Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Kevin was smiling. He wrapped his arm around me and pressed a kiss to my forehead. He leaned down to whisper in my ear. “You have the kindest heart of anyone I know. I love you so very much, Eleanor Schulte. And this time I promise that I’m not going to let you run away from me.”

  “That’s good,” I told him. “Because I love you so much that I don’t think you could chase me with a butcher knife.”

  We both laughed. And right then I knew I’d finally gotten my happily ever after. Fifteen years later than I’d thought, but better late than never, right?

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter One

  Tansy

  “No, Mama. I told you. I can’t pick up a shift at the restaurant tonight because I have a meeting with a client!” I pinched my phone between my ear and my shoulder and did my best to open my car door without hands. I wasn’t exactly successful. The stack of folders I was trying to balance tipped dangerously and I wound up dropping the phone just to avoid dropping the files.

  My smartphone clattered to the cement and in the last dying light of the day I watched the screen crack before my very eyes. Dammit! Those cost a fortune to replace and my contract was nowhere near up. Not to mention it had just added at least another hour or two to my day tomorrow. Ugh! Sometimes I had the worst luck. It was like I had been born under a bad astrological sign or something. If you believed in stuff like that anyway.

  I could hear my mother shouting at me from the ground. Evidently the damage to the phone wasn’t catastrophic enough to make her shut up. Darn. I doubt Mama even realized that I had dropped my stupid phone. She probably believed that I was deliberately ignoring her or something. Yanking the car door open, I reached across the center console and set the files carefully in the passenger seat. This involved a super awkward stretch over my driver’s seat that probably afforded the entire parking lot a stellar view of my backside. But I’m pathetically short and there was no way I could just reach over there without some extra effort.

  Finally, I managed to scoop up the phone. As I had imagined, my mother was still going on and on about how the family needed me and how they could never count on me anymore. I wanted to scream. It wasn’t fair!

  “Mama!” I snapped. “I can’t work tonight. I’m sorry. I don’t know why you won’t hire one of Auntie’s daughters to take a shift or two during the week.”

  “You must be out of your mind!” Mother told me huffily as I tried to get into my car with something approaching a dignified sitting motion that did not involve increasing the slit on the back of my pencil skirt. “Those girls would be far too busy flirting and laughing with all of the male customers. They’re far too pretty to wait tables!”

  Great. So then I could assume that this meant I was far too not pretty to have to worry about that problem myself. It wasn’t like I was stupid. I knew I was more homely than most of my huge Greek family. They were tall and willowy and probably looked like Athena or Aphrodite. I no doubt looked like one of the three fates. The short fat one. Short. As in barely five foot two inches tall. And fat as in I was big boned.

  You know, I hate that phrase. Seriously. Who invented that anyway? It’s just a way for everyone to tell a girl that she’s fat without actually having the balls to say it. They just look at you and titter at your large breasts and wide child-bearing hips and they say, Oh! You’re just big boned the same way that someone might look at a cow. It’s insulting.

  “Well, Mama,” I told my mother through clenched teeth. “Maybe the girls will meet their future husbands while they’re working. I’m sure Auntie would appreciate the help in marrying them off. She does have four of them.”

  I kept thinking of that line from Jane Austen about single men in possession of a fortune who then must be in want of a wife. Ha! If only life could be like an Austen novel or any kind of novel actually. It would be so much easier that way. People would do irrational things, but then they would see the error of their ways and suddenly start acting rationally. Like my mother suddenly deciding that my long curly dark brown hair and brown eyes were perfectly acceptable features for a young woman to have. Then my mother would tell me that she would be happy with any man I chose to love even if he wasn’t Greek. Even if—God forbid—he happened to be American.

  “I’m not going to marry off my nieces to customers in our restaurant.” My mother sounded as though she was utterly scandalized by this notion.

  I was struggling to start my car. I’d just had it worked on the previous week after it died a grisly death of epically embarrassing proportions right in front of the valet stand at a party given by a friend. The mechanic had told me the battery needed replacing because something about the battery terminals and they didn’t clip on all the way or something stupid like that. I don’t know. Cars are Greek to me. Ha! See that? A little joke there.

  Wait. My mother was still yapping at me. I had totally lost track of what she was saying. “Mom. I can’t talk right now. I’m driving.”

  “Well, pull over.”

  “I have to go somewhere!” I could not believe that she was really that pushy and grouchy and self-centered and then I remembered. This was my mother I was talking to. “Mom. I can’t work tonight. End of story.”

  “Tansy Economides, if you hang up this phone I will—”

  I hung up. I wondered if she was about to threaten me with some kind of legal action. My mother hates Americans. She hates the US. She constantly complains that this is not Greece. But this does not stop her from adoring the legal system here in the US. She is fascinated by the whole thing. My mother will watch court television all day long. She yells at the screen and makes judgments all on her own about who should get what kind of restitution. So I could totally see her dragging me to court to try and get a judgment against me. For something really stupid too. Like forcing me to quit my job at the real estate office and give up my license just so I can work in our family restaurant.

  Dammit. I was going to be late. I hate being late. It always makes me feel slightly off balance, like being late means that I did something wrong. And doing something wrong is going to get me a punishment. I’m a grown woman. I am thirty-six years old. I am too old to be feeling like this and yet it’s the sort of thing that I just can’t shake!

  It was getting dark. December in St. Louis, Missouri. Not only was it dark, but I could practically feel the road under my tires freezing as I drove across it. The weather forecast was for what they like to call a “wintry mix” and that usually meant ice pellets would start falling from the sky at any second.

  I had all of the paperwork I needed to meet with this client about listing their home. I knew exactly what I wanted to say. The house was in Tower Grove not far from the area where I’d grown up. I knew the neighborhood. I actually had a few buyers that were already interested in looking at the house. This should have been a slam dunk.

  So why was I so nervous?

  I pulled up to the curb in front of the house and double checked the address in the gloomy darkness. The streetlamps overhead cast an orange sort of glow over the pavement and the ice-crusted brown grass. There were Christmas lights up on almost every single house on the street. Every house but this one. Hmm. I was going to have to probe into that a bit more. Christmas lights and decorations were important when you were selling a house during the holidays.

  It was difficult to get a really good look at the house from the outside in the dark. It was a very typical Tower Grove home with a red brick exterior, a sharply pitched roof for the second floor, and a recessed entrance that seemed almost gloomy with only one bare bulb hanging right next to the front door.

  I gathered my files into my arms and marched up to the door. The yard was dead. Not just winter dead, but dead. It looked as if someone had opted not to water for years at a time. Even in a moist climate, those hot summer days in July and August are lethal to grass that sits exposed in the sunlight all day long.

  Feeling no small amount of apprehension, I rang the bell. There was a ligh
t on inside. I could hear a television droning on in the background. But there was no movement. I rang the bell again. Finally, I saw something in the front room move through the wavy glass of the front door sidelights. The figure lumbered toward the front door.

  The door swung open. I found myself face to face with a very disgruntled-looking man in his late twenties or early thirties. He appeared to be carrying a beer in one hand and a television remote in the other.

  “Excuse me,” I said, my heart hammering a staccato beat against my ribs. “My name is Tansy Economides. I’m from Upscale Realty. I had an appointment to meet the homeowner here this evening to discuss listing the house.”

  The man’s eyes suddenly seemed to go from half mast to wide open. “What are you talking about? This place ain’t for sale.”

  “Well, not yet,” I agreed. My stomach knotted in horror as I realized that this must be a tenant and homeowner thing. “Who owns the home? Can I speak to Ms. Stein?”

  “Stella!” The man snarled the word over his shoulder while still using his body to block me out. “Stella, you get your ass in here!”

  Stella Stein came bustling in from the kitchen and I realized all at once that I was in the middle of something very awkward. Poorly timed too. Stella Stein was in her eighties. She had to be. The grandmotherly woman had powder white hair, a pink apron over her purple house dress, and she was wearing a pair of cheap gardening clogs. She looked as though she wanted to hug me and then hide behind me all at the same time.

  “Rory, go back to your show on the TV,” Stella told the young man. “This don’t bother you none.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rory did not seem convinced. He was eyeballing me as though he were about to boot me to the curb. “This lady says you’re going to sell the house! You can’t sell the damn house! Where will I live?”

  Man, it was hard not to tell the kid to go get his own place and pay his own bills. It was very evident that this was either his grandmother or some other elderly relation and he had been sponging so fiercely off the poor woman that she had decided it was time to sell and get out just to get away from him.

  “Ms. Stein, would you like to step outside and take a ride with me to my office?” I suggested suddenly.

  “Oh no.” Stella looked down at her house dress. “I’m not dressed to go out. Let’s just meet it the kitchen. Rory won’t go in there.”

  He wouldn’t go in there… The words rambled round and round in my head. If he didn’t go into the kitchen, how did he get his beer? And if he really didn’t get his own beer, did that mean Stella did it for him? Oh my word! The idea of it all was just making me mad as hell!

  I followed Stella into the house and right past the glowering Rory. The man was dressed in coveralls of some kind as though he were a laborer. There was a name patch on his right breast pocket that announced his last name to be STEIN. Maybe he was Stella’s son, poor woman.

  He was glaring at me with such heat that I felt the need to fan myself and it wasn’t for any good reasons. Rory would have made a woman pee her pants. There was nothing attractive about him at all.

  “There you go, dear.” Stella pulled out a chair at the kitchen table for me. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That would be wonderful.” I tried to be quiet and unassuming and as calm as I could possibly be without giving into the urge to start pumping her for information.

  The only thing I had to fall back on was work. So I pulled out the files containing the listing agreement and I tried to get my head back in the game. Get a signature. Get her to make a decision about some advertising packages and get some basic information about the house in order to do the listing. That was what I needed to accomplish.

  “I’m terribly sorry about my grandson,” Stella told me softly. “His father and mother died when he was a teenager and I’m afraid he’s never quite gotten over the bitterness.”

  “I’m so sorry that you lost your children,” I told Stella softly. “That must have been awful.”

  “It was.” Stella put the pot on the stove to boil. “I think the worst part has been feeling as though I don’t love their son enough.”

  I bit my lip. I wanted to say a lot here, but I could not begin to fabricate the right words. “I think it would be very hard to love someone who seems as though he doesn’t have much of a desire to love you back.”

  “Yes.” Stella placed two mugs on the table. Then she put a little tin of teabags down between them. Finally, she began to pour the boiling water almost before the teakettle whistled to say that it was done. It was like she instinctively knew when it was ready. “What Rory doesn’t realize is that he has ruined me financially. The house was paid off by my dear husband. But Rory has been stealing my checkbook and forging checks all over town. He’s stolen so much money that I could not pay my taxes. No taxes means that they put a lien on the property.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I knew exactly how these things worked and it made me sad that this poor old woman was having to suffer for it.

  “I have a distant relation that I can go live with over in Jefferson City. But once this place is gone I don’t know what will become of Rory and I’m not sure that I care.”

  I felt a chill of dread run down my spine. It was highly possible that whomever bought this house was going to have to deal with Rory for a while as though he came with the place. This wasn’t going to be an easy sale at all.

  “I suppose let’s look at the listing contract and see what needs to be done,” I told Stella Stein. “Then we’ll make a decision from there as to what to do about your grandson.”

  “Thank you, dear.” Stella reached across the table and patted my hand. “I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your willingness to come out here even if there’s not much in it for you.”

  “That’s what I do,” I told Stella quietly. And that was the truth after all. This was exactly what I did. And it got me in trouble more times than not too.

  Chapter Two

  Valentino

  I am surrounded by douchebags. That’s right. Totally surrounded. All day long I hear douchebag comments about douchebag topics and I have to listen to one douchebag tell another one his horribly douchebag theories about why something happened in the first place. But I’m not bitter at all, as you can tell.

  Normally I like the banging of equipment in the garage. My engine and transmission repair shop has five bays. Most days the lifts are up. There are vehicles hanging suspended with their parts either accounted for or not. Tires sitting in stacks in every corner. Rack after rack of tools. The drone of the air compressors. The scent of new rubber, gear oil, and automatic transmission fluid. All of these things were part of my life. And I’d been here in this shop for the better part of three-plus decades so that was a big deal in my mind.

  “Hey, boss.” Beau was looking at me as though he honestly thought that I might be interested in what he was about to say. The guy had been working here for the better part of ten years. He should have known better. “Boss. What do you think? Boobs, hips, or ass. Which is the part you look at first when you’re evaluating a woman.”

  “Evaluating a woman?” I had to say that out loud because I was almost certain that this was not actually the three-word sentence that Beau had intended to spout out. “Did you honestly just say that? Evaluate? Like you’re going to look her over like a pig down at the butcher shop before you have her killed and butchered for storage in your freezer?”

  “Whoa!” Beau drew back and put his hands up in front of him as though he were now fending me off. Then he turned and waved at Mike. “Did you hear that? The boss wants to butcher the chick and put her in his freezer!”

  Mike snorted. He was busy refilling an SUV with oil from the big reservoir. “I don’t think Val Alvarez is some kind of serial killer, Beau. I think he just hates women.”

  “Which is the first thing they always say about serial killers!” Beau insisted. He was supposed to be working on an old four-door sedan
that needed a new heater core. That tended to happen when our weather here in the Midwest went from sweltering hot to icy cold in only a few days’ time.

  “Thank you, Mike,” I told the kid with the dirty blond hair. I liked Mike; he was quiet enough that he didn’t get on my nerves like Beau or the other five mechanics that I employed during the week. “At least he knows who signs his paychecks.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Beau wanted to know.

  I rolled my eyes. The guy actually lived on the garage property. He had a camper trailer at the end of our storage yard and he stayed there rent and utility free in exchange for being our security guard during the night. When the tow trucks needed to get into the yard after hours, someone had to let them in.

  “You know,” Mike prodded Beau. “Val signs your paycheck because he owns this place and you work for him.”

  “He don’t sign it. It’s direct deposit,” Beau informed Mike. “Don’t you do direct deposit?”

  “So tell me!” I said loudly to stop the conversation from sliding further down the road of stupidity. “What part of a woman do you notice first, Beau.”

  “Oh, her ass. Totally her ass.” Beau was bobbing his head up and down like one of those dolls they give away at the baseball game. “I love me a big ole ass.”

  Mike gave me a droll stare. “I don’t know whether to laugh or be horrified.”

  “I’m going to go with horrified. A big ole ass,” I muttered. “Beau, you need to be careful. You’ll be getting me in all kinds of trouble with women filing harassment complaints all over this place!”

  “Complaints about what?” Beau snorted. “If I like their butts, they might get a free meal out of it.”

  “Don’t you like how he says that in the plural,” Mike mused with a laugh as he replaced the top on the oil compartment of the SUV. He made sure the thing turned until it clicked at least twice and then wiped his hands on a rag. “Like a woman might have more than one ass so he could have even more big ole ass action.”