Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “You’re stealing my boyfriend!” She was trying to get back up to the front door.

  I still clutched the umbrella in my hands. There was no way I was letting her get anywhere near me. What if she had a knife? My God, she could be a murderer! “Get away from me, you crazy bitch!” I snarled at her. “If you don’t get off my property right now I’m going to stab you in the face with this thing!”

  “Ladies!”

  No. No. No! This was not happening. It was not getting worse! Oh God, but it totally was because there was Karl Kitson standing in the grass beside the discarded rock. He was looking at the rock and then at the front door and he had the worst expression on his face. It almost looked as though he were laughing. Laughing! Like it was funny.

  “Ladies,” Karl drawled in his worst southern accent ever. The guy sounded like a total wannabe porn star. “Let’s not fight. Can we work this out?”

  Trinity spun around and looked Karl up and down as though she were trying to figure out exactly how he fit into this picture. “This bitch is stealing my boyfriend!” Trinity informed Karl.

  “Is that right?” Karl’s eyebrows drew together and I could actually see the wheels turning in his nefariously horrid mind. This was not going to end well. “You poor thing. See, Lena is like that. She’s constantly cheating on her boyfriends and kind of sleeping her way through most of the men in the city.”

  “What?” The word burst out of my mouth as though it had been jet propelled. I had never been so rudely insulted before in my life! Not only that, but it wasn’t true! “That’s bullshit! I’ve never cheated on any guy in my life! And you’re one to talk, Karl Kitson. We were together for years and you never even stopped dating other people!”

  “You never told me to stop dating. You never said we were exclusive.”

  It was probably the simplest and most aggravating thing that the ass had ever said to me. I felt my mouth pop open. I didn’t even know how to respond. How could you respond to something like that? What would you say? It wasn’t like there was an obvious rebuttal. My word against his. Right?

  “Damn you, Karl. Get off my property.” I pointed at him. “You need to go. Now. I don’t want to see you anywhere near me, my job, my sister, my home, or me. Got it?”

  Karl only shook his head and then he gave Trinity the warmest most ooey, gooey disgusting smile I’d ever seen from him. Was this how he got women to just fall at his feet? Disgusting!

  Trinity seemed to stop being insane for a second. She beamed at Karl. The two of them were having a moment. This was bad. What. The. Hell?

  “You see how she is?” Karl asked Trinity.

  Trinity batted her heavily mascara covered eyelashes at him. “It’s rude. You seem like such a nice guy. You deserve so much better. I love my boyfriend, but he’s such a cheating asshole. It’s so bad when they don’t even appreciate how much you love them and try to make yourself a part of their lives!”

  “I know,” Karl gushed dramatically. “Tell me about it. Sometimes she just ignores me for weeks on end and then I’ll see her in public and she acts like nothing happened and she didn’t just rip my heart out and stomp on the pieces.”

  This was disgusting. I spotted my sister’s car pulling up. I swallowed back anything I wanted to say to Romeo and Juliet. This wasn’t going anywhere good. In fact, I didn’t know where it was going at all. So I reached back into my house and grabbed my keys, my phone, and my purse. I locked my front door, like it was going to make a difference.

  “Sometimes,” Trinity whimpered as she stepped closer and closer to Karl’s chest as though she were deliberately trying to heave just enough so her nipples started rubbing on his chest. “Sometimes I feel like Damion is so abusive to me when I meet him somewhere that I can’t even deal with the embarrassment of how he treats me in public. But I just love him so much, you know? I’m not willing to give up on what we have. It’s just so special.”

  “Oh, I totally understand.” Karl took Trinity’s hands and turned her away from Lena’s front door as though he were going to walk her back to the parking lot. What was going on? “Lena and I are just the perfect couple. Nobody understands Lena like I do. Nobody knows what she needs as well as I do. I just know her so well that I’m the only one who can truly say what’s going on in her head. She doesn’t even know her own mind the way that I do.”

  That was sick. It was also a little peek into what Karl’s real issue was. He was so stupidly assured of his own rightness that he could not let go of it. Damn narcissists!

  I did not wave when I passed the star-crossed lovers. I just kept walking right toward Eleanor’s car. I prayed that she would not get out. I could just see my big sister coming over here and inserting herself into this situation with totally disastrous results. She could not help right now. Hell. Freud could not help me right now!

  “What is going on?” Eleanor didn’t get all the way out of her car. She simply opened the driver’s door and half stood up between the door and the car. “Is that Karl?”

  “Yes.” I was already on the passenger side reaching for the door. “Unlock it. We have to go before something worse happens.”

  “What happened to your door?”

  “That is Trinity Moberly. She’s Damion Alvarez’s ex-girlfriend. She hit my front door with a rock to punish me for trying to steal her boyfriend.”

  “Wait!” Eleanor almost cranked her neck right off her spine trying to turn her head fast enough. “What are you talking about? Are you dating Damion? How did I not know this? You bitch!”

  “Get in the car!” I moaned. This was not better. “I’m not dating anyone. Can we just go? If they notice that you’re here it might get worse. I’m not entirely sure what it looks like right now and I don’t want to find out.”

  “Wait. Karl is talking to this stalker ex-girlfriend.” Eleanor tilted her head to one side. “They look kind of chummy. They’re… Lena!”

  “I know!” I had already caught a glimpse of it and I really wanted to un-see what I’d seen, but that wasn’t really possible now was it? “Can we please get out of here?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go!” Eleanor got into the car and pushed the unlock button. I bailed in just as my big sister was craning her neck to see over the dashboard. “Holy shit, he’s sticking his tongue down her throat! They’re gyrating right there on your lawn! Are they actually going to do it right there? Damn girl. Did you lock your door? I totally think Karl is going to try to borrow your couch.”

  “Ewwwwww!” I could not take this. “Just go. Food. If I don’t throw up first. Dammit to hell. Only Karl Kitson could totally ruin mushroom ravioli!” I felt like I was a little inclined to whine and moan and bitch since my stalker ex-boyfriend was now making out with Damion Alvarez’s stalker ex-girlfriend in my front yard as though they honestly thought that it was going to get to me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Damion

  There is nothing better than the peace and quiet of my office suite. Our home office here in St. Louis is in a huge building down in the center of Chesterfield near very important things like other buildings housing huge companies with tons and tons of computers and software. They look out their windows and they see the name of our firm scrawled across the side of the biggest, baddest building and then they pick up the phone and they call. This, of course, is the reason that it’s always best to have a short company name that tells everyone in as few words as possible what you do and where you’re located.

  Gateway. Because we’re in the gateway city. Ah. Good old St. Louis, the gateway to the west. IT. Because we provide IT nerds at bargain basement rates. And the word staffing because that pretty much says it all. Gateway IT Staffing. Boom! No questions. No wondering if we’re trying to provide dental hygienists to the local dental offices. It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like, right? This is something that continually baffles me about my competitors. Why do you need long names? And why in the world would you let people shorten it to a bunch of stupid letters that m
ean even less?

  Of course, that last thing where everyone shortens things to an acronym is part of the IT culture. I swear to you this is true. Spend five minutes with a bunch of IT nerds and your head will be so filled with idiotic acronyms that you’ll start wondering why they bother with language at all.

  “Damion?”

  I was not kidding when I told Lena that my administrative assistant is an older woman. Valentino used to refer to her as the dragon, but that’s mostly because she takes absolutely no crap from anyone and doesn’t let him come into my office and push her around like the rest of the little secretaries and resident nerds tend to do. Valentino gives off that “football star” vibe that nerds learn back in high school to avoid like the plague.

  “What did you need, Zelda?”

  I did my best to keep a straight face, but the only thing running through my head right now was that comment I’d made to Lena Schulte that my sixty-year-old assistant didn’t know what to do with morning wood. It really wasn’t funny. It was a sexual harassment nightmare. But I couldn’t stop my cheeks from bulging out as though I was going to bust wide open.

  “Are you all right?” Zelda frowned at me. “You seem really on edge tonight, Damion. I think you need to go home now and try to relax.”

  “As if going home is going to help me relax,” I muttered. “It’s just going to give Trinity another shot at harassing me.” I heard the bitterness in my own voice. I held up my hand. “Before you start lecturing me on my attitude and calling my therapist to schedule an extra session, let me just tell you that I put an offer on a new place this afternoon and I’m hoping to be moving as soon as I can.”

  “Does the new place have good security?” Zelda looked suspicious. And nobody did suspicious like Zelda. With her ankle-length denim skirt and total grandmother sweater vest over that chambray blouse, she looked like everyone’s idea of a school librarian calling you out for having snacks in the fiction section. “Because the condo you’re in now just isn’t capable of keeping that Trinity out.”

  “I know that.” I muttered the words because I had not told anyone about the horrible paper gluing incident. I hadn’t mentioned the gym incident either. I was really tired of people looking at me like I was making this stuff up. “And yes. This place has excellent security. The kind of security that will make Trinity’s efforts totally null and void.”

  “I suppose that’s good then.” Zelda set a pile of newspapers down on the corner of my desk. “I took the liberty of clipping the articles about this supposed IT recruiter buyout. I thought you might want to have a look at who was saying what about that story. It seems fishy if you ask me.”

  “Thank you, Zelda. And yes. I agree that it seems shady. I feel like that jerk at the local business rag is trying to push me around and make me give him an interview. I refused to talk to him about our new staffing packages or to tell him anything about our rates or our business plan. I don’t think he actually understands that in this business if you tell a competitor what your rates are and lay out a business plan, they will just undercut you. It’s like he thinks I should be helping the competition or something.”

  “Are you talking about Don Pratt over at Gateway Business Weekly?” Zelda actually rolled her eyes. “You realize that his brother works over at St. Louis Software Staffing Solutions, Incorporated. He’s trying to get inside information about our company because he’s trying to help his brother.”

  “Is that what the secretaries’ rumor mill is saying?” I couldn’t help it. I chuckled a bit as Zelda bobbed her head up and down in confirmation. “You guys have so much clout with your companies that you’re basically like a bunch of inside traders on Wall Street. I swear you could probably run this company without the corporate flunkies.”

  Zelda gave me an arc look and a dismissive shrug. “I still need you around to sign the checks.”

  “Oh, is that what’s keeping me alive. Thanks.” I snorted and thought briefly about my brother’s accusation that I’m getting paranoid about Trinity. “Zelda? Do you think that Trinity is capable of murder?”

  The older woman’s face went slack with shock. Then she started to nibble her lip and I could see her honestly considering it. “I don’t think I would believe her capable of planning a cold-blooded murder,” Zelda told me after more than a casual moment’s thought. “I do feel as if she could be driven to murder or could murder in a fit of passion.”

  “Great,” I muttered. This was a fantastic development. I had just started thinking that I was unnecessarily paranoid and all of a sudden I get an inkling that I might not be blowing things out of proportion. “So basically I don’t need to worry about Trinity planning to kill me. I just have to worry about her running at me in a fit of rage and trying to stab me with her high-heeled stiletto or something.”

  “That actually happened, you know,” Zelda informed me with way too much eagerness. “I’ve seen that case on more than one crime show. It was in Texas. The woman was drunk and angry at him for kicking her out.”

  “So basically she was a disgruntled girlfriend who got dumped.” This was just getting better and better. “And what? She waited for him to go to sleep?”

  “No.” Zelda looked less enthusiastic all of a sudden. “He took her out because she was leaving in the morning. She got really drunk and belligerent. Then she went back into his house and attacked him in the hallway. He didn’t want to hurt her, so he held back I think. Then she hit him in the head repeatedly with her shoe.”

  “So the moral of the story is not to be afraid to hurt a crazy bitch after you dump her?” I wondered how so many men in this world got the short end of the stick on this one. “It’s such a crap shoot, you know? I feel like there are a few assholes out there who truly abuse women and the rest of us are so afraid of being lumped into that category that we wind up getting sideswiped by some woman carrying a grudge against every guy who ever did her wrong. Then we get a stiletto in our brain and the whole world goes, but at least he didn’t hit her.”

  Zelda sighed. She perched on the edge of my desk and gave me a motherly pat on the shoulder. “You should go and stay with Valentino tonight. His place should be safe enough. No woman would ever dare come within a hundred yards of that house.”

  “Ha. Ha. You better not let Val hear you say that.”

  “Why?” Zelda snorted. “He would probably consider it a compliment of the highest order. I’ve never met a man so determined to keep women away.”

  I didn’t want to admit it, but Zelda actually had a point with that suggestion. There weren’t a lot of women who would be likely to get within spitting distance of Val’s house. He didn’t necessarily have signs up telling women to go away or saying it was a boys’ only club, but the plethora of junk cars in his yard, the broken windows boarded over, and the Christmas lights left over from about six years ago were enough of a deterrent that women typically didn’t have an interest in his place or whomever might be occupying it.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I muttered to Zelda. My eyeballs were starting to feel like they were covered in sand. “I’ll just head to Val’s and crash on his couch. Then I’ll pay some movers to go and pack up my stuff. We’ll do it in the dead of night so that Trinity won’t know about it.”

  “Honey, I don’t think you’re going to be able to keep her from knowing what you’re up to.” Zelda stood up and headed toward the door of my office, which was located by the bank of windows overlooking the parking lot. “I think if Trinity Moberly wanted to become a private investigator, she could absolutely make a killing ferreting out people’s embarrassing secrets for money.”

  “You should suggest that to her,” I told Zelda.

  The older woman made a face. “That would require me to get close enough to her to have a conversation and I think I’ve had plenty of those.” Zelda was staring out at the parking lot as she spoke. Her expression looked puzzled for just a moment. Then it changed and I saw the incredulity there plain as day.

  “Wh
at?” I actually felt panicked. Was there a cross burning in my parking lot? I wouldn’t put it past Trinity to think up something that idiotic. I stumbled to my feet and out from behind my desk. “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen something awful.”

  “I have,” Zelda whispered. “Look at that! Who is she with?”

  “Who?” I demanded. “Who is who with?”

  But as soon as I got to the windows, I knew. The days were still long enough that even at seven-thirty at night there was plenty of light. The parking lot lights still hadn’t gone on. The reddish glow of the sunset bathed the blacktop parking lot in a sinister glow that seemed too perfect for the scene playing out down there.

  “That would be Karl Kitson,” I told Zelda dully. “For crying out loud!”

  Karl Kitson had his arms around Trinity Moberly’s body. She was actually pressed back against an ugly green sedan that belonged to my brother’s long time mechanic Beau. Of course, that was my ride for the moment. So essentially Karl Kitson was making out with Trinity while smearing her against my car. Gee. Wonder what kind of point they were trying to make here? It seemed pretty obvious.

  “Who is Karl Kitson?” Zelda demanded. “And why on earth would he be with Trinity in our parking lot?”

  “It’s complicated.” How could I explain this? “There’s a woman.”

  Zelda now turned away from the parking lot and gave me a look that should have peeled my skin back from my skull. “What woman?”

  “She’s the admin at the real estate office I used to put the offer out on my new house. Unfortunately for poor Lena Schulte, she not only got caught by Trinity having a conversation with me, but she also happens to have a psycho stalker ex-boyfriend.”

  “Karl Kitson?” Zelda guessed. She was staring down at the parking lot again as though she were watching history in the making, which she kind of was. You couldn’t make this stuff up! Nobody would believe it. “This jerk sticking his tongue down Trinity’s throat and humping her on the hood of your car is the ex-boyfriend of a woman you just had a conversation with?”