Donovan’s Angel (7 page)

“Shake a leg, Preacher, or you’ll miss all
the fun.”

The screen door banged shut behind them as
Martie led Paul to her car. It was an aging Thunderbird convertible
painted fire engine red and boasting a four-barrel carburetor that
made everything else on the road look like a snail.

Martie slid behind the wheel. “Hang on to
your hat, Paul.” The revving of the engine resembled the roar of
fifteen lions.

“I’m not wearing one.”

“Then hang on to your head,” she warned him
as she barreled out of her driveway and careened madly down Highway
6 toward Tupelo. Two vans and a Pepsi-Cola truck blurred together
as she whipped around them and zoomed down the road.

“Do you always drive like this?” Paul asked
mildly.

“No,” she yelled over the wind that whistled
around their heads. “Sometimes it’s better.”

“Better?”

“Faster.”

He shook his head and prayed.

o0o

They came to the Wal-Mart on the western side
of Tupelo and clipped down the Main Street at a sprightly pace.
Heads turned to look at the bright woman in the bright car, and
Martie waved at everybody, whether she knew them or not. At
crosstown she turned right and zipped down Gloster. Late Saturday
night shoppers and moviegoers turned to watch their progress, and
many speculated that a celebrity had come to town, for surely no
one else would dare drive that way.

The tires of the red Thunderbird squealed as
Martie swerved right onto Garfield and wheeled into Matoka Park.
She bounced out of the car, put her hands on her hips, and looked
up at Paul. “If you think that was something,” she said, “just wait
‘til you see the way I drive a go cart.”

“As long as I’m not the passenger.” His legs
were wobbly and he was still praying.

“Passenger, shoot! You’re the other driver.”
She grabbed his hand and tugged him up the hill.

“I haven’t been in one of those things since
I was twelve,” he protested.

“You don’t know what you’ve been
missing!”

“You ride go carts regularly?” He didn’t know
why that should surprise him.

“I ran the Happy Day Care Center in Beaumont,
Texas, for a while,” she explained. “I frequently took the children
to amusement parks. Of course, they were just an excuse so that I
could ride go carts and water slides. I adore amusement parks. I
think they keep a person young at heart.”

“Would you mind if this young-hearted but
definitely old-bodied man sat on the sidelines and watched?” he
asked, smiling.

She looked solemnly up at him and repeated
the words he had said to her at the picnic. “I never figured you
for a coward.”

He paused. “All right . . . I accept the
challenge. Lead on, angel.” He affected the long-suffering look of
a horse thief being led to a hanging.

“I intend to beat your socks off,” Martie
warned him.

“I’ve no doubt about that.” Paul looked at
the kid-sized go cart. “I don’t think I’ll fit.”

“You have to fit. It’s no fun if you just
watch.” She shot him a mischievous look. “Besides, how will I make
you want to forget me if you don’t suffer? Fold your legs.” She
smiled as he lowered himself into the tiny car. “A little more.”
She burst out laughing as he finally managed to squeeze most of
himself into the miniature vehicle.

“What’s so funny?” Paul asked.

“You should see yourself.” She laughed some
more. “You look like a pretzel with your knees up under your
chin.”

“I’ve had more fun at the doctor’s office,”
he grumbled good-naturedly.

Martie smiled with wicked glee as she climbed
into her car. Her plan was working, she thought. After tonight, the
Reverend Paul Donovan would cross the street to get away from her.
She looked at his broad back, and her feeling of satisfaction
vanished. Without warning a tiny ache started in her chest at the
thought of not seeing him anymore and grew until it filled her
heart with pain. She looked up at the stars and whispered a
remembered childhood phrase.

“I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish
I wish tonight.” But she knew that it couldn’t be so.

She pressed hard on her accelerator and
whizzed past Paul’s car. Time to get on with the plan. She could
think about her loss tomorrow.

Her naturally high spirits reasserted
themselves as she drove with daredevil exuberance. Her light hair,
washed silver by the moon, whipped out behind her as she tore
around the track at breakneck speed, whooping with uninhibited joy.
She grinned wickedly as she imagined how appalled the minister
would be.

Paul was enchanted.

After the wild go cart ride, Martie
challenged him to a game of putt-putt golf. By now she was having
so much fun that she had forgotten her original purpose in coming
to the park. She smiled and sparkled and spoke eloquently with the
body language that he had loved from the first day he’d met her.
She was a terrible golf player, so each small triumph was occasion
for hand clapping and spontaneous bear hugs.

Paul was bewitched.

“Oh, dear!” she cried. “Just look at that!”
Her brilliant smile never wavered as she putted onto the wrong
green and turned the mistake into an adventure by making the
acquaintance of a seventy-year-old dancing couple from Verona. “You
jitterbug! I’ve always wanted to know how to do that,” she told
then. And they treated her to an impromptu lesson beside the
windmill on the third hole.

It took her fifteen minutes to get back to
her green.

Paul was delighted.

Being with her was like being in sunlight. He
felt warm and contented inside, and he knew that he was falling in
love. She was a dream, all lush, desirable woman one minute and
joyful little girl the next.

Martie resumed her game and promptly knocked
her ball over the fence. He stood quietly, puffing on his pipe as
he watched her climb after it. Did she have any idea of her
remarkable talent for making people love her? She returned
triumphantly holding the ball aloft and sporting a hole in the knee
of her pants.

“I finally got the little devil,” she
announced gaily, then picked up her club and prepared to swing.
Stopping in midswing, she looked up at him. “What’s my score
now?”

“Sixty-five over par,” he told her.

She pushed her hair back from her face and
smeared a streak of dirt on her cheek. “I guess that means I’m
losing?”

He resisted the urge to bend down and kiss
the smudged cheek. “By a landslide.”

“Then I shall treat you to ice cream,” she
announced grandly. Her club sailed into the air as she gave the
ball a mighty whack. “I think I’m going to turn my talents
elsewhere.”

“Allow me.” Paul began to take off his
shoes.

“What in the world are you doing?” she
asked.

“Have you never heard of gallantry? You
insisted on climbing the fence for your ball. The least I can do is
wade a pond for your club.”

“Yes, but I like climbing fences. Wading,
too.”

He put his foot into the cold water and
grimaced. “I guess it grows on you.”

They finished the game in style, Paul with
the bottoms of his jeans legs wet and Martie with a hole in her
pants. Her luck changed at the end, and she hit a hole in one.

“I think I finally have the hang of this
game,” she declared happily.

Paul took her elbow and escorted her back to
the car. “I think if you live long enough, you’ll be a fairly
decent player.” He grinned down at her and resisted the urge to
kiss her.

She slid behind the wheel. “How long is
that?” She looked across the car and wanted to devour him piece by
piece, starting with that wonderful cleft in his chin. Instead, she
revved the engine to life. The wind whipped her already tousled
hair as she pulled onto Gloster and silently denounced fishbowl
professions and public decorum.

o0o

She pulled up at the grand Hilton Hotel and
informed him that they were going to have Haagen-Dazs ice cream by
candlelight. She expected him to be mortified at the thought of a
ragamuffin going to the Ritz, but instead he was delighted with the
woman who approached life with such zest.

“Candlelight becomes you,” Paul told her as
they sat in a snug corner away from the late-night diners.

“You’re supposed to be concentrating on your
rum raisin,” Martie informed him. She took a big bite and rolled
her eyes to show him how to concentrate on the ice cream. But
tingles were rippling along her spine, and she was having a hard
time remembering that certain things were taboo in ritzy
restaurants. Things like ripping the shirt off the man beside you
and purring against his chest. Or kicking off your shoes and
running your bare foot up his pant leg. Or leaning across the table
and licking that little dollop of ice cream off his lips.

“I’d rather concentrate on you,” he said.

“Which part of me?” she asked. “My daredevil
driving or my disregard for convention?”

“Neither.” His voice wrapped her in velvet.
“Your enchanting smile and your incredible eyes.” He put down his
ice cream spoon and reached across the table to take her hand. “I’m
just sorry about one thing.”

“That I’m totally unsuitable. Right?” Part of
her wanted him to say yes, but most of her wanted a denial. Her
lips were slightly parted as she waited for his answer.

His fingers moved in slow circles on her hand
as he sat quietly in his chair savoring her. The candlelight
reflecting on her hair gave her an ethereal quality. He smiled,
thinking of the many facets of her personality. She was angel and
flesh-and-blood mischief maker, tranquility and high-voltage
energy. She was flamboyant woman with flashy jewelry and gamine
with dirt on her cheek. She was endlessly fascinating, and even if
he lived to be a hundred, he knew that she would still be
surprising him. He thought of the word he and his brothers had used
to tease one another about girls when they were growing up—smitten.
There was no doubt about it: Paul Donovan was smitten.

“No,” he told her in a voice she thought was
marvelous. “I’m sorry you didn’t think of this sooner.”

“You’re not serious! I know you don’t spend
your Saturday nights this way, racing through the streets like a
bat out of hell and wading in ponds and riding in miniature
cars.”

“The go carts and the hair-raising ride from
Pontotoc notwithstanding, I’m having a wonderful evening. The
company makes it so.”

“I didn’t plan for this to happen,” she
admitted. “You were supposed to hate this evening.”

“You made a common mistake, Martie, thinking
that I’m a stick-in-the-mud simply because of my profession.”

“I did
not
think that.”

Still holding her hand, he smiled. “Not even
a little?”

She made a face at him. “Maybe just a teensy
bit. Did you learn mind reading at seminary, too?”

“I learned about people long before that.
Living with my brothers and sisters, not to mention a host of
aunts, uncles, and cousins made homegrown psychology a necessary
survival skill. Appearances are sometimes deceiving, and people
rarely fit into the neat cubbyholes we assign them.”

Martie withdrew her hand from his. “This
evening is an exception. A fluke. It doesn’t change a thing.” She
turned her head toward the window so that he wouldn’t see her face.
He was too discerning, she thought. He would see the uncertainty in
her eyes. If the evening had failed miserably as an incentive for
forgetting, it had succeeded royally as a vehicle for advancing
their romance.

Through the window she saw the edge of an
orange moon, brilliant as only an October moon could be, and she
wondered if the improbability of their relationship was the cause
of her fatal attraction. Was she like a child who wanted most what
it could not have? She glanced at Paul from under her lashes.
No
. His inaccessibility was not the attraction. It went
deeper than that. He was quiet strength and controlled energy, easy
companionship and heart-thundering sensuality. And she wanted to
climb across the table and ravish his made-for-kissing lips.

“I agree.” Paul’s voice pulled her out of her
reverie. “It doesn’t change a thing. I’m a minister and you’re a
Jazzercise teacher, and we still live across the fence from each
other.” Something changed in his eyes, as if a wonderful secret
were lurking in their depths. “And something has already been set
in motion between us. Something neither of us can stop.”

She thrust her chin out stubbornly. “I intend
to try.”

“Did you two enjoy the ice cream?” Neither of
them had heard the waitress approach.

“Yes, thank you,” Paul told her.

She stuck a pencil into her red topknot and
gathered the empty bowls onto a tray. “I told Mary Muldooney back
there in the kitchen that I never saw a couple have more fun over
two little dishes of ice cream. Been married long?”

Martie opened her mouth to speak, but the
waitress didn’t require an answer. She had long ago learned the art
of carrying on one-way conversations.

“Mary Muldooney says you are probably
honeymooners, but I told her you looked more like one of them
fairy-tale couples where everything is just so combustible. You
know what I mean?”

They didn’t have the foggiest idea, but that
didn’t stop Ethel Ann. She rarely had a captive audience, which
translated meant one too polite to get up and leave; and when she
did, she took full advantage. Shifting the tray to her hip, she
leaned down to wipe the table.

“Now you take the Westgates,” she continued.
“Fight like cats and dogs. Even in public. Now I ask you, is that
any way to live?” She didn’t wait for their answer, of course.
“It’s as plain as Yankee Doodle that you two palpitate for one
another. And besides that have the highest admonition for each
other. You know what I mean?”