Fire Angel (30 page)

“What are you getting?” she asked. The batteries in the flashlights had died, and with the fire out, the cave was pitch black.

“Maya's whistle; I never leave home without it.” He took her hand and placed it on the thin silver whistle he always carried. When she moved her hand away, he raised the whistle to his mouth and blew. There was no sound, but the excited barking that followed told him that those who'd needed to hear the sound had.

Alexis looked closely at herself in the mirror next to the desk. The bruises on her face had healed, as had the frostbite in her feet, but she would never forget her time in that cavern.

The long green dress with the Mandarin collar she wore accentuated the color of her eyes. She walked over to the entrance of the lounge. From her vantage point, she could appreciate all of Minette's hard work. The restaurant had been transformed into a fairy land.

A local band played an eclectic variety of music, while on the dance floor couples gyrated to its sounds. She stood in the doorway, waiting for Jake. He had insisted on taking her dancing tonight.

After her ordeal, she wasn't sure that she wanted to go back to her old job. So much had happened and she knew that without Jake, her life would be empty. She had spent some of the time finishing her reports and playing with Mila. She'd opted to stay at the inn, although her uncle had offered to let her move in with him.

The door to the apartment opened and he walked through — no limp at all; the new prosthetic worked well. He wore a deep blue suit with a powder blue shirt and striped tie that made his eyes appear an even deeper blue than they were. He held a corsage of red roses that he pinned to her dress. When he had finished, he looked at her and smiled.

“I was going to give you one just like this at the spring dance. If you're ready, I believe the party has started.”

She put her arm through his and entered the lounge. Minette and Dave danced by them and waved. Jake handed her a glass of wine, and together they stood admiring the dancers.

Alexis sighed. This was the date he had wanted sixteen years ago, and being here with him reminded her how lucky they both were to be alive. The song ended.

“Dance with me,” he whispered as the band played a waltz.

Without a word, she took his hand, and moved into his arms. They fit together as if they'd been made for one another. She felt as if she had come home after a long journey. He pulled her more closely to him. They moved with the smooth grace that comes from perfect unity.

She felt his heart pounding against her chest. The wool of his jacket was smooth beneath her hand. His palm caressed hers. His spicy aftershave was an aphrodisiac. She closed her eyes and savored the moment.

“I'm glad you came home,” he said.

She smiled. “So am I.”

“And I don't ever want to let you go.”

The music stopped and they clung to one another. She nestled into his arms.

“Stay right where you are, folks; here it comes. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one! Happy New Year!”

The strains of Auld Lang Syne began to play. Jake pulled her closer to him, shielding her from the boisterous crowd. He leaned down, pressing his forehead against hers.

“I've waited sixteen years for this moment; I love you, Alexis. Marry me.”

He kissed her brow and then trailed tender kisses along the side of her face, creating a heated trail to her mouth. When he touched his lips gently to hers, she felt like a person stranded in the desert finally being offered a drink of life-saving water. She responded to the kiss as it deepened. She heard his contented sigh.

She slowly pulled her lips gently away from his and smiled. “Yes, Jake, yes I'll marry you.”

Who would have thought that she'd find love and happiness in Paradise?

Susanne Matthews grew up as an avid reader of all types of books, but always with a penchant for happily ever after romances. In her imagination, she travelled to foreign lands, past and present, and soared into the future. Today, she has made her dreams come true. A retired educator, she now gets to spend her time writing, so she can share her adventures with her readers. She loves the ins and outs of romance, and the complex journey it takes to get from the first word to the last period of a novel. As she writes, her characters take on a life of their own, and she shares their fears and agonies on the road to self-discovery and love.

Susanne lives in Cornwall, Ontario with her husband. She has three adult children and five grandchildren. When she isn't writing, she enjoys reading, chatting on the Internet with her writer friends, and hearing from her readers. You can learn more about Susanne at
www.mhsusannematthews.ca
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It was spring in Los Angeles, and the jacaranda trees dripped their sticky purple blossoms along the path Kate Flynn jogged just about every day, a path she'd staked out for herself along Los Feliz sidewalks, past craftsman bungalows and pastel-colored apartment houses, into and through the urban wilderness of Griffith Park.

Kate was born and raised in New York, and while Griffith had nothing on Central Park, it was basically the same idea, just smaller, less, well, central to the city, and instead of skyscrapers on the horizon, there were the twilight-hazy Hollywood Hills.

Kate cruised around the carousel, glowing and spinning celestially in the dusky light. Not all that long ago she'd sat on a bench there, sharing a big, blue bouffant glob of cotton candy with her husband. When had cotton candy stopped being pink, anyway, and why? And when exactly had she realized her husband was having an affair, well actually, a whole lot of affairs?

She'd realized it a while ago — subconsciously at least a year before she admitted it and acted on the knowledge, excising him from her life as swiftly and cleanly as possible with a Reno divorce and the determination to cut him off cold turkey. No recriminations, no phone calls, no haggling over whose CD was whose, whose book was whose. Of course, if the book wasn't about football, her ex being assistant coach at USC, it wasn't his. Besides football, there was really only one thing Ron was interested in. And that was women. The more women the better.

Now she was passing the zoo, already closed for the day. She could hear the distant roar of the lions. Maybe she shouldn't have acted so quickly, divorcing Ron. It might've been altogether more satisfying if she'd spent one last afternoon with him, at the zoo, say, where they could've looked at those lions together, and then oops, his foot might've slipped, and oops again, he might've fallen right into the lion enclosure, where the mighty beasts, starved for prey —

Okay, never mind. There would've been no way in hell she could've passed something like that off as an accident. The cops would've seen right through her. She would've seen right through herself, but then of course Kate was a cop, second detective grade, descended from a family line in which the men were cops and firemen and the women married cops and firemen. She was the epitome of a new age; she was the cop; she didn't have to marry one. Lucky thing, too, since there was no way in hell she was ever getting married again after the Ron debacle.

Now she was passing the miniature trains, making their last circuit of the day. Women who had husbands long enough to have kids were giving their toddlers a ride. Kate hated to think what it would've been like to see her ex on a weekly basis, handing off a child or two. Still, she felt a twinge of regret, seeing the moms and the babies waving and cooing at each other.

Kate realized she'd probably never experience anything like that now. She'd just crested thirty, but since the very moment of her divorce, she'd sworn off not just marriage, but men, for all time. Well, almost since the moment of her divorce, and almost all men.

There was this one guy she'd met, pure rebound, on the plane back from Reno.

He had an amazing smile, intense blue-grey eyes with long lashes, offset by a ruggedly masculine jaw and strong cheekbones. His hair was a little long in the back and unruly on the sides and thick. He was the kind of physical package that would've immediately wowed any woman, at least any woman who hadn't just gotten an ostensibly zip-less, yet somehow still incredibly painful, divorce.

But in spite of her well-justified reserve that afternoon, it didn't take him all that long to win her over. Just the hour the plane sat on the runway due to mechanical difficulties, and then, once they were finally towed back to the terminal, the hour it took them to consume some uninspired Cheez Whiz nachos and weak margaritas at El Tortilla, which was what passed for a Mexican restaurant in the Reno airport.

It was that smile, really, and the way he kept somehow making her laugh, effortlessly, the way she hadn't laughed in a long time, that convinced her to spend the evening with him.

They were rescheduled for a midnight flight, and after the El Tortilla dining experience, they had five more hours to kill.

They'd already acquainted themselves with and bonded over the similar aspects of their careers — he was a newspaper reporter who worked crime beat, so they were both involved in pursuing, either for arrest or attribution, various criminal low-lifes. They exchanged mutually amusing, cynical anecdotes about their work. They easily discovered they were both unattached, that Kate was newly unattached, and that he should avoid that subject altogether, although she'd tried not to be too prickly about it. And they determined that neither one of them was into feeding dollar bills and quarters into airport slot machines. So, they decided to take a ride.

He rented a car, the only one available he said, a very sexy choice: a Cadillac convertible. He drove it top down through a warm summery night, headed for the deep blue waters of Lake Tahoe where he'd spent the preceding long weekend fishing.

He took her to a fine little place he knew for dinner, with a porch looking over the water, a row of white lights strung from the roof, substantially better margaritas, cold beer, fresh trout, baked potatoes, and a rich chocolate lava cake for desert. He told jokes and she laughed. He was a very funny guy, smart funny. She started telling jokes herself, and he laughed, too. She'd never realized before just how funny she was.

And then his leg touched her leg under the table. His hand brushed her arm. Her hand wrapped around his neck and pulled him close, and there they were, on the way back to the convertible, kissing under the pines. And the kiss lasted so long and made her so breathless that they just had to kiss again, and then he was kissing her neck, her shoulders, her arms right down to her fingers, until at last they were hungrily mouth-to-mouth again. It was this third kiss that led them into the back seat of the convertible where they became deeply involved in the removal of her bra and his belt, while keeping the kissing going, so involved that they didn't notice when it began to rain.

The rain was just a sprinkle at first, and with his shirt all untucked and belt dangling he climbed into the front seat and turned the ignition and pressed the button that was supposed to make the roof go up, but it didn't.

Laughing, she joined him, bra straps loose, skirt all bunched up, and sure, they got a little distracted by each other's disarray, they took a few moments to do a little more groping and kissing and undressing — lose the bra altogether, pull off his shirt — but they did try, they honestly did try to get the roof up on the car. She even pulled the service manual from the glove box, read the instructions twice to be sure because they were a little bit hard to follow with him licking and kissing her breasts, his hand working up under her skirt.

Eventually, they both put some of their clothes back on and got out of the car and tried manually tugging the roof up, but it wouldn't rise more than half way, they got absolutely soaked, and the car was flooding.

So really what choice did they have but to drive to the nearest covered parking garage — attached to a Best Western just down the road — and leave the car in its berth while they took a room for the night?

It was one hell of a night, too, they were peeling off their wet clothes again while they were still in the elevator, his shirt gone, her dress unzipped, they kicked off their shoes and fell across the bed and didn't quite finish taking off everything until the third time they made love, giggling, watching themselves in the bathroom mirror. He still had one sock on even then.

The rain stopped by morning, it was a beautiful, radiant day, sunshine streaming in, the lake a devastating azure. He suggested they stay another day, rent out a boat; but she had work to get back to, a life she had to put back together, a checked bag already making its way to Burbank. And things were just happening too fast, it couldn't possibly be real, what she was feeling, how much she just plain liked this guy, and how much he just plain liked her.

No, she knew it was all just rebound, all just sex. It had to be. So she put her damp, wrinkled dress on again, and they drove back to the airport.

The rental car company wasn't exactly thrilled with the condition of the interior of the car, but agreed, after Kate flashed her badge, that the damage was not caused by their negligence but by vehicle maintenance issues.

Flashing her badge didn't work as well at the airline ticket counter. Despite Kate's claim that she was “on duty” and unable to reschedule the previous night's postponed and then missed flight, the reservation agent still socked them with a hundred dollar per ticket change fee.

They paid separately for their new tickets and ended up on different flights, several hours apart. Kate's plane boarded first. He didn't want to let her go. He pressed her against him right there at the gate, rubbed the small of her back, and lower, lower, slipping his hand under her skirt, concealing her gasp with a long, deep kiss. Kate gave herself up to the moment physically, but she was already steeling herself for departure.