Tangled Up In Love

by Unknown

  That brought a sharp bark of laughter, and he stepped into the hallway, head shaking. “Careful with that temper, Wile E. You know how most of those little tricks turn out—with the coyote flat as a pancake and the road-runner getting away without a scratch.”

  “I’ve got better aim,” she replied as she pushed the door closed behind him. It clicked soundly, and slipping the chain then turning the dead bolt had a cathartic effect on her blood pressure. The minute she did it, she began to relax, tension pouring from her body in waves.

  Then his voice came, like a spike to the center of her brain. “See you for our next knitting lesson!”

  And in addition to his footsteps padding down the hallway, she could have sworn she heard whistling.

  Row 7

  “Whoa! You actually locked lips with the Ice Queen? Weren’t you afraid your tongue would freeze up and fall off?”

  “I wasn’t exactly thinking with my tongue,” Dylan said in response to his friend’s surprised question.

  “Dude.” Zack grunted as he twisted one rod after another on the foosball table in an attempt to stop one of Dylan’s passes. The six-foot-six-inch goalie was wearing a black T-shirt with a squirrel that stretched across his wide chest. The squirrel was in a tiny suit of armor, holding up a metal shield, and beneath that were the words PROTECT YOUR NUTS.

  Zack’s tastes ran a little toward the never-grew-up, Peter Pan side of things. Even his apartment, where they’d gathered to eat, drink, and be merry, looked more like a theme park than an adult dwelling.

  With its tall windows that overlooked the city, a massive amount of square footage, and glossy hardwood floors, most people would kill for this apartment, and do a lot more with it than the hockey player had. But because it was Zack’s, it more closely resembled the loft from the Tom Hanks movie Big. In many respects, the Rockets goalie was just a kid in a man’s body, as his surroundings could attest.

  Grace was beginning to clean the place up, adding a few mature, feminine touches, but miracles of that magnitude didn’t occur overnight. Zack still had his foosball table, pinball machines, the giant plasma television on the far wall. The floor was still scuffed in places from impromptu soccer or basketball games—when it came to sports, he might play hockey for a living, but he was an equal-opportunity fan—for which a net was stuck in one corner and a hoop was attached over the bedroom door.

  He also owned all the latest video game equipment, be it PlayStation, Xbox, or Wii, with every game imaginable for all three. And his idea of art was assorted street signs or posters of sports figures, anchored to the wall with whatever was handy at the time and did the trick.

  He was so not getting his security deposit back when he moved.

  Not for the first time, Dylan contemplated the fact that professional athletes got paid way too much. And he didn’t get paid nearly enough.

  Which was why he had no qualms about hanging out at Zack’s place every chance he got to take advantage of the arcade-like atmosphere. He also had no problem letting Zack supply mass quantities of beer and pizza.

  “You gonna kiss her again?” This from Gage in a low, dispassionate voice. Having lost the last round, he was kicking back on the black leather sofa, waiting to see who won the right to pick the night’s pizza toppings.

  Zack’s horse of a dog, Bruiser, was stretched out across the remaining two seat cushions, his legs hanging over the edge, his head resting on Gage’s leg, where a giant wet spot was beginning to develop from the animal’s open, drooling mouth.

  If Gage minded being covered in St. Bernard slobber, he didn’t show it. None of them did anymore, they were so used to Bruiser’s presence.

  Zack had adopted the ungainly mammoth three years before from the local SPCA, when he’d been no more than a puppy. Already a gangly, massive creature at only six months of age, with a huge head and giant paws that were too big for the rest of his body, but a puppy all the same.

  And though Zack wouldn’t admit it under threat of death or castration, the canine was his baby. He doted on the boy, giving him free run of the apartment and feeding him whatever he was eating.

  He swore the dog was a babe magnet, too. Before he’d met and fallen blades-over-brains for the fair-haired Grace, he’d had puck bunnies hanging on him like barnacles on a boat bottom, and insisted it was at least in part due to Bruiser’s irresistibility.

  Or maybe it was just the guy-with-a-dog thing that women found irresistible. Because Dylan was pretty sure that if the ugly brown-and-white mutt had been sitting alone on a street corner, with those droopy eyes, sagging jowls, and lines of spittle hanging from his jaw, most people—men and women alike—would run screaming.

  But he wasn’t here to lament his friend’s strange taste in pets. He was here to gain control of pizza toppings and maybe get a little friendly advice about the situation with Ronnie.

  “Doubtful,” he replied in answer to Zack’s question. Negotiating a nice bank shot to spin the ball past Zack’s defensive line, he brought them another point closer to pepperoni and Canadian bacon. “She threatened to drop an anvil on my head.”

  “An anvil? Who is she, Snidely Whiplash?” Zack wanted to know.

  “More like Dita Von Teese,” Dylan mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  It was one thing for him to harass Ronnie about her screen name and get worked up over the erotic images it created in his brain; it was a whole other to share that sort of thing with his friends. Maybe someday, but not now.

  While he was distracted by fantasies of being tied to the bed while Ronnie loomed over him in hot, skintight S&M gear, Zack shot the ball past him twice in a row to score five points and win the game.

  “Yes!” his friend cheered, pumping his hand in the air. “Anchovies it is.”

  Dylan and Gage both groaned. Dylan grabbed a beer and joined Gage on the sofa while Zack went to phone in the order.

  “We’ve really got to come up with a better way to decide on pizza toppings,” Gage said, propping his feet on the low, glass-topped table.

  “Yeah. He kicks our butts at anything sports-related every single time.”

  “How good do you think he’d be at Rock, Paper, Scissors?”

  “My guess is, he’d go for rock.”

  “We could always challenge him to a game of Scrabble,” Gage added. “That ought to trip him up.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I think the two guys who aren’t getting laid on a regular basis should be the ones to choose what kind of pizza they get. I mean, we deserve some kind of consolation prize, don’t we?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Gage intoned.

  “Oh, yeah?” Dylan turned to the somber, stone-faced cop. “You telling me you’ve been getting some since you split with Jenna? Because your mood lately would indicate otherwise.”

  Gage’s expression turned even darker, which was really saying something. He flipped Dylan the bird at the same time he muttered, “Fuck you.”

  Dylan didn’t take offense at the remark. It wasn’t the first time one of his friends had told him where to go or what he could do with himself, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  And with Gage, they were all willing to cut him a little more slack than usual. He probably shouldn’t have brought the man’s ex-wife into the conversation to begin with. That was still a sore subject and, Dylan suspected, the direct cause of Gage’s continued sullenness. The man had never been much of a talker to begin with, but for the past year or so he’d been practically catatonic compared with his old self.

  “What are we talking about?” Zack wanted to know when he reentered the living room.

  “Dumb jocks,” Gage supplied.

  “And jerks who are getting a regular supply of sex making their friends suffer through anchovies on their pizza.”

  Zack moved to the low, black leather chair that matched the couch and was cocked at an angle in front of the coffee table. The air blew out with a whoosh as he dropped his two-hu
ndred-plus pounds onto its overstuffed seat cushion.

  “Jealousy is an ugly trait, gentlemen. Crack all the jokes you want about my intelligence, I’m still the one who gets to shag a beautiful woman every night and kicked both your asses at foosball. Foosball,” he said again, shaking his head with exaggerated disappointment. “What a couple of wusses. I’d be afraid to get on the ice with you two. I might be brought up on manslaughter charges just for looking at you funny.”

  Dylan and Gage exchanged a glance.

  “When the pizza gets here,” Dylan said, “you distract him. I’ll pay the delivery guy and spit on his slices.”

  “Deal,” Gage agreed.

  Zack made a rude gesture with his right hand. “Yeah, yeah, I’m real scared. Stop whining and tell me more about feeling up the Ice Queen.”

  “I didn’t feel her up. We didn’t get that far.”

  “Still. I know she’s Grace’s friend and all, but I didn’t think she was capable of thawing enough to get her legs apart, let alone wrap one around your ass.”

  Dylan frowned. “Don’t talk about her like that. She’s not that bad.”

  A couple of seconds of dead silence passed, and he knew his friends must be questioning his sanity. From the time Ronnie had first started getting under his skin with her emasculating challenges and razor-sharp tongue, he’d said stuff like that and worse, and Zack and Gage had been there to hear most of it.

  But ever since he’d been in her apartment and she’d actually been civil to him for a short window of time, his opinion of her had begun to shift.

  Not swing a full 180 or anything bizarro like that, but alter. Subtly.

  “It was kind of odd,” he said.

  “Why? Did she have a forked tongue?”

  Dylan frowned. “Not the kiss, just . . . it. The whole visit.”

  The doorbell buzzed and Zack jumped up to retrieve the pizza. He returned in record time, and no sooner had he set the box on the low table than Bruiser’s ears perked up, his head lifted, and he hefted his bulky, two-hundred-pound weight off the couch and over to Zack.

  Zack peeled a slice of pizza away from the rest of the pie, folded it in half, and held it up for the dog, who devoured it practically in one gulp. Only then did Zack pull out a slice for himself and pass the box around to the others.

  Used to Bruiser getting first dibs, they dug into the hot, crusty pie, anchovies and all. And Bruiser, knowing he wasn’t going to get another whole piece of pizza, settled at a spot an equal distance among the three men in the hope of being the recipient of a few crumbs or leftover crust.

  “So go ahead,” Gage put in after they’d each consumed a full slice and downed half a beer. “Tell us what was so odd about your trip to Ronnie’s place.”

  “She was nice to me, for one. Half the time, anyway. And she was wearing these cute little pajamas with basset hounds all over the bottoms and one right in the center of the top. It was disturbing to say the least. I’ve never seen her in anything other than prissy, top-of-the-line business attire.”

  He stopped short of telling them about her screen name. He hadn’t quite come to terms with that one himself.

  Not that he had any particular qualms about spilling her secrets to the world. Thinking back on his Pink Panty–seeking mission into the biker bar on the outskirts of town, he was tempted to rent a billboard and stick the user name up there, right along with a Photoshopped picture of Ronnie in coordinated dominatrix gear.

  But it never hurt to keep some ammunition in the arsenal. He’d save that little piece of information for later, when he was really pissed and needed to vent.

  “She does have a nice set of sweater puppies,” Zack remarked around a mouthful of pizza, “so I get the choice in sleepwear.”

  While his friend was right about Ronnie’s ample assets, the comment still caused Dylan’s jaw to tense.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about . . .” He shrugged, searching for the words to describe his feelings about his time spent at Ronnie’s apartment.

  “I don’t know. You know Ronnie. You’ve seen her at The Penalty Box. She’s always so well put together. Looks like she just stepped off the cover of some fashion magazine, with her designer clothes and shoes, never a hair out of place.”

  “What? Was she a scraggly mess in rags from the Goodwill store when you dropped by?”

  Dylan’s brows knit as he picked pieces of anchovy off his second slice of pizza and fed it to the dog, who had proven long ago that he would eat anything.

  “Nah. Her hair was still damp from the shower, but she looked good enough.” Good enough to eat, if truth be known, but he didn’t say that.

  “It was more the apartment that threw me. It was kind of . . . Spartan. I would have expected something that looked like Martha Stewart had decorated, but instead it was more thrift store mix-and-match. The couch, the TV, the coffee table . . . they had to be at least ten years old—and they looked every minute of it. She had a radio, not a stereo. Not even a CD player that I could see. And a VHS machine, but no DVD player, and hardly any tapes. None of her dishes matched, at least the ones I saw. The artwork on the walls was kind of old-fashioned and almost creepy, like the stuff you see at the dentist’s office. And she had recycle bins next to the kitchen.”

  “Recycling is good,” Zack said. “I recycle. Everybody should.”

  “Don’t you mean Magda recycles for you?” Gage asked, monotone.

  “She’s my housekeeper, it’s her job. But I pay her to do it and make sure no one throws anything recyclable into the trash so she doesn’t have to dig it out.”

  “You Prince Charming, you.”

  This time, Gage was on the receiving end of a single-finger salute.

  “I’m with you on that, and you’re more than welcome to my beer bottle when I’m finished with it, but in a million years would you ever have pictured Veronica Chasen living in anything other than fashion-forward comfort, maybe even near-luxury?”

  “Maybe it’s all hand-me-downs from a dead grandmother with lousy taste or something,” Gage offered.

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe she’s trying to save a buck and doesn’t get much company, so it doesn’t matter,” Zack suggested.

  “That’s just it. Who spends beaucoup bucks on their wardrobe but skimps at home?”

  Zack shrugged. “A woman? Women do all kinds of crazy things for all kinds of crazy-ass reasons. Grace has this weekly face thing she does, and she won’t let me be anywhere near her when she does it. So once a week, she refuses to come over here and won’t let me go over there.” He spun a finger next to his ear to indicate his fiancée was Looney Tunes.

  From his spot on the sofa, Gage cocked his head. “So what are you going to do once you’re married?”

  “Beats me.” He took another big bite of pizza, chewing while he talked. “Hopefully she’ll wait until I’m on the road to go all Night of the Living Dead on me.”

  Bringing the conversation back to Ronnie, Dylan said, “But wouldn’t you think that someone who wanted to pinch pennies or watch their budget would try to save money with everything she buys? How much sense does it make to buy a cheap television set, then spend six hundred dollars on a pair of designer shoes?”

  “Not much,” Zack agreed. “Then again, how much sense does it make to kick your hot and horny boyfriend out of bed because you need to moisturize? Women are nuts half the time. But if you tell them that, they go even nuttier.”

  “It’s better to just mind your own business and let them be,” Gage volunteered. “That’s why God created Monday Night Football and Saturday-night hockey games . . . to give us guys a break and a few hours of much-needed sanity.”

  Dylan eyed his two friends, tapping a thumb against the side of his rapidly warming bottle of Michelob. “You two ever fly this little theory past your significant others?”

  They exchanged a glance, then broke out in wide, matching grins. “Hell, no,” they both replied at exactly
the same time.

  “Well, I can’t figure her out, that’s for sure. All this time, I’ve thought she was this steel-heeled bitch who could burn a man to ashes at fifty paces. Now I’m not so sure. Something about the way she lives doesn’t jibe with the woman you see in public.”

  Zack raised a brow and washed down his last bite of pizza with his last swig of beer. “You’re the reporter,” he said, wiping his palms on his gray Champion shorts. “Why don’t you investigate her and see what’s up?”

  Dylan hadn’t thought of himself as much of an investigative reporter lately. Not since he’d gotten stuck writing lackluster columns that mostly revolved around trying not to let a woman with a chip on her shoulder from a rival paper kick his ass.

  But his friend had a point. There were bells going off in his head, telling him that all was not as it seemed with prissy Miss Veronica Chasen. And suddenly, he very much wanted to find out what made her tick.

  He just hoped he didn’t discover that she was a time bomb, about to blow up in his face.

  Ronnie bustled into The Penalty Box behind Jenna and Grace. It was just the three of them tonight; everyone else from their knitting group had opted to skip the trip for after-meeting drinks.

  As soon as Ronnie saw Dylan sitting with Zack and Gage at a table in the center of the bar, she began to wish she’d done the same. She just had no stomach for dealing with him tonight.

  Not anymore, anyway. She’d already had to bite her tongue, curl her fingers, and count to a thousand when he’d shown up at The Yarn Barn for her previously Jackass-Free weekly knitting meeting.

  Everywhere she turned lately, he seemed to be there. Her apartment for one-on-one tutoring . . . he’d dropped by again two days after The Kiss, and just as she’d flippantly demanded that night, he’d brought Chinese.

  She hated him for that. Not only for showing up again—at her home and sanctuary—when she would have much preferred he disappear from her life altogether. But also because it appeared she’d finally met a man who actually listened and followed through, and wouldn’t you know it had to be him.