Tangled Up in Love (17 page)

Shaking her head, she seemed to snap out of whatever daze had held her frozen. She marched past him and out the double glass doors, and he was forced to hustle to catch up to her.

Honest to God, this woman could teach classes on keeping a man on his toes. He couldn’t remember ever trailing after, sniffing after, or lolling after another woman the way he had Ronnie just this morning. And if anyone had told him he’d be acting this way without receiving a full frontal lobotomy first, he’d have laughed them off the planet.

“I think it would be better if we stopped the knitting lessons, too.”

“Why?”

They were making their way rapidly along the sidewalk to one of the apartment building’s two small parking areas. He didn’t have the heart to tell her they were heading in the wrong direction. Or maybe he was simply enjoying her snit too much, and was willing to walk a few extra yards if it meant observing the stick-up-her-butt mood awhile longer.

“Because it doesn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense before, but now that we . . .”

“Took the last train to Fucksville?” he supplied.

Her brow rose at his choice of words, even though she’d been the one yelling “All aboard!” last night.

“I think it would be better if we went back to avoiding each other as much as possible. You’re certainly capable of losing your latest challenge all on your own.”

“Oh-ho!” he chuckled. “Nice one. But with or without you, I’m not going to fail.”

They’d reached the parking lot and stopped walking. Not beside any vehicle in particular, just stopped and were standing there. Dylan suspected Ronnie was trying to be inconspicuous while she scanned the lot for her car.

“Know what I think? I think you want to stop with the knitting lessons because you’re afraid you won’t be able to control yourself around me anymore. You’ll be sitting there, watching me wrap my yarn around that long metal needle, and you’ll get so hot, you’ll jump my sexy bones.”

Her head whipped around, and if eyes could be fitted with laser beams, he’d have been a crispy critter smoldering on the blacktop.

“You really are mentally unstable, do you know that?”

“Chicken.”

“I’m not a chicken. I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” she said, her tone growing sharper. Then she cast a disparaging glance up and down his tall frame. “And I would not be even remotely tempted to jump your bones, believe me.”

This
was what he loved about Ronnie.
This
was the relationship he was used to, what made his blood pump harder and brought all of his competitive instincts to the fore.

“Wanna bet?” His two favorite words, and the question he knew Ronnie wouldn’t be able to resist.

“Are you saying I can’t get through an evening in your presence without introducing sex to the mix?” Her eyes had narrowed, her mouth thinned into a stiff line.

It took all of his strength not to grin at her response. “That’s what I’m saying. And the only way to prove me wrong is to continue with the private knitting lessons.”

He lowered his voice to a near whisper and leaned close enough for his breath to stir her glossy brown hair. “The two of us, all alone in your apartment. My
irresistible sex appeal. It will be too much for you to handle. You’ll fold like an origami swan.”

She pulled back, glaring at him, a dusting of pink tingeing her high cheekbones. “You’re a jackass, Stone,” she told him tartly. “And I hate to bruise your ego, but you’re not the least bit irresistible. You’re undoubtedly
re
sistible. So come on over. I’ll teach you to knit and manage to keep my clothes on the whole time.”

Now he did grin like an idiot. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I have some bad news for you.”

“What now?” she asked, sounding exhausted already at only ten in the morning.

“Your car isn’t here. It’s still at The Penalty Box. If you want to get to work anytime soon, I’ll have to drive you—either to the
Sentinel
offices or the Box, it’s up to you.”

“You’re both traitors,” Ronnie told her friends, her needles clacking together angrily. The madder she was, the faster she knit, and right now she was about twenty degrees past thoroughly pissed off.

The three of them were seated in the living room of Charlotte’s hundred-year-old farmhouse. Grace and Jenna were perched on an ancient red brocade and mahogany settee, faded and frayed with wear. Ronnie sat away from them in a mismatched hunter-green, wing-back armchair. She was in no mood to sit shoulder-to-shoulder and be all buddy-buddy with the other two, not when they’d proven themselves to be the least trustworthy friends on the planet.

She’d been in no mood for a knitting session at all, really, but when she’d called Grace to read her the riot act, her friend had informed her that they were all
needed at Charlotte’s house to knit like the wind and fill an order for twenty dishcloths that had been placed through the older woman’s craft booth.

Normally, Ronnie would have been happy to help. Normally, knitting relaxed her. But today she felt brittle enough to snap, and she was actually afraid that if she didn’t get her temper under control, she might very well break the size seven metal needles clutched between her fingers.

“Oh, what are you complaining about?” Grace retorted. “You should be
thanking
us for providing you with the opportunity to have a dozen orgasms in the same night. My God, do you know how amazing that is? Even Zack has never accomplished that, and he’s like the Energizer Bunny in the sack. That man just goes and goes and goes.”

The slightly glassy-eyed expression on Grace’s face and the breathy sigh that passed her lips did nothing to dispel Ronnie’s annoyance. After all, she was having her skull pounded into the headboard on a nightly basis by a man she loved and was engaged to marry, whereas Ronnie now had to live with the knowledge that she’d repeatedly boinked her worst enemy.

She wondered how long it would take him to throw
that
up in her face. To brag about it with his friends, to try to humiliate her or use it against her. If he hadn’t already.

It was enough to make a girl want to gouge her eyes out with a nice, sharp stick . . . or a nice, sharp knitting needle.

A noise from the kitchen reminded Ronnie that Charlotte was just a room away, and she made sure her voice was low enough not to be overheard when she responded.

“How many orgasms I had is irrelevant. I shouldn’t have had
any,
because
you
should have protected me from him. You should have driven me home instead of turning me over to him like some virgin sacrifice.”

Grace snorted. “Oh, honey, you’re no virgin.”

“Shut up,” Ronnie snapped. “You threw me to the wolves. Or in this case, wolf.”

“My, what big teeth you have,” Grace teased, her eyes bright with amusement. “My, what big hands you have. My, what a big dick you have. Bring that bad boy over here and take me like you mean it!”

At her side, Jenna laughed, then lifted her half-knitted, sun-yellow dishcloth in front of her face when Ronnie shot her a nasty glance. But while Jenna might have been the quietest of the three, she was by no means meek.

“So how big was it?” she asked, her green eyes sparkling mischievously, her needles only half hiding a devilish grin.

Narrowing her eyes, Ronnie refused to answer, so Grace answered for her.

“Big enough that she was walking funny when she arrived.”

Charlotte appeared then to hearty laughter and a fair share of
ooooh
s and
whoo-hoo
s from two-thirds of the room’s occupants. The other third was completely una-mused.

The older woman set a tray bearing teacups, a teapot, milk, sugar, and lemon wedges on the low coffee table in front of the settee before tugging at the hem of her brightly flowered polyester blouse and taking a seat directly across from Ronnie. Her big beehive
poof of hair was as orange as ever, her lipstick thick and bubblegum pink even at eight o’clock at night.

“What’s so funny?” she wanted to know, leaning forward to pour tea into the delicate china cups.

“Ronnie’s mad at us for dumping her on Dylan Stone last night,” Jenna supplied. “She had a little too much to drink, and Dylan offered to drive her home.”

“That was awfully nice of him,” Charlotte said, passing Jenna one of the cups, then lifting the milk, sugar, and lemon to silently question which she might like to add to her tea.

“That’s what we thought,” Jenna agreed.

“Once they got there, though,” Grace said, “they spent the night doing the wild thing.”

Charlotte’s thin, brown, stenciled-on brows—which were a startling contrast to her Lucille Ball, carrot-red ’do—drew up in confusion. “What’s the wild thing?”

The three younger women exchanged glances before Grace said, “They slept together.”

“Well, they didn’t exactly
sleep
. At least not much,” Jenna teased.

“They went at it like a couple of horny howler monkeys.”

Ronnie cast a dirty look in Grace’s direction. “Thanks for the vivid imagery.”

“You’re welcome,” Grace beamed.

“My goodness,” Charlotte said. “A lot certainly has happened in a short amount of time. I’m so glad you girls came over so I didn’t have to wait until next week’s meeting to hear about it.”

“Yeah, none of us want to wait a whole week to hear the juicy details,” Grace added sweetly. “So come on,
Ronnie, spill. Was Dylan as sexy-hot naked as you’d expect given how good he looks in a pair of jeans?”

Ronnie cocked a brow at her too-curious friend. “What are you doing checking out how another man fills out his Levi’s? Wouldn’t Zack be annoyed if he found out?”

Given her current state of mind, Ronnie would be only too happy to rat out Grace to her fiancé. It would serve Grace right for getting her into this mess in the first place, and at the very least, it would draw the woman’s attention away from Ronnie’s fucked-up relationship with Dylan and onto her own.

Granted, Grace and Zack’s relationship seemed to be functional and normal and healthy, and would probably last forever. Damn them.

“Zack knows that I occasionally check out other men’s butts and packages. The same way he checks out other women’s boobs. We may not be able to
order,
but we can still look at the menu,” she said, voice cheeky, nose pointed slightly in the air.

It was all Ronnie could do not to stick her tongue out at her impertinent friend.

“Come on,” Jenna wheedled. “We’ve all been dying of curiosity where Dylan is concerned. Zack and Gage are no mystery; Grace and I have been involved with them, so we’ve discussed them
ad nauseam
over the years. You and Dylan were the only unattached members of our little group, but now that you’ve hooked up, we want the scoop.”

“You can’t tell me you tried to picture Dylan naked,” Ronnie challenged, astonished by the very thought. She wouldn’t have expected something so impish of her
friend. Especially when, for the majority of the time Jenna had known Dylan, she’d been a semi-happily married woman.

Without a hint of self-consciousness, Jenna replied, “Of course. Didn’t you?”

Strangling on her own breath, Ronnie found herself unable to answer. Because the truth was, she
had
pictured him naked. Many, many, many, many, many,
many
times since she’d first met him.

She wasn’t proud of it, but she’d certainly done it, and she suspected every warm-blooded American woman who’d ever come within ten yards of him had, too.

Now, though, she didn’t have to use her imagination or fantasize the perfect physique beneath those soft, worn jeans and comfortable buttondown shirts. She
knew
.

Knew that his butt was, indeed, as tight and round and perfect as it looked beneath a thick layer of denim.

Knew that his chest was broad and smooth and would send professional trainers running for the gym to put in a few extra hours with the weights.

And she knew what had been hidden behind the seam of his zipper and how potent that particular appendage truly was.

Thanks to last night, she had a constant, full-blown, Technicolor instant replay of every single aspect of Dylan’s naked, amazing, mouthwatering body seared into her brain.

The image flashed across her mind’s eye, and she went hot and achy all over. She thought of him and knew that if he were in the room at that very second, she’d be all over him like rats on cheese.

She nearly groaned, realizing what sorry shape she was in. And her friends weren’t helping matters.

“That’s the problem,” she told them. “I
shouldn’t
have been picturing him naked. Ever. And I sure as hell shouldn’t have slept with him.
Oh, God.
”

Bending double, she buried her face against her knees and groaned. Her stomach was a mass of tightly coiled knots. And not the good kind. Not the tight knots of awareness and longing Dylan had evoked last night. The bad kind that made her feel like throwing up. That reminded her of exactly what she’d done, and how wrong it had been, and just how many horrible repercussions there would be in her future because of it.

“I don’t know what you’re so upset about, dear.”

Ronnie raised her head just enough to peek through the fall of her bangs and across the coffee table at Charlotte, who was sipping a cup of hot tea and munching on pretzel sticks like she didn’t have a care in the world.

“You spent the night with a man you like and have known for quite a while, and find very attractive. You’re both young and single. I don’t see the problem.”

“But I
don’t
like him,” Ronnie stressed, her voice muffled by her legs. “I hate him.”

Charlotte didn’t respond for a moment, and then she said, “I’ve always found that there’s a thin line between love and hate.”

Ronnie made a face where Charlotte couldn’t see it. She knew the older woman was only trying to help, but
there’s a thin line between love and hate
didn’t.

“If you want my opinion—and I know you do,” Grace said, “I think this has been a long time coming. You and Dylan have been dancing around each other, tossing out challenges and taking part in an old-fashioned pissing
contest for months now. If you ask me, all that misdirected passion was bound to come out eventually.”