Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy

by Dee Bridgnorth

  I began to sort. I like this job. Most of the guys hate it. It’s actually supposed to be Beau’s job. He’s supposed to do it after hours. You might have noticed by now that Beau didn’t necessarily stay on-task after hours very often. So here I was evaluating tread and looking for spots where the steel belts might have worn through the rubber. Then I would put the tires on the rack or into a new pile where the recycle guy would come pick them up.

  It was hot work. Good work. And soon enough I could feel my whole body calm down. My mind stopped spinning and I finally stopped for a moment to look up at the sky. The sun was already fading. It was December. Early December when the days were getting so short that they practically ended at four thirty in the afternoon. It was a good time for a fire and some hot chocolate. I wondered if that was what I should do when I headed home. A little fire. A little music. Some hot chocolate. A book. It sounded like heaven.

  “They said that I could find you out here.”

  It is quite possible that I actually felt my whole body tense up at the sound of her voice. I spun around to find Tansy Economides standing in the yard with her hands on her hips. She was staring at me as though she were looking at the lowest life form on the planet. I bristled. I could not help it. Who the hell did this woman think she was anyway?

  “Oh yeah?” I said sarcastically. “Did they also tell you that customers aren’t allowed back here?”

  “You just got done complaining at me on the phone a few hours ago that I’m not a real customer anyway because I didn’t pay for my services,” she retorted. “So I guess rules for customers don’t apply to me anyway.”

  I opened my mouth to say something back. Something even nastier. But something about her expression stopped me. She looked like she was expecting it. Maybe she would have even welcomed the verbal sparring match. But the truth was that I was too tired for that shit.

  So I shook my head and snorted. “The rules exist to keep people from being hurt. But you’re evidently above that. Fine. I’ll come inside right now and get your invoice and you can become a paying customer.”

  “You know it still really pisses me off that you’re going to stand there and double charge me for something like this. To say nothing of the smell that has been plaguing my car ever since you guys worked on it.” She folded her arms over her chest and looked extremely self-righteous.

  I stared at her. The woman was tiny. I am six feet one inch tall. This chick could not be any more than five foot two or three. She was wearing these brown boots that had been spotted by the wet. The leather looked cheap and the boots went so far up her legs that the bucket top was practically covering her knees. Her camel-colored suede skirt rested just above the tops of her boots. She had nice curvy thighs and an extremely round backside.

  There is something incredibly feminine about a chick with a round booty. At least that’s what I’ve always thought. But Tansy Economides was round in the chest too. She was one of those softly curved women who makes you want to snuggle them close in front of a fire.

  Except this one. She had incredible soft dark brown hair that fell in long curls that bounced each time she moved. Her brown eyes were equally soft and brown. Her face was expressive. And that’s where the attraction ended. Because her lips might have been the kind of thing to give a man naughty thoughts and erotic dreams, but the words that just kept rolling out of her mouth were guaranteed to cool a guy off and give him frostbite.

  “You’re not even going to respond to that?” She snapped. “I just informed you that you double charged me and you made my car smell like a locker room.”

  I turned and walked into the building. I took the shortcut from the garage bays to my office. The door is tiny and I had to turn sideways to squeeze my shoulders through it. I really wished that we had a receptionist or a secretary or something. That way I could just slap a bill in Miss Mouth’s hand and tell her to pay the lady on her way out. But hiring another employee would have been a ridiculous waste of money.

  Tansy did not have to squeeze through the door. She just marched into my office and stood in the corner with her arms crossed and a belligerent expression on her face. Somehow looking at her managed to push all of my buttons at once. As in, the woman pissed me off so badly that I was pretty sure I was about to start getting really, really rude.

  “Well?” Tansy said in a snippy voice. “What about the repairs you made at the party last week?”

  “Here you go.” I thrust a comprehensive invoice at her.

  I say comprehensive because she had pissed me off so thoroughly that I had even added in mileage for driving to and from the auto parts store. I saw her face gradually go slack until she was gaping in shock.

  “You’re out of your mind!” She was sputtering. “You charged me for the trip to the auto parts store?”

  “You didn’t seem very appreciative. In fact, you’ve started to act like mechanics are some kind of public servant that fixes your car for free,” I reminded her, not caring how nasty I sounded. “So I charged you for every cent of my time, trouble, and expense since doing you a favor apparently doesn’t sit well with you anyway.”

  Her eyes were bulging. “This is all bullshit!”

  “Except this is what I, and then my mechanic, Beau, did to your car.”

  “You were fixing the same problem!” she insisted. “And I don’t know what Beau did, but he made my car smell like a locker room!”

  “You know, I’m confused.”

  “About what?” She waved that invoice so that it crinkled madly. “It seems like you’re pretty sure of yourself from where I’m standing.”

  I ignored her theatrics. “I’m confused because if you’re such a good mechanic who knows so much about cars, why would you need me to help you at the party anyway.”

  “I’m not a mechanic,” she said quickly. “I don’t know how to fix a car.”

  “And yet you’re going to stand there and diagnose the issue, decide what parts are needed, and then apparently you’re going to tell us how to do our jobs too by choosing how long or how often we work on the car.” I was probably being ruder than I needed to be. I could have discounted that invoice a lot. But I didn’t want to anymore. I didn’t feel inclined to help her at all.

  Why was that?

  “I didn’t diagnose the problem!” she argued. “I just told you what the issue was. If it’s the same issue both times then it stands to reason that it’s the same mechanical malfunction.”

  “No. It doesn’t.” I could feel myself vibrating with anger. Why was I so mad at her? It was almost irrational. Then it hit me. The woman reminded me strongly of my late wife. Late because she had died so many years ago now that I often forgot how long it had been.

  I expected her to keep arguing because let’s face it, that’s exactly what Cari would have done. But Tansy didn’t keep pressing me to agree with her. She just tilted her head and gave me a look that was skeptical at best.

  “You’re saying that when you turn the key and the car doesn’t start, that there is usually more than one reason why?”

  For the love of God! All of a sudden the woman had decided to be reasonable? Why? What had happened to change her mind? I didn’t understand and I wasn’t sure, but I think it made me even more suspicious of her on the whole.

  Chapter Seven

  Tansy

  I was embarrassed. I was holding in my hand an invoice that told me I owed this man four hundred dollars. And change. I wasn’t worried about the change. I was more worried about the fact that I did not actually have four hundred dollars. Not right now. My bank account was pathetically empty. I had gas money for the week and a little bit of cash to buy groceries. But for the most part I was totally and completely broke. And of course this didn’t do a thing about the smell. Nobody seemed to want to admit that there was a smell.

  And then there was the whole thing about being so desperate to find a way around this repair bill that I had behaved like a complete bitch. And now I felt stupid. I’m not
stupid. I’m really not. I understand that there are probably a thousand little processes that happen when you start a car. All of them are not related to one issue, but that did not mean one issue was caused by one problem either.

  “I’m sorry.” I realized that I sounded stiff and probably not all that genuine. It was kind of hard to spit those words out though. So I cleared my throat and tried again. “I realize that I probably haven’t been—well, let’s just say that I have not communicated very well in the last few days. I’ve been distracted, but that’s no excuse for me to basically accuse you of lying or making up a bill.”

  He glanced at the invoice in his hand. “You get a whole lot more bees with a pound of sugar than a pound of lead.”

  “What?” Bees? Sugar? Lead? What was he talking about?

  He actually rolled his eyes at me. I did not appreciate the attitude, but I had been the one to set the tone for this conversation so that made me feel like I had to cut him some slack. “I’m just saying that there are ways to be nice and appreciative that will make someone want to do you a favor, like not charging you mileage or not charging you for a repair job done in front of the valet stand at a party. But snapping at that person and being rude is pretty much going to get you nothing but an itemized bill for every bit of trouble that they suffered in order to give you a helping hand.”

  “So you’re saying if I had been nicer, I wouldn’t be holding a bill for four hundred bucks in my hand?” I breathed in and breathed out and struggled mightily with the urge to throw that invoice at him and give him yet another piece of my mind. What kind of bullshit was that?

  He lowered himself into his executive chair and leaned back as though he were some kind of snooty Wall Street executive. “Exactly.”

  I stared at him. Valentino Alvarez is an incredibly handsome man. There is absolutely no denying that. If you’ve ever heard of a man described as “earthy” and wondered what that means, it’s probably because you’ve never met a guy who makes you feel like you’re getting in touch with your primal hormones. By this I mean the man has some weird genetic anomaly that makes women want to take off their clothes and beg him for sex because they just instinctively know that this guy will make great big strapping babies to ensure the survival of our species.

  The Alvarez men are Hispanic. I remember asking my friend Lena about that once. She’s engaged to Val’s brother. She told me that they aren’t Latino. Meaning definitely not from Latin America. The Alvarez family is from old Mexico. As in conquistadores, Spanish Dons, and roots that probably go all the way back to the founding of California. Lena claims that Val and Damion’s mother is super fierce about her ancient Spanish heritage. As in you do not refer to her or her family as anything other than Spanish.

  As a woman whose parents are so Greek that they still fly the Greek flag in front of their house, I totally get that. But whether he’s Spanish or Mexican or Latin Spanish American, Valentino Alvarez is hot. As in dark wiry hair with a tendency to curl around his neck and forehead. His skin is the color of melted caramel. His eyes are deep and dark and so brown that they remind me of chocolate.

  Food. Chocolate and caramel. Why is it that I feel so inclined to describe yummy men in terms reminiscent of ice cream toppings I swore off years ago to avoid increasing the width of my booty? And of course, Valentino is also extremely well formed. This is just a polite way of saying the guy is built like a brick shithouse. Which, by the way, what does that even mean? Because Valentino Alvarez has shoulders so wide he has to turn sideways to go through regular doorways. His back is broad and muscular. And I will totally admit to watching him sling enormous tires around out back before he realized that I was watching just so I could see his butt flex beneath his coveralls. Lip smacking, panty-soaking hot. That was Valentino Alvarez.

  “Why do you hate women?” I licked my lips and prepared for fireworks. But I wanted to ask. I was dying to know. And since this guy had a warning label all over him that said LOOK DON’T TOUCH, I figured I might as well just ask and get it over with. “Or is it just me? I feel like it’s not. I feel like you hate all women.”

  “I don’t hate women,” he growled right back at me without even stopping to think. “I don’t know why you would even say that. Don’t you think it’s unfair for you to stand there and accuse me of price gouging you, lying about repairs that I made or that my staff made, and then saying that my response to that bullshit is because I hate women? Really? How about I just hate bullshit?”

  “Come on,” I coaxed. “You have some kind of secret you’re hiding. I know you are. Nobody acts like you do without a reason.”

  “Acts like I do?” He looked absolutely outraged. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  I waved my hand to encompass all of him because I wasn’t really sure how to answer that. “You know, this brooding handsome hero thing you have going on.”

  “You think I’m handsome?” He actually looked incredulous and not flattered. Was that good or bad? I couldn’t make a decision about that without more information. “That’s rich. You’re treating me as though I am the lowest life form on the planet.”

  I pointed at him, barely suppressing the urge to scream Ha! “And you’re acting as though you blame me for all of the female screw-ups on the planet! Ergo—acting like you hate women. So how about you just tell me what happened.” I was already rolling my eyes. “Did some woman break your heart? Did she run off with another man? Did you get cheated on? Did some woman tell you that your dream to become a mechanic was stupid? Did they make fun of your bank account balance? Come on! Fess up!”

  “Woman,” he said with a shake of his head. “You are one of the pushiest and most annoying beeyotches I have ever come across! And that’s saying something considering I regularly deal with women who claim to know more than I do about their cars.”

  I couldn’t help it. A noise of total outrage slipped out of my throat and made me sound like a turkey getting its head chopped off to become a holiday meal. His words were so incredibly rude and crass and startling that I didn’t know what to do. And then suddenly I couldn’t hold it in any longer.

  I started laughing. Hard. Like laughing so hard that I was snorting and choking and probably sounded like some really weird television character. I could not help it. He was so hateful and yet he could make it sound totally blasé and almost reasonable.

  “Why are you laughing?” Now he sounded disgruntled. He was sitting in his worn leather chair with the cracked leather arms and the faded headrest with his arms crossed and a dark look on his face. “It’s not funny.”

  “Seriously?” I snorted. I actually snorted. Ugh! Talk about undignified. But really, what did I care? This man obviously disliked me for some reason that probably had nothing to do with me. “You don’t see anything funny about this whole interaction?”

  “No.”

  “We’re both behaving the way that we are because we’re all defensive thanks to other people in our pasts. Now we can’t even have a healthy interaction between the two of us because we’re so obsessed with making sure that we don’t expose ourselves to possible hurt or disrespect.” I figured this sounded pretty straightforward, so why did he look so mystified?

  “You’re nuts.”

  “And you are blaming me for the sins of your past girlfriends,” I told him firmly. “So, who was it. High school? Or later. College maybe? I know you’re older than your brother. How many years have you been nursing this grudge?”

  “Oh my God!” he groaned. “You just told me that you understand that I’m pretty much hostile where you’re concerned. How in the hell does it follow that I would want to sit here and reminisce about my past emotional scars with you?”

  “Right.” I nodded. This was a valid question. “It’s because you don’t care about me or what I think and because I’m curious and I don’t care about you or what you think. So you can sit here and unload on me and it won’t matter because there’s no relationship.”

  “You are out of
your mind.”

  “High school girlfriend?” I wondered out loud. “Wait. No. You got married young. I bet that’s it. You actually seem like the type.”

  “Both,” he snapped. “It was both. So, could you please just stop picking at me? I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

  “Both.” I puzzled that through in my head. And then of course, it became totally obvious. “Ah. You married your high school sweetheart. Yikes! I can’t even imagine. But I know that happens a lot.” I considered where we were. “Especially in this town. Holy cow. The question de jour that people from St. Louis ask every single new face that they meet is where did you go to high school. We are so stuck in that era of our lives!”

  I could have waxed poetic about that for days. I didn’t though. I shut up. I wondered if he was going to boot me out of my office. Actually, why hadn’t he booted me out of his office? It wasn’t like I was going to pay this bill right now. Was he waiting because he thought that I was? That was embarrassing.

  “Are you done?” He looked up at me with one sarcastic eyebrow lifted in question. How is it possible for an eyebrow to be sarcastic? Not sure, but he managed it. “Because if you are, we can get on with you paying your bill and then you may leave.”

  “Yeah. About the bill.”

  I swear that steam started to roll out of his nostrils. “What about the bill?”

  I pressed my lips into a firm line. I couldn’t fold or back down. “Let’s just say that I could write you a check, but that would just irritate both of us a little more. I don’t have four hundred dollars. I have to wait until I sell a house.”

  “Are you kidding me right now?”

  “No.” I narrowed my gaze at him. “Do you think I like having to borrow rent money from my parents? Or how about eating soup out of a can day in and day out because it’s all I can afford? I’m working on it. Okay? But it’s not easy to make it in a city where there are about a billion real estate agents. But I have a listing that’s very likely to sell soon. And then I have two prospective buyers that I’m currently working with to find a home. So when those close, I’ll have the money to pay this bill.”