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
