Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Well, that’s what I’m going to do,” Harvey admitted suddenly. “So that’s why I need it back. I’m going to trade it in.”

  I laughed. “If you think I’m letting that thing out of my sight until the bill is paid in full, you’re out of your mind. Especially now since you shared that detail!” I snapped. “You take it, you trade it in, and I get nothing. At least with it sitting in my yard and knowing from your handy credit report that you only owe another three thousand dollars on it, I have the satisfaction of being able to get a lien on it.”

  “A lien?” Harvey’s mouth popped open. Behind us I could hear one of my other customers gasping in surprise. Did people really not know how this worked?

  “Yes,” I said calmly. “A lien. As in, your finance company will get their three thousand, I will get my six thousand, two hundred forty-five dollars and eighty-seven cents. And then maybe if there’s anything left over you might get yourself a decent down payment on a new truck.”

  “A decent down payment!” Harvey squeaked. Then his features drew down into a deep frown. “How do you know how much I still owe on it?”

  “I pulled your credit report.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “You owe me money,” I said firmly. “I’m perfectly within my rights to do that. You were basically asking me for credit.”

  “I did no such thing!” Harvey protested.

  I pressed my lips into a line. How did people do this? How did they actually believe the bullshit that they spouted off? Did Harvey really not see how he was asking me to give him a loan? Or had he really convinced himself that this was a gift or something? “Harvey, you asked me to do over six thousand dollars’ worth of work on your truck. You gave me a bad check. I could have called the police. I didn’t. I came directly to you. You tried to pass me what was very likely another bad check. Now you’re here acting like I’m the bad guy because I refuse to just hand over something that hasn’t been paid for. Where else in the world would you do that? Do you walk into a department store, start picking stuff off the shelves, and then tell them you’ll be happy to pay for it later?” I looked at him for a long moment. “No. You give them a credit card. They get the money from the credit card company. And then eventually the credit card company has the resources to come after you for the cash. So give me a credit card, and I’ll give you back your truck. Otherwise I’m going to take my parts out of your truck and return it to you with a tow truck.”

  I exhaled. That was a long-ass speech. I think it was quite possible that nobody else in the room had ever heard me say that many words all at once. It felt kind of good. Like I had gotten it all out and established my new policy. Or at least established for people that I was not some kind of charity organization.

  Harvey pulled out his wallet. “Fine.” He handed me a credit card. One. Fucking. Credit card. “Put the bill on this.”

  I turned on my heel and walked back into my office. My hand was shaking. The little plastic card was trembling in my fingers. I half expected it to decline. I had already run the numbers through my machine and pushed the amount into the reader when I realized that Tansy was still standing in the corner of my office.

  Her arms were folded around her middle and she was smiling at me. It was such a beautiful expression. I felt a leap of joy. And then the credit card machine began spitting out paper and I felt another leap of joy. I had just gotten the money from Harvey Kraus. I had actually gotten the money!

  I snatched up the invoice, the credit card slip, and all of the warranty paperwork on Harvey’s truck. Then I made tracks back out to the front of the shop where Harvey was waiting. I set the papers on the tall counter so he could sign them. Plunking the little plastic card down on the countertop, I resisted the urge to grab it and give it a big kiss. Then I stuck my head out into the garage. I motioned to Mike.

  Holding out Harvey’s keys, I handed them to Mike. “Go and get Harvey Kraus’s truck. The bill is paid in full.”

  “Seriously?” Mike whispered in shock. “Yes, sir!”

  I knew how Mike felt. Mike and Paul had spent two days working on that thing. They’d been the ones to put in the hard labor. And to see the vehicle just sitting out there because the guy wouldn’t pay had been a kick in the pants.

  It was tempting to start running around the shop doing fist pumps and shouting and whistling and being so freaking happy that I could hardly explain it to anyone who might witness such a thing. But I did know for certain that I was not necessarily the one who should be taking all the credit.

  I shook Harvey’s hand. “Mike is bringing the truck out front. Best of luck with the trade-in. Thank you again.”

  Harvey didn’t smile. He didn’t thank me either. He just picked up his credit card and left. Fine. Good. I figured that was all for the best. Maybe the guy would never come back. I don’t know. Maybe he would trash my name all over town. That was sad, but it was possible. But even when you owned a business and you wanted people to see you in a positive light, you could not manage to out talk every single liar out there.

  I turned and whistled my way back into my office. She was still there. I could smell the light feminine fragrance that belonged solely to Tansy. It was achingly arousing. But that wasn’t what I wanted right now. Not exactly.

  Sweeping Tansy into my arms, I lifted her off the floor and gave her a hug until I was pretty sure I was squeezing too hard. “He paid his bill!” I told Tansy excitedly. “He paid it! The whole thing!”

  “That’s wonderful!” she gushed. Then she laughed and I felt her squeeze me back. “And all of it too. That’s really great, Val!”

  She had called me Val before. I wondered why. It wasn’t like I minded. I just hadn’t really thought about what she could call me. I kind of liked it. Something about having the mood between us be so decidedly casual was nice.

  “I really could not have done that without you,” I told Tansy. “You have no idea. I just went out there and I threatened him with exactly what you suggested. And he called my bluff. I don’t think he believed it, but I explained why it would be better for me to get something than nothing and he just folded. He folded!” I probably could have gone on and on and on. I was just so blown away by the ease with which Tansy could anticipate and react to people like Harvey Kraus.

  “I’m so glad for you, Val. I really am.” She pointed to the wad of cash on my desk. “Does this mean you can pay your taxes?”

  “Yes!” I hadn’t even begun to celebrate that yet. Celebrate. Hmm. “I’m taking you to dinner tonight!”

  “What?” She looked mystified. “Why?”

  “To say thank you for helping me out, Tansy. That’s why. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. So I’m going to take you to dinner so that we can celebrate together!”

  “Well, I can hardly say no when you’re making me sound like the guest of honor,” she told me with a grin. “But it will have to be later. Eight? I have a few afternoon appointments to show property.”

  “Eight is perfect. Where should I pick you up?”

  She pressed her lips into a line. “My house. Yeah. My apartment.” She rattled off an address and I scribbled it down. Then she touched my arm. “I have to go though. I’m late already.”

  I watched her leave my office and could not help but feel like I was the luckiest guy on the entire planet.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tansy

  Going out on a date was good. No. It was terrific news! I wasn’t exactly sure if this was going to amount to anything, but it was at least a step in the right direction for me personally. Sort of. Maybe. Oh, I don’t know!

  I stood just inside a pleasant two-story house built in the sixties and watched my clients open all of the closets and explore the kitchen pantry, cabinets, and countertops as they tried to decide if this was really the house that they wanted to put an offer on. I had a smile plastered on my face, but my insides were in knots as I tried not to dwell on my personal problems while I was doing my level
best to make sure that my career did not hit the toilet too.

  “Do you think this wall could be torn down to open up the living and dining area to the kitchen?” The young woman was asking both me and her husband.

  I cleared my throat. I had seen enough of these houses to know that the wall she was referring to was pretty much the main load bearing wall for the structure itself.

  But her husband was nodding. “Sure. Why not? It’s just a wall. You use a sledgehammer and tear it down and then you have to refinish the floor. No big deal. I see that stuff on DIY shows all the time.”

  “That would be so amazing. I think it would really be the thing that makes this living area workable. I just don’t like all of the tiny rooms folding into each other. You have a wall between the living and the dining room. Then you have another wall between the dining room and kitchen. It’s so close in here with just the doorways on both ends.”

  “Sure, babe.” The husband was already making motions with his hands as though he were ready to pick up a sledgehammer at any second.

  I bit my lip. I felt like I had a responsibility to these people to make sure they purchased a house that they would love. And if the loving it came with the caveat that the wall had to go, I wasn’t entirely sure we’d found a match.

  I sighed. People could be so strange sometimes. “Ah, just a thought here, but you might want to double check that the wall you’re talking about getting rid of isn’t load bearing.”

  The woman—Mrs. Avery—frowned at me. “What does that mean?”

  “It means the wall is very important to the house’s stability. Like it’s holding up the entire second story,” I told her in what I hoped was a very mild and neutral voice. In reality I was tempted to scoff and say something along the lines of hey moron, you can’t just knock down walls!

  “One wall can do that?” Mrs. Avery did not look convinced. “I suppose we could get a contractor to do some of this, but I would hope we could do most of it by ourselves to save some cash. We’re real DIY enthusiasts!”

  I almost choked. If I had a nickel for every time I heard that one… “Well, that’s a wonderful way to save money. Is this the house then?” My job here was done. They’d obviously made a choice.

  “Yes. Let’s go back to the office and write a contract!” Mr. Avery was looking at his wife and nodding enthusiastically as though they had just won the lottery. It was actually kind of the opposite, but since this was their first house their enthusiasm was very understandable.

  I pulled a sheaf of papers from the messenger bag I had looped over my shoulder. “We can actually do this right here. Sometimes I find that it works better.”

  I took a seat at the dining room table and began filling in information. “All right, were you wanting to offer asking price?”

  Mrs. Avery sat in a chair beside mine. “Oh, I don’t think we should offer asking price. Do people do that?”

  “It always depends on the market,” I explained. “When do you want to close? Is it really fast? Is it really a long time away? Is your offer contingent? People almost never accept those anymore. If you haven’t already sold your other house you need not look for a new one. That sort of thing.”

  “Well, like we told you, our other house is a for sale by owner and its closing on December twenty-eight. So we’d like to close on this the day after so we don’t have to spend weeks in a hotel, you know?” Mr. Avery looked very serious. “Can we close before?”

  “If you have the money and the credit to have two loans, then yes.” I could not imagine these two having that kind of resources on them.

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s not going to work, is it?” Mr. Avery said with a laugh. “Do people always make that sort of mistake or request? I feel like this business is full of these tiny little rules and ways of operating that don’t really make sense.”

  “You’re not wrong there.” I was busy with my phone’s calculator trying to come up with what might be a reasonable asking price. “You guys are approved for the full amount of the asking price, so how about you ask ten thousand less and just go from there expecting to have to pay full price anyway?”

  Mr. Avery frowned. “Aren’t you supposed to be working with us to get us the best price? I thought real estate agents were negotiators.”

  I felt an eye roll coming on and managed to subdue it with effort. “That sometimes comes later. We have to negotiate things like closing costs and whatever comes back in the inspection. The price on the contract and the asking price are just jumping off points.”

  Mr. Avery still looked skeptical. What did the guy expect me to do, I wonder? Just wave my magic wand and make him the owner of this house? “So what we really need to do,” I told them both. “Is to come up with that first price and know that it’s not likely to be the final one.”

  I couldn’t help it. I kept glancing at the time on my phone. I could see Mr. Avery glaring at me when I did. Finally, I looked up at him and smiled. “We can only be in this house until four o’clock. After that there is another showing. That’s also why I think we need to be careful with our offer. Look at the sign-in sheet. There have been a lot of people coming through here. They just dropped the price. And it’s reasonable and in a good neighborhood. All of those things make it difficult to convince the seller to give it up at another price.”

  Mr. Avery rolled his eyes. “Fine. Just put down asking price.”

  I did as I was told and went through each and every page. I initialed. They initialed. And then all at once we were done and I put the contract back in my bag. “Okay. So I’m going to call the other agent and let them know if you get an acceptance and if there are terms.”

  “Terms?” Mrs. Avery looked apprehensive.

  “Buyers aren’t the only ones who get a say in terms. If the seller wants to add something in about a closing date that works better for them, they can. If you don’t like it we don’t have to agree, but still. It’s all up for grabs. I’ll call the other agent and tell them that I’m heading to the office to email her a contract. Then I will call you back as soon as I hear anything at all.”

  “Okay.” They were nodding and looking nervous. That was normal.

  I really had to go. It was past time to meet my next set of clients and that meant I was going to be late for my dinner nondate with Val. I could call it a nondate. Right? I didn’t feel like I could really call it anything else.

  That thought rolled round and round in my head until I got back to the office and spotted my next set of clients sitting in the reception room looking anxious. I was really pushing it today. But at least my Saturday deadline of having at least one contract had been met. Truthfully, I had expected the Avery family to take all freaking weekend to get a house.

  The Musgraves were a bit different. This was not their first house. It made them easier to deal with, but also a little more jaded. “Hello there, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrave.” I gave them my best cheerful wave. “Just let me scan this really quickly!”

  There was no administrative assistant in our office anymore. Not since Lena had left and gone to work at another brokerage. Our old boss had treated her horribly. But now we had to fax everything or scan it for ourselves. This always made me miss Lena dreadfully. She had been the most efficient coworker on the entire planet.

  As I was trying to work the stupid scanner, I realized that there were some phone messages back here for me. We had a little slot system so that if anyone answered phones or got the messages, they could write down the necessary info and then just put it in our little mailboxes. Mine had been empty earlier, but it was full now. How odd.

  I reached into the mailbox and pulled out several pink While You Were Out slips. My heart sank right into my shoes when I saw that four of them were from my mother. Then I saw the other two and felt my eyes nearly come out of my head.

  What. The. Hell?

  They were messages from Trinity Moberly-Kitson. She was requesting I take her house hunting tomorrow. I had to read the note three times befo
re my brain would actually believe what it was seeing. And it still wanted to start shouting the word no at the top of my lungs. But the truth was that it was money. Trinity Moberly and her husband Karl Kitson were pretty wealthy as things go.

  “Ah, I see you got your message.” Ray meandered around the corner. “I’ll admit that I don’t think that message was intended specifically for you, but you got voted to take care of it.”

  “Why?”

  Ray Fines snorted and then made a grand sweeping gesture in my direction as though I had just missed something obvious. “First of all. You weren’t here. And we all know how desperate you are to make sales. That’s pretty much all it takes to guarantee that you’ll get the worst phone messages of the day.”

  I slipped the little pink notes into my messenger bag and sighed. “I feel like I’m never going to get past that point in my life.” Then I glanced out at the Musgraves. I really could not afford to have them hear me whining about my financial situation or the state of my career. So I cleared my throat and raised my eyebrows at Ray. “Were you the one who took the message?”

  “Yes. I was.” There was a smug little smile playing at the corner of his mouth as though he were hiding even more than I had thought he might be. “And you know, Trinity Moberly-Kitson is really rather nice on the phone.”

  “I imagine she might be.” I bit my lip. This was going to be tricky. I couldn’t just refuse to talk to the couple. And not just because I couldn’t afford to either. This was a professionalism thing. And it did not matter one bit that Lena Schulte was one of my closest friends. Talk about awkward. “I’ll take care of this later I suppose. You wouldn’t want to…”