Angela's Affair (Pacific Waterfront Romances, #13) Read online

  Phone him. There were pay telephones everywhere inside the waiting room. The place was almost empty, but there was an attendant at a ticket window and a waitress inside an empty cafeteria.

  There was a clock. It was one in the morning.

  She walked up to the ticket counter. She could see busses through the big double doors, but everything looked still and quiet. Didn’t the busses run all through the night? Would she have to wait forever in this place? All night?

  “Could you tell me when the next bus goes to...” To where? She knew there was nothing going direct between Port Townsend and Canada. “To Seattle,” she decided, knowing she could make connection there.

  “Six-fifteen.”

  She stared at him.

  “Next one after that is eight o’clock.”

  Five hours. Would Kent go out looking for her when he woke and found her gone? If she had left in broad daylight, maybe not, but in the middle of the night—Yes, probably.

  Vancouver was a big enough city to get lost in, but how long would it take him to think of looking in the bus depot?

  Chapter Ten

  It was three-thirty when he walked through the door from outside. Angela was sitting in a bolted-down seat with a cardboard cup of bitter coffee in her hand. She had been studying the details of a printed leaflet that told her it would take three days to go from Vancouver to Toronto by bus. She had almost convinced herself that six-thirty would come and the bus would leave for Seattle with her on it, and Kent would not come through that door.

  She jerked to look every time she heard the door. There had been an old man with a cane. Two women together. A family, the youngest child rubbing his eyes and yawning. A bus had left at two-thirty, going somewhere with about eight people on board.

  More people, a scattering of yawning travelers arriving from somewhere else just after three.

  Then nothing until Kent walked through the door from outside. He came two paces into the waiting room, then stopped. She watched as the door behind him slowly swung shut. He stared at her. She had thought he would be angry, but he was just cold and hard and frozen, watching her. He was not wearing the jeans and knit shirt, but his usual suit. She wondered if he would ever wear the red shirt again and her hand went to the charm hanging from her left ear.

  He jerked his head. “My car’s outside. Come on.”

  “No. I—my bus leaves soon.”

  He looked around the empty waiting room. She closed her eyes, opened them again and saw the exasperation around his mouth.

  “If you’re so desperate to get away from me...if it can’t wait until morning, I’ll take you out to the airport. I don’t imagine my pilot will be very happy to be dug out of bed in the middle of the night, but I’m damned if I’m leaving you here in a bloody bus depot.”

  She stared at his mouth. Not the eyes, she warned herself. Keep focused on that hard mouth, and keep it together for just a few more minutes.

  “I’m not coming with you. I want you to go away.”

  If anything, he looked more rigid, more immovable. She kept focused on that chin, hard and jutting.

  “Kent, I don’t want you here. I want you to go home and I’ll take my bus and...” She must not cry, not until later, when she was alone, when it did not matter. “I—I don’t want to see you again.”

  Kent and his damned sense of responsibility. She should have known. Damn it, she had known! Hadn’t he always looked after Charlotte, even when she was being her most exasperating and wild? And his grandmother. Tomorrow he would be at the house she had never seen, because the woman he had called mother all his life was upset about a neighbor painting his house blue. Even though Kent thought it was silly, he would go. Just as he had come to take charge of Charlotte’s sailboat. Just as he had taken Harvey to San Francisco, because Harvey loved Charlotte and maybe it would work.

  Just as he would make sure she got home safely, even though she had gone too far and blown their affair into a disaster. She saw his lips, straight and hard and turned down at the corners. She saw the muscle jump in his jaw, heard the discomfort in his voice.

  “Angela, last night you said you loved me.”

  Something went tight and hard and painful in the pit of her stomach. He would have been smiling if she had not said those words. Wanting her. Now she was just a responsibility. She focused on his chin, but it kept going blurry. “That was...” She fought a spasm in her throat and somehow managed to say, “That was just..sex.”

  “It wasn’t true?”

  She could not manage the words. She shook her head. She felt the earrings he had given her brush against her skin as she moved.

  Then she held herself very still until she saw the blurry edge of the door closing behind him. When he was gone, she turned and found her way past the row of lockers, past the darkened baggage room, into the ladies room where there was no one to see her tears.

  She wouldn’t have been surprised if she had turned the order of Sailing Rags for the Bellingham store into real rags, fit only for the garbage. But oddly, the pieces of canvas went together as if they knew their place without her directing them. She supposed she had her brain on autopilot, because she certainly didn’t have her mind on what she was doing.

  She worked from Monday until late Wednesday night, sewing alone up in the loft at the shop. Everyone left her alone. They were all unhappy with her for one reason or another. Barney was talking to her politely, as if they were strangers instead of people who had shared high school homework and Anna’s apple pie. Charlotte kept talking about Kent, telling little bits and pieces of memories of the man when he was a boy, aiming the words at the middle of the room and meaning them for Angela. Harvey just looked worried, as he had back when he had been trying to trace Ben in hopes he could put Angela’s marriage back together for her, before they learned of the freeway accident.

  Even Jake was sulky. Aunt Angie had forgotten to bring him even the smallest souvenir of his beloved Mounties.

  She hardly noticed any of it at first, except for the flinching she felt inside whenever Charlotte said Kent’s name. Her hands worked on the canvas, and her mind was stuck in some miserable mire.

  Thursday morning she packed the order up and handed it over to the UPS man for delivery to Bellingham. She realized as the green truck drove away with the parcel that she had forgotten to enclose the packing slip. She sat down and wrote out the invoice and put it in an envelope and walked out to put it in the mailbox before she forgot that too.

  Sally drove up in her station wagon and rolled the window down. Wendy was beside her in a baby car seat. Jake, much to his own pleasure, was now spending his weekdays as a student at the primary school. He had told Angela the week before that he was going to be a teacher when he grew up.

  Sally called, “Angie!” and Angela walked over to the car, realizing that this might be the first smile anyone had given her since last weekend.

  “Hi.” She had known Sally most of her life, but now she felt awkward. “Going shopping?”

  “Yes—groceries. And a new dress for the dance next week. Come to dinner tomorrow?”

  She nodded. Life went on. It was time she started picking up the threads. “Want a baby sitter?” she offered.

  “No, we want you. Fresh caught salmon, done over the barbecue in our back yard. And wear something nice—I’ve invited our new neighbor.”

  She felt a sharp pain somewhere around her heart. “Sally—”

  “Angie, you’ve got to just grit your teeth and make yourself look for someone else. Someone who’s more your own kind.”

  Her kind? She squeezed her eyes closed. Kent. Oh, God! Kent.

  “Angie?”

  She gave an odd laugh, realized that her fingers were gripping the door of Sally’s station wagon. “Sally, I just can’t.”

  Sally frowned and pushed back her soft blonde hair. “You’ve only known him a few weeks.” Sally had known Barney all her life, could not remember a time when he had been a stranger.

/>   “Yeah.” Angela stared at her fingers, gripping the window opening so hard they went white. She pulled her hands away. “It doesn’t matter,” she said dully. “A few weeks, or a lifetime. I’ve got him in my blood so bad that I seize up inside just hearing his name.” The damned tears were going to come again. She blinked and said bleakly, “I’m not sure that’s ever going to change. So—so don’t plan any dinners with that neighbor for a while.”

  She walked into the shop and up the stairs and into the room where they had been leaving her alone all week. Had they talked it over and decided Sally was the envoy to come and start trying to get Angie out of herself? They probably had a program all worked out for her. Step one was the neighbor and a neighborhood barbecue. Heaven knew what step two was. She knew they were doing it because they loved her, because they cared that she was hurting and did not know what to say to her.

  Except Charlotte, who seemed to have worked it out that Angela was the villain. Charlotte, who always did have trouble seeing things straight.

  Kent did not come for the weekend. She had known he would not, of course. Eventually he would, she supposed, to visit Charlotte, because they seemed to have formed some kind of relationship that they were both comfortable with. He did not call her mother, but he had been talking to her and they had been laughing together.

  Angela knew she would have to move. The carriage house would not be far enough. It would have to be somewhere she could not stare out and see his car in the drive. Maybe she would have to leave entirely, try to set up the Sailing Rags thing somewhere else, although there was nowhere else that was home to her.

  On Monday, a letter arrived from England.

  It was from her father, the words stilted and formal as they always were, the letter folded around an open airline ticket, Seattle to London, and the words, past time you visited us.

  How like her father to put it that way, not saying they wanted to see her. They had never been close. She had always felt that they wanted a different kind of child than she was. Perhaps she had never lost the resentment that had grown in that one telephone call all those years ago. Three days after she married Ben, standing in a telephone booth in California with Ben in the truck, impatient to be back on the road.

  Her father had told her to come home at once and he would look after the divorce. The message was plain. Ben, or her family. She had chosen her husband then, and of course her parents hadn’t actually disowned her, but the feeling that they were strangers had grown, and now she stared at the letter and wondered if there was any point to using the ticket.

  The ironic thing was that Kent was exactly the kind of man they would have wanted for her; yet if she did use the ticket, it would be mostly to escape Charlotte’s voice saying Kent’s name.

  She wasn’t sure what she felt about her parents. If Barney weren’t so annoyed with her she would have asked his advice.

  It took her until Wednesday to decide that she was probably going to use the ticket. It was a return ticket, and she wasn’t going to stay with them more than a few days, but it would be some kind of breathing space from this place where every time a car drove up, she was tied in knots waiting for Kent to come through the door.

  Her period came on Thursday and she cried when it happened because she wanted Kent’s baby growing inside her. She wished she had not gone to the doctor, had not made so sure that there would be no pregnancy. She wanted his child.

  She wanted his love.

  She made her announcement that night: England, her own parents, she wasn’t sure how long.

  Harvey said, “Angie, this is your home. You won’t forget that we all love you.”

  Charlotte said, “You’re running away. Shouldn’t you think about Kent?” Then Harvey shook his head and Charlotte said nothing more.

  Angela called the travel agent and found that while she could fly from Seattle to New York any day she wanted, she would have to wait a week for a space on the flight to London.

  Barney offered to drive her into the Seatac airport for the flight and she accepted, but it took forever for the day to come. Then Barney got her there too early. He checked her luggage at the curb, then they stood together at the edge of the check-in lineup, uncomfortable with each other.

  “You don’t have to wait, Barney.”

  He shrugged and said, “I’ll see you off.”

  “Big brother?” She managed a smile.

  “Yeah. Well, you need it. The way you’ve been behaving lately.”

  She fiddled with the tab on the zipper of her carry-on bag. “Charlotte says I’m running away.”

  He snorted. “Not that my scatterbrained new mother-in-law is in any position to criticize when it comes to running away, but that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

  “I’m visiting my parents. That’s not—Oh, hell, Barney.” She closed her eyes and wailed, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I forgot to wire them when I was coming.”

  He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Are you sure you want to go?”

  “I’ve got to do something, don’t I?”

  He shrugged and took her arm and at least he had stopped frowning at her. “Let’s go for a coffee. And then why don’t you figure out what it is you really want. What’s going to make you happy?”

  She let him take her into the cafeteria. It was a Wednesday morning, and from the stream of people around them, air flight was at its peak.

  She drank the coffee he brought her from the counter, decided that she was going to have to stop drinking so much coffee. The stuff was starting to taste like ashes. Everything tasted like ashes.

  “Well?” asked Barney. “Have you decided?”

  She shook her head and tried to smile. “Being happy isn’t really one of the options right now.”

  “Then don’t you think you should change your options?”

  She laughed, but it didn’t sound right.

  He said, “Maybe Charlotte’s right about more than the running.”

  She stared at her cardboard cup and the dark liquid in it, then at Barney. Charlotte thought Kent was serious about Angela. She whispered, “You didn’t think so. You told me—”

  He moved impatiently. “Are you going to gamble your happiness on my being right? I hardly know the guy. You’re the one who’s in love with him.” Barney picked up his own cup and ground out grimly, “He’s not the man I would have picked for you, but you told Sally he was in your blood. Going to England isn’t going to change anything if you’ve got it that bad.”

  “I know, but...I—I don’t think I can face him again.”

  Barney laughed shortly. “Scared or miserable, take your choice.”

  Or scared and miserable, she thought, remembering the hard, cold line of Kent’s mouth as he had stood in front of her at the bus depot.

  She didn’t realize that Barney had left her alone in the cafeteria until he came back. He picked up his cup without sitting down, emptied it in one long swallow of the tepid coffee.

  “Your plane to New York is boarding in ten minutes.”

  She sighed. “I guess I’m not going.” Why hadn’t Kent called Charlotte? Charlotte had expected him to call, and he had no reason not to. Unless...

  That harsh, freezing look at the bus depot, the same message that she’d seen in his eyes back on the sea wall when he’d told her he had no practice with relationships. She had assumed he meant that he did not want a relationship with her. All that weekend, she had been so afraid he would tell her she had no real place in his life.

  What if that was wrong? What if she had gone to him that day, touched his chest and stared into his eyes, searched for something behind the ice? Was it possible that he was frightened, too? That he...loved her?

  “There’s a flight to Vancouver leaving in twenty minutes.” Barney frowned and said, “Or do you want me to drive you up there?”

  “No.” She bit her lip. “It’s going to be bad enough without witnesses.”

  “I’ll track down your luggage
for you,” he offered.

  “What?”

  “Your suitcase. It’s checked through to London. I’ll look after it.”

  Her luggage was the last thing she was worried about. She had never been quite so frightened in all her life. Kent might not let her in. Even if he did, he would quite likely not want to hear what she had to say. She would have to speak her piece in cold blood. She’d have to watch his eyes as she spoke, because she would know if she watched his eyes.

  The plane.

  She got on, then somehow missed the part where it took off. Suddenly the stewardess was hovering over her, asking quietly, “Are you nervous? It’s going to be a quiet flight.”

  Angela shook her head. “Thanks. I’m fine.”

  In Vancouver, the Canadian customs officer took her birth certificate and asked if she was visiting for business or pleasure. She said pleasure and he looked at her oddly. She wondered if she looked as frightened as she felt.

  She went to the currency exchange window and changed a hundred dollars into Canadian. Then she went to a telephone booth, found a listing for Ferguson Holdings in a telephone book and walked outside to the row of waiting taxies.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kent’s office suite was what Angela would have expected—quiet, elegant, expensive. Eleven floors higher than the rest of the world. The receptionist matched the decor, dark-haired, immaculate and expensive. Angela walked up to the desk and tried to look as if she belonged.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Ferguson, please.”

  The brunette smiled with professional regret. “Mr. Ferguson is completely booked. Perhaps I could help you.”

  A door burst open behind her and a slight, worried man rushed out, closed the door quietly, then dropped a small pile of papers on the receptionist’s desk with quiet violence.

  He spoke in a low-voiced tirade, his voice trembling with anger. “Patricia, the man’s impossible! What’s got into him lately? Look what he’s asking for! I tell you, those elevations are all wrong!”

  The brunette turned away from Angela and spoke soothingly, her voice so low that Angela could barely hear. “David, do what you can. He’s not an a very good mood today, but I’m sure—”