Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “You have no idea what it’s like to deal with someone who has absolutely no conscience and refuses to listen to reason! I know that you’re making a real attempt to be a help to your brother, but you need to cut him some slack. You really do.” Lena’s tone was almost school teacherish. She was treating my brother like an errant schoolboy and it was funny as hell.

  “Ahem.” I cleared my throat and coughed and managed to grab their attention. Valentino was glaring at me. I barely managed to hang onto my composure when I saw that. I didn’t get it. He usually didn’t have any qualms about letting someone know that he’d had enough. “Lena, I assume you’ve met my brother, Valentino.”

  “Yes.” Lena’s cheeks were red. I saw the color gradually creeping down her neck. She evidently realized that I’d caught at least some of her lecture. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insert myself.” She looked between me and Valentino and then I knew the instant she had decided to flee. “I’ll just head back inside now. I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff to scan and email now that you and Bob are done with the offer.”

  Yes. The offer. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her not to do a damn thing for Bob. I wanted to tell her to quit this place and just walk away. But this wasn’t the moment for it. Not right now. And I needed to have a quick chat with Val anyway.

  “Lena, thank you.” I grabbed her hand and held it for a moment. I pressed my other hand over the top of hers and held it probably just a moment or two longer than convention required. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your help with all of this.”

  “Anytime.” Her blue eyes were wide and her voice was a squeak.

  Val watched Lena bolt back into the real estate office. I almost envied her the air conditioning. I wondered how my brother could stand out here in a pair of freaking coveralls and not even seem hot. It was like his internal thermostat was broken or something. Maybe he’d removed it. I wouldn’t put it past the guy if he thought that it would make his life easier.

  “Well then,” Val drawled. He stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on his thick soled boots. “That was very interesting.”

  I could not figure out exactly where this was going, but I thought I should at least start with the obvious. “Thanks for not making her cry.”

  “She really likes you, man.” Val was trying to hide a grin and failing miserably. “You’ve got your hands full. I thought you were going to swear off women for a while.”

  I felt the frown on my face, but I didn’t know exactly what to say here. What was he talking about? “What do you mean? I’m not interested in Lena Schulte like that. Not romantically. That girl has her own issues. She’s been trying to get rid of her own version of Trinity Moberly for two years. Two years, Val. Can you freaking imagine that? I met the guy. Total d-bag. I’d beat his ass if I thought it would help, but I think he’s actually too arrogant for that to work.”

  “And you care about her problems, why?” Val even managed to keep a straight face. I could see him fighting to manage it. “She’s not your problem. Right? You don’t actually have any reason to care about her. She’s just the assistant at your real estate office. Right?”

  “Yes. She is.” Why did it feel like Val didn’t believe me? Hell. Why did it feel like I wasn’t even sounding convincing? Dammit. I did not like Lena Schulte like that. Which was a ridiculous statement even to be making inside my head. For crying out loud, what was I? A teenager? “Lena is a woman who was really helpful to me because she totally understands my issue with Trinity. I appreciate her help. That’s it. I’m not making designs on her or anything else like that.”

  “Uh huh.” Val turned toward the car he had up on the flatbed and seemed to be willing to let the whole subject drop. Good. “I suppose I should have brought you that classy little two-seater I have in the way back. You know, so your new girlfriend would be impressed with your car. You could take her for a ride.”

  “As I recall,” I shot back, “you were the one who needs to get laid. Maybe you should go cruising in the sports car and try to find a woman for yourself.”

  “I’ll admit that you don’t seem to have an issue finding the women.” Val was laughing. The ass. “It’s the hanging onto them that you seem to have problems with. You chase them off. They run away. Or even worse, you have to run away from them.”

  “Are you going to keep blabbing or am I going to put my fist in your face?” I asked my brother. I was totally ready to do it too.

  Val pursed his lips. “Are you going to help me get your car off this flatbed? It will make things go faster.”

  “Right.”

  I had been loading and unloading cars off the tow truck since I was a kid. Both of us had been our father’s and uncle’s tow monkeys when we were no more than five or six. Now our father was retired and our uncle had run away to Florida with some hot young girlfriend he’d found at the Riverboat Casino.

  The car that Val had brought for me to drive was totally nondescript. Green. At least ten years old. The thing looked as though it should be on one of those used car lots that seemed to pepper the depressed sections of the city. I figured it was perfect. Hopefully it was sufficiently ugly and the windows were tinted enough that Trinity wouldn’t realize that I was driving it.

  I snapped my fingers as Val lowered the end of the flatbed to help dump the car into the parking lot. “Wait a second. Isn’t this Beau’s car?”

  “Yeah.” Val pointed at the thing and then at me. “Beggars can’t be choosers. So unless you want to go out and buy your own fleet of rental cars, you can take what I can get my hands on.”

  I made a face. Beau wasn’t the cleanest person. In fact, he was downright disgusting. Driving around in his car wasn’t going to be a pleasant experience. But Val had a point. Right now, I was the beggar.

  “Fine.” I climbed up onto the flatbed and reached into the car’s open door to turn the key and make sure the stick shift was in neutral. “But I’m not paying that bastard some kind of fee to use his car. I’ll go have it cleaned. That’s payment enough.”

  Val only shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat, man.”

  The wench began to whir and the car started to back its way down the ramp. In only minutes it was flat on the ground. I climbed into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. When I went to put it in gear I noticed a half eaten fast food hamburger in the passenger’s side floorboard.

  “For the love of God!” I shouted out the window at Val. “Does this thing have A/C? I’m going to kill you if it doesn’t.”

  “Other people pay us to fix their air conditioners,” Val shouted back. “Of course it has air conditioning. I don’t know if it’s been charged or not though. You might need a bottle of the stuff. You want to buy one from me?”

  Did I want to buy one? Sometimes my brother was such a smart ass that I didn’t even know how to deal with his attitude. He was the sort of guy who could slide one past you without you noticing until it was far too late to do anything about it.

  “No,” I told Val. “I’ll just run down the street to the auto parts store and buy one at a quarter of the cost. Thanks though.”

  Val shot me a dirty look. I was considering driving away, but that would have been really rude. It’s not like he couldn’t handle getting the flat tired vehicle up on the flatbed, but it would be easier with the keys, which were currently in my pocket.

  The guy had driven all the way up to Chesterfield from Fenton. The least I could do was to help him with this one thing. So I parked the ugly green monster car with the windows down even in the sweltering heat. I left the engine running and the air conditioning going full blast. I was calculating the current distance between myself and the closest full service car wash. That was going to be my first stop. I didn’t care if I had to pay them a hundred bucks or more to clean this thing out. It would be worth the time. And the inside of those places was always blessed with fierce air conditioning. The kind that rivaled the one in the local hospital that made pe
ople complain they were freezing.

  “Hello?” Val was waving his hands. “Are you melting? Did your brain finally just leak out from between your ears? I don’t know what’s happened to you over the last few years. You’ve turned into a total weenie about the heat. It’s not that bad. It’s fall. September is always like this and it’s a hell of a lot better than it was in August and July.”

  I didn’t answer him. I was too busy digging my keys out of my pocket and throwing them to Val. It didn’t take us long to get the car up onto the flatbed. Once Val had maneuvered the edge of the vehicle at the back of the flat tires, he just winched it up. I watched it go, standing there beside the controls and getting a good look at the tires. They were flat on the ground. Each valve stem had been tampered with until the little pins were just gone. It was almost professional.

  “Val?” There was a thought entering my mind and I was actually hoping that I was wrong. “I’ve never known Trinity to have any knowledge of cars. None at all. But that looks like a tire stem tool. It has to be. So where did she get one of those.”

  “From our shop,” Val said curtly. He cleared his throat and refused to look at me. “Beau was telling me the other day after Trinity left that he thought she stole some tools.”

  “What?” I spun around so fast that I felt my feet tangle together. “You’re just telling me this now?”

  “You know Beau!” Holy cow, Val was defensive! He drew back from me as though he expected me to hit him. “He’s always losing stuff or misplacing tools and then blaming some random and convenient target! Generally it’s the new kid. But we don’t have a new kid at the moment. So I figured he was just using Trinity because she’s convenient. We all hate her. He knows that she’s already in the dog house.”

  “Dammit!” I felt my temper surge and for a second I wanted to rail at my brother for ever being stupid enough to let Trinity anywhere near our family garage. What had he been thinking? Was he honestly surprised by any of this? The woman was kryptonite! “She stole tools. What else? A lock pick set? Did she steal a slim jim? Can I just expect her to be opening every freaking locked car that I drive?”

  Val refused to look at me. That was bad. Really bad. It meant that I was pretty much dead on with my accusation.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I growled at my brother. “That bitch stole a slim jim? She now has the ability to jimmy open any locked car?”

  “Only ones that were made before this decade!” Val snapped defensively. “You don’t use those on a brand new vehicle.”

  “You idiot!” I groaned. I turned and used both hands and pretty much my whole body to gesture at Beau’s green car. “Does that look like it was made in this decade?”

  “No.” Val inhaled and then exhaled a long slow breath. “So just don’t leave anything in the car.”

  “Is Beau the one who showed that crazy witch how to use the stem puller?” I demanded. “Because if he did that, then maybe he also showed her how to pop the hood and cut a brake line!”

  Val looked at me for a long moment. Then all at once he frowned and shook his head. “Do you honestly think she’s crazy enough to try and kill you? Listen to yourself, Damion. You’re talking as crazy as she sounds. Calm down before you make things worse. She’s a whack job. Nobody is arguing with that. But I really don’t think she’s capable of murder.”

  I almost responded, but at the last second I managed to stop myself. What if he was right? What if I had become so paranoid that I couldn’t even trust my own instincts anymore? I needed to go back to work. That would help. I needed the cool, orderly, and organized world of my office. I needed the comfort of my competent staff. That would at least bring me back to the point where I was grounded. Maybe then I could separate truth from fiction. Because right now it was all starting to feel like a really bad Lifetime movie.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lena

  I was pacing the floors in my little townhouse by six o’clock that evening. I didn’t know when I could expect to see my sister actually show up. Eleanor was going to be really interested to come over here and badger me, but there was no way that it would take precedence over her desire to dominate everyone at her office. That was the other reason I would never in a million years agree to work for my sister as her administrative assistant. Eleanor was a total perfectionist. She was so OCD that she made OCD people cringe. But she wouldn’t actually cop to it so she just claimed that everyone else was disorganized and totally substandard.

  When the doorbell finally rang I almost jumped out of my skin. That wasn’t exactly like Eleanor. At least not the usual way that she did things. My sister never felt like doors should be off limits or closed if she wanted to be on the other side of them. She had a key and wasn’t afraid to use it.

  I stared at the door for a long moment. I live in a nice little townhouse complex not far from my real estate office. When the place was being built, I made friends with the original rental agent. She had gotten me a sweet deal on this place. Fixed rent that was probably now at least a thousand bucks less than the going rate for these units that everyone else was paying. I didn’t have to pay as much in fees either. I considered it a perk of being in the real estate business. But the complex was huge and didn’t exactly have great security. Actually, there was no security. There was a fence around the property, but the gates were always open and the concept of security was more for show than practical use.

  The bell rang again and I started gnawing on my bottom lip. I had thrown on a pair of gray yoga pants and a tank top over my favorite sports bra after work. I had done some yoga in my spare room, which was set up like a little yoga studio. Then I had grabbed myself some raw almonds and a banana because I fully intended to order a huge plate of mushroom ravioli and then eat every single scrumptious bite of that while stuffing myself full of as much garlic bread as the waiter could bring to our table. And I had no intention of sharing with my sister either. She hadn’t earned any part of that!

  It was six. Eleanor had sworn she would be here at six to pick me up. But she didn’t use the doorbell. I snagged my phone off the hall table and looked at the display. Surely if Eleanor had been on the other side of that front door, she would have been texting the hell out of me by now telling me to open up because she had forgotten her key.

  “Open up!”

  The words came from the other side of my front door, but the voice did not belong to my sister. I swallowed and was not surprised to find that there was a huge lump in my gut. “Who is it?”

  “It’s time to have a little chat!” The voice was certainly getting angrier. “This is the woman whose boyfriend you’re trying to steal.”

  Okay, that really pissed me off. I wasn’t stealing anyone’s boyfriend! I did not do that kind of thing. Ever. I had a policy. Hell! Every woman needed to have a policy about that sort of thing. You did not steal boyfriends. You just didn’t do it.

  “Go away, Trinity!” I shouted at my front door. “I’m not stealing anything from you. There is absolutely nothing going on between me and Damion Alvarez. You’re off your rocker, woman! Do you realize how crazy you sound right now?”

  “Open this door!” The bitch started banging on my door. The banging got louder and harder and I realized that the horrible woman had to have picked up a landscaping rock and was now using that to bang on my front door! “Open. Up. Now! Now! Now! I’ll put this rock through your damn window, you whore!”

  Oh my word! My heart was racing. I grabbed an umbrella out of the claw footed antique umbrella stand in my foyer and I held it out in front of me like a weapon. This was not going to do anything to protect me from a rock, but it was something.

  I scrambled to unlock the door and felt it shiver beneath my fingertips as it took another blow from the rock. Then I finally got the door open and found myself face to face with the mottled angry red face of one Trinity Moberly. She did not look any worse for wear from her experience in the Chesterfield jail earlier today. In fact, she looked even craz
ier.

  “What are you doing?” I gasped. There were huge welts in my front door. It looked as though the wood had been splintered in some places. I loved that stained wood. It had been one of the best features on the front of my house. There was a fan window above the door set into the brick façade of the house that just totally completed the curbside appeal of the place. “You ruined my door! You’re going to pay for that! Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  I was so mad that I forgot she was still holding that rock. When I spun around to face her, she had lifted the rock as though she were going to belt me across the face with it. I did not think. I just acted. I hit the button that umbrella so quickly that the thing burst open as though there were a downpour.

  The umbrella’s pink and white striped fabric seemed to explode from my hands. Trinity shrieked as the thing smacked her in the middle of her torso. The rock flew out of her hands and landed harmlessly in the yard to the right of my front steps. She had been standing at the top of the steps. The force of the umbrella opening and the sudden explosion of brightly colored fabric sent her spinning backwards.

  I didn’t care. I shoved that umbrella at her as hard as I could. She needed to get out of here. Now. And I didn’t care if I hurt her in the process. I wished I had my phone. I would be calling the cops again. Officer Gerald would be happy enough to cart this crazy woman away from my house if I asked him to. I had no doubts about that.

  “I’m going to sue you!” Trinity shouted at me. “You assaulted me!”

  “You’re on my property and you destroyed my front door!” I shouted right back at her. I was not going to tolerate this crap at my own house. Then something horrible occurred to me. “How do you know where I live? Why are you here? Oh my God! Did you follow me? What is wrong with you?”