Page 89 of Angel In Armani

Lucas caught up to her halfway across the room, his hand closing around her arm. She pulled it free with a jerk.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t?—”

“Didn’t what?” Sara said. “Didn’t think your mother was going to have an issue with you dating a lowly helicopter pilot?” She shook her head, trying to ignore the sting in her eyes. She’d been looking forward to tonight, to dancing with Lucas in her beautiful dress.

Music and moonlight and romance.

The perfect fairy tale.

Only now reality was rearing its ugly head, and she felt like a child caught playing dress-up. One who’d been told the wrong theme to the party, at that, and turned up dressed as a clown when everyone else was wearing space suits.

The outsider.

“I need some air,” she said and turned away from him.

But he didn’t just let her go. Instead he took her hand and led her up the staircase, out of the claustrophobic crowd, and then into the nearest elevator.

It surged upward silently. Neither of them spoke. The elevator stopped and the doors opened.

“Where are we?”

“Roof garden,” Lucas said. “We hired it for the afterparty. There shouldn’t be anybody up here.”

Sara stepped out, shivering as the breeze hit her. Lucas slid his tux jacket off and slipped it over her shoulders. Then took her hand and led her across to the far side of the garden. The space was lit with a million tiny white lights winking through the lush foliage of the trees and bushes dotted throughout the space.

The quiet was nearly deafening after the noise of the ballroom, the sounds of the city traffic faint beneath them. Sara stared down at the lights of Manhattan, the sparkling arc of it, the patch of sparser darkness that marked the swath of Central Park. It looked different than it did from her helo, but familiar just the same.

“Better?” Lucas asked.

She nodded, not looking at him.

“Sara?”

She looked up. “Yes?”

“You know I don’t care about what my mother thinks, don’t you?”

He kept telling her that. But this was now. The future still had a hell of a lot of then to play out. And in the long term, in her experience, family tended to win out. “Maybe you should. Family is important.”

“Not everyone has a family like yours. Mine isn’t close. And I disappointed them a long time ago. That’s what my mother’s attitude is about, not you.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure she’s no fan of mine,” Sara said.

“That makes no difference whatsoever,” Lucas said. “My mother isn’t part of this relationship.”

“She is, though. Family always is.” Sara shivered. “Family is important. Who you are and where you come from is important. And you come from this world.” She made a sweeping gesture at the garden and the rooftop. “I don’t. We don’t fit.”

“The hell we don’t,” Lucas said. He reached for her but she moved back.

“Sex doesn’t last. And it’s not enough. It doesn’t work to hold people together. Been there, tried that.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means heat doesn’t last. And when it goes, we’re too far apart.”

“So you dated some jerk who dumped you when the chemistry wore off and that means you and I can’t make it work?” he said incredulously.

“Close enough. It wouldn’t even matter if your family loved me. There are always going to be people who look at me like your mother did just now. Like I’m the money-grubbing trailer trash after the rich guy. And I can’t do that.”

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