Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Huh?”

  “Turn the car off!” He shook his head, muttered something, and then pushed past me to reach inside and turn the key off. Then he pointed to a door that said Waiting Room. “Just go in there and sit a spell. All right?”

  I got a wave of stench from his horrible body odor and hurried to comply before I was overcome and wound up puking right there on the shop floor. He already had my hood up and was poking around in there as though he knew what he was doing.

  By the time I got into the waiting room, I was just glad to be warm and somewhat dry. The weather outside was frightful. Unfortunately, there was no fire inside to be delightful and I couldn’t decide why my brain was going down that holiday road anyway. I had to get to the office and put Stella Stein’s house in the MLS so I could get started at soon as possible with selling it. The poor woman was desperate and this was going to be tricky thanks to the lazy Rory.

  My phone started to ring. I groaned. I should have been cheering, but it was unlikely that this was a potential sale on the line. Especially when my shattered phone screen showed me an image of an older woman with enormous red lips wearing even more enormous dark fashion sunglasses. It was my mother. Yay.

  “Yes, Mama,” I intoned into the phone. “I really can’t talk right now. I have to finish getting my car fixed and then I’ve got to go into work.”

  “You’re working on a Sunday?” My mother clucked disapprovingly. “What kind of career requires such a thing, eh?”

  “Really?” I didn’t bother to try and hide the sarcasm in my voice. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Of course not!” Mama told me in her most mournful tone of voice. “I just feel so bad for you to be working like this for no reason.”

  “You mean instead of reporting for some waitress who didn’t show up this morning because she had car trouble or is afraid to drive?” My voice might have been getting louder and louder. I don’t know. But it felt louder. “You know, because real estate has awful hours, but the restaurant business doesn’t? Mama, that’s not fair!”

  “Ah, yes!” Mama said, backpedaling so quickly I could practically hear the squeal of tires in her head. “But if you were working for the restaurant, you would not have worked the other six days this week too!”

  “Doubtful.” I pursed my lips. I wanted to shout and yell at my mother that when I had worked for her in high school I had been a seven-day-a-week fill-in employee because Mama felt like she should be able to think of me as the ultimate substitute. After all, being part of the family meant I had to sacrifice for them too. But reminding her of that was pointless. She would never admit it or acknowledge anything.

  I started to speak again, but she beat me to it. “Tansy,” Mother said in her best no-nonsense tone of voice. “Your father and I are worried about you.”

  My father. Ha! Dad didn’t worry about anything. Ever. He was totally absorbed in cooking Greek food in his Greek Maiden restaurant and making new and exciting versions of harisa sauce or his personal favorite—tabouleh. The guy was a total foodie. I doubted that he remembered he even had a daughter.

  “Your father,” Mama said again. “He’s found a man from a good family in Greece.”

  “Wait. What?” I felt like my ears were about to fall off. “He found a man? For what? To cook for him? I fail to see how this has anything to do with me!”

  “Well, dear,” Mama was hedging. That was never good. “The man is a good cook, yes. But he needs a Visa to come over here from Greece.”

  “Wait. No. No!” I could not believe that she was actually saying this out loud. “Mama, I am not going to help Dad with some scheme to get a green card for his new cook! You must be out of your mind!”

  I hung up. I could not stand it. I was shaking with rage and embarrassment and confusion and I needed to stop listening to this nonsense or I was afraid that I might actually be in danger of going crazy. Green cards and cooks from Greece. Talk about taking one for the team!

  Chapter Four

  Valentino

  “You what?” I was absolutely sure that I had misheard what Beau was telling me. I had to have misheard it. “You let her in on a Sunday and then you used my tools, my electricity, and my parts to fix her car for free?”

  Beau nodded proudly. “Yeah, cause she was standing out there freezing and stuff and just banging on the door. The lady didn’t even know it was Sunday.” Beau turned to Alex and made a face. “Can you imagine? So I fixed up her car and sent her on her way.”

  “And who was this person?” I tried not to look at Alex. He was deliberately not looking at me too. The other mechanics in my shop were all used to Beau’s sometimes erratic behavior by now. Beau had been employed at my shop longer than anyone else. I think he’s actually related to my mother in some distant way. I’m not sure. “Did you at least get a name or a driver’s license so we can send her a bill?”

  “Why would you want to do that?” Beau scoffed.

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you intend to get paid for the work you did on her car yesterday?”

  “Oh. I didn’t think about it. I guess so.” He scratched his greasy head. “But you know, you told me that since I’m still living here on the property I got to be looking out for people here after hours. So I guess I figured it was just one of those times when I was here after hours and there was an emergency.”

  “So you don’t think you’re going to get paid?” That was the labor cost at least. It said nothing for the parts or the mess that he had left in the bay after he had fixed the lady’s car.

  “Oh, I reckon I should get paid.” Beau tucked his hands into his coveralls and rocked back and forth on the heels of his steel-toed work boots. “You know”—Beau now winked at Alex—“since I was fixing your mistake and all.”

  “Excuse me?” I felt my eyebrows shoot up so fast and so far that they were probably tangled in my hairline. “You were fixing my mistake?”

  “Yeah.” Beau bobbed his head with no small amount of enthusiasm. “She said you fixed her car at some party the other day, but that you’d obviously done a shabby job of it because the car was still having the same problem. So I got under there to look, and whoo-wee!” Beau made some expansive gesture with his hands. “You must’ve been in a hurry or something because that thing was a mess!”

  Sudden understanding did not make me feel any calmer. I pinched the bridge of my nose and wondered if the headache that was coming on right now was likely to be with me for the rest of the day. “Tansy Economides.”

  “What?” Beau frowned and then stuck his pinky inside his ear and wiggled it around as though he thought his ears were clogged. “What’d you say?”

  “Tansy Economides!” I snapped. “That was the name of the woman. And did you happen to look at the battery cables and the new battery under the hood?”

  Alex was now snorting and choking as he tried to avoid laughing out loud. At this point I could see Mike and Paul over on the other side of the shop craning their necks as though they had just realized there was something incredibly amusing going down over here. I didn’t care to make a spectacle of myself or even of Beau. But I could not let this stand. I had made a mess. Really?

  “So you saw the work that I did the other day at the party in front of my brother’s place,” I prodded Beau.

  He just shrugged. “Oh, I guess so.”

  “And do you honestly imagine that in that period of time, at the party, I somehow decided to break a bunch of hoses to create about a dozen vacuum leaks, totally ruin the radiator, and then install a dirty oil filter two sizes too small and fill the engine with rotten motor oil after putting some nasty brake fluid in at the same time?”

  I could actually see Beau working this through in his head. He was working backwards from everything that I’d said and I think he was coming to the right conclusion. But with Beau you never really knew. Finally he bobbed his head up and down. “I think I get it, boss. You’re saying that all that stuff was wrong when you first looked at th
e car.”

  “Yep.” Oh good. He’d gotten it. Alex had given up and was belly laughing so loud that it was echoing off the cavernous ceiling in the shop. “That car is a death trap. I don’t know how it’s still running. But I feel like we are probably going to keep fixing pieces of it, which will in turn make other things fail because we’ve stirred up the dust—so to speak.”

  This was a common problem with the average driver. I could not count the number of times some idiot had come into my shop and bragged that their car was so amazingly sound that it didn’t even need oil changes. As if regular maintenance was somehow a sign that the car was defective instead of normal.

  “What did you fix?” I demanded of Beau. “Tell me exactly what you did.”

  “Fuel filter,” Beau grunted. “It was so clogged that the engine wasn’t getting any gas.”

  I exhaled a sigh. This was probably going to mean that the engine would start having idle issues or something else. The sudden influx of fuel would mean that Tansy Economides had more power. More power would put additional pressure on those faulty vacuum hoses and the engine itself, which had almost no viable motor oil in it. Which reminded me…

  “Did you add any motor oil?” I asked Beau in a clipped voice.

  He nodded. For all of his faults, Beau was a really good mechanic. That’s why I kept him around. He was a religious fluid checker. “A quart.”

  “So I added a quart last week and you added a quart yesterday. Did you happen to notice if there was an enormous oil leak underneath the thing when it left the shop?”

  “Yeah. I figured that was just the way it is.” Beau shrugged. “You know how people are. If they don’t have time or money to change a mail seal or an oil pan gasket, they just keep adding oil.”

  He wasn’t wrong about that. But I had to feel more than a little worried that Tansy Economides was speeding around St. Louis County in a car that was pretty much ready to quit at any second. It wasn’t that I particularly liked the woman. She was annoying as hell. And pushy. But she was hardworking and single and it was readily obvious that nobody had taught her squat about cars.

  “Get back to work,” I told Alex and Beau. “I’ll go and have a chat with my brother. He’ll have Tansy’s number.”

  Beau shrugged. It was obviously no skin off his nose. Great. It was always nice to know that my employee was just so conscientious and caring of my time. And my resources. Not that changing a fuel filter was much in the way of parts. It did not require anything more than something we carried plenty of in stock. It was more the whole mentality of gee, the mechanic must have fixed it wrong because now the car is doing the same thing. The car wasn’t doing the same thing. The symptoms might have been similar to someone who didn’t know anything about what was happening under their hood, but that didn’t mean the cause was the same.

  I shoved my way into the waiting room and then entered my cluttered little office. My ancient desktop computer was whirring away as though it were solving all of the world’s problems on its own. I didn’t care about the world. But it would have been nice if the thing could solve my problems. Like the problem where my quarterly taxes were due and I had four different customers who owed me at least ten grand between them for various engine and transmission rebuilds.

  I don’t know why everyone always assumes a repair shop will take payment plans. You give them the estimate. Tell them that you accept cash or charge. They agree. They sign. You do the work, and then they say they want to pay a hundred now and a hundred a month for the next six years. What. The. Hell? Oh great. I’ll just pay my mechanics a hundred now and a hundred a month for the next six years. How do you think that will go?

  I stared at the invoice on the desktop. This was pretty much exactly that situation. I had the guy’s truck in my lot. He owed me six thousand dollars for a new transmission. The vehicle was almost brand spanking new. Do not ask me how he managed to burn up a transmission on a truck that had less than forty thousand miles on it. He did. He wanted it fixed. I fixed it. The labor involved in something like that is far more than people can possibly imagine. Yeah. We have all the tools and the lifts and the experience, but just because me and my guys know what we’re doing does not give us some kind of weird Jedi mind powers.

  Yeah. I was going to call my brother first. I grabbed my cell phone and dialed. It was Monday morning. My nerdy-ass brother would be behind his desk surveying his IT recruiting empire at nine o’clock on a Monday morning.

  “Damion Alvarez’s office,” a breathy feminine voice answered. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah.” I could picture the big boobs and curvy ass of my brother’s administrative assistant and wondered why his future wife tolerated that bimbo being anywhere near her fiancé. “This is Val. I want to talk to my brother. And if I can’t talk to Damion, get me Zelda.”

  Zelda was my brother’s personal assistant. She sometimes answered his phone calls, but for the most part she was kept hopping by all of the ridiculous paperwork that Damion seemed determined to bury himself in.

  “Please hold.” There was a definite edge to the bimbo’s voice. Most of the people in Damion’s office hated me. At least until they wanted me to hook them up with a cheap brake job or something else of that nature. Typical in my opinion.

  “Hello, Valentino. How are you this morning?” The smooth cultured and slightly aged voice of Zelda was a relief. Maybe I had called hoping that Damion would be too busy on a Monday morning to talk. My brother was a bit of a jackass most of the time. This, of course, just meant that he was full of himself and honestly believed that he was better than everyone else.

  “I’m doing just fine, Zelda.” I tried my best to smile into the phone and will that to be true. “I was hoping that you might be able to help me with a phone number or at least contact information.”

  “Of course.” Zelda was already in work mode. I could hear it in her voice. “Who are you looking to contact?”

  “Tansy Economides.” I nearly tripped over the tongue twister of a last name. Economides. Who had a name like that anyway?

  “Of course! Tansy.” Zelda’s curiosity was evident, but she didn’t give into the urge to pump me for information, which I appreciated. “Can I just email this to you? That might be easier.”

  “Oh. Sure. Thanks. I guess I didn’t actually think about that,” I admitted to Zelda. Then I wondered if I should ask about Damion. “Is Damion doing all right?”

  That sounded ridiculous. Like I was inquiring after some vague acquaintance. Great. She was probably thinking that I was digging for some particular bit of info on my brother.

  But Zelda mentioned nothing if she did think that. The woman was perfectly cordial. “Damion is actually out of the office today.”

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I felt my mouth pop open.

  Zelda cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. I thought that you knew. He and Lena took your parents to see the little country inn that they’ve rented for the wedding festivities. They were gone all weekend and won’t be back until tomorrow.”

  “Uh huh.” I hadn’t thought overmuch about the fact that I hadn’t seen or heard from my parents all weekend. Now I wondered why nobody had ever bothered to mention this to me. Dad didn’t run the garage anymore, but what if I had needed his help with some business matter? I should be informed that he was out of the area. Right? “So the four of them spent the entire weekend at some inn?”

  “Yes.”

  Nothing more. Just yes. Hmm. Okay. I suppose it was nice of my brother to pay for my parents to have a little vacation. They didn’t do that kind of thing very often. Our family had always lived life around the garage. When you were self-employed and ran your own small business, you worked hellish long hours. It didn’t leave much time for anything else. Now that my folks were retired, maybe it was good for them to get out and see things.

  Of course this will never happen for me. But whatever. I’m single. I’ll be single. And why would I need to take some stupid vacation
weekend at an old moldy inn in some back woods wedding destination?

  “Well, Zelda, thanks so much for the information. You have yourself a really nice day,” I told her with probably a little more cheer than was normal. I might have even sounded forced. Gee. Wonder why?

  “Have a great day, Valentino!” The line clicked and Zelda’s friendly presence was gone.

  I poked at the invoice on my desk. I was now officially feeling crabby. It was the perfect time to call and tell some guy that I was going to keep his truck as collateral until he figured out a way to pay off his bill. I was in such a bad mood there would be no chance I’d cut him any slack. Then I’d get the money to pay my damn taxes. Wow. This would be the highlight of the entire quarter. Isn’t my life exciting?

  Chapter Five

  Tansy

  “What’s that smell?” Ray Fines leaned away from my car as though a huge purple-headed monster had come out when I opened the driver’s door.

  I made a face. It wasn’t like I hadn’t noticed the smell. I was just trying my best to ignore it. Ray apparently wasn’t feeling that generous. He would probably say that he was just too sensitive to that kind of thing. Ray Fines always looks like a million bucks. But that’s partially because he’s flaming gay and knows how to work it.

  Ray tossed his perfectly coiffed blond hair and put out his hand, palm up. “Girlfriend, I am not riding with you in this car. I refuse to arrive at that open house smelling like a locker room.”

  “Locker room?” I scoffed. “Come on. It’s not that bad. I had the car worked on yesterday. That’s all. The guy probably spilled some fluids or something. I’m sure it will wear off.”

  Ray tilted his head and propped his hand on his hip. He was wearing an expensive custom suit and these cute little zip-up half boots that seemed to be doing pretty damn well in the sloppy parking lot. It was like they actually repelled the water. Unlike my cheap knock off knee-high boots that looked as though they were now tri-colored and absolutely soggy with the nasty water they were soaking up.