Tangled Up in Love (25 page)

“As hard as things were while you were growing up,” her mother continued, “the most important thing to remember is how we stayed together and worked together to get through it. We were a very strong, loving family, and those years weren’t all bad. We may not have had money, but we loved and supported each other.”

That was certainly true. She didn’t think of it very often, but now she recalled just how much laughing they’d done when she was a kid. There had been sing-alongs and campfires, long walks along dirt roads and in the woods, and trips to the creek where they’d spent hours swimming and splashing and swinging from tree branches into the water. Her parents had always done
their best to make things fun and try to help them forget that they didn’t always have a roof over their heads or enough food to fill their bellies.

They had been
close
when she was a child. She and her brothers and sisters had been inseparable, and God help anybody who messed with them. Mess with one Chasen, you messed with them all; it had practically been their family motto.

Until that moment, Ronnie hadn’t realized just how far she’d drifted from everyone. She visited her parents only once or twice a year, even though she lived only a couple of hours away. She exchanged the occasional letter or phone call with her brothers and sisters, but didn’t really keep up with their lives. She couldn’t even remember where they all lived—states, yes, but town names? Actual addresses or phone numbers by heart?

Had she let her fear of going back to living hand-to-mouth cause her to push her own family away, when they were the ones she could count on most in the whole world, no matter what?

What a dolt she’d been. She had nieces and nephews she barely knew, but suddenly, she
wanted
to know them, very much. She felt almost desperate to contact her siblings, to not just make an obligatory phone call, but to
really
find out how everyone was doing and make a point of staying in better touch.

As soon as she got home, she would dig out her address book,
memorize
every single one of their addresses and phone numbers, and call them all. She would find out how they were doing, make sure they knew she loved them and didn’t want to keep her distance any longer, invite them all for Christmas.

Given the size of her apartment, that last might not
be feasible, but maybe she could put the wheels in motion for a big family gathering at her parents’ house over the holidays.

She could bring Dylan and introduce him as the man who routinely made her eyes roll back in her head. Tell everyone that while she didn’t necessarily like him, she no longer
despised
him like a bad case of poison ivy on her no-no area.

Okay, that probably wasn’t such a good idea. By Christmas, she and Dylan probably wouldn’t even be heating up the sheets anymore.

Since she hadn’t come to her parents’ house to contemplate her nonrelationship with Dylan, she shrugged off the small niggle of regret that tugged at her insides at the thought of them going their separate ways, and instead tried to focus on what her mother had said.

“I loved it when we used to make those mountain pies out of white bread and cheap pie filling,” she said, surprising herself with the cheerfulness in her voice.

She
did
have happy memories of her childhood, and she wasn’t quite sure why—or how—she’d stuffed them down so far and let the bad memories and the fears they generated take over so thoroughly.

Her mother smiled. “And catch crawfish in the stream.”

“And frogs, and newts, and sometimes a water snake, but that was more Joe and Mike.”

With a shudder, her mother said, “One of the many delights of raising boys.”

They laughed, and a few minutes later were back to baking cookies. While her mother slid a new, full sheet into the oven and reset the timer, Ronnie picked up the
wooden spoon and started dropping dollops of dough onto another.

This was nice—being home, helping her mother in the kitchen, simply relaxing and enjoying herself. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done something like this without feeling as though the weight of the world balanced on her narrow shoulders, and it made her all the more determined to get past her own insecurities so she could start making new, worry-free memories. With her family, her friends, and in every aspect of her life.

While they baked and chatted, keeping the conversation light, Ronnie made a mental list of what she needed to do when she got back to Cleveland.

She would call Dylan’s father, for one. If he was as financially savvy as Dylan claimed, she wanted to talk to him and get some advice about handling her own money, and it would probably be smart to do that before she and his son went their separate ways.

Depending on what he suggested, she suspected she would also look into hiring a financial adviser to help her put her money here, there, and everywhere in order to be safe and grow as much as possible, whether it was through earned interest or intelligent investments.

By the time the sound of crunching gravel alerted them to her father’s return, she felt lighter and more relaxed than she could ever remember. Her mother was drying her hands on a dish towel, preparing to meet him at the front door, but Ronnie stopped her.

“Let me surprise him,” she said, wiping her own hands, then picking out the biggest fresh-out-of-the-oven cookie she could find.

With a grin, she skipped out of the kitchen and down the hall in time for the door to swing open.

“Hi, Daddy,” she singsonged, bringing her father’s head up.

His eyes went wide for a startled moment before he spotted the cookie she held out. Reaching for it, he smiled and opened his arms, and she wasted no time launching herself into his welcoming embrace.

“So how’s your knitting coming along, Aunt Bea?”

“Bite me, Hoolihan.”

Sitting in the center of Zack’s deep, soft, overstuffed leather sofa, Dylan scowled and continued to concentrate on his stitches.

He already felt like a pansy, sitting here with his testosterone-laden friends, watching the Steelers game and
knitting,
for God’s sake. He should be perched on the edge of the sofa, tipping back a brewski, and shouting at the screen like Zack and Gage.

But his deadline for making it or breaking it on this latest challenge was fast approaching, and he wasn’t about to let their usual Sunday get-together set him back and cost him his prized Harrison Award. Not to mention the humiliation he would suffer when the entire city discovered he’d been unable to complete a simple task that every high school girl and her grandmother knew how to do.

So he’d bitten the bullet, packed up his needles and yarn, and come over to Zack’s to watch the game and take his licks from two guys who’d never had to check
their balls at the door just to keep from getting their asses handed to them by a woman.

Even if that woman was Ronnie, and she happened to be smokin’ hot when he got her alone, winning this challenge was for the greater good. For his job, his pride, and the pride of every red-blooded male walking the streets of America.

And if that meant taking some ribbing from his supposed best friends, so be it.

He finished a row, dragged another length of yarn from the rolled-up black ball, and turned his needles to start back the other way.

He would be glad when he won this bet and could once again turn the tables on Ronnie. What he would make her do, he wasn’t quite sure.

He’d been contemplating it ever since she’d dropped the knitting bomb on him, but now that they’d started sleeping together, things like collecting litter along major freeways in a string bikini in the dead of winter, or shaving her head and dressing like a Hare Krishna to distribute pamphlets outside the bus station, had morphed into decidedly more sexual tasks.

Entering the Miss Ohio pageant and requiring her to use her amazing mouth for the talent portion. Working at a strip club and doing a little pole or lap dancing—provided his was the only lap she gyrated on. Dressing in skintight black leather and spending a day with him at the
Herald,
keeping him on the straight and narrow, and putting him to work and treating him like the bad, bad boy he was if he slacked off on the job.

It didn’t take much of that for his Johnnie Walker to sit up and begin to beg, and he moved the length of his knitting down a few inches to cover his crotch. If Zack
or Gage noticed his boner, they would no doubt think he got off on playing with yarn, and that was something they’d
never
let him live down.

Until the end of time, anytime they passed by a scarf, a hat, a pair of gloves or mittens, it would be,
Ooh, Stone, does this make you hot? Would you two like to be alone?

No, thank you.

When another commercial came on, leaving Zack without active play to distract him, he took a long pull on his bottle of beer and turned back to Dylan. Reaching for the end of the knitting connected to the needles—and entirely too close to the bulge behind Dylan’s zipper—he said, “It doesn’t look like you’ve gotten very far. What’s it supposed to be, anyway?”

“A scarf,” Dylan replied shortly.

Though he wasn’t sure it looked much like one at the moment. The end was a mishmash of stitches, too tight and then too loose as he’d been struggling to learn, struggling to do everything right.

A few inches up, he’d gotten the hang of things . . . give or take. At any rate, the last few inches he’d done looked better than those first several rows.

But if it was going to be a scarf, he’d better get a move on to finish it. At its current length, it would probably do better as a bib.

“I’ve only got a week left to get this done and show Ronnie that I learned to knit, or my ass is grass. I’m going to work on this thing every waking minute until it’s done, and get my Harrison Award back.”

“Hey, you know us,” Zack replied with a shrug. “We’re just kidding around.”

“Yeah,” Gage said. “I’m kind of impressed myself.
You don’t work those things quite as fast as Jenna, but you’re not doing half bad.”

“And you know we always want you to win these competitions, too,” Zack put in. “It wouldn’t do to let the ladies pull one over on us men. Shit, we’d never hear the end of it if they did.”

A moment passed in silent agreement as Zack and Gage both took a sip of their beers and all three of them nodded in deep male accord.

Dylan had every intention of winning this bet, even if Ronnie was doing her level best to distract him with slick, sweaty, mind-numbing sex.

That was something his friends weren’t yet aware of, and he intended to keep it that way for a while longer. The knitting thing was bad enough; he didn’t need them ragging on him for falling into bed with his archnemesis, too. He preferred to take his lumps one at a time, thank you very much.

But without letting them know
why
he was bringing it up, this did seem like the perfect opportunity to follow through on Ronnie’s suggestion that he try to get an exclusive interview with Zack.

He’d been thinking about it all day, ever since she’d brought it up and the lightbulb had gone off over his head flashing,
Duh! I can’t believe it took
Ronnie
to point out what was in front of my face the entire time! Bang, bang, bang.

That last was the sound of him mentally smacking the heel of his hand against his own forehead.

“Actually,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “I’ve been thinking maybe it’s time to put an end to this one-upmanship business with Ronnie.”

Zack froze with his beer bottle halfway to his lips, and Gage turned his gaze almost in slow motion from the TV to Dylan.

“Come again?” Gage said.

Lifting a shoulder, Dylan kept his attention on his needles and yarn. “It’s getting a little old, don’t you think? We’ve made each other do just about all the zany, ridiculous, humiliating things we can. If we keep this up much longer, I’m afraid we’ll cross the line into true degradation or even something seriously dangerous. I think it might be time to wrap it up and move on.”

“Move on to what?” Zack wanted to know.

I’m so glad you asked,
Dylan thought somewhat wryly.

“Well, you know this columnist gig isn’t my idea of a dream job. It pays the bills, and the challenges with Ronnie have kept things interesting, but I’ve been thinking lately that I should maybe make more of an effort to start doing what I really
want
to be doing before it’s too late.”

“The sports reporter thing, right?” Zack asked. He was nodding, his elbows balanced on his splayed knees. “You’d be damn good at it. I always wondered why you settled for writing about other stuff when your heart wasn’t in it.”

“I guess I figured writing was writing, and that eventually I’d luck into exactly the job I wanted. But since that hasn’t happened quite as easily as I’d hoped, I’ve been thinking I might need to go at it from a different direction.”

“And that would be . . . ?” Gage prompted.

Dylan spared a glance for one friend before turning
to the other—the one who could make or break this brilliant idea of his. Or of Ronnie’s, really, but that was a detail he didn’t intend to share at the moment.

Taking a deep breath, he shoved the row of stitches he’d been working on farther down the needle so they didn’t slip off, then set the whole wad of yarn and plastic beside him on the couch.

“It sort of involves you,” he said, holding Zack’s gaze.

“Me?” his friend asked, straightening a few inches as his eyes went wide. “Why me?”

He looked part startled, part guilty, and Dylan wondered what he’d been up to that being singled out worried him.

“Well, you are the hockey star.”

His expression turned even more wary as he glanced back and forth between his two friends, the football game in the background now completely forgotten. “Yeah. So?”

“So . . . ,” Dylan dragged out, “you’re also known for being closemouthed with the press, but since you happen to be one of my best friends, I was hoping you might be willing to bend your rules a bit and grant me an exclusive interview. It could really open some doors for me.”