Hope Entangles: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (Book 2 of 3)

by Alice Bello

  Jacob…

  Why did that name mean something to me?

  As if it were a battered VHS copy instead of my own memory, I could almost see a stringy, far too skinny guy walking side by side with my huge, jock brother. They both had letterman jackets on, but this guy’s jacket was far too large for his bird-like frame.

  If he’d been taller he would look more like a basketball player than a member of the football team.

  I could see him, though, over and over again, helping me pick up my books—I was a klutz in high school, and was always dropping them.

  And he must have helped me pick them up a hundred times.

  I had never really looked at him. No matter what, he was a jock, like my brother. I’d been looking for a man with a dangerous, artistic air to him.

  Jacob. Jake…

  Had that been him?

  I heard footsteps on my dinky back porch. I lurched up off the stool and fought off the impulse to grab a sharp, pointy knife from my cutlery drawer.

  The unmistakable metallic sound of a key sliding into a lock made my heart leap up into my throat. No one had a key to my house.

  What the…

  The back door came open and Bette slipped in, pulling it closed behind her and locking it.

  I gaped at her as she sashayed into my kitchen and pulled out two coffee mugs from the cupboard.

  “What in the world is happening on your front porch?” she queried.

  “You have a key?” I didn’t care that I sounded totally pissed off.

  She turned and came over to the floating island, setting down a fresh mug of coffee beside the stool I’d been sitting on, and waving my question off with a wave of her hand. “I had one made up ages ago.”

  With everything that had happened the last two weeks, and as much as I knew about Bette’s difficulty with boundaries, I really couldn’t stay shocked.

  “Of course you did.”

  “Now,” Bette said eagerly, “about the women getting ready to throw down on your porch?”

  “You know I’m going straight to the hardware store for new locks as soon as the coast is clear.”

  Bette opened her eyes in doe-like innocence. “Why not just go to Wal-Mart?”

  I stared at her hard enough to put a dent in the side of a car.

  “You know exactly why I can’t go to Wal-Mart!”

  Bette cocked her head. “Oh, I meant another Wal-Mart. There are five others in the San Antonio area.”

  Somehow I didn’t think she was entirely on the up and up. She was acting too naïve, and her voice had that tour guide cadence.

  She picked up her cup of coffee and took a careful sip. “You don’t still have any lingering feelings for Jake, do you?”

  Okay, that was a weird question.

  Of course I still had feelings for him! But that was pretty damn pathetic, wasn’t it?

  I shook my head. “No, none at all. I just don’t want to go through the hassle of facing him right now.” Liar, liar, pants on fire.

  Bette’s face was strangely expressionless. She was either hiding something, or she’d caught my mother’s emotional detachment syndrome.

  My phone rang. I picked it up and looked at the caller ID.

  Raphael.

  I took the call.

  “I’m going to get even with you no matter how long it takes!”

  “Now, now… I was just being neighborly and helping old friends reconnect.”

  Bullshit. “You’re going to need reconnecting when I get through with you.”

  He laughed. The infuriating asshole laughed at me!

  “First you wanted my head, and now it’s my balls.”

  “I never said—”

  “Are there any parts of me you’re not coveting?”

  I hung up on him.

  Bette hid her smile behind her coffee mug. That was until her phone started playing I’m Sexy and I Know It.

  “Really?” I growled.

  She smiled beatifically and then accepted the call. “Raff! What’s up?”

  Raff?

  She listened, she smiled even wider. “He wants me to ask who’s re-enacting Clash of the Titans on your front porch.” She listened some more and giggled. “And would you like him to call law enforcement for you?”

  I lunged across the floating island and grabbed Bette’s phone out of her hand.

  “If you cause me any more trouble, you… you…”

  “I have fresh coffee and banana nut bread.”

  Banana nut bread? “You…”

  “I just baked it. It’s still warm.” Raphael’s voice was like melted butter.

  “I…”

  “There are no homicidal women camped out on my front porch.”

  I sighed. “We’ll be right over.”

  I hung up, grabbed the Spencers’ sack with the novelty mug and started for the back door. “Come on, Judas.” I cricked my finger at Bette. “We’ve been invited for coffee at the neighbor’s.”

  Bette fell in behind me, humming a jaunty tune. I think it was the theme song to Green Acres.

  Chapter 14

  We stole across the side yard toward Raphael’s house, the sound of high strung, well-educated women verbally bashing each other our soundtrack. Well, that and Paula barking out curse words.

  Raphael stood in his open backdoor. I suddenly realized the sheets of plastic and work tools were gone, and what was left was a beautifully remodeled back porch/deck combo, with a top of the line grill, mini fridge and the biggest hot tub I’d ever seen.

  How had they gotten all this done in one day? It must have cost a fortune…

  I stopped and gave Raphael the dirty look he deserved.

  In return he just smiled wider, looking even more handsome, wearing a muscle hugging black t-shirt with some sort of math or Greek lettering on it.

  Bastard.

  I walked past him into the kitchen, jamming my knuckles into his six pack abdominals as I handed him the Spencers’ bag.

  Just touching him gave me a little thrill, as if I had a low grade fever. He groaned over dramatically, but never stopped smiling.

  “Mi casa es su casa, ladies,” he crooned. “So who are all those angry ladies on Hope’s front porch?”

  I went right for the coffee and banana nut bread, cut off a four-inch slab and slapped it on one of the plates Raphael had set out.

  Don’t look at me that way! I eat when I’m nervous.

  Bette, still acting beyond strange, bee-lined it straight for Raphael’s open laptop. “The first two were Hope’s ex’s mother and sister,” Bette said absently. “The late comer was her mother.”

  Raphael made a low whistle and a scowl, pouting his luscious lips.

  I just stared at Bette. “What, do you have my porch bugged too?”

  She tried to look apologetic as she pulled her mini listening device from her ear. “I just had my binoculars out, so I kinda caught the whole thing.”

  I shoved a huge bite of banana nut bread in my mouth and then pointed accusingly at Bette.

  “Ma shoon ass—”

  “What?” Bette said, furrowing her brow at me.

  Good god the banana nut bread was good!

  I swallowed and took a gulp of coffee. “As soon as the goon squad loses interest in having a death match on my front porch, I’m going to change all the locks on my house and install surround sound speakers in every room so you won’t be able to eavesdrop on me anymore.”

  Bette shrugged.

  “And black out blinds on every window.”

  She actually looked sad at that.

  Raphael laughed at me.

  I turned on him, “And you, you immature little…”

  He just smiled at me. “I’ll go with you to the party.”

  “You will?”

  He took a step closer. “Yeah, I’ll go to your little party.” He stepped closer. “I’ll be impeccably groomed, probably better dressed than you, and I’ll do my best to make every woman and man in the place w
ish they were you.”

  I bet he would…

  I looked up into his dark, sexy eyes and lost all track of my thoughts. I’d been angry, right?

  He smiled, looking like the sexiest devil ever, and raised the bag I’d given him up into my line of sight. “I assume this is from you?”

  That broke me out of my temporary mind meltdown. I shook it off and coughed.

  “Call it a belated house warming gift.”

  Raphael walked away, and the temperature in the kitchen blessedly went down about twenty degrees. He placed the bag on the floating island, gave Bette a cursory glance, and then pulled the box out of the bag. He opened the box and pulled out a gaudy, multicolored, sprinkle clad coffee mug. Only the handle was white.

  “I washed it and everything, so you can have your coffee in it.” If you can stand it… you obsessive compulsive pain in the ass!

  Raphael studied it with a scowl. I mentally patted myself on the back. This was the last thing he’d want in his kitchen, or his house.

  I smiled.

  “Um, Raff?” Bette interrupted.

  We both turned to look at her. She was still standing in front of his open laptop.

  “Sorry to be so nosey,”—Raphael and I rolled our eyes simultaneously at this—“but are you really worth what it says on this spread sheet?”

  Raphael gulped, suddenly looked flushed, and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “No… not really.”

  Liar. Just hearing his words screamed he was lying.

  I walked over to Bette and peered at the screen.

  It was a spreadsheet and… well, I hadn’t any idea what it all meant. But there were a lot of large numbers on there.

  “What’s it say?” I whispered to Bette.

  “It says our neighbor is rich enough to live in a penthouse in New York City… and to summer in the Hamptons… and to have a villa in France—”

  “Ladies!” Raphael said, his voice cracking. “I’m…”

  We both stood there, staring at him, not giving an inch.

  “I remember your sisters said you were some kind of computer genius,” I prompted. Maybe he’d started some software company like Bill Gates had?

  He shook his head.

  Bette raised her eyebrows. “So you’re… what, some sort of mobster?”

  “No!” Raphael scowled.

  I joined in. “Are you the founder of a pyramid scheme? Like Ponzi?”

  That made him smile. “No.”

  He walked over to his refrigerator and pulled out a package of Hot Pockets: the two pack. He turned it so we could see the back and pointed to the UPC—the little barcode that they scan at the cash register.

  “What about it?” I said.

  Bette raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Don’t even try to say you invented barcodes!”

  He shook his head, looking meek and embarrassed. “No. I just came up with a way to make them look better.”

  We looked to each other and Bette shrugged.

  “What do you mean, look better?”

  He took a deep breath and sighed. Then he walked closer and pointed to the UPC again.

  “See how it’s in the shape of a flame?”

  Bette and I nodded.

  “I came up with that.”

  I canted my head at him. “No way.”

  Bette took the box out of his hands and glared at the barcode. “I read that this shit came out of Japan.” She locked him with a hard gaze.

  “Yeah, they implemented it first… but I’m the one who came up with it.”

  WTF?

  “Okay…” Raphael pulled up a stool and sat at the floating island. “I was sixteen, I’d graduated early from high school and was a freshman at MIT.”

  Oh boy… he really was a genius.

  “By the way, I don’t recommend going to college early. Especially so far away from home.” He looked off out the window over his kitchen sink. “I was homesick, friendless, and bored shitless when a professor in mathematical statistics started in on a two hour lecture on the modern UPC.”

  “Eww,” Bette said sympathetically.

  “Yeah, so I started playing on my laptop, found the UPC for Preparation H on the internet, and then made it look like his face. His teeth, actually.

  I had to smile. Sixteen and alone in a strange university, and he was still a smart ass.

  “I’d hacked into the professor’s email the first week of class, and had the emails and phone numbers for everyone in class… so…”

  Bette had a wicked smile on her face, leaning forward in anticipation of where his story was going.

  He took another deep, embarrassed breath and sighed. “So, I texted it to everyone in the class.”

  “And?” Bette prompted.

  “And people started laughing and talking, and the professor swooped in and took a kid’s blackberry from him and saw the UPC.”

  Bette roared with laughter. “I bet that went over real well!”

  Raphael shrugged his broad, thickly muscled shoulders.

  “At first he looked pissed… and then he started smiling. Next thing I knew he dismissed the class and had me making other—less embarrassing to him—UPCs. About an hour later he dragged me across campus to the Dean of Computer Sciences office and presented me and my little trick.

  “They both got really excited, and for the next two weeks I was refining and making more and more of my “artistic barcodes.” They took me to six meetings with manufacturing executives, but they didn’t think much about my little trick. So they started talks with some companies over in Japan and Asia. I guess the Dean had some contacts over there from his college days.”

  He sighed. “They ate it up, and before I knew it most of the products over there started sporting UPCs made to look like cartoon art.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “A couple years ago they started popping up in the good old US of A.”

  “And you…” Bette shook her head and smiled. “You get paid for every product that uses it?”

  He shrugged. “I get paid a certain amount for every item that’s sold that has one. It renews every six months.”

  “Wow…” I couldn’t even imagine how much money that was.

  Bette shook her head again. “So why the hell are you living here?”

  Good question.

  Raphael looked around his kitchen and I could see him relax. “I liked the house.”

  I raised my eyebrows to Bette.

  “I mean… I grew up in a crappy little apartment, sharing my room with two brothers, and the rest of the apartment with my mom and two sisters.”

  “There were five of you?” Bette asked.

  “Yeah, in a two bedroom apartment.”

  Okay, I couldn’t even imagine that kind of living arrangement.

  “My Aunt Freda lived in a house just like this one, and I always thought they were the luckiest people in the world. So I looked around until I saw a house…” he stopped for a moment, and then took a deep breath. “Until I saw a house I would’ve liked to have grown up in.”

  Bette sat down on a stool and leaned her chin on her hand. “With your kind of money you could afford to buy a hundred houses just like this one.”

  He smiled roguishly. “I have.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “I didn’t know what to do with all the money at first. But I’d seen some of the elaborate life styles the owners of some of the companies paying for my barcodes had, and it just made me feel like they didn’t have homes. They had show pieces and party houses, and cold, hard works of art that they pretended to live in.

  “So one day I was at my family’s summer reunion. We gathered at a campground in Hemis Fair Park, and there must have been three hundred people there.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “And like a hundred and fifty rusted out junkers.”

  I felt a pang of recognition: I abruptly knew exactly how he felt. I cringed.

  “My family has always been poor,” he c
ontinued. “Maybe two or three people in the family went to college. Only Aunt Freda owned her own home. And that’s when I knew what I wanted to do with the money, and with my life.

  “I wanted to help my family… all my family.”

  “So,” Bette said, looking starved for more of the story, “You bought them all houses?”

  “And new cars—nothing flashy—and set up a fund so anyone in the family who wants to go to college, and has the grades to actually get in, can go.”

  “You’re paying for college?”

  He nodded gravely. “Right now there are fifty one adults enrolled in community and state colleges all over the country, and seventy-five teenagers. Ten are in Ivy League colleges, but they won scholarships. I’m just helping out with the extra expenses so they won’t have to work and try to go to college.”

  Well shit… here I was feeling like such a humanitarian about helping Darla learn how to drive, and I’d had a hot, sexy, male Mother Teresa living right next door!

  He shrugged those massive shoulders of his again. “So truthfully, I can’t afford much bigger of a house than this right now.”

  I had to laugh.

  He smiled at me and at Bette. “So, are you ladies okay with this? I mean, can I count on you keeping this to yourselves… and not treating me any different?”

  I caught Bette’s eye and she winked.

  I leaned across the floating island and patted his hand. “I promise to treat you like the conceited asshole you’ve always been.”

  Bette snuck up behind him and threw her arms around his heck. “And I promise to try to seduce you and get you to be my next husband from now until the day you die.”

  Raphael’s eyes got round as saucers when she playfully nibbled on his earlobe. “Um… Bette?”

  “Yes, baby?” she purred.

  I burst out laughing at the sudden look of panic on his face. It was too freaking good!

  Raphael got this long-suffering look on his face. He’d obviously been the butt of his sisters’ jokes before.

  “Woman…” he muttered.

  Bette let go and strutted back to where she’d been sitting.

  When I finally regained control of myself, and stopped laughing at him, I took a sip of my coffee and pondered getting a cookie—how had I not noticed the sparkling glass cake pedestal boasting over a dozen white chocolate macadamia nut cookies?