UNHEAVENLY ANGEL Annette Broadrick THE TROUBLE WITH ANGEL Blake Carlyle wouldn't have chosen Angel Bennington for a wife if she were the last woman on earth. He needed an obedient corporate wife, not a capricious bohemian artist. But their union was inevitable, due to a comical clause written into their fathers' wills. If they wanted to save their inheritance in the multimillion-dollar corporation, they had to marry and produce an heir. Soon Blake discovered that this vixen wasn't too far from heaven's gate after all. Angel was a bubbly, generous woman, with more discretion than Blake had thought possible--though her halo may have occasionally slipped for a kiss or two! Chapter One Harrison Tyler wearily rubbed his forehead. For the first time in his fifty-five years, he felt old. Harry sat behind the impressive desk that served as the focal point of Scott Bennington's large and well-stocked library. Never before had he occupied the seat behind the desk because Scott had always been there. Until now. Harry studied the two young people seated across from him and once again was reminded of his age. How had time slipped away from him? He clearly remembered the day Blake Carlyle was born. How could he possibly forget the three of them—he, Todd Carlyle and Scott Bennington celebrating the arrival of Todd's firstborn by getting rip-roaring drunk. That had been more than thirty-two years ago. Thirty-two years. What had happened to all those years? There were still so many things the three men, friends since grade school, had intended to do together. Not that they hadn't done a hell of a lot in their lifetimes. But for some reason they had behaved as though they would live forever—as though nothing could possibly harm them. Scott and Todd had been wrong. Now it was left to Harry to inform their offspring of the plans Scott and Todd had made for their children. He wasn't looking forward to the telling. His gaze fell admiringly on Angel Bennington. Angel had been a beauty since the day she was born, almost twenty-six years ago, which was why Scott—in an uncharacteristic outburst of sentimentality—had insisted on naming her Angel. She had always been tiny for her age, reminding Harry of a sprite flitting among the massive furniture amassed by generations of Benningtons, looking almost as out of place as her mother had obviously felt. Angel had been only five when Yvette had declared, in her lightly accented tone, that she would never be happy living in San Francisco, despite all of Scott's inducements and promises, and that she and, of course, la belle Angel were returning to the civilized world, which to Yvette, of course, could only mean France. Scott had been devastated, but he had survived. When Angel was older he convinced Yvette to allow Angel to visit San Francisco each summer, and he flew to France several times a year to see her. The adult Angel still looked like a pixie sitting there before him. A very sad pixie. She had lost the father she adored, just as Harry had lost his two closest friends. No one knew what Blake was feeling. No one ever did. When Scott and Todd decided to go into the electronics business several years before, microchips had rarely been heard of and their function only vaguely guessed at. Harry had been their attorney and had watched the business mushroom into a multimillion- dollar corporation—privately owned. All of the stock had been held by the two men, although they had offered Harry shares when they first started. He sometimes wondered if things might have turned out differently if he'd agreed to take the shares. But he hadn't. Scott and Todd took turns being chairman of the board and president of the company, alternating each year. They almost made a game of it. Blake had gone to work for the company as soon as he graduated from Harvard. No doubt he was aware he was being groomed to take over the business someday, some mythical, far-off day when Todd and Scott no longer cared to work or preferred to explore the world. What nobody had expected was a plane crash in the Orient, killing all passengers, including fifty- five-year-old Todd Carlyle and fifty-four-year-old Scott Bennington. Of course they had made provisions for their offspring in the unlikely event something unforeseen happened to them. Unfortunately they treated the whole thing as a joke. The idea they hatched between them was the result of an all-night poker party that had been liberally endowed with a great deal of booze. Harry couldn't remember which one of them first suggested the outrageous idea because they both immediately roared with laughter and decided that the suggestion merited considerable thought. Harry had felt certain that by dawn's sober light they would forget it. Unfortunately they hadn't. He spent weeks trying to talk them out of their plan but they were having none of his arguments. It was only when they threatened to find another attorney to draw up the papers, because, after all, what they were proposing was in no way illegal (outrageous, perhaps, but certainly not illegal), that Harry agreed to draw up the buy-sell agreement—a routine document in a partnership—as well as a will for each of them. Perhaps things might have been different if Blake's mother had not died when he was ten. Lydia Blake Carlyle had always been a cool, aloof woman. Henry had never understood how the warmhearted, fun- loving Todd Carlyle had ever fallen for such a cold, seemingly unfeeling woman. But perhaps she could have exerted some influence over the proceedings and made the men face the impropriety of what they were suggesting. He certainly hadn't been able to do so. Studying the man seated before him, Harry found himself secretly wondering if Todd's only son had had the misfortune of taking after his mother. Blake wasn't cold, exactly. Reserved was a better description of his personality. He had his father's height and muscular build and his mother's dark coloring, but it was his roguish smile, so seldom witnessed by those not close to him, that reminded Harry that Blake was very much Todd's son. Blake had had little to smile about, however, during these past several days. It had fallen on him to arrange the double funeral, to contact Angel in France and arrange for her arrival in San Francisco to coincide with the services, and to continue running the business that Scott and Todd had left. It was the disposition of the business that was the crux of the matter now. Harry cleared his throat, pointedly looking first at Blake, then at Angel. Blake's compelling black-eyed stare steadily met his, while Angel's large, sapphire- blue gaze caused a lump to form in Harry's throat. The fiery flame of her burnished curls gave an aureole effect to her countenance. With her sad expression she did, indeed, appear to be a grieving angel. "I'm sure you two understand how very difficult all of this has been for me," he began, studying his folded hands lying on the desk in front of him. "As you both are aware, my friendship with your fathers spans almost fifty years. And since I never married, you two are the closest I have ever come to having children. I have watched both of you grow and mature..." He paused because he detected a faint trickle of moisture fall from Angel's left eye and realized that at the rate he was going, he would have all three of them sobbing very shortly. "I don't believe that Scott or Todd ever imagined that the documents I am about to read to you would ever be put into effect. I am ashamed to say that I feel they were meant to be an attempt at their brand of rather ribald humor. Had either of you married before their deaths, I am sure changes would have been made immediately." Blake Carlyle shifted in his chair, startled at the mention of marriage. He couldn't imagine what their being married would have to do with the disposition of the estates. Surely the situation was simple enough, since he and Angel were the only ones in line to inherit. Blake had been eleven years old when Yvette Bennington and Angel had moved to France. He remembered Angel's mother very well. She had been vivacious, outgoing and very striking with her splash of red hair, ivory skin and lustrous green eyes. Blake's mother had despised her. Had she lived, Lydia Carlyle would have been the first to point out that she had predicted the marriage would not last. She would have been right. As far back as Blake could remember, his mother had always been right. She had even predicted her own rather untimely death. Almost no one died of pneumonia anymore, not since the advent of penicillin. But Lydia Carlyle did. Blake had sometimes wondered if she might actually have died in order to prove that she had been right and everyone else had been wrong. But her opinions of the woman who had produced and directed the upbringing of the young woman seated beside him had colored his opinion of both. Blake looked at Angel impassively. He found even her name distasteful. Nobody was named Angel, except perhaps a burlesque queen. Although he recognized that she could not be held responsible for the name she had been given at birth, she had made no effort to change it, although Angelique didn't sound much better to him. It brought to mind some bawdy French madam. His gaze returned to Harrison Tyler. Never had he seen Harry quite so agitated, almost unstrung, although it wasn't particularly surprising. After all, he had just said goodbye to his two closest friends. Blake himself still couldn't believe the men weren't going to come through that door momentarily, admitting it had all been some macabre joke, laughing that the rest of them had fallen for it. He knew his life would never be the same without them. Angel was valiantly struggling not to cry in front of the two men. Not that she really minded crying in front of Harry, who had bounced her on his knee as far back as she could remember. He and Todd had often accompanied her father on his visits to France and she had always considered them as part of her family. She knew that Harry could understand her grief at the abrupt cessation of the loving relationship she had shared with her father. Angel had loved her father with a fierce, undying loyalty that nothing or no one could sway. Her mother had found her energetic defense of her oftentimes absent father rather exhausting and totally boring and had allowed her only child—and she had made it clear to all who would listen how thankful she was to have had only one child— to hero-worship to her heart's content. Now he was gone. Angel surreptitiously wiped a tear away. She did not want to show her grief in front of Blake Carlyle. She barely knew the man. They had seen each other very infrequently during the years Angel had traveled back and forth between France and the United States. Although six years older, Blake had always seemed to be an adult to her. Perhaps it was because he was so serious and reserved. She had never known what to say to him and had avoided him as much as possible. Blake appeared to be nothing at all like his father, who had been a warm and affectionate person, full of fun and with a sense of adventure the young Angel had appreciated. She could see none of that in his son. He seemed to be at home in the business world, a world so foreign to Angel it could have been on another planet. According to her father, Blake had a natural flair for the business and an unusual ability to identify the underlying problems in a given situation and be able to provide a workable solution. Her father had greatly admired Blake, and Angel trusted her father's judgment implicitly. She was the first to acknowledge, however, she and Blake had absolutely nothing in common. Her thoughts, emotions and ambitions centered on the art world. The young, lonely child had gravitated toward the solitary occupation of art, finding solace in the bright colors and the expression of her emotions on canvas. Thus she poured all of her passionate feelings into her paintings, spending her youth taking lessons and attending classes in Paris. Her first painting sold when she was sixteen. Her mother was killed in a car crash in southern France when Angel was nineteen. By the time she was twenty- one Angel was living in Paris in an apartment building filled with painters, sculptors and students of art. She didn't need to worry about money because of the income derived from the trust Scott had set up for her when she was born. Additionally, during the ten years she had been painting professionally her work had increased in value and her style and technique were beginning to be recognized throughout the art world. No one, now that her father was gone, knew how successful Angel had become with her painting. It had been a joke between them that the halo she used as her signature on each of her paintings had been interpreted to mean a ring or a gold band of some sort.