Tangled: Contemporary Romance Trilogy Read online

  “I don’t know.” I couldn’t help it. The stupid was just going to come pouring out of my mouth regardless of what my brain had to say about it. “You probably need to check your butt.”

  The guy looked. He looked! It was funny as hell. He was wearing black slacks and a white short-sleeved polo shirt with some company logo on the outside of the right sleeve. I should have kept silent. But I didn’t because that’s kind of my thing.

  “Don’t worry. Your ass looks amazing in those pants. I checked,” I informed Damion Alvarez. “But you know, gyms are really good for helping you check on that. All of those mirrors positioned in great places where you can suddenly be faced with an awkward image of yourself squatting in some horrible position to do a dead lift or something.”

  He seemed surprised. “You lift weights?”

  “I do.” I needed to be clear about this. “I’m not great at it. It’s not like I dead lift hundreds and hundreds of pounds.”

  “Still. That’s cool.” He was nodding. “I don’t know why I never expected Trinity to start showing up at my gym. It’s pretty obvious. But when it happened I felt like I was actually more upset than when she had violated my morning paper.”

  “Gyms are kind of sacred,” I reminded him. “It takes forever to find one that you like. And when you do, you don’t want to switch because then you would have to do that whole posturing thing again.” I was really getting into this explanation. Geez! The guy was going to think I was psycho.

  But Damion was nodding. “Right? I totally get what you’re saying. You have to find that perfect time to go when the grunting power lifters haven’t overtaken everything. Then you have to learn how to use all of their equipment, because it’s always different in just enough ways that you don’t automatically know which machines to avoid or which weight pins don’t work precisely like they should.”

  “Or what time they put the clean towels out,” I added as an afterthought. “That’s a big one for me. I hate going to the towel bin and finding out that there’s just a washcloth left at the bottom.”

  He was laughing now. Wow. Just. Wow! He threw his head back and his eyes crinkled at the corners and his laugh was deep and rumbly and so freaking sexy that I was pretty sure that I was about to need to run to the back and change my panties. This guy could get me wet with nothing more than a laugh. That was crazy!

  Wait. I wasn’t in the market for a boyfriend. Not really. I was trying to get Upscale Bob to sponsor my real estate license. I didn’t have time to start some other relationship. Except this guy wasn’t in the market for a chick either. He was still trying to get rid of the last one.

  What is it about that situation that makes you feel safe about being attracted to someone? It’s like they’re not interested so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you are? I wasn’t sure about the psychological research behind this social phenomenon. But I wasn’t above taking advantage of it.

  “So you’re moving to a gated community in order to avoid your stalker,” I mused. I nodded my head. That actually sounded pretty brilliant if you could take that kind of drastic step. “Smart move. Literally, I guess.”

  “I hope so.” He looked a little glum. “I like my condo, but it’s been proven repeatedly that the security leaves something to be desired.”

  “Yeah, I get that.” Oh boy, did I ever. “Karl’s family is loaded. I did not realize that this means he can pretty much grease the palms of anyone who might want information on me. He even romanced the sales associated down at the cell phone store to pretty much give him full access to my cell phone account. Talk about awkward. The guy actually paid my bill and then changed my plan and made himself the administrator so he was getting all of my texts and call logs thanks to parental controls.”

  Damion’s brown eyes widened. “Are you serious? That’s bad. I hope Trinity doesn’t get that savvy. She mostly attacks my cars. My family owns a garage in Fenton. She must have decided that the way to get my attention was to keep giving me reasons to go and see my brother, Valentino. Val kept having to send the tow truck to rescue me. At one point she slashed all of my tires. Then the next week she put sugar in my gas tank.”

  Okay. This bitch was one hundred percent wacko! “Who does that? It’s so wrong. And expensive. Did your car survive the sugar thing?”

  “No. Not really. Val has the car on our storage lot waiting for parts. I guess you have to replace the entire fuel injection system.” He sounded glum. “I liked my car. I wasn’t thrilled to find out that she had killed it.”

  “That’s why she did it.” I felt bad for him. “They take the things that mean the most and then they just poke and poke at them until it’s more of a curse than anything else.”

  “Mr. Alvarez?” Sideshow—no wait—Upscale Bob strode around the corner of my desk wearing his supersized smile. I felt a sudden need to go back to my urge to Google Damion Alvarez. Bob Abernathy only used that smile for what he called the White Whale Clients. The people who had more money than Midas and offered Bob the opportunity to net a massive commission. “I’m Bob Abernathy. I’m so pleased to have you here in our office! Welcome! I hope Lena has been keeping you company while I finished up with my, ah, meeting.”

  For crying out loud! I cleared my throat once. And then I did it again. I needed to let Bob know that his fly was down. Literally in this case. But he kept shooting me these surreptitiously ugly looks. Fine. If Bob wanted Damion Alvarez to figure out that Bob had been back in his office with Candace Longmeyer bent over his desk, that was his problem.

  “Let’s come back to my office and have a nice long talk about what your needs are for this real estate transaction,” Bob suggested to Damion. Bob was wearing his “serious real estate” expression. This was the mask he wore when he was pretending that he was going to listen to what the client wanted instead of trying to nudge them in the direction of the biggest commission check. “I want to really get to know you and what you’d like to see included in your potential property.”

  “Thank you.” Damion at least sounded sincere. Maybe even a little relieved. “I think security is my main concern at this point.”

  “Oh, no doubt!” Bob gushed. “Someone in your financial position needs to be concerned with security. That’s always of utmost importance for my top tier clients.”

  Uh huh. Top tier clients. And financial position? My fingers were just itching to start typing Damion’s name into my computer search engine. Was the guy part of the August Busch family or something? He didn’t look like he was. But I felt like there had to be some catch to it.

  Bob ushered Damion around my desk and down the hallway. Or at least he tried to. At the last second, Damion turned around and offered me a warm smile that melted my insides like warm honey. “Lena, it was so good to meet you. I’m sure we’ll be chatting again since I’ll be coming back here pretty often until this whole deal is done. I just want you to know how much I appreciate your frankness and your sense of humor.”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t get any words out. That was lame. But the way that Bob Abernathy was staring at me made me want to crawl under my desk. Bob looked suspicious. And suspicious Bob was not happy Bob. Hopefully this moment would not come back to bite me in the ass. I needed Bob’s help. And I didn’t want to have to do something low like manipulate Damion Alvarez just to get it.

  Damion winked on his way down the hall and I had to lock my knees to keep them from buckling. Good gracious, the man was hot! He looked like—actually, he didn’t look like an underwear model. People are always saying that. That a guy looks so hot that he could sell underwear. I don’t know about the rest of you ladies out there, but lately I’ve noticed that underwear models look about twelve and have bodies that should belong to a high school boy.

  Damion Alvarez looked like a man. Complete with just a hint of scruff on his cheeks because he obviously had a thick beard. His body was toned and he walked with the kind of casual grace that came from being an athlete. Or maybe mechanic would be more
accurate. Which brought me right back around to the need to Google the guy. A family that owned a garage in Fenton, Missouri, wasn’t exactly rolling in cash. Not enough to get the top tier douchebag treatment from Upscale Bob.

  “Damion Alvarez. St. Louis, Missouri.” I sounded out the name as I typed it, deciding at the last minute to put a Z on the end.

  My computer spent a brief moment thinking before it spit out about a billion results. I felt my mouth pop open. The guy was everywhere. He was a… Wait one second! He was an IT recruiter. Or at least he owned a huge St. Louis-based IT recruiting firm. Wait until Eleanor heard about this! I would totally blow her socks off that I had met this guy. She would be so jealous. Then she would either start making up a bunch of nonsense that the guy was overrated. Or she would beg me for an introduction.

  Hmm. That could actually be my ticket to finding out more about him. Ick. Calling Eleanor and scheduling a second visit during the same week? I hoped that Damion Alvarez realized how much trouble I was going to in order to…

  “Dammit!” I muttered. “I’m totally stalking him!”

  Where was the line really? I was gathering intel. I wasn’t planning to use it. I wasn’t going to follow him around town or pretend to join his gym by accident. I just wanted to know what kind of guy he was because I was…doing research for work! Right.

  Okay, I can be honest here. That’s complete bullshit. I had no reason to need or use information on this guy. Maybe it would be better if I just focused on my own problems. After all, it wasn’t like I was lacking things to keep my busy.

  The bell over the front doors jangled again. I stood up from behind my desk to do a property greeting. I needn’t have bothered though. It was a delivery man. I think by now Tobias the delivery guy and I were probably in more of a relationship than I had with the individual who kept making it necessary for poor Tobias to keep coming to my office.

  “Seriously?” I gaped at Tobias.

  The lanky guy in the khaki pants and blue denim uniform shirt was nearly staggering beneath the weight of one of those edible arrangements. It was full of pineapple and cantaloupe and grapes. There was no candy of course because that would have meant that Karl Kitson was encouraging my poor eating habits and he would never allow himself to indulge in that. Nope. This thing was all healthy and all unwanted.

  Tobias plunked the huge vase down on the counter. “Sorry, Lena. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “Wouldn’t do any good,” I teased. “They’d just hire another one and Karl would keep sending these.”

  Tobias stared at the arrangement for a moment and then shook his head as he produced a receipt for me to sign. “Yeah. I don’t get it. This thing easily costs about two hundred bucks. Why would someone send something that expensive to a person who has been known to refuse delivery? It’s not like I can take this back and get him a refund or something.”

  “Nope.” I signed off and then waved my hands. “Give your wife my compliments once again.”

  Now Tobias was laughing. He shoved the receipt in his pocket and scooped the edible arrangement back up into his arms. “I’ll tell her. Our kids have been missing these. I thought there for a while it had stopped.”

  “Me too,” I said glumly. “But I guess you can never trust crazy to be done. Right?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Tobias left with his free edible arrangement and I felt a pit of dread open up in my belly. Was this just another beginning to the crazy? Why did I get the feeling that Karl was just about to redouble his efforts?

  Chapter Seven

  Damion

  Sometimes the thing that grounds me the most is to head back to my family garage down in Fenton. The place is like a time warp. I’m sure that the tools get updated and replaced as necessary, but I’m probably not savvy enough to notice. The building is one of those old white cinderblock structures that looks straight out of a sixties-era gas station ad. There are four bays now with lifts and big electric doors that seem to stay open almost all year round. Val is the one running the place and he employs another four mechanics other than himself.

  I pushed my way through the glass doors at the front of the building. We got rid of the gas pumps about fifteen years ago when it became far too expensive to update the safety features. That means there are empty spots under a covered metal awning where people tend to park just to run into the shop. It has always looked to me like the gas pumps are conspicuously missing from some kind of what is wrong with this picture game.

  The words ALVAREZ ENGINE & TRANSMISSION are stenciled onto the front and sides of the building in bright red paint. And of course there’s a little yellow sign hanging from one corner of the shop advertising that state approved emissions tests were performed at this location. If people only knew how much money our shop made off those stupid things, they would be writing their congressman. It was a total racket.

  “Hey!” I called out when I walked inside the shop. There was a convenience store in here a million years ago. My mother used to work the counter when we were kids. Now it’s just an awkwardly-sized waiting room with a few tired chairs and a potted plant that looks fake because it is. “Val!”

  My older brother did not bother to actually get up from his desk or come out of the office located at the far corner of the shop. “Your car isn’t ready. I told you. A week at least to get those parts from Germany. You should have taken it to the dealership.”

  “They charge too much,” I informed Valentino as I walked into his office without an invitation. “And I wasn’t necessarily here to check on my car. I didn’t expect you to get those parts here any faster. I realize they can’t be sent by carrier pigeon.”

  He was using two fingers to poke at the keyboard of his ancient desktop computer. He did not look up. He’s just an older version of me, but slightly shorter and probably way more built. It’s hard not to get some serious upper body muscle going on when you spend all day turning wrenches on bolts that have probably not moved since they were put in at the factory when the car was manufactured.

  “I wish I could get parts by carrier pigeon,” Val muttered to himself as he smacked the Enter key. “Do you know how much that would save me on the bullshit shipping? And if I have to hear one more person coming in here telling me that they don’t know why their car is making weird sounds, I’m going to scream.”

  “You’re a mechanic.” I couldn’t help it. There was more than a little dose of glee in that statement. “That’s your thing. Weird engine noises. I’m surprised we don’t add that to the signage. Alvarez Weird Engine & Transmission Noise.”

  “Yeah.” My older brother sounded more than a little disgruntled. “But when they say. Oh, this car has always been perfect. Why, I’ve never even had to change the oil! Then that makes me want to call the stupid car dealerships and remind them that they need to get smarter salespeople. Those idiots are actually telling their customers that modern engines can go forever without an oil change.”

  “Well, in theory that’s true.” I took a seat in the single chair sitting in front of his desk. “They just don’t explain to the customer that this is only the case if the vehicle is in constant optimal driving conditions. And that even pure synthetic oil breaks down after three to four years of city driving in stop and go traffic at a hundred plus degrees.”

  “Exactly!” Val burst out. He waved both of his hands in the air and made a low noise of frustration. “So they come in and their car has been leaking oil out of some blown seal or just because the oil filter has been skewed for over a thousand miles and they don’t understand why their engine is toast. It’s so freaking irritating. What do they teach people in schools these days? That’s what I want to know.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and prepared myself for one of Val’s rants about the stupidity of the educational system in our country. He was a huge complainer when it came to that kind of thing. He didn’t even have kids. The guy wasn’t married.

  “Dated anyone lately?” I aske
d him. There. That was guaranteed to throw off his rant.

  He sputtered for a minute and then glowered at me with enough force to peel paint. “No. I don’t date. How about you?” He curled his lip and passed me a snide look. “How’s Trinity. She was in here the other day for an oil change.”

  “What?” I actually jumped out of my chair. I did not have words. I was going to kill him! “You changed her oil?”

  “It was just an oil change,” he said calmly. “It’s not like I took her in the back and made sweet passionate love to her or something.”

  “Oh, ack!” I wanted to gag. That was about the worst image I could conceive of. My brother screwing Trinity? That would be horrible. It would cause so many issues in my life that I could not even predict the ending of that little melodrama. “That’s just gross, Val. You’d do better to go down to the bar on the corner and pick up some woman after last call.”

  “That is more Beau’s thing than mine,” Val mused. His longest standing employee was a guy named Beau who smelled like a homeless guy and actually lived in a little camper trailer in the back lot as a form of “security.”

  I took a deep breath. I needed to make things really clear for my big brother. “The thing with Trinity is totally out of control, Val. You need to shut that down. She can’t keep coming to this garage.”

  “Why not?” Val didn’t even look up from his computer screen. “She’s a paying customer and those are really important. I don’t talk about you. I don’t even let her chase me down that rabbit hole. The mechanics all have strict orders not to talk to her about anything other than her car.”

  “She’s the one who made it necessary for you to order parts from Germany!” I burst out. I felt like my blood pressure was rising so quickly that my head was about to pop off. “That should be enough of a reason to tell her to take a hike!”