The Other Side - J. D. Robb [82]
The long, delicious moment stretched. I’m going to die, she thought clearly. She lifted her hand to touch him—just as he pulled away. “Late,” he mumbled, and opened the buggy door.
With her own light out and the curtain open, Angie could see, across Lexington Street, the rectangle of gold that was Henry’s window. Once he even walked past it, a dark, fleet silhouette, but that was a quarter of an hour ago; since then, no sighting. But his light was still on. She imagined him in bed, reading.
A flash of movement in the yard made her press her nose to the glass and peer harder. Oh—Astra. He’d recently fallen in love with the dog next door, a spaniel named Lulu with long, curly ears and saucer-sized eyes. Henry said he was hardly ever home anymore.
Margaret, curled up at the bottom of the bed, never fell in love. Never came into her estrous cycle, was the technical term. She’d been born that way. Neutral.
Angie used to feel a kinship with the cat in that way. Not literally, of course; metaphorically. Passion was something that afflicted other people, she’d thought, not her. She knew all about it, though. You could say she’d spent her childhood watching other people behaving passionately. What a mess it was. Chaos, absolute chaos—her parents’ marriage was a perfect example in miniature, and a traveling theatrical troupe was a perfect example in . . . whatever the opposite of miniature was. Maxiature.
Her grandparents’ marriage—that was her ideal. They’d completely adored each other, but their love had been steady and deep and calm. Fight? Never, not a cross word. They’d lived a rich, satisfied life, like two devoted fish on the bottom of the ocean. Shouting was the sound that had characterized her parents’ marriage; her grandparents’—laughter.
That’s what she wanted—if anything. Really, she was fine the way she was. But if she ever did have a chance for a partner, a life companion, God forbid it should be anyone like Henry Cleland. That would be like—like marrying her father. Another huckster, another showman, just in a different field. Please, God forbid.
She might be an aging spinster, but she wasn’t completely inexperienced, no indeed. She’d had a suitor once, a serious one, too—Abel Odenton, of Spears, Rank, & Odenton Insurance Agency; they had an office on the square and one in Springfield as well, so he was an “up-and-comer,” or so he had often assured her. Maybe she should’ve married Abel. If anyone. Or someone like him: steady, even, safe. (Safe—an underappreciated quality, practically ridiculed in romantic novels, where the hero was always the risky, exciting one. How childish.) Abel, unfortunately, had had a disqualifying flaw she’d managed to rise above until the first (and last) time he’d kissed her: fishy-smelling breath. (Why? Why? Did he eat tuna every day? It had been like kissing Margaret.)
Henry . . . would be lovely to kiss. She even liked the smell of him. The way his hair fell. His strong, straight shoulders. His wrists. His sideburns. She could go on.
Obviously he didn’t feel the same, although she would prefer to attribute other motives to him: he was too much of a gentleman to kiss her—he never mixed business with pleasure—he didn’t feel he’d known her long enough. But she couldn’t have it both ways. If he was the confidence artist she’d hoped for when she’d hired him, then he was unlikely to have gentlemanly scruples about something as frivolous and unimportant as kissing old maid Angie Darlington.
He simply didn’t fancy her.
What a cruel irony. She got in bed, and when the cat crawled up to snuggle, she asked her, “How do people ever get together?” Margaret yawned, reminding her again—twice in one night—of Abel Odenton. “Why couldn’t I have loved him? Why can’t Henry love me?”
Pointless