Angel Falls (Angel Falls Series, #1) by Babette Jongh (inspiring books for teens txt) 📗

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication:

Note from the Author:

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments:

Geri Krotow, writing goddess and good friend, who was happy to read a chapter when I needed a fresh perspective. http://gerikrotow.com/

Author Bio:

Please visit her at

Dedication:

This book is dedicated to my first ballet teacher, Susanna Smith, who taught me to love ballet and gave me a firm foundation that set me on my path as a dancer, and later as a small-town ballet teacher. Without her guiding influence in my young life, this book would never have been written.

Note from the Author:

The town of Angel Falls and its inhabitants are all entirely fictional, though anyone who knows me may notice similarities to the small town where I grew up and then taught ballet for almost a decade. I started teaching in an upstairs studio very much like Casey’s—but not nearly so nice because I didn’t paint the walls or refinish the floors, though maybe I should have.

My studio was accessed by steep metal stairs sandwiched between two downtown buildings. Pigeons roosted on the steel support beams in the stairwell, so it always smelled like pigeon poop. If the music wasn’t too loud, we could hear the pigeons cooing, and watch them through the windows while we did our barre work. I later moved the studio to a space adjacent to the town’s newspaper, but alas, no one like Ian Buchanan worked there.

I still remember many of my ballet students by name. While none of the characters in this book are modeled or named after them, a little bit of everyone I taught is in there. I also had many wonderful “ballet parents” through the years, and each is in the character of Meredith. Students and parents who were so good to me, I love you all. This book is for you, too.

I have taken many liberties with the location Angel Falls. There is no way any place could be simultaneously as close to Gulf Shores, Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, or in fact any of the real towns I mentioned, as I have created Angel Falls to be. It’s a fictional world quilted from every place I have lived, and others that never existed.

I hope readers will enjoy Angel Falls, and come back to visit again.

CHAPTER ONE

It wasn’t the end of the world. Just the end of my world. And that was close enough.

A warm breeze teased the hem of my sundress, but my leotard and tights sucked at my skin in the late-August humidity. Lizzie, my awesome Australian Shepherd, walked beside me, tongue lolling sideways in a doggie grin. Happy in the heat, as long as she was with me.

I wished I could be as happy with life exactly as it is.

So I’ll get happy. My never-ending mantra since I moved back to Angel Falls. I’ll trade the stage for the studio and get happy in the small town where I grew up, where nothing ever changes. I’ll get happy teaching the kids of my old friends, my old enemies, my first lover.

I’ll get happy teaching the kids who might have been mine, if I’d made different choices.

I slapped myself upside the head. Get happy, dammit. Not a mental slap. A real slap. A get-happy-dammit slap.

Lizzie turned blue eyes up to mine, questioning. I ruffled her speckled gray fur and we crossed the street to the sidewalk in front of the newspaper office.

I glanced inside and saw a man so gorgeous, so sexy, so perfect, I forgot to walk. I forgot to breathe. Struck stupid, I forgot to do anything but stare.

Here was someone I wouldn’t mind getting happy with.

He was beyond beautiful. Gerard Butler’s Attila but modernized, civilized, realized in physical form—in my century and my zip code. A sublime tower of sculpted brawn in blue jeans and white button-down shirt, with short dark hair and smoldering eyes—were they gray? He was smiling an indulgent and very sexy smile, looking down at Grace Lambert, Old Man Shaw’s elderly secretary. He put a gentle hand on her narrow shoulder. His left hand. His unadorned, ringless left hand.

My heart did a crazy little twirl that ended with a splat on the sidewalk in front of me. I knew better than to get excited from a glimpse through a window. But if any man on earth could make me forget about Ben, this one could.

He‘d probably come into the newspaper office to have his photo taken for the article someone must be writing—Rare Eligible Man Sighting in Angel Falls. I hadn’t seen a desirable man—desirable according to me, anyway—who wasn’t taken or gay, or both, since I moved back home.

My heart ooched back into my chest and collapsed. What was this Prince of Perfection doing in Angel Falls, Alabama, our dinky little deep-south town on the backside of nowhere? He didn’t belong here. Though neither did I. Yet here we were. Gerard Butler’s twin and me—displaced daughter of the old south, back on home soil, but still unrooted.

Unrooted, because back-home looks a lot like hell, where I’m forced to watch my old boyfriend and my once-best-friend share the happy-ever-after that should have been mine. We’d been the Three Musketeers throughout childhood, and Melody had been happy for us when Ben chose me to be his high school sweetheart.

I couldn’t say the same about my feelings when he chose her to marry.

After months of witnessing Ben and Melody’s happiness, months of being steeped in jealousy—then mired in guilt for feeling so jealous—I craved a true love relationship of my own. But Holy-Mary-Matilda, I’d happily settle for a true lust diversion. How long had it been since I’d felt a man’s arms around me, since I’d wrapped my legs around—

Too long. That’s how long.

Pickings were slim around here. Since coming home, I had so far avoided settling for the town’s only halfway hunky bachelor, Ken Kelley, the