Page 9 of No Angels

“That’s not why I’m helping out. I’ve been helping out for the last ten years.”

“You need to examine why that is, because you’re a good guy, but your motives aren’t entirely pure.”

He’s wrong. My motives have always been pure. Serena Cassidy, Bianca’s mom, always treated me like a son, and I couldn’t let her farm or business suffer when Bianca abandoned her. I’ve been helping out for the last ten years because she’s special to me in her own right. It breaks my heart that her cancer is out of remission.

“You’re wrong. They’ve always been pure. Because I never expected her to come back.”

“Well she’s back now and maybe it’s a good thing all around. You can finally do something about the way she’s haunted your life.”

“I’m gonna follow your advice and ask her out. We’ll see where it goes from there.”

I knock on the back door at six a.m. She flings open the door on the second rap, her brows lowered in distress.

Bianca motions me inside and quietly shuts the door behind us. “She’s having a really bad morning and finally fell asleep again.”

I keep my eyes on her face instead of the long, long legs that stretch below the hem of shorts so abbreviated they should be outlawed. The ragged t-shirt she’s wearing isn’t much better. It has a hole in one armpit and it’s falling off her shoulder. The cotton is so worn it’s almost threadbare, and I swear I caught a glimpse of peaked nipple behind the fabric. She’s completely unaware of the effect her sleepwear is having on my anatomy.

I clear my throat. “Is there anything I can do? I’m here to repair the fence in the west pasture.”

“I could use some company over my morning coffee.”

I’ve tried staying away because of the way she makes me feel. Tongue-tied and stumbling and on the edge of my seat. But what’s the harm in a cup of coffee?

“Come in if you’re going to. It’s not like I’m going to lace it with arsenic or something.”

She holds the screen door open, hopping from one foot to the other because it’s a frosty morning.

“Coffee sounds great,” I mumble as I brush past her. I sit down at the battered Formica table and pick up the newspaper.

“Do you still drink it black?”

I’m surprised she remembered. Her mom started letting us have it when we were twelve and I love the way it smells when it’s undiluted by cream and sugar. “Yep. Do you still use the paper to hunt for yard sales?”

She hands me the cup she just poured and lowers herself into the seat across from me. “Yep. Best place to score vintage clothes and vinyl. I already circled a couple for next weekend.”

I sip the coffee and remember the way she used to dig through the boxes from someone’s garage looking for old show tune records. I’ll never forget the look on her face the day she found a pristinely preserved copy of Cole Porter’sAnything Goes.“What made you start collecting them?”

She laughs. “Mom, of course. She wore out her cast recordings ofThe Sound of MusicandMy Fair Lady. It was always my dream to strut across the stage belting outThe Rain in Spainas Eliza Doolittle.”

“Did you ever get the chance?” I’ll never tell her I kept up with her career and I know the answer to the question.

“No, and it’s something I still hope will happen someday.”

“You could always just serenade the town after the pageant.”

“My Fair Ladyisn’t a Christmas play. It wouldn’t fit.”

I shrug, because I don’t think the audience would care. “You’d make it fit.”

She shakes her head, her expression unreadable. “My voice isn’t the same. I don’t think it ever will be.”

I’ll never forget the first time I heard her sing. It was the sixth-grade talent show and she closed her eyes, clasped her hands and broke intoMy Favorite Things. She’d been humming it for a week, but whenever I asked why, she changed the subject. When her voice soared over me I was hurt because I’d never heard anything so beautiful and I couldn’t believe she hadn’t shared it with me. Later on, I realized I fell in love with her that day, while she was standing in a pool of light holding an entire audience captive. I’d probably loved her since the day she peeked her head over the fence that separated our yards and blasted me with her water gun. But that’s the first time I couldn’t imagine my life without her.

Singing was everything to her, and my heart breaks at her confession. “Just because it’s changed doesn’t mean it’s different in a bad way. I bet you still sound like an angel.”

She snorts. “An angel who smokes three packs a day. It’s raspy now, and I can’t hit the higher registers.”

“But you just need to rest and it’ll come back, right?” I can see the shattered pieces of her dream laying at her feet. Even though I want her to stay here, I don’t want that mess to be the cost.

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