Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Just as I was preparing to close up shop and make sure I turned off the light, I spotted a strange box that seemed to have been shoved far back into the corner of the front porch. It was smaller than the others. It seemed to have been there for years. Long years. Curious, I climbed back into the attic and bent myself into a doubled over pretzel in order to push a few random carpet samples, leftover gallons of paint, and painting supplies out of my way. When I finally laid hands on the box, I used the already nasty gloves to swipe the dirt from my mother’s scrawled label.

  My heart leaped into my throat and my stomach fell into my boots. I blinked. But my eyes were not full of dust or dirt or anything that would prevent them from seeing correctly. The box was labeled KEVIN WEDDING. I swallowed the coating of dirt and grime in my throat along with the lump of something else that had appeared. Then I very carefully tucked that box under my arm and took it back down the ladder. I shut off the light. I closed the attic access. And I wondered if I was about to look into a time capsule I would later wish I’d left untouched.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Eleanor

  Having my morning interrupted is one thing. When the summons comes from Ruth Powers in her trademark snide tone of voice it has the ability to send my mood into the toilet. I followed Ruth’s round backside out into the common area and toward the steps. Of course, she was heading back up to the administrative desks on the second floor of the building. Her booty was squashed into yet another vintage-style dress. This one was tight in the hips and thighs and then flared out into a ruffle that sort of clung to Ruth’s dimpled knees. The bodice was pretty snug too. I wondered if she was having any luck with these obvious attempts to ingratiate herself with Mr. Landau and decided not to ask. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

  What is it about a five-second walk that suddenly enables a brain to send at least a million thoughts running through your head? Looking at Ruth’s swaying backside and fake flaming red hair, I could not help but wonder what kind of woman Kevin Landau had picked for a baby mama. Was she voluptuous like Ruth? I certainly wasn’t that and never would be. I was lucky to fill out an A cup on a good day. Had Kevin fathered a child with a woman like Ruth concerned only with climbing the ladder and getting her hands on the prize at the top no matter what that was?

  “Mr. Landau is right inside, dear,” Ruth told me with an imperious wave of her beringed right hand. “You can go on in.”

  Her smirk suggested she thought that this was it for me. What had he said? Was he angry about the baby daddy thing? Was this something else entirely? I could not decide and wasn’t even sure that I cared.

  “Thanks, Ruth.” I stared her right in the face. “I would tell you that your slip is showing”—Ruth immediately gasped and reached for her hemline—“but there isn’t nearly enough room in that dress for a slip so I guess you’re probably not even wearing one.”

  I didn’t say anything else. I really didn’t need to. My comment had been petty enough on its own. Stupid too. Pointless. How many other words could I come up with to describe my state of jealousy and contempt? I really needed to get over myself.

  After a brief knock, I entered Kevin’s office. Or rather it was still Mr. Moss’s office. It was still full of Mr. Moss’s crap, but he was in Florida. I had gotten an email from him yesterday telling me that Mrs. Moss was going to their daughter’s house for Thanksgiving so he was going to stay in Florida and head out on another fishing boat adventure. How great to be retiring on a huge chunk of change gained at the expense of everyone who had worked their ass off for years to make you money.

  “You requested my presence?” I didn’t even bother to check my attitude at the door. Kevin could have called down to my office. He chose to send Ruth down there like some royal page. Fine. I could be rude too.

  Except Kevin did not seem to appreciate my rudeness. He was too busy sticking his nose into a box labeled KEVIN WEDDING. I blinked. My heart stopped for a second. Then it started again with a roaring sound in my ears at a frantic pace that had my pulse fluttering in my neck and wrists.

  I swallowed. “Kevin, what is that?”

  He didn’t respond. At least not right away. He was busy lifting things carefully out of what was obviously a very old and somewhat forgotten box covered in chew marks from a million mice and probably filled with droppings that he was in all likelihood getting all over his desk top.

  The word ick came immediately to mind in more ways than one.

  I moved closer to the desk. “Where did you get that?”

  “My mom asked me to get the Christmas decorations out of the attic last night.” He finally murmured something but was still preoccupied by the contents of the box. “I waited until this morning to open it.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “You should have left it at home. It’s probably your mother’s box of keepsakes. Moms do that. You know?”

  “It’s mine.” Kevin glanced up for the briefest of seconds. “Come and see.”

  I rolled my eyes. I didn’t want to see. Kevin Wedding? Had he been in a lot of weddings then? “Kevin, I have work to do. Over half of the potential new hire candidates have told us that they’re not interested in Kansas City pay packages.”

  Now he looked up at me. Good. Apparently, business still mattered. What a relief. “Kansas City pay packages? What does that even mean?”

  “It means that the mean cost of living in Kansas City must be less than it is here because so far the pay scales you’ve handed me combined with the cost of benefits from our provider is creating a really noncompetitive salary situation. That’s what it means.” I even managed to get that whole sentence out without curling my lip or spitting at him. I had been soothing, cajoling, and making empty promises all morning to try and keep these potential hires from walking.

  Kevin frowned. Deeply. I knew that look. It was funny when you had grown up with someone and their basic expressions were so ingrained in your lexicon that you didn’t even have to ask what they were thinking. Right now, Kevin had absolutely no idea what I was talking about and that was a problem.

  “Where did you get these pay packages?” Kevin asked slowly. He set a stack of moldy paper and what appeared to be an old picture frame on his desktop. “Did I give them to you?”

  “No. They were sent to my email from corporate yesterday morning.” Didn’t he get the same emails that Charlie and I did? Charlie. Ha! There was a joke. He was pretty much on a permanent lunch meeting while this whole takeover thing was going on. I would not have been surprised to see him jump ship within a day or two if he actually took the time to read over this email though. “Charlie got the email too. He mentioned it to me and asked if I had spoken with you about it. I told him no, but that I would. In the meantime, I wanted to call back a few of the new hires just to see how it went. I’d promised them I would call as soon as I had any information. So I did. Let’s say that it created a huge stir.”

  “How huge?”

  “I didn’t even have to keep calling them, they started calling me the minute the first two or three of their nerd community buddies got the rumor mill churning.” I grimaced. It hadn’t been a good morning and I did not have time for a bunch of ancient history.

  “I didn’t send you that email,” Kevin said quietly. He stared down at the crumbling paper on his desk. “I was waiting to hear what Dan and Todd Hopper wanted to offer in regards to salary for potential new hires. We have a whole department that does comparison shopping for every single city where we have an office. It’s not like they’re new at this.”

  “But apparently they flunked this particular bit of homework,” I argued immediately. “They’re at least ten percent under the average offer from other comparable companies and at least twenty percent less than Gateway IT Staffing.”

  Kevin set his hands on the desktop. They were leaving dirt smudges on the wood. Then he frowned and looked at me as though I somehow had all the answers. “Does Damion Alvarez really pay that well?”

  “In
a nutshell? Yes. He figured out that was the way to always employ the cream of the crop. I’ve even heard a rumor lately that he’s started to tap into the government market with employees who have a security clearance and can work at some of the federal facilities here in this area.”

  “Damn. That’s a good market,” Kevin muttered.

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry. If the pay is that far under the average, I’ll have a chat with the Hoppers and explain. I’m sure they’ll be perfectly willing to offer your potential hires something competitive.”

  “They’d better,” I snorted. Then I started to turn and walk away. I was leaving the office before he did something I knew that I would regret. Like diving into that box and pulling out something I could not resist looking at.

  “You were a beautiful bride,” Kevin told me suddenly.

  I froze. I was less than a foot from the doorway. I should have kept going. But I couldn’t. How is it possible for five words to take me roaring back to that moment in the bridal shop when I’d stood up on the ridiculous little platform and gazed at myself swathed in white satin and lace? I could still feel the dress’s softness against my skin. It had felt perfect. The perfect dress for the perfect bride who was planning to marry the perfect man.

  I looked at Kevin. He was holding up a photograph in an old brass picture frame. It was one of those pictures that the photographer takes a week or two before the ceremony so that you can put a picture of the dress in the local newspaper. I didn’t realize that my mother had given one of those to Kevin’s mother.

  Against my better judgment, I moved closer to the box of doom. Kevin had pulled out old newspaper clippings, our engagement photos, and even the wedding invitations still swathed in fading yellowed tissue paper.

  “Today I marry my friend and begin the life I’ve always dreamed of.” I whispered the words that appeared on the front of the invitations. I didn’t need to read them. Sometimes I thought that they were burned into my brain.

  Kevin’s finger brushed the crumbling edge of the old invitation. “I remember picking these out.”

  “Today we would just order online,” I said with a chuckle. The thought made me giggle. “We had to go to the old print shop about a thousand times. Do you remember? I started making you go because the clerk was so chauvinistic that he just told me not to worry about a thing even though he screwed up the whole order!”

  Kevin’s low laugh sent a ripple of awareness across my skin. He certainly hadn’t had that ability at twenty-two. I gazed at him. I don’t know when we had moved that close together, but we had. He was quite close. I could feel his breath whispering across my skin as we looked at the remnants of a previous life. He smelled good. That clean soap scent again. Maybe a hint of aftershave. I could see the stubble of growth on his cheeks and chin in a way that he’d never had as a young man.

  He gently picked up a framed photograph of the two of us. I could barely recognize myself let alone him. We had been so damned young. Now? We were older. But something else. World weary maybe.

  I could not stop staring at his hands. They were tanned and strong. His fingers were long and blunt tipped. Even though he worked inside an office building he still had the look of someone who spent time outdoors. I didn’t know why, but I wanted to. What did that say about me?

  Unable to resist, I reached out and stroked the back of his hand with my fingertips. Just the tips. There was hair on the backs of his hands. I didn’t remember there being hair before. It was soft. I traced the veins that were visible just behind his knuckles. They were springy and soft even though the hands themselves had skin that felt every bit as tough as I suspected this man really was.

  “Eleanor?”

  His voice made me shiver. It sent a thrill of awareness down my spine. There was something else inside me clamoring for attention and reminding me that this man could not be trusted. I didn’t listen. My heart just did not want to.

  “Eleanor, I’m sorry that things ended the way that they did,” Kevin whispered.

  “Why?” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat, but it did nothing to dispel the tightness building in my chest. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything. I left you there. I just walked away and left you standing there. I was so angry.” I sucked in a huge breath and stared up at the ceiling. “I remember the moment my mother told me that—that”—I could barely get the words out—“that you had a baby with someone else. It was like the entire world crumbled to pieces. I just couldn’t…”

  I couldn’t speak anymore. I tried to turn and leave the office. I wanted out of there. I could not be there anymore. I couldn’t look him in the face or remember any more of this. But he caught me. He caught me and he pulled me to his chest and he held me there. He was the same and he was different. I buried my face against him in spite of every reservation screaming inside my head. I could not make myself pull away. I didn’t really want to.

  He smelled good. He felt better. His arms were strong. They were snug around me and I felt incredibly safe. Fifteen years fell away and suddenly I was right back where I belonged. His lips brushed my hair. I felt him kiss the top of my head. He lightly stroked his cheeks against my head as though he were remembering the feel of me in his arms.

  His hands lightly stroked my back. Up and down they went in a mesmerizing sort of pattern that left me feeling relaxed and yet heightened my awareness of everything that was happening between us. The air was heavier. The atmosphere was charged. And then before I could tell him no, Kevin pulled back just far enough to lower his lips to mine.

  The kiss was nothing more than a light brushing of his lips against mine and yet it burned me from my head to my toes. I felt my toes curling inside my sensible shoes. I felt as though I could not breathe. Tasted him on my lips. He was the same. He was different. He was Kevin. I didn’t know what this meant or if it was nothing more than a side effect of all these damn memories. Maybe it didn’t matter. But I could not help but feel that this was just the beginning and that there was a long, twisted road ahead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Kevin

  Distracted. That’s what I was. Not just by the box on my desk, but by the kiss still lingering on my lips. I pushed away from my desk and stood up. God! I sounded maudlin as hell. The kiss still lingering on my lips? Really? What was next? Some ridiculous poetry about her taste or her scent? Should I stand here by my office window and start pontificating about the warmth of her skin?

  What was wrong with me? The woman still honestly believed that I had fathered a child with some strange hypothetical woman. How could I be considering anything but getting her help with this stupid takeover and then ditching her like she had ditched me all those years ago?

  But that wasn’t what was on my mind at the moment. God help me, my hand kept itching to touch my lips. I wanted to close my eyes and stand there while I reminisced about the way it felt to hold Eleanor in my arms. She wasn’t my ideal woman. Not really. Not anymore. Or maybe I just didn’t know anymore. What was ideal anyway? Eleanor was rail thin. She had a small chest, no hips to speak of, and not much of a backside either.

  We had been so young when we first fell in love. Maybe none of that had mattered back then. I didn’t remember. I didn’t recall ever being dissatisfied with anything about Eleanor. Maybe looks didn’t matter. It wasn’t like the first time I’d seen her washing her mother’s car in a pair of cut offs and a bikini top I had been smitten with physical attraction. If I could remember correctly—and I was certain that I could in spite of my best efforts otherwise—Eleanor had ignored me in favor of really putting her mind to her task. It had been that earnest drive to do the best job possible with a task that might have seemed mundane to anyone else that had so fascinated me about the young woman. She was still like that. None of that had changed.

  “Mr. Landau?” Ruth Powers’s scratchy voice came through the intercom.

  I rolled my eyes and wondered if there was another errand I could manage to send t
he woman on to get her out of my hair. I still needed to talk to Eleanor about exactly what the administrative assistants did around the office—besides controlling and watering the rumor weeds, of course.

  “What is it, Ruth?” I wondered if she could hear the exasperation in my voice. I could. It wasn’t like I was trying to hide it.

  “Someone named Todd Hopper is on line one,” Ruth told me snappily. “He says it’s important.”

  “Thank you, Ruth. I’ll take the call in here.” I puzzled over the idea that Todd wouldn’t just call me on my cell phone. It was sitting right on the desktop beside my laptop, which still did not have any emails from corporate in the inbox.

  I pushed the button and picked up the dinosaur phone. It was truly a relic from another time complete with a shoulder rest. “Hey Todd, how are you doing this afternoon?”

  “Kevin, glad we caught you in the office.” Todd didn’t seem to have much inflection in his voice. In fact, it was all rather dead. Great. This did not bode well. “I’ve got you on speaker phone. Dan is here as well. Can you hear us both?”

  “Hello, Dan.” I hated being right. This wasn’t going to be a good conversation. That much was pretty obvious. “Glad to hear from you both. Things on this end are going slowly, but I think productively. I’ve been pushing through on the items from the list that you both provided me. Mr. Moss has been extremely hands off and willing to simply step down.”

  “Yes. We’ve gathered.” Dan sounded irritated for some reason. I could not imagine why. No. Irritated was the wrong word. The little bastard sounded smug. Like he was preparing to really shove it in my face. What was it though? “I’m sure by now that you’ve heard about the email we sent to your recruiting managers. Since your report indicated that you were certain you wanted to keep both of these individuals because you considered them assets, we thought it pertinent to send them the new hire packets so that they could get going with business as usual.”