twenty-eight

Damien had calmed down considerably by the time he rang Angelique’s doorbell twenty minutes later. Both his parents had preached that if he went looking for trouble, it would find him. Attacking Angelique would solve nothing. He was a lawyer. Words and reason were his forte … if he got the chance to use them.

He rang the doorbell again. “Angelique. I know you’re in there. The doorman said he hadn’t seen you come out of the building today.”

Silence.

Tired of this, Damien went for the kill. “What kind of psychologist runs from her problems?”

The lock clicked almost immediately. A fuming Angelique jerked open the door. She had circles beneath her eyes and she wore her grubby clothes, which meant no bra. Damien congratulated himself on keeping his gaze locked on her very angry face.

“How dare you question my professionalism,” she hissed.

“You had no difficulty questioning mine,” he retorted.

Her head jerked back as if he had hit her. He used that unguarded moment to push his way inside.

She swung the door shut and turned to face him. “I’m busy, Damien.”

“Hiding from me.”

She crossed her arms over her unbound breasts. “You certainly think highly of yourself. You think I have nothing better to do than hide from you?”

His eyes narrowed. “That’s right. I do think highly of myself and apparently you don’t. You either thought I was too stupid or so weak that you had to save my career for me or that I was so self-serving and shallow that I’d be ashamed of you. Either way, that’s not saying very much.”

Angelique let her arms fall. “I never thought you were any of those things!”

“Yes, you did. When you decided it was over. How do you think that made me feel?”

Uncertainty crossed her face. “We were just dating.”

“And sleeping together, or didn’t that mean anything to you?” he snapped out.

Her face flushed with anger. “I don’t sleep around.”

“When your character is being attacked unjustly it’s not a very good feeling, is it?” His mouth flattened into a narrow line.

She shoved her hand through her hair impatiently. She was losing this battle and knew it. “I apologize if I offended you. Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to work on my dissertation.”

“Mind if I read it?”

Her eyes narrowed. “No one has read it yet, not even my advisor.”

“Seems to me that you should have another pair of eyes look at it.” He walked over to her work area, then released the single button on his dark gray jacket and hunkered down by the papers scattered around the sofa. “I’ll leave after I read it, and I won’t bother you again.”

That was what she wanted, for him to leave her alone, so why did her chest hurt? She walked over and gave him the thirty sheets that she had sweated bullets and spent hundreds of hours in research to write. “I was about to fix a sandwich. Yell when you finish. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Damien took the papers, then sat cross-legged on the floor and began to read.

Realizing she was standing there trying to gauge his reaction, Angelique forced herself to leave and fix that sandwich she no longer wanted. Damien was out of her life, so his opinion didn’t matter.

About to open the refrigerator, she closed her eyes and leaned her head against the door. She was doing it again, lying to herself when she’d made a vow long ago that she’d never do that again. She wanted Damien, and knowing she’d never be with him was killing her.

*   *   *

“I’m finished.”

Angelique sprang up from the table and rushed back into the den. It had taken him exactly twenty-seven minutes.

One hand negligently slipped into the front pocket of his gray slacks as he stood by her sofa. “Thank you for letting me read it.” He started for the door.

Angelique stared at him in disbelief, then crossed her arms stubbornly across her chest. She wasn’t going to ask. She wasn’t.

He reached for the doorknob. “What did you think?” she blurted, unable to help herself.

He gazed at her, his expression unreadable. “You really want my honest opinion?”

She hated it when people asked that question. She’d always been tempted to say, No, I want a jackass’s opinion, but since one’s not around, you’ll do.

“Yes.”

“It’s biased and weighed heavily by your obvious mistrust and dislike of men.”

“What!” she sputtered.

“You paint men as users and women as long-suffering weaklings who have little backbone, but somehow manage to keep home and hearth together.”

“That’s not—”

He talked over her. “Who do you think man, since the beginning of time, went into battle for? Why they fought vicious animals with only their bare hands or clubs? Why our forefathers suffered inhumanities and injustices that could have broken them? I’ll tell you why. They did it for the families they had waiting at home, depending on them. They still do.

“Nowhere in those pages did I see men like my father who put in ten-hour days and went to school at night to make a better life for me and my mother, to make us proud of him although we already were.” He walked over to her until he was towering over her. “I didn’t even see your foster father, and for that you should be ashamed.”

That hurt and cut to the quick. “The paper is not about good men.”

“How can you be a clinical psychologist and not weigh all sides equally?” he asked. “If you look at a patient you’re counseling with prejudices and preconceived notions, you’ll do more harm than good. You know that.”

She did. “I wouldn’t do that to my patients.”

“Then write your dissertation the same way … without prejudices or biases and not to get back at anyone.” He moved in closer. “Give me the same fair consideration.” His tone became low and intimate. “Don’t judge me. Don’t make my decisions for me. Don’t lump me with the father who abandoned you, the lover who hurt you, or all the men like Randolph who made you feel less than the intelligent, beautiful woman you are.” He pointed to his chest. “This is me. Look at me and see me, not them.”

He turned, walked over to the door, and wrenched it open. “If I were you, I’d take another long, hard look at your dissertation and at me. You’ll only have one chance.” The door closed behind him.

Angelique stood there, vibrating with anger. How dare he attack her professionalism. She was good at what she did! The recovery rate in her case file was the highest at the center. She’d even heard talk that she was being considered as the director of a new satellite facility they planned to open next year. What did he know?

She went to her dissertation, picked it up, and began to read. Halfway through, she sank back into the sofa. Her mouth was tight with anger and it was directed at herself.

He was right.

She had taken out her anger and frustration on the men in her life who had abandoned or mistreated her. She was scheduled for her oral defense of her dissertation in four weeks and what she’d written wouldn’t cut it. She could plow ahead or work her tail off to correct it.

She picked up the phone. “Hello. Dr. Jones. I hate to call you on a Saturday, but there’s a problem with my dissertation. Do you think we could meet this afternoon or tomorrow and discuss it?” She said a little prayer and waited for his answer.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll be right over.”

Heading for her bedroom, she pulled off her sweatshirt. If she went down, she’d go down fighting.

*   *   *

“Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?” Jacques asked Kristen. “It’s been slow all day. Take Rafe with you. I admire anyone who enjoys art, but he’s been with those statues for over an hour.”

Kristen had thought the same thing. He had to be bored, but he showed no sign of leaving. Rafe, who liked his solitude and who probably had twenty things to do, was sticking around to see that she was all right. “Jacques, I can’t. I got in late and I took off last Saturday.”

“You work hard. I won’t take no for an answer.” He walked over to Rafe. “I’m giving Kristen the rest of the day off. Please see that she gets home. It’s still raining outside.”

Rafe, who had appeared to be studying the pattern of the hardwood floor by his feet more than the art display, lifted his head. “Yes, sir. You have your umbrella?” he asked Kristen.

She pulled it out of her purse. “I really think I should stay.”

“I don’t.” Jacques took both their arms and led them to the door, opened it, escorted them onto the stoop under the awning, then closed the door behind them.

“Which way is your car?” Rafe asked, shifting nervously from one foot to the other.

“I’m all right, Rafe,” Kristen said. “You don’t have to watch over me.”

He let his gaze sweep the crowded streets and sidewalks before coming back to her. “I took something from you that can’t be replaced. It wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t cared. If you hadn’t cared. I just want you to know that it can’t be the way you want, but it mattered to me. You matter.”

He was giving all he could. She shouldn’t be greedy. She raised the umbrella and handed it to him. “We never did see that movie.”

“Afterwards, you can find us another restaurant,” he suggested.

“I’d like that.” She stepped onto the street. For the time being she’d have to accept him as a friend, not the lover she wanted—and live with the possibility that he might never be again.

*   *   *

Sunday found Angelique and Kristen subdued. Neither had to explain the reason why. After church, both opted to return home. Angelique to continue working on her dissertation with the suggestions her advisor had given her; Kristen to start working on the database for nineteenth-century African-American art. Each was dealing with the possibility that the man she loved might never be hers.

*   *   *

Kristen didn’t know what to expect when she and the students arrived at Rafe’s shop Monday night. She caught him watching her more than once Saturday at the movie and later at the restaurant. It was almost as if he were trying to peer into her and determine if she were pregnant. His fear that she was, was a constant source of pain for her. After speaking to him, she’d gone to her assigned work area in his shop.

“Kristen, you’re working with me tonight,” Rafe said, picking up the pieces to her box from the card table. “Tonight we work on installing the hinges, and they have to be done exactly right.”

She followed him back to his workbench, wishing she didn’t have the feeling that if they hadn’t made love she’d still be working with Jim, and that guilt, not concern, drove him. She watched his strong hands, remembered them heating her body, stroking, loving. He picked up a chisel and demonstrated how to cut a series of shallow cuts for the mortises or joints. Too bad she couldn’t chisel away the hard shell around his heart so he’d let himself love her.

“Your turn.”

Without comment, Kristen took the chisel. It was going to be a very long week.

*   *   *

Saturday morning found Angelique typing furiously in her office. With Professor Jones’s help, she’d been able to rethink her paper and make it more even. It wasn’t the stuff that a talk show would want, but it presented a fairer picture of relationships between the sexes. She had to admit that some women, like men, were users and often had their own agenda.

She didn’t even blink when she heard the doorbell. The last time she’d gotten up for a soft drink it had been close to four in the afternoon. Kristen didn’t get off until five. The professor and her associates knew to call first. That left solicitors, who occasionally snuck past the doorman. She wasn’t going to delude herself that it might be Damien. She’d done that too much already.

The phone rang twice. Stopped. Then rang twice again. Her foster parents’ signal. Hitting “save,” she was up and running to her bedroom for the phone. She snatched it up. “Hello?”

“Hi, Angelique. We’ve come to visit,” said her mother in a voice always filled with love and happiness.

“You’re here?”

“Open the door. These heels are hurting my feet.”

“I’ll be right there.” Smiling, she went to the door. Her foster mother bought shoes for beauty and style instead of comfort. Angelique opened the door and blinked in surprise. With her foster parents were two of her foster siblings. “What are you all doing here?” she asked when they were inside.

“Visiting,” answered her foster father, thin as the proverbial rail, dressed in his favorite clothes, khaki shirt and pants. “We thought we’d drive up and see how that paper is going.”

“Yeah,” David Hall said. “Papa Howard can’t wait to wear that suit you bought him. Gia and I are working on getting him out of his old shoes into some cap-toed lace-ups by Ferragamo.”

Elmo Howard snorted. “Can’t even pronounce the name. I’m not about to put ’em on my feet.”

It was an old argument. David, trim and well-dressed, with almond-colored skin and gray eyes, managed a department store in Baton Rouge. The family teased him that the women customers made up problems so they could stop by to see him.

“Now, Papa Howard,” Gia Sample said, her tone placating. “You’d look great.” Petite and pretty, she had coal-black skin and hair. She was the last of the Howard “brood” and had graduated in May and now worked as a dietician in a hospital in Baton Rouge. “Mama doesn’t mind.”

“And she can’t go twenty feet without sitting down, either,” he reminded them.

Bette Howard, full-figured and proud of every ounce, wiggled her stocking-covered toes. A true Southern lady, she never stepped out of the house without being in full make-up and dressed to the hilt. Today she wore a pretty white suit. She relished David’s job as much as he did. “But I sure look pretty.”

“It’s good to see all of you.” The rest of the infamous twelve were scattered over the state. Whatever her beginnings, she had a family who loved her.

“Get dressed. We’re going out to dinner,” David said. “And don’t take all day. Breakfast is just a faint memory.”

“I’ll be right out.” She ran to get dressed and missed the conspiring wink between David and Mama Howard.

*   *   *

The five of them piled into the fifteen-year-old van. Its odometer had stopped at one hundred thousand miles when Angelique was in high school. Fortunately, Papa Howard was a shade-tree mechanic and kept the vehicle running smoothly. “What do you want to eat?” she asked, propping her arms on the back of her mother’s seat as she had done so many times in the past.

“Doesn’t matter,” Mama Howard said. “Just so I don’t have to cook it.” In the passenger seat, she gazed out the widow. “They sure have some pretty houses here. Seems like, as many times as we’ve been here, we never get to look.”

“Papa Howard can take St. Charles Avenue and we can be in the Garden District in nothing flat,” David said. “Some of the most beautiful houses in the city are there.”

Angelique started to protest, but then remembered that Jacques, not Damien, lived there. “Sure, why not?”

As her foster father cruised through the beautiful neighborhood, she tried to remember what Jacques’s house had looked like. She had been paying more attention to Damien than where they were going.

“Look at all these cars lining the street. Someone’s having a party,” Gia said, scooting closer to Angelique and looking out her window. David sat behind them at the other window.

“What a hunk! Too bad he’s with someone,” Gia said. “Don’t you think he’s all that, Angelique?”

Angelique, still trying to remember Jacques’s street, wasn’t interested, but she looked anyway. Her eyes bugged and before she knew it her nose was pressed to the window. Damien stood on the lawn with some long-legged woman.

He turned and looked directly at her. He didn’t even have the courtesy to appear embarrassed. He waved.

“Look! He’s waving. My goodness! He’s motioning us to stop,” Gia said, excitement in her voice.

“Keep going!” Angelique’s fingernails dug into the back of Mother Howard’s seat.

“Where are your manners, Angelique?” her foster mother admonished. “Pull over, Elmo.”

Angelique slumped in her seat.

Damien came to the passenger side of the van. He was all smiles and so handsome Angelique wanted to kiss him until neither of them could breathe, then toss him off the nearest cliff.

“Hello.” He looked at her. “Hi, Angelique.”

Four pairs of eyes centered on her. “You know Angelique?” Gia asked.

“We dated until she dumped me,” Damien confessed with a smile.

Once again, Angelique felt the scrutiny of her family.

“You seem to have gotten over it quickly,” she said, then could have bitten off her tongue.

He laughed and extended his hand to her foster mother. “Damien Broussard.”

Her foster mother introduced everyone. “You have a beautiful home.”

“Actually, it’s my father’s but I know he wouldn’t mind if you’d like to come inside. He should be arriving any moment.”

“No.” Angelique glared at him.

“Yes,” Gia said.

“There’s no place to park,” Angelique pointed out happily.

“I’ll move the orange cones I had for another guest and you can park there.” Damien picked up the three cones directly in front of his father’s house and stacked them on the sidewalk. Elmo quickly pulled in.

“What a nice young man,” Mama Howard said.

Gia nudged her foster sister in the side. “Are you crazy, giving up a man like that?”

“Yeah,” David piped in. “He looks like he’s a BMW to me.”

Angelique scrunched up her face. She detested the acronym for “black man working.” “I’m staying in the van.”

“No, you’re not. You get out of this van now,” Mama Howard said from the sidewalk.

Angelique got out of the van. No one crossed her mother when she spoke in that tone or had “the look” that could pick you out from a hundred feet away in the choir stand or on a playground, and said, Your butt is mine if you don’t straighten up.

“Don’t slouch,” her foster mother said, straightening the straps of her pink sundress and finger-combing her hair as if she were a little girl. Angelique thought of protesting, but Mama Howard still wore “the look.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Damien waiting patiently. So was the long-legged woman, who had moved to the black wrought iron gate leading up to the Georgian mansion.

“This way,” Damien said.

With her foster mother holding her arm, Angelique had little choice except to follow. With each step toward the woman who had taken her place, Angelique’s shoulders became a little straighter, her chin a little higher. She had walked away from him. No. She had tossed him away. As stupid as it seemed, she wasn’t going to have his last memory be of her looking pitiful or being spiteful.

“You were right about my dissertation. Thank you.”

He sent her a look that turned her legs to water, then he spoke to Mrs. Howard. “You and your husband raised quite a woman.”

Bette Howard beamed with pride, then chuckled. “She fought us every step of the way until she was in high school.”

“My parents tell me I did, too.”

The long-legged, and yes, disgustingly beautiful young woman in a multicolored chiffon peasant top and light blue denim jeans opened the gate. “Hello.”

Damien waited until all of them were on the walkway before he did the introduction. He made points with everyone by remembering their last names. “This is Simone Fairchild, my cousin.”

“Cousin!” Angelique exclaimed.

“Thanks for the compliment,” Simone said, smiling knowingly.

Angelique looked away in embarrassment; then she was shoved aside by David, who was practically drooling over Simone. So much for family loyalty.

“Let’s go inside, and you can meet the rest of the guests.”