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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 1998, 2021 by Carolyn Brown

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Stephanie Gafron/Sourcebooks

  Cover image by Levente Bodo/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Originally published as Winning Angel in 1998 in the United States by Kensington.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  In memory of

  my sister, Patti…who loved happy endings!

  Dear Readers,

  I’m so thankful for the opportunity to bring this story up-to-date. Written more than twenty years ago, it was among the very first four books I was fortunate enough to get published. A lot has happened since 1998. Attitudes have changed. Cell phones and computers have become the new normal.

  It’s been fun to look back and then look forward as I worked on Clancy and Angela’s story. I have a lot of folks to thank for their help in doing this job. Thanks to my agency, Folio Management, and to my agent, Erin Niumata, for everything they do. Thanks to Deb Werksman for working with me on this new edition, and to all my readers for their support and love through the past twenty-two years and through more than a hundred books. And thanks to my husband, Mr. B, who is my biggest supporter! All of you deserve a standing ovation.

  As I finished rewriting the story—with Clancy and Angela sitting on my desk and telling me how they felt—it was like leaving old friends behind. I hope you feel the same way when you read the last chapter.

  Until next time,

  Carolyn Brown

  Chapter 1

  Clancy Morgan didn’t plan to go to the Tishomingo Alumni Reunion but changed his mind at the last minute. The banquet part of the evening was almost over when he arrived, so he stood in the back and scanned the room from the shadows. Evidently, one of his classmates from ten years before had done the same thing, because a woman stood over behind a huge fake tree just inside the double doors leading into the ballroom. Clancy’s dark brows drew down until they were almost a solid line above his chocolate-brown eyes. Something about her silhouette looked familiar, but it had been a while since he’d seen most of his former classmates, and he couldn’t make out her face in the dim lighting. Perhaps she hadn’t been a member of his graduating class, but was someone’s wife, or else their plus one.

  A vision popped into his mind of a girl who used to stand like that with one hand on her hip. He shook the memory out of his mind. Angela wouldn’t show up to a noisy ten-year high school class reunion, not as shy as she had been.

  “And now, please welcome Martha Simpson, the valedictorian of the class of 1953, and the woman who keeps this alumni association going,” intoned the master of ceremonies from the podium. “Isn’t she wonderful?”

  The crowd applauded as a frail, elderly woman made her way to the front. Clancy sneaked in and sat down at the first table with an available empty chair.

  “Martha Simpson is probably the only living member of that class,” Laura Sides Walls whispered to him.

  Clancy smiled and applauded dutifully with the rest of the alumni. When he looked back to see if the mystery woman was still standing in the shadows, she was gone. Nothing was there but the doors swinging to and fro, as if she had seen enough and left. Clancy wished he had gone over just in case she had been Angela.

  “Damn,” he mumbled under his breath. “Now she’s gone, and I’ll probably never see her again.”

  Martha leaned in close to the microphone and held up her palm for them to stop the applause. “Thank you all, but really, I’m just good at delegating, and I managed to live to be eighty-five. I always told that Emily Jacobs that I’d be famous someday.”

  Everyone laughed and clapped even harder.

  “Welcome to the Tishomingo Alumni Banquet and Reunion,” Martha went on, “a place where we’re all seventeen or eighteen. Ever realize that when we come to these affairs, we’re all seniors in high school again? Too damn bad that we don’t look like we did then.”

  Clancy laughed with everyone else, but he couldn’t get Angela Conrad off his mind.

  ***

  Angel was aware that he had spotted her. She had felt the questions in his soft brown eyes, but she wasn’t ready to face him. Before the evening was over, he would know who she was if she had to sit in his lap and tell him herself. But for now, she had to get ready. The sound equipment was in place, the microphones set up, the amps ready to bring the house down, and the rest of her band members were in the bus.

  Angel slung open the door, stomped up the steps, and slumped down on the short sofa on the far wall. She crossed her arms over her chest, sucked in a lungful of air, and let it out slowly.

  “Did you see Clancy?” Bonnie asked.

  All of the members of the band were blonds except Angela. Patty and Susan were the same height, but Bonnie stood at just under six feet tall when she wore her cowboy boots.

  “Yes,” Angel answered. “Looking just as egotistical and full of himself as ever. And he’s even sexier than he was ten years ago.”

  “Methinks I hear a note of love gone wrong. Hey, sounds like a good title for our new song. Maybe I just got the inspiration for the Billboard chart–topping song that we’ve needed all these years to take us straight to the top in Nashville.” Patty pulled on her boots and twisted her straw-colored hair up in a twist.

  Susan tossed Angel’s cowboy hat acro
ss the bus. With her honey-blond hair and round face, some folks said that she could have been Miranda Lambert’s sister. “Right. Just when we’ve decided to give up touring.”

  Angel caught her hat and laid it beside her. She stuck out her tongue at her friends, stood up and peeled faded jean shorts down over her hips and tossed them beside the hat. She jerked her knit tank top over her head, threw it in the direction of her shorts, and slipped on a black silk kimono-style robe.

  “Hey, girls, I want to thank you again for tonight. Only real friends would play a two-bit gig like this, and I appreciate it. Means a lot to me.” She sat down in front of a built-in vanity, complete with mirror and track lighting, and slapped makeup on her face, covering a fine sprinkling of freckles across her upturned nose. She outlined her big green eyes with a delicate tracing of dark pencil, then brushed mascara on her thick lashes. She flipped her dark-brown hair around her face with a styling comb and sat back to look at her reflection. Not bad for a backward girl who’d been scared of her own shadow ten years ago.

  She wondered if anyone would recognize her. Not that Angel had planned to attend this reunion any more than the other nine that had already gone by. But then she had received the letter from the class president and decided—without exactly knowing why—that she’d come to this one. Some of the alumni might doubt she’d even been in their class when they saw her onstage, but after tonight, they’d go home and drag out their yearbooks to find her name and picture. And there she would be in big glasses, which she’d since replaced with contacts, and wildly curly hair, which she still couldn’t tame.

  Tonight, Angel was going to put away the past and forget about the pain. The self-help books she’d read and her therapist both told her to face her fear. Tonight she was doing just that. Tomorrow she was going to wake up a brand-new woman, ready to face whatever life might bring her, and she was never going to think about Clancy again.

  She forced a smile at her reflection and then reached up and peeled the letter from the class president off her mirror. The committee had asked for a brief paragraph listing her accomplishments in the decade since she’d finished high school. Her short biography would be published in the alumni newsletter that would be sent out the next week. They had also asked for a contribution of some kind to the reunion. Angel had written back and offered to bring her band and play for the dance—free of charge.

  “Better jerk them jeans on, darlin’.” Mindy came out of the small bathroom and looked at Angel in the mirror. “Clancy Morgan’s eyes would pop out of his head if you got to gyratin’ your hips in nothing but that cute little lacy bra and underpants. I can’t wait to see his face. Be sure you do something so that we know which one of the guys is the man who broke your heart.”

  “Oh, hush.” Angel giggled as she stood up and took her freshly starched white jeans from a hanger and shimmied into them. Then she topped them with a sequined vest with flashing red and white horizontal stripes on the right side and white stars on a ground of blue on the left.

  “Lord, all I need is a couple of pasties with tassels.” Angel checked her appearance in the mirror one last time.

  “Hey, we’re playing a gig for a bunch of high school alumni. We ain’t doing a show for Neddie’s Nudie Beauties. Time to go, ladies. Ten minutes until showtime.” Allie, the shortest one in the band and the one with the lightest blond hair, crossed the floor and pushed open the bus door to lead the way.

  “Y’all look wonderful.” Angel was proud of her five friends in her band. They wore identical black jeans and black denim vests with the state flag of Texas embroidered on the backs.

  “We clean up pretty good,” Susan agreed. “You’d never know we were plain old working women the rest of the week.”

  The band members laughed and headed for the ballroom.

  ***

  “Let’s give the equipment one more check before they open the doors between the banquet room and this ballroom,” Allie said. “Testing.” She blew into the first microphone, which produced an ear squeal, and she nodded toward Bonnie, who was adjusting the amplifiers.

  “Smoke machine is…ready,” Mindy said from the side of the stage.

  Allie turned a knob or two, double-checked the timer, then sat down at her drums and gave a warm-up roll with the sticks. “Ready to rock and roll,” she growled into the microphone beside her.

  “Ready,” Susan breathed into her microphone, and drew her bow across her fiddle, creating a haunting sound that made Angel’s blood curdle, just as it did every time they played.

  “Then let’s knock ’em dead.” Mindy stretched her fingers and warmed up on the keyboard with a few bars of Miranda Lambert’s “Hush, Hush.”

  The double doors from the banquet room swung open into the ballroom, and people wandered in, not quite sure this was where they belonged. Clancy Morgan and several companions found a table right in front of the small knockdown stage Angel toted around in the equipment trailer behind the bus. Even its slight elevation of twelve inches gave the band an advantage, which was better than being stuck back in a corner of a room on the same level as all the dancers.

  “Dark in here,” Angel heard a man say. “These itty-bitty candles on the tables don’t give much light.”

  “You didn’t complain about that ten years ago at the prom.” His wife giggled. “Matter of fact, you wanted to blow the candles out so the ballroom would be darker.”

  “Yeah, but back then you were fun to be with in the dark,” he teased.

  The woman pouted.

  Angel thought she recognized him—wasn’t he Jim Moore?

  The alarm on Allie’s watch went off, and she did a roll on the drums and pushed a hidden button with her foot. The smoke machine emitted trails of white fog across the stage, and a rotating strobe picked up every flicker of candlelight from the tables. When the smoke began to clear, there were five Texas state flags facing the darkened room. Then, from somewhere behind a huge amplifier, Angel stepped out, all aglitter in red, white, and blue sequins.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said in a deep, throaty voice. “I’m Angel—and this is the Honky Tonk Band. There’s Allie on the drums.” She stepped aside, and Allie stood up, bowed, and gave the audience fifteen seconds of a percussion riff.

  “And Patty on rhythm guitar.” One of the flags turned around to reveal a honey-blond woman, who struck a chord and waved to the people.

  Angel hoped for an enthusiastic crowd. Lord, but she hated to play to a dead bunch, and these alumni sure didn’t look as lively as the folks they’d played to last night.

  “Bonnie on steel,” she said and the second flag turned.

  Bonnie made the guitar slung around her neck whine like a baby.

  “Susan on the fiddle.” Angel waved to her left, and a short woman with platinum-colored hair perched a fiddle on her shoulder and let them hear a tantalizing bit of a classic country tune.

  “And over here is Mindy on the keyboard.” Mindy did a few chords of Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date.”

  Then the final flag turned slowly to face the alumni of Tishomingo High School. “Hi, y’all,” Angel said huskily into the mic.

  “And this is Angel!” Martha stepped up to the microphone. “You might remember her as Angela Conrad. She and these gorgeous band members have agreed to play for us tonight for free. Let’s make them welcome and get ready for a show. These ladies will be at the Twisted Spur Honky Tonk in Davis next Friday night for their final gig, so we’re lucky to get ’em. Angel says she’s tired of working all week and the weekends too. So, give them a big hand to let them know how much we appreciate them playing for us.” She started the applause and the audience followed suit as she left the stage and grabbed a young guy’s hand, led him to the dance floor and nodded to Angel to start the party.

  “Wind ’em up, girls,” Angel whispered. She grabbed a mic and started the evening with a su
refire crowd-pleaser. Mindy tinkled the keyboard keys and Allie kept a steady beat with the brushes on the drums. Angel strutted across the stage, sequins flashing in the strobe lights, and the long diamond drops that dangled from her ears glittering in her dark-brown shoulder-length curls.

  Before long, there were at least twenty couples in the middle of the floor, dancing in one way or another. Several were doing something between the twist and the jerk, and an older couple was executing a pretty fine jitterbug. Angel kept looking down at the table where Clancy Morgan sat alone while his friends tried to keep up with the beat on the dance floor. Evidently, Melissa—if he had married her—couldn’t accompany him tonight. Or maybe he hadn’t married her. Now wouldn’t that be a hoot?

  ***

  Angel put her left hand on her hip and struck a pose, and memories from that summer ten years ago flooded Clancy’s mind, again. What had happened to the Angela Conrad he’d known? She was supposed to marry old Billy Joe Summers and raise a shack full of snotty-nosed kids. She was supposed to work in a sewing factory, supporting Billy Joe’s life-threatening drinking habit. She wasn’t supposed to be on a stage, belting out songs by famous artists.

  Patty started a strong rhythm and Angel stepped off the stage and mixed with the people in the dancing crowd, singing into a cordless mic. Then she sat down on the table right in front of Clancy, wiggled her shoulders, and sang to him as she looked right in his eyes. He wanted to say something, but what could he say? Words wouldn’t turn him from a jerk into a decent guy, so he just sat there without saying a word, shaking his head in disbelief.

  She looked something like the old Angela, except she wasn’t wearing glasses. She leaned toward him far enough that he could see down the front of her vest, and a red heat stirred inside him as he remembered her body against his. She kept singing while the girls provided backup on the stage. Then suddenly, before he could blink, she was back on the stage.

  ***

  “Hey, Mike Griffin, pull that woman up a little closer. You sure danced closer than that when we were in high school,” Angel teased in the middle of another song, a more romantic one, while the band played the break.