Not Quite an Angel (11 page)

“I see.” He nodded as if all this gibberish made perfect sense.

She'd taken her sandals off in the car, as she always did, and now she pulled one bare leg up and encircled it with her arms, resting her chin on her knee. Her skirt hiked up so that part of her thigh was exposed. Her skin was golden, sleek and soft and inviting. He longed to reach across, place his hand on that smooth, slender leg, slide it up under her skirt— His body reacted energetically, and the loose cotton pants he wore were suddenly constricting.

“You know, Adam, this assignment is proving much more difficult than I expected it to be.” Sameh's voice was pensive.

He stole another glance at the expanse of thigh. Trying to stop himself from pulling the car over to the curb and climbing all over her was proving more difficult than
he'd
expected. He cleared his throat and tried to pay attention to traffic. “How so?”

“Well, I studied this era before I came, of course, but living in a primitive society is lots different than viewing it on simucam.” She sighed, and from the corner of his eye he saw her breasts rise and fall under the sleeveless silk top she wore.

Damn it, what was it about her? She was fully clothed and yet she had him hot and breathless with wanting her. This stuff about only being friends was just making him more determined by the second that he was going to win her over in the end.

“I was mentally prepared for—” she ticked the list off on her fingers “—for the AIDS epidemic, drug addiction, social unrest, homelessness, wars, environmental disasters and archaic diseases like Alzheimer's.” She wound her arms around her legs again and let her chin drop.

“I wasn't bothered by any of it, because I knew that within another couple of hundred years, mankind would overcome most of those problems with the inevitable marriage of metaphysics and technology.”

She was bright. Brilliant, even. In the time they'd spent together, he'd come to admire her intelligence, the way her mind worked within the boundaries of the fantasy world she'd created. Now there was a first for him; it wasn't ordinarily a woman's mind that got him hot and bothered.

She dropped her leg to the floor and turned to face him, shifting a little to get comfortable within the confines of the seat belt and unfortunately tugging her skirt down until it wrapped around her legs like a shroud.

“But when I got here to the nineties, the whole project became personal.” She frowned, and her blue eyes clouded. “I wasn't really prepared for how emotionally involved I'd get with everything and everyone. In my time, emotions are far more controlled than they are here.”

That sounded like a barrel of laughs, all right. He could just envision two people having sex in a controlled manner. It gave new meaning to the expression “no sweat.”

“Being here makes me feel emotionally…” She struggled for the right word. “Emotionally primal.”

“Sounds like fun.” The look he gave her must have been
far too lusty, because now she scowled at him and shook her head.

“Honestly, Adam, you have to try not to interpret everything in a sexual way. This is a serious conversation.”

“Sex can be perfectly serious, if that's how two people want it,” he teased, but when she didn't smile, he sighed and tried for serious. “What's so bad about feeling emotionally primal, anyhow?”

“It's wasteful. In my time, we channel emotional energy into use for all the disciplines. It's a valuable commodity. Here, most of it is squandered. Raw passion runs rampant here, and control becomes very difficult. It's hard to maintain an impartial distance when I feel the way I do about Corey. And Myles. And Delilah.” She shuddered. “Or Violet.”

He noticed that, good or bad, she'd left him off the list, and in some cockeyed way, it hurt him. “Well, if it gets too tough, I guess you can always go back, can't you?” He sounded flip, and he regretted the words the moment they were out of his mouth. Fantasy or not, he didn't want her going anywhere, or even considering it. And it was wrong of him to encourage her delusions.

She was giving him that look that seemed to lay his entire brain open for study. “I have to go back eventually, Adam. I have no choice in the matter. My stay here is temporary.”

Damn it all, why couldn't he keep his big mouth shut?

“When do you figure you'll be going?” Just so he knew what the hell was going on in that complicated mind of hers.

She frowned, shrugging her shoulders. “It's hard to say. Not for some time yet. I have a great deal left to do. For instance, I haven't begun to chronicle all the details I need for Delilah's biography.”

“But you're not going anywhere tonight for sure?” He forced a lightness into his tone. She shook her head, and he
was rewarded with a smile. God, he was becoming addicted to her smile. Face it, he was addicted to Sameh.

“Not tonight. For sure.”

“Great, so you've got the evening free.” He'd been driving toward the beach with a half-formed idea in mind. “Y'know, you've never seen where I live. I'm renting this cottage on the beach—you can see the ocean, the sunset, miles of sand. It's not far from here. Want to have a look?” His cleaning service had been in on Friday, so the place was as good as it was ever going to get. He could probably find time to make the bed and pick up the undershorts he'd dropped on the bathroom floor.

She was hesitant. “I'm not sure it's a very good idea, us being alone together at your house.”

Before she could refuse outright, he sweetened the pot. “We can pick up some pizza and a couple of videos. C'mon, Sameh, we're grown-ups. We can manage civilized, can't we?” God, she was right about him. He was a liar. “It's a clear night,” he went on. “We can watch the moon come up over the water, eat vegetable pizza, watch movies.” He knew she adored both pizza and movies.

He also knew he had a bottle of wine, and if they were alone for a couple of hours, relaxed and easy, who knew what might happen? He shot her an anxious look, hoping she hadn't picked up on the all-too-friendly things he was fantasizing about.

It seemed she hadn't. She was considering. “I'd like that,” she said at last. “There's an old movie I remember hearing about, one I'd very much like to see. It was considered a classic for centuries.”

He hated highbrow movies, but what the hell. “What's the title?”

“It's called
E.T.
”

God help him, he might have guessed.

 

“T
HIS IS A WONDERFUL
place to live, Adam. How did you ever find it?” It was late, and they were munching leftover pizza and finishing off the bottle of wine he'd opened earlier.

They'd had a good time together in spite of the fact he hadn't even kissed her. They'd drunk wine and talked about Myles. They'd watched
E.T.,
and Sameh had cried. They'd danced together to some of his old, slow music, and they'd laughed at a television comic. He'd told her stories about his job, ridiculous things that happened to him as a celebrity guard, and she'd giggled and then choked on a mouthful of pizza. He'd had to rub her back.

Sameh had wandered outside. She was standing on the wide deck that stretched across the front of the cottage, where hours before she'd admired his sweeping view of the beach and the Pacific Ocean. It was dark now, but the moon was shining on the water.

Adam was admiring Sameh. She'd relaxed once she realized he wasn't going to toss her over his shoulder and head for the bedroom, and she was barefoot. She'd pulled her silky top out of the waistband of her skirt, and it was all wrinkled. The breeze was ruffling her gleaming hair, turning her curls into a riotous mass around her face and neck.

He looked past her now, out to the horizon where the sun had set hours before. Together they'd watched it sink out of sight. She'd agreed with him that L.A.'s smog made for spectacular sunsets, with streams of purple and green and gold streaking the sky.

He thought all of a sudden how much he liked this place, although he hadn't spent nearly enough time enjoying it. It was fun seeing it tonight through Sameh's appreciative eyes. He remembered she'd asked him a question just now, about how he'd found the house.

“Renting this was one of the perks of doing celebrity security,” he said. “It's owned by an actor who was a client of ours. He got a job in London in a television series two years ago, and he didn't want to leave the place empty. He figured, with justification, that it would likely get broken into and wrecked, so he was happy to rent it to me for a pittance, considering what real estate costs along this stretch of beach.”

She was having trouble balancing her pizza and her wine, so he dragged two deck chairs over to her. “Sit down.” She did, spilling a little wine in the process. She wouldn't be Sameh if she didn't spill a little, he thought with a surge of tenderness.

“What will you do when the owner comes back, Adam?”

“Move, I guess. Find somewhere else to rent.” He hadn't given it that much thought.

“Won't you miss this place when that happens?”

He shook his head. “Not much. I've never stayed in one place for long, so I never get too attached to it.”

She was still staring out at the silvery ocean. She took another bite of pizza, chewed and swallowed. “Myles said you came to the military academy when you were fifteen. Did you have problems at home with your family? Is that why you were sent to a place like that at such a young age?”

In some strange fashion, he'd grown accustomed to telling Sameh the truth, and now, for the first time in his entire life, Adam did the unthinkable. For no reason he could fathom, and before he could stop himself, he told her the truth about his origins, as well.

“My mother, Gina, was a hooker,” he heard himself saying. “A New York prostitute. Beautiful, expensive, very high class, but a hooker's a hooker. She died while I was at the academy. I was seventeen at the time. It was a relief
in a way, because I was petrified the other guys would find out who and what she was.”

Once the damning words were out, he couldn't believe he'd said them. His heart began to pound, hammering against his rib cage, and his mouth went dry. Something like fear swept over him.

What kind of spell had this woman at his side cast over him? She'd demanded the truth, and like an utter fool, he'd supplied it.

A
DAM WAITED FOR
S
AMEH
to react. He waited for the shock, the disgust, the morbid curiosity he'd always known would be the response if he ever told the truth about Gina.

Instead, Sameh crossed her legs at the ankle and went on munching pizza as if what he'd said wasn't at all out of the ordinary. “So that's why you were angry when I spoke to that prostitute on the street.” Her voice was sympathetic, but also matter-of-fact. It was too dark to see her expression. “What about your father, Adam? Where was he?”

His throat was tight. He wished to God he'd never gotten into this. “I never knew who my father was—I don't think Gina even knew for sure. She named me Hawkins, but for all I know, she drew the name out of a hat. Her name was Buxton.” He remembered asking her, when he was small, about his name being different from hers. She'd told him she named him after her mother's family, and maybe she had. Adam had never tried to find any relatives.

“She sent me to the academy as a last resort, because I'd found out what she did for a living the summer I was fourteen, and for a whole year after that I ran away from every expensive private school she put me in.”

“How did you find out?”

He laughed, a mirthless sound. What the hell was he thinking of, spilling his guts to her this way? But now that he'd started, he couldn't seem to stop. “One of her friends told me, a woman named Morgan. I didn't live with Gina
much while I was growing up—she kept me in boarding schools and with foster families most of the time. I used to stay with her during the summer holidays.” He remembered dreaming of those few magic weeks with his mother.

“Y'know, when I was really young, I thought Gina was a princess, because she lived in a lavish apartment in a tall building in New York that seemed like a castle to me, and during the month I spent with her, she'd buy me stuff, take me wherever I wanted to go. I figured she had to be a princess.” He snorted. “Dumb kid, huh?”

Sameh reached out and took his hand in hers, but she didn't say anything. She just looked at him with an understanding sort of look and waited for him to go on.

“Anyhow, the summer I was fourteen, she got sick while I was with her. She was rushed to the hospital, and I was left by myself in her apartment. She had an operation, probably a hysterectomy. She was in hospital for three weeks. I was pretty scared, and she asked this friend of hers, this Morgan, to come by her apartment and see if I was making out okay.”

He wished he still smoked. He needed a cigarette right this minute. “I was a big kid for my age. I was six-two already, pretty skinny, though. Morgan was a high-class call girl, like Gina, and I guess it was some kind of kick for her, initiating a boy into the mysteries of sex.”

“She was physically intimate with you?”

Any other time he'd have been amused at Sameh's choice of words. He'd always used a much coarser description for what Morgan had taught him. “I was both fascinated and horrified by what we did together. Within a couple of days, I was hooked on sex, but I was also disgusted with myself and, most of all, with her. She was supposed to be my mother's buddy, see, and I just knew that Gina had no idea what her friend was really like. Also, we were screwing in
my mother's apartment. My guilt and misplaced morality finally got the better of me, and I told Morgan I didn't want her coming around anymore. God, I was a dumb little fool. I added, like some kind of sanctimonious prig, that I didn't want her around my mother, either.”

Even after all these years, he was amazed to find that remembering that scene still had the power to make his stomach churn. “She killed herself laughing, and that's when she told me all about Gina.”

“Oh, Adam. That must have been horrible for you.” Sameh tightened her hold on his hand, rubbing her thumb across the back of it in silent support. “For her, as well. Your mother, I mean. Her life must have been very difficult.”

“Yeah, maybe it was.” He'd never really gotten around to feeling sorry for Gina, and he didn't now. “She chose her life, the way anybody chooses what they do for a living,” he said in a harsh tone. “She could have gotten out if she'd really wanted to.”

“Maybe she couldn't. Perhaps there were things you didn't know about her life and why she chose to do what she did. We seldom really know much about the private lives of our parents, but it sounds as if your mother must have loved you a great deal to have gone to such lengths to protect you, to make sure you didn't know about her.”

Adam didn't reply. He was wishing he could get out of this conversation.

“When did she die, your mother?”

“When I was seventeen. I was at the academy.” He remembered Myles coming to get him out of the gym that morning. He remembered the muscles in the arm Myles had wrapped around his shoulders, and the clean, freshly pressed smell of his uniform. “She was murdered. They never found out who did it.” His first reaction had been guilty relief.
Now no one would ever know. None of his friends would ever find out who and what his mother had been.

The murder was reported in the New York newspapers, of course, but no one at the academy connected the murder of a New York call girl named Gina Buxton with Adam Hawkins, the star quarterback who led the football team to victory that fall.

Myles knew, of course. Adam had never asked when or how the older man had found out about Gina's profession. It was something they'd never discussed, even though Myles had tried, during the months that followed Gina's death, to talk to Adam about his mother. Gina had left a trust fund to pay for Adam's education, and Myles had administered it. Adam had persisted in his refusal to discuss her, and after a few abortive attempts, Myles had given up.

“So tell me, are there prostitutes where you come from, Sam?” he asked, hoping to make this discussion less personal, to diffuse the torrent of confused emotions that engulfed him when he thought of his mother.

She shook her head. “We've outgrown the mind-set that made prostitution viable, and we've improved the social situations that caused it. I think I told you our society is matriarchal. Women have power, and so the sexual exploitation of women is no longer possible.” She was silent for a few moments. “But that doesn't mean I don't sympathize with your mother, Adam. I once had a lifetime as a prostitute,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “It's one of the few past lifetimes I was able to review through retrocognition.” She shuddered. “It ended badly, as badly as your mother's did, and I didn't make much progress that time around.”

She'd explained her belief in reincarnation, so he had some vague idea of what she was talking about, even though he didn't for an instant believe any of it. “You just making that up to make me feel better, Sameh?”

“I wouldn't do that, Adam.” She waited for a moment, but when he didn't respond she went on, “You're still mad at her, aren't you? It took me a long time to get over being furious with my mother, too, you know,” she said. “When she died, I was sixteen, and I hated her for leaving me.”

He laughed, a harsh, angry sound. “Forget the drugstore psychology, Sameh. I came to terms with my feelings about Gina long ago. I've seen enough of the world to know that people choose lots of different ways to live their lives.” He stood up. His muscles ached as if he'd been in a knockdown, drag-out brawl. He wanted as never before to take her to bed, to lose himself in the oblivion of sexual release. “Let's go inside, Sameh. It's getting cool out here.”

She shook her head. “I should go. Will you drive me home now, please?”

So much for bad intentions. “Sure thing. I'll just get my keys.” He felt a mixture of relief and remorse and a peculiar certainty that once again she'd managed to read his mind and find in it all the things he'd tried his best to keep hidden.

 

T
WO WEEKS LATER
, Sameh was jogging along her usual route just past 6:00 a.m. on a morning that, despite the early hour, promised to be a scorcher.

August in Los Angeles was a good argument for climate control, she reflected. When had the techies perfected climate control, anyhow? She knew it was well after the millennium, but the exact date escaped her. There'd been horrific opposition to the idea from the Green Alliance, she remembered.

“Morning. How's it going? Hot enough for you?” A tall young man she passed almost every day came running toward her and stopped. His eyes, filled with longing and lust, skimmed down her pink shorts and singlet and back up again to her face. He'd used at least a dozen innovative
approaches, asking her to join him for everything from a bagel to a premiere of a movie he said was directed by a friend of a friend.

Sameh admired his tenacity, but she wished he'd stop trying. She had no desire to go anywhere with him, and she'd told him so with her usual candor, but he seemed to consider her a challenge.

She smiled and put on a burst of speed, and to her relief he didn't turn and try to join her this time. She sighed as she turned a corner and started past a park.

The men in this century were proving to be a bigger problem than she'd anticipated. She slowed her pace a bit and corrected herself. It wasn't men in general who were proving to be a problem, it was one man in particular.

Adam had stuck to the promise he'd made to be her friend—at least he'd stuck to it technically. He hadn't made any obvious advances to her during the past couple of weeks. But he was diabolically clever at making sure she was physically aware of him every second they were together. He brushed against her, he touched her hair, he held her hand, he slung a companionable arm around her shoulders as they walked, until every nerve ending in her body was aroused.

The Sunday night two weeks before when he'd lured her over to his house with the promise of pizza and videos was a perfect example. He'd poured wine, turned on soft music, dimmed the lights and asked her to dance with him as the moon rose over the Pacific—but he hadn't made one single solitary attempt to even kiss her.

Which, of course, was exactly the way she wanted it, she told herself, cutting past the children's playground to a path offering some shade. Adam was being a perfect gentleman, and wasn't that what she wanted from him?

He'd looked at her with that absorbed, intense green gaze
that told her in more than words exactly what he wanted to be doing with her, and she'd dropped, spilled, broken, tripped over everything in sight and completely bungled whatever it was she was doing all evening long. She'd stepped all over his feet when they danced, far too aware of his muscular arms holding her a few enticing inches away from his body. She'd dropped pizza down the front of her silk shirt and then knocked a plate flying.

Adam wanted her, and he made sure it showed, but he stuck to the letter of their agreement that they would only be friends. She paused at a water fountain to take a few long gulps before she ran again, her mind still on Adam. Who would have believed that having him want her could be so seductive? She understood now all too well how he'd become as arrogant as he was about his sex appeal. It was getting harder and harder to be around him without succumbing to his wordless campaign.

“Sameh. Sameh, hey, Sameh, stop.” An arm suddenly snaked out and grabbed her, almost pulling her off balance. It took her only a moment to recognize the thin figure in the tattered cutoffs. It was Troy, the young street boy she'd brought home weeks ago, the boy Violet had chased away.

Sameh had worried about him, watched for him every morning. Relief at seeing him again rushed over her, and she reached out and took his grubby hand in hers, twining her fingers through his. He looked even thinner than he had when she'd last seen him, and she noticed an ugly bruise on the side of his face. He wore round, rimless glasses, and the nosepiece was taped together. He kept shoving at the glasses with one finger.

“Troy, I'm so happy to see you again. How are you? Where have you been?”

“Around.” His eyes flitted past her, and he tensed as a figure appeared farther down the path, relaxing only when
he realized it was just an old man leading a small dog on a leash. In an urgent voice he said, “Sameh, you got any money on ya?”

“Very little.” She dug into the inside pocket of her running shorts and produced the four quarters that Adam insisted she always carry when she went jogging—enough to make phone calls in case of an emergency. “Only this.” She held the coins out on her palm.

Troy's thin shoulders sagged and he jabbed at his glasses again. Under the smudged lenses she could see dark circles under his eyes. “Jeez, a lousy buck. It's not enough. My buddy's sick. I need money to get him some stuff.”

Sameh remembered Adam's warnings. Was Troy talking about drugs? She studied him, trying to decipher the truths that lay behind the anxiety swirling around him in a murky cloud. He was hiding something, was frightened and desperate, but she couldn't sense any menace in the boy. Instead she detected an appeal for help and the pervasive feeling of hopelessness that had so bothered her the first time she'd met him.

“Where is your friend? What's his name?”

“Cougar. He's over there, behind those buildings. We're, like, kinda camped out over there.” Troy gestured toward the park's concrete-block washrooms a few hundred feet away.

“Take me to him and maybe I can help.”

“Promise you won't call the cops? Cougar's major scared of cops.”

“I promise.”

He set off at a trot, and Sameh followed close behind. There was a depression in the ground just behind the buildings where shrubs and a few trees grew. Troy shouldered his way through the foliage to where an emaciated figure with a shaven head lay huddled on the ground, partially
covered with a jean jacket. He looked even younger than Troy, who'd told Sameh he was fourteen.