Send Me An Angel by alysha Ellis Page B

everyone who’d ever been subjected to it. In a voice that could make grown men tremble, she attacked, “What are you doing here? Naked, and on my doorstep.”
    The man didn’t even flinch. His eyes were still transfixed by his penis. The distraction of Ellie’s questions had stopped its awesome progress to full rigidity. As the potential hard-on subsided, the worry left his face and his attention returned to Ellie. “I fell.”
    “Fell? Fell from where?” She gazed up at the empty sky. “And why does it involve being naked?”
    He stood there looking at her. She glared back until the sound of a motor coming down the street jolted her into action. No matter who he was, or where he’d come from, she couldn’t leave him standing, naked, on her front step.
    She opened her door, and dragged him inside. Considerations of personal safety were less important than her standing in the neighborhood.
    He was in her living room. Tall. Blond. Gorgeous. Naked. With his tempting body so blatantly on display, Ellie couldn’t think. She snatched a rug from the back of the lounge, and threw it at him. “Here. Wrap this around you. And tell me who you are, and what you’re doing here, or I’ll call the police.”
    The man smiled his astonishing smile again. Ellie shook her head to rid it of the persistent sound of distant harps.
    “My name is
Peter
. I am an angel. I fell.”
    A stripper-gram. That had to be it. One of her friends, maybe a whole bunch of them together, had sent her a stripper gram, and somehow the poor guy had started his routine too early, and had fallen and knocked himself out on her step, and now he was suffering post-traumatic confusion.
    Of course, if her friends had had the temerity to send her a stripper-gram, they’d have been here to watch her get it. There would be some clothes scattered about. The man had to strip out of something, after all. His car should be parked in front of her house. And no man who had ever worked as a stripper was going to be afraid of a hard-on.
    Then she thought about what he’d said. An angel? He couldn’t be. Could he?
    “Why did you say you were an angel?”
    “Because I am. Or was. I’m not any more. Not since I fell.”
    “Knocking yourself out on my doorstep stopped you from being an angel? That’s a bit harsh isn’t it? Whose decision was that?”
    He blinked. It occurred to Ellie her tone was a bit sharp, especially when contrasted with his melodious voice. “You’ve got it back to front,” he said. “I landed on your doorstep because I stopped being an angel.”
    Ellie shook her head so hard she wondered if he could hear her brains rattle. “You get kicked out of heaven, and end up on my doorstep? Why me? Since when has my house been the gateway to Hell?”
    “Oh, no. I didn’t get kicked out of Heaven. I chose to leave. And I’m certainly not on my way to Hell. I don’t have a clue why it was your doorstep I landed on, though,” he gave her a wide appreciative grin. “Just good luck, I guess.”
    Ellie had had enough. She pushed him down on the lounge, and strode off to her room. It was at moments like these, a girl had to call her best friend. One, to find out if she was responsible, and two, to do something Ellie never did – ask for advice. A naked angel from heaven was not something they taught you how to cope with in school.
    Except that her best friend,
Jeanne
, wasn’t answering her phone. Ellie tried and tried, but the out-of-service message just kept droning on. With no more idea of what to do than when she left, Ellie walked back into the room.
    And stopped dead. She could not have moved if her life depended on it.
    Her angel was still exactly where she’d left him, on the couch. But he was leaning back, the covering blanket slipped from his shoulders. His eyes were closed, his mouth slightly open.
    The bulging pads of his chest muscles stood out, and she could see the faint sprinkling of hair that narrowed into a thin line flowing