Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “More than one?” Beau scratched his head.

  I shook mine. The guy was dumber than a box of rocks, but he knew his way around the inside of an engine compartment. He’d been taking these things apart and putting them back together since he was a little tyke. That’s why I kept him around. But for pity’s sake, it seemed I was going to have to keep him away from the customers.

  “Yeah,” Mike continued. “And please tell me what it is you think a woman owes you when you buy her dinner. You’re suggesting that she has to let you stare at her butt all night long if she wants to eat.”

  “Well now, that’s a given.” Beau was getting into his topic. The bluster in his voice was rising to epic proportions as if he were really warming to his topic. “Any woman who says she’ll go out to you is agreeing to let you stare at her ass. Her boobs too if a guy leans that way.”

  “Oh really?” I prompted. Wait. Why was I encouraging this? It was the worst idea in the world. Some customer could come walking into the bay despite all of the signs telling them to stay out. Then I would probably get slapped with some sexual harassment suit!

  But Beau was far from done anyway. “Yeah. So when you buy her dinner she’s agreeing to at least go to first base. You’re going to get to cop a feel. That’s only right. You know? Dinner ain’t cheap these days, you know?”

  “Yeah. We know,” Mike snorted. He was shaking his head. “I’m done with this one, boss. You want me to do the others?”

  “Go ahead,” I told Mike. He would whip out the oil changes faster than Beau was ever going to get done talking about the implied contracts that women apparently engaged in all the time. “So, Beau, you cop a feel and you think that you get to do that how many times just because you bought her dinner?”

  “At least twice,” Beau decided. “But if you take her to a movie?” He let that statement hang for a second. “Then she’s telling you that you’re going to get a blow job.”

  Mike wolf whistled. Two more mechanics came walking into the shop, finished with their lunch hour. Both men raised an eyebrow at the words blow job. Mike waved at them as though he were begging them not to say a word.

  “Wow,” Mike encouraged. “So you get head every time you take a woman to the movie, huh? Do you go a lot? I’d be going every single weekend!”

  “You know, I haven’t gone out with a woman in months,” Beau admitted to us all.

  I was having trouble not choking on the epic snort that wanted to slip out. I finally managed to clear my throat enough to speak. “Gee, Beau. I can’t imagine why that might be. You’re just such a stunning conversationalist. Not to mention the fact that you’re totally up front with a woman about what she’s going to have to do just to spend time with you. Can’t imagine why anyone would be against that.”

  Paul and Alex started laughing now. They were shaking their heads as they moved back to the cars they had been working on before their lunch break. It was a pleasant kind of camaraderie in the garage. It always had been. Even with Beau’s idiot thoughts spewing everywhere, he could not seem to spoil everything.

  “Hey!”

  I stood up so quickly that I almost smashed my head on the underside of the truck I was working on. I had to slide out quickly and scramble to my feet when I saw that there were a pair of strange feet by the entrance to bay four. And they were definitely not wearing shoes designed to be in a shop.

  “Sir, can I help you?” I reached for a rag to wipe my hands, but I didn’t offer a hand to the gentleman because I didn’t want to risk getting a bill for his dry cleaning. “Customers are asked to wait in the lounge area.”

  “Lounge, ha!” The man muttered. “I need my vehicle done right now. I have to get moving or I’ll miss my meeting.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Did someone tell you that your vehicle was going to be done?”

  He pointed to the SUV. “It’s that one. Right there.”

  “Then it’s done,” I told him smoothly. “We just need to give it a quick cleanup and it will be out front waiting for you. The tech just took the invoice tag to the front office a minute ago.”

  The man wrinkled his nose as though he had just smelled something foul. “And you should know. I could totally hear every bit of your conversation. The lot of you are animals! Animals! I’m putting this in my yelp review.”

  I ground my teeth together. I hated online reviews. I really did. I actually paid someone to go on there and make positive ones. That’s why I could tell you that those things weren’t worth a damn. They didn’t mean shit unless you wanted to believe that they were true. Apparently, this guy was already a pain in the ass kind of person. The internet just made that character flaw worse in my opinion, humble as it might be.

  “You go ahead and do that, sir,” I told the man. For just a moment I felt as though I were channeling my brother Damion. I wanted to tell this jackass exactly where to get off. I wanted to tell him that we didn’t need his business anyway and that if he was so uptight that he needed to fabricate reasons to be mad, then he was just a pathetic excuse for a human being. But that’s not what I said. “I’m sorry you felt offended by our crass speech. We’re just a bunch of working men. And you know, men will be men.”

  The man’s nose actually twitched as though he smelled something foul. He probably did. I could smell the rancid odor of Beau’s body odor from this side of the shop. The guy never bathed. Ever.

  The customer spun on his heel and stalked out front. I looked at my mechanics. Mike, Paul, and Alex all looked perfectly normal. They were working hard. Beau looked like a disaster. He was once again under the hood of the old sedan, but something had apparently snagged the butt portion of his coveralls. There was a huge section of fabric just hanging off his hip. Underneath that I could see that he wasn’t wearing pants.

  “Beau,” I said in a clear, even, and I prided myself on how calm, voice. “Why are you wearing long underwear under your coveralls?”

  “It’s easier than putting on pants.” Beau did not even bother to look at me when he said that. He announced it as though it were the most reasonable thing he’d said all day long. “I just get up in the morning and pull on my coveralls. Then at night I take them off.”

  Mike finally stood up and looked at me. Then he pointed at Beau. “Is it just me, or did he actually make that sound like a totally reasonable way to get dressed in the morning?”

  “Nope,” I said with a sigh. “He made it seem reasonable.”

  Beau was currently scratching his ass though the hole in his coveralls. His expression looked troubled. I almost hated to ask. But then I didn’t have to ask. He waved a wrench in my direction. “Hey, Val?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think that weird stalker ex-girlfriend of your brother’s stole some more of our tools last night.” Beau sounded as though he were making a very honest and even insightful suggestion. “I saw lights on in the shop last night and I heard someone banging around in here.”

  I blinked. For one moment I was sure that I’d heard him wrong. “Did you come and investigate? That’s why you live here. Remember?”

  “Yeah. But I was already in bed.” Beau shrugged. “That’s how I ripped my coveralls.”

  “How? You said you were already in bed.”

  “I was trying to get them back on. They got caught. Then when they ripped I got so upset that I just sort of forgot about the lights on in the shop. Until now anyway.” Beau sounded like a pouting, petulant child. I wanted to slap him. But the most important thing was to find out why he assumed it was Trinity Moberly-Kitson who had done it.

  “Why do you think that it was my brother’s ex-girlfriend?”

  “Because I saw her.” Beau made it sound as though I were the stupid one here. I didn’t appreciate it. But right now I didn’t know what else to do. “That’s why I didn’t bother going inside. I saw who it was. I figured I’d just tell you about it and let you handle things.”

  “Uh huh.” I pointed at the clock on the wall. It was nearly
two in the afternoon. “And you decided to wait until now because why?”

  “Well, I forgot until now.” Beau pointed at his ass. “You know, because I forgot my coveralls were ripped.”

  “I see.” And I did. But I wasn’t entirely sure that it was Trinity who had stolen tools from my shop last night. What was going on? Why did I feel so off balance? It was almost like there was something else going on here. “Well, next time could you please go and confront the intruders? That’s why you’re here on the property, Beau. If you’re not going to do the job, I suppose I just don’t need the trailer out back anymore.”

  There. I watched him panic. Maybe that would at least get him thinking straight next time. I could not afford intruders, stolen tools, or employees who didn’t do their job. I really couldn’t afford employees who did do their jobs. Or employees at all. Such was the way of the self-employed small business owner.

  Chapter Three

  Tansy

  My car was dead again. Oh my word, I did not have time for this shit. Not at all. I let my head loll forward to smack against the steering wheel. The leather wrapped around the thing was cool against my forehead. I thought of all the things I had to do today, not the least of which was getting my phone fixed. I didn’t have time to wonder why my car wasn’t starting.

  Okay. Calm down. I had to try again. That was all there was to it. It was going to work. The power of positive thinking was going to make it work. It had to.

  “Okay, car,” I said very deliberately. “Here’s the deal. You can’t not start. All right? It’s just not acceptable today. If you want to take a day off you should check back next week. I know that probably sounds crazy. But if I don’t get a few more listings and make at least one sale before the end of the month I may have to start taking shifts at the restaurant in order to make ends meet.” My voice was starting to get a tad hysterical. I think I was panicking. I don’t know. “Do you have any idea how bad that is?” I demanded of my car.

  There was ice on the windshield. There was ice on the ground, on the street, hanging off the trees, and probably falling out of the sky like little daggers ready to skewer me alive. It was one of those December mornings when you wanted to burrow back under the covers because it was negative five outside with a wind chill of about negative twenty-five or something absolutely preposterous like that. There was a winter storm warning in effect—that seemed a bit redundant, don’t you think? And the entire city was probably going to clear the shelves and refrigerator section of every supermarket in every county in the St. Louis Metropolitan area. Because that is how we do bad weather here. We buy supplies and stay home. Except people like me who have no money for supplies and no time to stay home.

  “Okay.” I put my hand back on the key and prepared to turn. “Start!”

  I shouted the word and turned the key and smacked the gas pedal and finally the engine chugged, chugged, and then it turned over! Again! And when the car sputtered to life I actually started to cry. I pumped the gas again and the idle finally got a little steadier as if the thing were going to stay running. I cranked up the defrost and grabbed my little oven-mitt-looking ice scraper.

  I felt like I was holding my breath the whole time I scraped my windows. The car was running. The car was running. I had a million stops to make but apparently the first one was going to be down in Fenton at the mechanic’s shop. Great. That was like a billion miles from where my real estate office was located in Chesterfield. That made it a billion and five miles from the rest of my errands.

  It didn’t matter. I got inside that car and pointed the nose away from my little apartment complex and down the highway toward the engine repair shop. The roads were crusted in ice. I could not help but get more and more pissed off with each passing second as I thought about having to drive way down here just because some stupid mechanic couldn’t get it right the first time.

  I steered my car around a treacherous curve on the highway. The visibility wasn’t great. There was some kind of fog in this low spot and it was nearly impossible to see more than a few yards in front of me. Another car spun off toward the median. Their red brake lights looked eerie in the strange white half light from the frosty morning. I hated this commute thing. That’s why I didn’t usually drive that far. But when my car had died at the party, there happened to be a mechanic there. He was my friend Lena’s future brother-in-law and he happened to own a repair shop down in Fenton.

  I should have been insistent that I use a mechanic closer to home, but the guy had actually gone to an auto parts store around the corner from the party and he’d come back with the necessary stuff to fix my car. I hadn’t actually had to use his shop. Now though, if I wanted warranty work I was going to have to make the stupid drive. Ugh!

  If you have ever driven in morning traffic amplified by the stupidity factor that seems to happen when there is some kind of adverse driving conditions, you know how I felt by the time I pulled into the repair shop that my GPS told me was the place I was looking for.

  The place looked deserted. No. That’s not quite right. It didn’t look deserted because there were at least a trillion cars parked in every place and position imaginable. It did not look open because every door was closed and I did not see a light on in the office.

  I parked right in front of the door in a spot that was probably normally handicapped. The ice was covering up the blue or yellow stripes so it didn’t count. At least that’s what I told myself. Besides, a handicapped person should not be out driving in this ridiculous weather anyway. When I got out of my car—leaving it running of course—I was pelted in the face by tiny shards of ice. I’m not kidding you. There were miniature icicles falling from the sky. Welcome to Missouri, right? Weather anomalies are the norm here.

  Marching right up to the door, I started knocking. I kept knocking. Nobody answered. I didn’t care. I kept knocking and knocking and finally I saw a light go on in the back of the shop. The garage part of the building. It looked like a tall, lanky man with hair sticking up at all angles. He was walking toward the front door with the kind of mincing, hesitant steps that make you think he’s not really sure he’s going to open it.

  Then the guy stood right in front of me behind the glass, thank God! And I realized why he might be hesitant to open the door. He was wearing his underwear. Not boxers or briefs or boxer briefs, but actual long underwear as if had stepped right out of one of those old spaghetti westerns or something. It. Was. Awful!

  Oh ew. And he was dirty. Dirty did not cover it, actually. He was filthy. When he opened the door of the shop I caught a whiff of something gross and totally biologically hazardous to my health. It made my throat close up and my gag reflex kick in.

  “What do you want, lady?” he demanded rudely.

  What did I want? Really? “This is a car repair shop. Why are you closed?”

  He jabbed his finger at the adjoining plate glass window where there was a huge logo stamped onto the glass in black vinyl that included a list of operating hours. “It’s Sunday. We’re closed on Sundays. And in case you hadn’t realized, there’s an ice storm going on out here.”

  My brain had stopped working at his very first announcement about it being Sunday. Surely not. Surely it was not Sunday. I groped in my pocket for my phone. Was it Sunday? How could that be? Had I gone to Stella Stein’s house on a Saturday night? Really? I didn’t remember making that appointment for Saturday. I thought it was Tuesday. Why would I get my days mixed up like that? That wasn’t like me at all!

  “What’s wrong with your car?” The smelly, long-john-wearing man asked me.

  I was still staring at my phone display. Surely cracking it into four distinct and separate little islands wasn’t going to make it stop keeping the correct date and time. Right? “I don’t know. That guy who owns the place, Mr. Alvarez? He put some new stuff in it the other day at a party because it died. He said battery cables, bad connection, blah, blah, new battery, and something else I can’t recall. But now it’s doing the same th
ing it did before.”

  Now the stinky man was giving me a droll stare as though I were the one standing there in my panties and bra. I felt suddenly self-conscious. What was his problem anyway? He cleared his throat. “Blah. Blah?”

  Oh. So that was probably a little hard to understand. “I don’t know much about cars.”

  “I gathered that.” He snorted and shook his head. “Fine. I’ll open that first bay. When I do, I’ll help you pull into the garage. Then I’ll have a look. But if it needs something serious, you’re going to need to come back tomorrow.”

  “Thank you!” I hustled back to my car. It was still running, which I took as a good sign.

  I climbed into the vehicle and backed up a bit. My tires spun on the icy parking lot. The little icicles falling from the sky had turned into great big chunks of something that could not decide if it was ice or snow. Maybe ice cream. Yes. That would be a huge improvement in the weather pattern for sure.

  I saw the big glass doors start to slide up on the very first bay in the building. Long underwear guy appeared. His hair was even ickier and stringier from this angle than it had been up close and far too personal through the door. Whatever. If he could fix my car and make my life possible, I would let his poor hygiene slide.

  He started waving me forward. I pulled in. My tires were stuck on the icy pavement though. I had to gun the engine a bit. Unfortunately that meant my tires suddenly got traction and I lurched forward and nearly plowed right into underwear man. He grimaced and shot me a really dirty look before he jumped nimbly out of the way and finally got my car inside the shop.

  “Sorry about that!” I called out to him as I exited my vehicle.

  He did not respond to my apology. “Turn it off.”