Angel of the Morning Page 17

  He handed her the box, and she opened it with trembling fingers. Inside was the most beautiful ring she’d ever seen, white gold with an oval diamond solitaire surrounded by tiny diamond chips. “I had my mother express this to me. It was my grandmother’s. Your family names girls after grandmothers. My family goes with heirloom rings.”

  “So you told your family about me?”

  “About you and Annie. They can’t wait to meet you. I know you’ve got the store and everything, but I was thinking, maybe we could fly them here for Thanksgiving. Your parents, too. I don’t know if we can get the house ready in time, but I can book a bunch of rooms at the Ocean Bluff Inn and we can have a big Thanksgiving party.”

  It all seemed so homey. So unglamorous, so un-Hollywood.

  So Dylan.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You like that idea? A Thanksgiving gathering at the Ocean Bluff Inn?”

  “Yes, I’ll marry you.” She pulled the ring from its slot and slid it onto her finger. The overhead fluorescent light caught its facets, making it glitter as if lit by an inner fire. “Yes,” she murmured, pulling Dylan in for another kiss. Not as deep a kiss as she would have liked—they were at the community center pool, after all—but one that conveyed how very much she loved him, how very happy she was.

  “No more walking away,” he whispered once the kiss ended.

  She smiled, her lips so close to his, she was sure he could feel her smile against them. “No more walking away,” she vowed.

  ***

  About the Author

  Judith Arnold is the award-winning, bestselling author of more than one hundred published novels. A New York native, she currently lives in New England, where she indulges in her passions for jogging, dark chocolate, good music, good wine and good books. She is married and the mother of two sons.

  For more information about Judith, or to contact her, please visit her website. Feel free to check out her other books and sign up for her newsletter.

  If you enjoyed Angel of the Morning, I hope you will consider posting a review of it online. Thank you!

  Here’s a preview of Rescue Me, Book Eight in the Magic Jukebox series:

  Sam Harper couldn’t sleep. It was too damned quiet.

  It was also eight-thirty in the evening, ridiculously early for any self-respecting man to be in bed alone. But yesterday he’d pulled a night shift that had wound up running eleven hours. A couple of inches of fresh snow had made the roads slick, and he’d had to deal with four car accidents, one serious enough to require an ambulance. No deaths, thank God. Nothing tragic. Just a lot of fear and anger, aches and pains. And paperwork. Tons of paperwork. Even if most of it was done on computers and didn’t entail actual paper... Bureaucracy was bureaucracy.

  When you were the new kid in town, you had to expect to get stuck with snowy night shifts. Sam wouldn’t complain. He was grateful that the Brogan’s Point Police Department had taken him on when he’d needed to get the hell out of New York.

  The lack of noise here freaked him out, though. He lay in his bed, in a third-floor walk-up a couple of blocks from the ocean, listening to the nothingness beyond his windows. Back in New York, he would have been lulled to sleep by a symphony of street sounds: buses wheezing along Broadway, the IRT train rattling over the bridge into the Bronx, inebriated people shouting at one another, the pulsing bleat of a car alarm in the distance, the wail of a siren. You got used to it, so used to it that trying to fall asleep in a quiet town perched on the ocean’s edge north of Boston was impossible.

  He stared into the surrounding dark, wondering how long he ought to stay where he was, pretending sleep would settle onto him like a thick winter quilt if he just remained motionless. But his stillness only emphasized the stillness beyond his building’s walls. A car cruised down the street outside his window, a whisper of tires against the slushy pavement, fading to silence as the vehicle turned the corner and drove away

  In the kitchen, the refrigerator motor hummed.

  Time to face the ugly truth: Sam wasn’t going to fall asleep.

  He pushed himself to sit, raked his hand through his hair, and reached for the jeans he had tossed over the back of the chair a few feet from his bed. He stood, pulled on a T-shirt and over it a sweater, and stuffed his feet into thick wool socks. Wallet, phone, and keys in his pockets, he strode out of the bedroom. His boots stood drying on yesterday’s newspaper near the door. He laced them on, grabbed his jacket from the coat tree, and headed out into the chilly January night. Maybe a walk would tire him out.

  The icy air chafed his cheeks. Despite the ocean’s proximity, Brogan’s Point was much drier than Manhattan. The wintry atmosphere reminded him of the chilled martinis Maggie used to enjoy in Callahan’s after a shift. She’d always stay for one drink, then go home to her husband. One drink was okay with Sam, just enough to decompress.

  He wasn’t into cocktails. He usually opted for beer. Maggie had been a martini aficionado, an expert, highly opinionated on the pluses and minuses of various garnishes—olive versus onion versus lemon peel. She’d insist that he taste her drink as she tried to educate him about the nuances of this or that brand of vodka. He could never detect any difference, though. They all tasted the same to him: not as good as beer.

  Thoughts of Maggie made his head swim and his shoulders seize. He shrugged to loosen them, swallowed hard, and headed in the direction of Atlantic Avenue and the beach beyond the sea wall.

  Stupid decision. The bitter wind coming off the water slammed into him. He walked faster, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket. He should have worn gloves. They weren’t doing him any good sitting on the kitchen counter.

  Should’ve worn a scarf, too. Should’ve worn a hat. Should’ve stayed home and banged his head against a wall until he knocked himself unconscious.

  He turned up the collar of his jacket and hunched against the frigid sea breeze. To his left, the ocean was a stretch of black, meeting a black sky at an invisible horizon.

  No moon tonight, but the streetlights illuminated Atlantic Avenue well enough. Cars drove up and down the road, which had been salted and plowed, leaving fringes of dirty snow along the curb. He supposed that in Brogan’s Point, this much traffic would be considered just a few vehicles short of rush hour. But you wouldn’t have to say a prayer before trying to cross the street here. So different from New York City, where cars and cabs, trucks and buses barreled down the avenues and sped along the cross-streets, slowing for a red light only if they had no alternative.

  Well, he’d wanted so different from New York City. He’d needed so different from New York City. His hope was that once he was better, once the nightmares ended, he’d return to the noise and the crowds and the turmoil and energy of the Big Apple. Maybe in a year. Maybe sooner.

  Another blast of ocean air smacked into him, making him shiver. He noticed an illuminated sign a short distance up a side street: Faulk Street Tavern. It beckoned to him. Some warmth, a beer—or a cold, dry martini, a toast to Maggie—might buff the rough edges off his nerves. He turned the corner, his long strides carrying him to the door and inside.

  Ah. Warmth. The pub was heated not just by a furnace but by bodies, by chatter and laughter and gentle amber lighting. The Faulk Street Tavern appeared to be an unpretentious place—scuffed tables, scuffed linoleum flooring with a scuffed wood dance floor surrounded on one side by booths, on another by free-standing tables, on a third by an ancient-looking jukebox and a sign reading “Restrooms,” with an arrow pointing down a back hall, and on the fourth by a long bar lined with stools, most of them occupied. Most of the tables were occupied, too. Servers in white shirts and black pants meandered through the room, carrying trays filled with pitchers and mugs, stemware glasses, and platters of wings or flatbread pizzas or nachos drowning in melted cheese.

  Sam surveyed the room and spotted a familiar face at the bar. Ed Nolan, a detective on the Brogan’s Point police force, was perched on a stool, angled so that Sam c
ould see only part of his profile. He recognized Ed’s build, his broad shoulders, square jaw and salt-and-pepper hair, the khaki trousers and thick-soled leather shoes he’d had on that morning, when he’d entered the squad room and found Sam hunched over his computer, typing up his final accident report of the night. Ed had advocated for Sam when Sam had been desperate to find a new job. Although Sam had completed detective training in New York, he’d wound up leaving the NYPD before he could receive his promotion. Ed had argued that Brogan’s Point needed another detective on its force. He’d thrown Sam a lifeline, and Sam had grabbed it and held on tight.

  What he’d learned, in the few weeks since he’d joined the local squad, was that detectives in a small town had to be flexible. They had to fill in as patrol officers, manage their own paperwork, and handle fender-benders on winter nights when the roads were treacherous. “We all do whatever’s got to be done,” Ed had explained to him.

  Sam hadn’t taken Ed for a heavy drinker, and as he crossed the room to the bar, he saw a plain porcelain mug planted on the bar in front of the guy. Could be coffee laced with something, or just straight-up coffee. Sam would bet on the second option.

  “Hey, Sam,” Ed greeted him, stretching one long arm out to snag an unoccupied stool and dragging it closer to his own. “I thought you’d be dead to the world by now, after your last shift.”

  “I thought I’d be dead to the world, too.” Sam shrugged. “Instead, here I am.”

  “In that case, welcome to the Faulk Street Tavern.” Ed signaled to the bartender, a tall middle-aged woman with short tufts of rust-colored hair framing her face. “Gus, this is Sam Harper, the police department’s new acquisition. Sam, Augusta Naukonen, the owner of this fine establishment. What are you drinking?”

  “I’ll have a beer, thanks,” Sam said, turning to Ms. Naukonen. “Whatever you’ve got on tap.”

  She smiled and pulled a clean glass from a shelf. Sam reached for his wallet, but Ed nudged Sam’s hand away from his hip pocket before he could pull the wallet out. “On me,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Sam knew better than to argue with Ed about who would pay for his beer.

  “I’ve got a running tab,” Ed explained.

  The bartender snorted a laugh. “Running for how many years now?”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” Ed told Sam. “She’ll be my wife once she realizes resistance is futile.”

  That got an even bigger laugh out of her. She set the glass of beer on a cocktail napkin in front of Sam and gave Ed’s arm a poke. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got more important people to take care of.” She shot Sam a grin, then strode down the bar to fill an order from one of the servers.

  “If you’re going to have a girlfriend, a bar owner isn’t a bad choice,” Sam said.

  Ed grinned.

  Sam took a sip of beer, then swiveled on his stool so he could gaze out at the room. Partly it was a cop’s instinct—always check out your surroundings, searching for any signs of incipient trouble. Partly it was just plain curiosity.

  A couple of women wearing black bomber jackets, skinny jeans, and too much make-up hovered near the jukebox. A quartet of burly men at one of the tables made a big show of divvying up a flatbread pizza, cheerfully accusing one another of being greedy pigs. Two women sat facing each other at the booth nearest the bar, drinking wine and talking. The one with her back to Sam had hair so bright a red, it almost looked as if her scalp was on fire. The other one had dark blond hair, long and wavy. Her features were delicate and her posture was unusually straight. He wondered if she had a back injury and was wearing a brace.

  No, she wasn’t. She looked too slim, her gray sweater hugging the slender curves of her torso. He saw no odd bulges that would indicate there was anything under that sweater besides her body.

  Music suddenly blasted from the jukebox, a lively, bouncy tune that sounded vaguely familiar to Sam. A Beatles song, he recognized. His mother was a big Beatles fan. She had all their music on vinyl albums from her childhood, and on CD’s she’d acquired more recently so she could listen to them today, decades after she’d last owned a turntable.

  A bunch of patrons leaped to their feet, crowding the dance floor. “What’s with the ancient music?” Sam asked Ed.

  “It’s that jukebox,” Ed told him. “It only plays oldies.”

  “It looks pretty old itself.”

  “According to local legend, the jukebox was standing here before the Faulk Street Tavern even existed. They built the place around it. Right, Gus?” he called to the bartender, who had apparently been eavesdropping on their conversation while she shook, stirred, and poured cocktails.

  “Not legend,” she said. “It’s the truth.”

  Sam chuckled. “So it plays Beatles music?”

  “It plays whatever it wants,” Ed answered.

  “Only if you put a quarter in it,” Gus added as she passed the drinks over the bar to one of the waitresses. “Three songs for a quarter. One song for a dime, but no one ever puts in just a dime.”

  “And it plays whatever it wants?” That didn’t make sense to Sam. Surely the person who inserted the coin could press the buttons and select the songs.

  Ed must have read his confusion in his face. “You can’t pick the songs. You put in a quarter and it plays three songs. You never know what’s going to come out of it.”

  Weird. But the jukebox was beautiful, a bullet-shaped sculpture of polished wood, with stained-glass peacocks adorning the sound panel in front. “If you say so.”

  “Sometimes a song will cast a spell,” the bartender added. “Be careful. You could wind up bewitched.”

  Okay. That was beyond weird. Sam didn’t believe in magic. He was from New York. New Yorkers were by nature cynical and skeptical. They didn’t believe anything, even if it was just inches from their eyes, complete with charts and graphs and explanatory text written by some scholar with a Ph.D.

  The folks dancing didn’t seem to be under a spell. They were just having a rowdy good time—a much better time than Sam had been having in his apartment, listening to the silence around him. There was plenty enough noise here. Happy noise.

  The redhead and the blonde in the booth near him slid out of their seats and joined the dancers. A lesbian couple? he wondered as he watched them dance. The redhead bounced around in a giddy frenzy. The blonde moved more smoothly, more gracefully, her limbs uncannily flexible.

  An erotic image flashed through Sam’s mind: the two of them, in bed with him. Bouncy, graceful, and him sandwiched in between.

  Shame on him. He took a sip of his beer and laughed at his crude male instincts.

  The Beatles song ended and another song began. He didn’t recognize this one at all. A woman’s voice, loud and lusty, begged for someone to rescue her. She was lonely. She was blue. She needed love.

  The blonde said something to the red-head, who shook her head and returned to the table. The blonde remained on the dance floor, dancing by herself.

  Nothing remarkable about that, Sam told himself. Lots of people danced by themselves, especially when a dance floor was crowded enough to absorb them. Sam wasn’t much of a dancer—he always felt self-conscious, unsure of what to do with his limbs—but he’d been at a few gatherings where everyone danced with everyone in one big, sweaty mob. Usually those gatherings involved the consumption of copious quantities of alcohol. But hey, this was a bar. Alcohol consumption was what it was all about.

  The woman didn’t appear drunk, however. She was poised and elegant, her arms gliding through the air, her hips swaying back and forth, her body moving so fluidly she made all the other dancers sharing the dance floor with her look clumsy and clunky. Sam could watch her dance all day. All night. She moved as if she owned the song, owned the bar, owned the world.

  Her gaze locked with his, and for a strange moment, he could have sworn she was dancing only for him. He could have sworn he was on that dance floor with her, one of the clumsy, clunky ones, while she wove magic around him
and the singer soulfully pleaded to be rescued. He could have sworn he was enchanted—by the dancer, by the song. By something.

  Wait. No. Sam didn’t believe in magic.

  He tried to swivel away, to break the spell that seemed to wrap around him and the willowy woman. Whatever he was feeling, it wasn’t magic. Ed’s bar-owner girlfriend had simply planted a silly idea in Sam’s mind, and he’d proven susceptible to it because...

  Because he was tired. Yeah, that sounded like a plausible explanation. He was tired and drained, his mental abilities sluggish. He should be back at his apartment, sound asleep.

  Instead, he was in this pub, sipping a beer, listening to a singer belt out a song and watching a beautiful woman dance for him.

  She wasn’t dancing for him. Not really.

  But damn.

  Seeing her almost made him believe in magic. Almost.

  *

  By the time the song ended, Cali’s entire body felt as if it had lost its substance. It was movement, motion, energy. What was that Einstein equation? E=MC². Mass could be converted to energy, right?

  Sure—if it was moving at the speed of light squared.

  Her body wasn’t moving particularly fast. Her mind wasn’t moving at all. She’d slid into a zone, something she was skilled at, a place where thought vanished and sweet emptiness took over, a oneness with her surroundings. Right now, she felt a oneness with the song. Come on, baby, and rescue me.

  And a oneness with that man at the bar. She’d never seen him before, which was a shame, because he was awfully good-looking. His hair was dark, a bit shorter than it ought to be but adorably tousled. His eyes were dark, too, with a sexy sleepiness about them, and his jaw was darkened with a shadow of beard. His jacket hung open, revealing a lean, strong torso. His faded jeans hugged long legs. He had an athlete’s build, not muscle-bound but sleek and agile. She’d love to see him doing a warrior pose, or a plank, radiating strength and energy.