Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “What? Where did you hear that nonsense?” Mom scraped up the sticky dump cake and tossed it into the garbage can. She reached for a spray bottle of cleaner and a roll of paper towels.

  I took them from her and began to clean up the remainder of the mess. “I heard it from Thayla, Mom.”

  “Oh. Right.” Mom pressed her lips together and squeezed her eyes shut. Kneeling there on the floor, she looked as though she were praying. “That Wanda Schulte. I was so mad at her for spreading that rumor!”

  I sat back on my heels. It wasn’t like I hadn’t suspected as much. It seemed like an obvious conclusion to draw. But hearing it out loud was a bit different. “So Wanda Schulte told her daughter and other people that I had some illegitimate child that I was keeping secret?”

  “Yes.” My mother choked back a sob. She was whispering as though she did not want my father to hear this. As if he didn’t even know to begin with. “It made no sense. I could not understand why she waited until the very morning of your wedding day to make such a hateful statement to poor Eleanor. I knew that the girl was a bit young and a bit immature. We all are at nineteen, mind you.”

  “So you were angry with Eleanor for, what? For not immediately realizing that it was a lie?” I could not begin to imagine what I would have thought at nineteen if someone had told me something like that. And that probably did not begin to cover all of the other things that her mother had been feeding her during that stressful time. “Mom, you realize that Wanda was probably talking terrible about me every chance that she got for months before the wedding.” Yes. It was making sense now.

  “What? Why?” My mother stood up and reached for another bowl. She was going to be dishing up that cake come hell or high water. And despite the sick feeling now settling into my gut, I was going to have to eat it too. Great. “Why would she do such a thing? It just doesn’t make sense! Look how successful you are! You would be a wonderful husband for any woman.”

  “But I wasn’t successful at twenty-two,” I mused. “I was planning on going into the landscaping and snow removal business. I had no school. I had no plans to attend more than a junior college to get some classes in accounting and such. I was planning to be a self-made man.”

  “What on earth is wrong with that?” My mother put the bowls down on the kitchen table with a noticeable thump.

  “Come on, Mom.” I picked up a spoon and forced myself to take a bite of the cake. It was good, but it might as well have been sawdust on my tongue right now. “Would your mother have been happy with a man who didn’t have a job at a factory or a company with a pension and benefits? This is now. Now this happens all the time. You don’t have to have a traditional job to be successful. But fifteen years ago?”

  Before the IT boom. Before recruiters used the internet to get connected with potential candidates and could access hundreds upon hundreds of resumes almost instantly because people uploaded them to online databases in order to network with potential employers. The world had been so different fifteen years ago that I could hardly even recall what it had been like at all.

  “I see what you’re saying,” my mother said quietly. “But I still don’t see how that makes an excuse for Wanda Schulte to spread those kinds of lies about my boy.”

  “I’m not making excuses for the witch, Mom,” I said grimly. “If the woman weren’t dead I would go over there and demand an explanation.”

  My mother licked her spoon. Sometimes with her huge eyes and tiny features, she reminded me of the very fragile little girl she must have been once upon a time. “That’s quite a problem, isn’t it? I mean, Wanda is dead, Kevin.”

  Like I didn’t realize that? “Her girls aren’t idiots,” I reminded my mother. “I think they’re perfectly ready to acknowledge that their mother wasn’t perfect.”

  “But there’s no way of knowing why she would say such a thing,” my mother insisted. “That was the reason for the fight, you know? I was just so angry with her! I wanted to know why she would tell such a lie. It just didn’t make any sense. I didn’t even know it until my hairdresser told me that Wanda had told her that you had a baby with some other woman. My hairdresser wanted to know who the mother was and whether or not you were going to be marrying her instead. As you can imagine, I was so very embarrassed! I just could not believe that people would believe that my son would do such a thing!”

  “I don’t think people believed her, Mom.” I wasn’t sure if this was me trying to soothe my mother or me trying to convince myself that people didn’t think I was that much of an ass. “I never even seriously dated anyone else. Who would I have impregnated? Really. Eleanor and I had been together for years by that time. She was jailbait for me actually. These days I’d probably be a registered sex offender.”

  “Ridiculous since the two of you were utterly innocent!” My mother’s protest took me quite by surprise. “I’m sure the two of you never engaged in any of that nonsense.”

  “What nonsense?” I almost choked on my cake.

  My mother looked scandalized. “Why, that heavy petting and such! I bet you and Eleanor are still virgins since neither of you are married!”

  Okay. Wow. On the list of things that a guy never wants to discuss with his mother, sexual history ranks pretty high up. I barely managed to swallow the cake in my mouth. “Can you please explain to me what heavy petting is, Mom?” Wait. Was I out of my mind?

  “Oh you know.” She waved her hand at me. Her cheeks were pink. “When a young man is inappropriate with a young woman and touches her intimately before they’re property married. All of that making out and touching breasts and well—other things.”

  “Right.”

  I truly wondered if my mother believed that both Thayla and I were virgins. No doubt the rest of the world didn’t keep to those antiquated notions of purity. Or perhaps they really did. I didn’t know. I dated so rarely that my experience was almost laughable compared to modern standards. I could handle myself, but… Wait one second here. When I say that I could handle myself I was not talking about literally. I was just trying to establish that I wasn’t a complete novice in the bedroom.

  “Mom,” I began suddenly. Then I changed my mind. “I appreciate you helping me to understand what happened all those years ago.”

  She was still licking blueberry filling off her spoon. Her expression was thoughtful. “I didn’t realize that your sister had heard about that incident at the beauty shop. Thayla never mentioned it. That girl. I just can’t understand her. I certainly wish that I had that close mother-daughter relationship with her that Wanda had with her girls.”

  “Sounds like Wanda’s relationship with her daughter was abusive, Mom,” I reminded her.

  Sometimes I feel as though my mother got stuck in some time warp where everything was a fifties television show and all problems were solved in a thirt- minute interval of time after Ward and June lightly chastised the Beaver for not doing his homework on time.

  “I suppose so.” My mother sighed.

  Mom finished off her cake. I hadn’t even managed to make a decent dent in mine. There was no way. I felt as though my gut was in knots. Eating junk food wasn’t going to happen. I was going to go for a run. That would make me feel better.

  “Are you not hungry, Kevvie?” How was it that she could act as though nothing had happened? Was this some weird mother trait that they all seemed to gain after so many years of pretending that their marriage was great and their children were perfect? “I can wrap that up for you if you’d like.”

  “Sure, Mom. That would be great. Dinner was just so good I forgot to leave room.” Because pot roast four nights a week never got old. Right? “And I think you should serve that at Thanksgiving dinner. I think it will be a hit for sure.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” My mother’s face lit up as though I had just paid her the most intense compliment ever. “I just want Brock to feel like one of the family.”

  “I’m sure he’ll feel like a king,” I muttered. In fact, I was p
retty sure he already felt like the king. It was Thayla that I was worried about. Serf was probably far more likely to be her status instead of queen.

  Chapter Twenty

  Eleanor

  One did not ignore a summons from Damion Alvarez of Gateway IT Staffing Solutions. At least if one were at all interested in maintaining a healthy career in the IT recruiting field, one did not ignore Damion Alvarez. The man was the owner, operator, CEO, CFO, whatever, of the most prominent IT recruiting company in St. Louis. They had offices in nine major American markets and one in Canada. Damion had built the business from the ground up, and he ran it as though he were so totally invested in the day-to-day operations that he made Mr. Lawrence Moss look like the biggest idiot on the planet.

  Not that this was really much of a stretch. Mr. Moss was the biggest idiot on the planet in my book. I had gotten an email from him recently. The morning that I’d gotten my summons from Damion Alvarez. I was reading that email for about the third time when Damion’s receptionist told me that I could go on back to Mr. Alvarez’s office.

  Of course, the leggy brunette behind the front counter on the executive floor of Damion’s company was only the first line of defense between the CEO and the rest of humanity. Once I went around the big desk in the front reception area, I found myself in a huge room full of cubicles without any real boundaries. They looked like tables in a kindergarten classroom. There were offices around the edges of the floor.

  I could see an older woman beckoning me in her direction. She had a desk in front of an office as though she were the local watchdog. 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 talking above a whisper. I could absolutely see Damion hiring this woman. She was probably efficient as hell. The kind of efficient that you just didn’t find any more in the younger version of administrative assistants like Ruth Powers and the like.

  “Ms. Schulte?” The older woman beamed at me. “Pardon me, Eleanor, but you look enough like your sister that I knew immediately who you were.”

  Right. This woman would know Lena. Probably pretty well, all things considered. Lena had worked here for a little while before she had gotten an offer to start in a local real estate office as a future agent sponsored by one of the county’s leading broker agents.

  “My name is Zelda, dear.” The older woman was still smiling at me.

  I needed to respond. “It’s nice to meet you, Zelda. Lena has told me so much about you.”

  It was true in a roundabout manner. My sister had teased me time and time again about needing to hire someone like this Zelda person to help me stop obsessing over all of the details in my life. Lena had it in her head that I was entirely too OCD.

  “Lena is such a sweet woman,” Zelda informed me. “She’s been so good for Damion.”

  “Speaking of Damion,” I managed to say without choking on my tongue. “I was really surprised to get the summons this morning. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, I think he would rather talk to you about it himself,” Zelda said vaguely. She gestured to the office behind her. “You can go on in. I think he’s just going through his morning correspondence.”

  “Right. Thanks.” Because I always loved going into a powerhouse meeting like this without a freaking clue what it was about.

  Damion’s office was nice. It was casual. More couches and places to sit down and just chat than places to work. There was a desk, of course, but the workspace seemed swallowed up by file upon file stacked on every inch of surface.

  “Oh good, you came right over,” Damion said with a strange sense of eagerness that made absolutely no sense at all to me.

  Damion Alvarez is considered one of the best looking bachelors in St. Louis. I just don’t get it. But then I’m not necessarily into the raw boned guys who look like they are secretly mechanics masquerading as businessmen. Damion is six feet tall. He has broad shoulders and black hair that is thick and wiry and a little longer than fashion dictates. His skin is darker thanks to his Hispanic heritage. He has brown eyes that my sister calls chocolate. She’s crazy though. His eyes are more like mud. The kind of sucking Mississippi mud that drags you in and refuses to let you out until it has stolen your boots and your dignity.

  “Can we just get to the part where you explain to me why you claimed you needed a meeting right away?” I figured that the guy was about to become my brother-in-law, which allowed me a little bit of rudeness when I spoke to him. Right? “I really don’t have a clue why you would want to talk to me.”

  “I had a very interesting conversation just last night with a man who has been interviewing here and at your company for several different possible positions,” Damion began in an expansive voice.

  There was a smile playing at the corners of his mouth, so I could not decide if he was annoyed or angry or amused. It was very disconcerting. I cleared my throat. “That happens a lot, Mr. Alvarez. I think we’ve discussed this before. You know, because your recruiters are pretty much always given the okay to offer anyone who has interviewed with our company at least one to two percent more in salary than we offered them to begin with.”

  “Right.” Damion shrugged off the accusation. “Business is business. You know that.”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t a big fan of sniping like that, but I wasn’t going to get into an argument about it now. What good would it do? “So you spoke with someone who had been, what? Given an offer by our company?

  “Yes. It and it was a very innovative and rather convoluted offer too. But the candidate was insistent that he wasn’t going to be interested in our offer at all if we couldn’t guarantee him six months of employment at a five percent salary raise plus the good benefits package that the company offers and not the standard one that we offer our possible new hires.”

  Aha! Now it made sense. I had spoken with three people yesterday evening before I’d gone to dinner with my sister. I had tried out the new deal that Kevin and I had discussed. Of course, Charlie had pushed it through with the company without much trouble at all. It was our first trial of the new idea, but it seemed to have gone over really well. If Damion’s obvious concerns were any indicator, it had gone over a whole lot better than I had expected.

  “Lena always said that you wanted to work here for me,” Damion told me suddenly.

  Whoa. Wait just a second here. Where was this going? I frowned. “I don’t know where she got that idea. I know my sister is head over heels in love with you, but I happen to think you’re a bit of an ass.”

  Damion only laughed as though he found this notion highly entertaining. “I don’t believe I can be more of an ass than Kevin Landau, Eleanor. Kevin is a notorious ass. In fact, he’s probably the most hated employee at Midwest IT Staffing.”

  “I know that. He told me that both Dan and Todd Hopper dislike him.” I was trying to decide now if Damion were in contact with Dan and Todd. It would seem almost likely, but how underhanded was that? I could not begin to express how pissed off it would make me to think that someone was trying to deliberately force Kevin to fail. How was that fair?

  “Can you please just cut to the chase here?” I growled. I was tired of dancing around.

  Damion looked momentarily taken aback. “I want to offer you a job, Eleanor.”

  “A job.” I didn’t believe it for one second. “So who told you to hire me? Todd and Dan Hopper? My sister? What’s the catch?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Damion’s expression darkened for just a moment. “Are you suggesting that Dan and Todd are pulling my strings? Because I have to say that I highly resent the notion that anyone pulls my strings.”

  “I get that,” I said quickly. “But you can see why I might think that, right? It’s obvious that Kevin was sent here to fail. He was sent by Todd and Dan Hopper. So it makes sense that for reasons of their own, which make no earthly sense by the way, they might want to push as many of Kevin’s supporters aw
ay from him as possible. If I walked away from the company and my job there, I would essentially be leaving Kevin high and dry.”

  “Is that how you’d really see it?” Damion sounded doubtful. “Is it that dramatic? You’re not leaving him high and dry. Kevin isn’t going to stay here. He’s going back to Kansas City the first chance he gets. Are you just going to stick around at that office when you’ve said yourself that it’s supposed to fail?”

  “I’ve been at that office for years now, Damion,” I reminded him. “It’s not going to fail. If I have to carry the entire company myself, it is not going to fail. And don’t you dare try and tell me that I can’t do it either.” I pointed at him and wagged my finger because I was feeling extremely pissed off about the results of this whole conversation. “So I don’t know what you’re playing at here, but if anything you’re just proving to me that we’re on the right track.”

  “Oh really?” Damion frowned. “Why is that?”

  “Because obviously you’re feeling threatened,” I said sarcastically. I wasn’t even going to bother pretending that I wasn’t sarcastic here. I didn’t care if I hurt his feelings or offended him or what. “And if you try to tattle on me to my sister, I’m going to laugh in your face.”

  “Okay. Come on.” He held out his hands. “Give me a little credit here. I might think that it would be easier to squash this stupid deal by plucking the only decent recruiter out of the Midwest IT bullpen. But this isn’t personal like what you’re suggesting.”

  “Why do you want to squash this stupid deal?” His words struck me as odd. Really odd. “Why do you care? Your company is huge. You dominate this market.”

  “Uh huh, and these assholes dominate the Kansas City market,” Damion reminded me. There was a storm cloud on his face and it was getting darker and darker by the second. “I’ve stayed out of their sandbox. I don’t understand why they’ve decided to come and pee in mine.”