missed this. She liked the perfume Mama had used all her life, but wished she would give up the smokes.

Oh, it felt good to be cradled in Mama’s arms. Mama might be the town tramp, but she’d always been a good mother.

Missy pulled away to look at her. “I missed you.”

“I missed you, too, Mama.” She fingered a lock of Mama’s hair. “Why did you go back to the blond?”

Missy had stopped dyeing her hair after Hal died. Now she was using again.

“Phil likes it this way. He says it makes me look younger.”

Phil was an ass. He was a big part of the reason Angel had come home instead of heading off to a big city, any city where people didn’t know her. The moment she’d heard her mother’s message, she’d packed her saddlebags and set out for Ordinary.

Mama would marry Phil over Angel’s dead body.

Of course, that was only part of the reason she’d run home. To be honest, she was also here for Mama’s TLC. Mama always knew how to make her feel better about things. At the moment, Angel needed a double dose of her mother’s care.

Angel tried to turn away before her mother could read her expression. But Mama held her still and saw everything Angel tried to hide.

Mama’s happiness turned to concern. “What’s wrong, honey? What happened?”

Giving in to the impulse to lean on someone else for a minute, to let someone take on her battles, Angel hid her face against her mother’s shoulder and sighed.

“Oh, Mama, I screwed up so badly.”