Tangled Up in Love (6 page)

He sidled up beside Ronnie, bumping into her as he made room for himself at the crowded bar. She turned to see who’d jostled her and her expression transformed from calm and unlined, almost happy, to scowling.

“Can’t you find anyone else to annoy, Stone?”

“Do I annoy you, Chasen?”

“Only as much as a pebble in my shoe, a thorn in my side, a boil on my butt . . .”

He let his gaze slide down, figuring her mention of that portion of her curvaceous anatomy was as good as an invitation to look his fill.

“And a nice butt it is, too. If you’ve got any boils on it at the moment, I hope you get them lanced before they scar an otherwise perfect canvas.”

While he was preoccupied ogling her behind, she placed three fingers of her right hand flat to the side of his jaw and applied just enough pressure to pull his gaze
upward again. The heat of that touch burned against his skin and made his chest go tight.

“Don’t you worry about my butt,” she told him in a tone just this side of arctic. “And keep your eyes up, or I’ll be tempted to poke them out.”

As much as he knew it would piss her off, he couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. Only Ronnie could dress him down like a parochial school nun and still send blood pumping hot and thick to his groin. Coming from any other woman, those words, in that cold, sharp tone of voice, would have shut him down in an instant and threatened to shrivel his tea bags.

“You gonna do that poking with your knitting needles?” he asked, thinking back to earlier when she’d both held a pair to his throat and stabbed him in the thigh. The two spots on his upper leg still throbbed.

“With whatever’s handy,” she murmured distractedly, catching the bartender’s attention and waving him over to take her order. When Turk approached, she ordered a round of Cosmos and pointed to the back booth where her friends were waiting.

She turned to leave, but before she could move away, Dylan caught her arm. Her dark brows arched, and she looked pointedly at where his fingers curled around her elbow.

Risking another poke with whatever she might be able to find near the bar, he didn’t let go. “I’ve been thinking . . .”

“Did it hurt?”

He made a face, one side of his mouth lifting in an unamused quirk. “Ha ha. Seriously, though, I think your friend Charlotte is right. I could use some one-on-one tutoring for this knitting thing.”

“So what do you want me to do?” she asked on a half laugh. “Recommend somebody?”

“No, I thought maybe you’d be willing to do it.”

At that, her eyes went wide and the tension drained out of the arm he was holding. “You’re joking, right? Why in God’s name would I be willing to help you learn to knit
at all,
let alone one-on-one? In case you’ve forgotten, this is a competition. You challenge me to something, then I challenge you to something, and we both sit back and pray the other will fail miserably and crawl away to a cave somewhere to die of shame.”

She had a point, and until she’d touched his face, sending spear-points of awareness rocketing through his system, the idea had never even occurred to him. Until he’d grabbed her arm and gotten a second dose of that electricity, he hadn’t known what he planned to say, let alone this.

It didn’t make a lot of sense, and there was certainly nothing in it for her, but the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. The more determined he was to convince her to go along with it.

“Oh, I don’t know, I thought maybe you’d consider it a challenge within a challenge. We can make a little side bet.”

Her full red lips, shiny with a layer of gloss, pursed doubtfully. “Such as?”

“You believe there’s no way I’ll ever learn to knit, otherwise you wouldn’t have made it part of the competition, right? Well, I think I
can
learn, though I admit to needing a bit more help getting started than I first expected. So I’ll bet you . . . I don’t know, another one of my trophies that you can’t teach me to knit. You don’t have to do a great job, and you don’t have to stick with
it long. And provided I don’t complete a full knitting project in the month’s time, you’ll still win the original challenge.”

For a moment, she seemed to consider his offer, but just as quickly, a flickering change in her expression signaled she was about to turn him down.

“I’ll even sweeten the pot by paying you outright for your time,” he rushed to add, feeling almost desperate now. “Say, a hundred bucks?”

“A hundred bucks?” she retorted. “Hardly worth it. I’d much rather see you crash and burn.”

She tugged her arm free and took another step toward the booth where her friends’ drinks had just been delivered.

“All right, then,” he called after her, raising his voice enough to be heard over both the music from the jukebox and the distance she’d put between them. “How about a thousand?”

All the way home from her knitting group, Charlotte Langan’s mind raced. She kept thinking about every look and every word that had been exchanged between Ronnie and that nice boy, Dylan Stone.

They purported to be mortal enemies—or at least that’s what Ronnie would have people believe. But Charlotte had been around for a lot of years and had seen a lot of things.

Her hair might be gray . . . not that anyone would know her natural red had long ago faded away, thanks to Nice ’n Easy Morning Sunrise Number 86 . . . her eyesight might be waning, and her hearing might not be what it used to be, but she could still spot sparks when they shot ten feet into the air over her head.

Ronnie and Dylan might claim to hate each other, but Charlotte suspected there was more to the situation than that.

Oh, yes, there was something there. She just had to find a way to bring it out . . . and to get two people who were possibly the most stubborn and obstinate in the world to stop fighting long enough to realize that all the bitterness and vitriol they were busy tossing
back and forth was really just an overabundance of pent-up desire.

Easier said than done, of course. It wasn’t as if two young people like Ronnie and Dylan were going to listen to an old woman they probably thought was half senile already. They may love her and think of her as an aunt or mother figure, but that didn’t mean they were going to let her give them advice about their love lives. And, frankly, she was afraid that if she so much as hinted to Ronnie that her feelings for Dylan could be more intimate than she realized, Ronnie’s head might just explode.

There had to be some other way, then. Something subtle and sneaky.

A smile curved the pink of Charlotte’s heavily lipsticked mouth as she put on her turn signal to turn into her driveway, even though the long dirt road she was currently on was rarely traveled by anyone but herself, and there were no other cars behind her.

Sneaky could be good, she thought, cutting the engine and stuffing her keys into her purse as she got out and headed for the front door of her small white farmhouse. Sneaky was possibly her very favorite thing.

The house, along with several acres of land, had been in the Langan family for years. It was only five years ago that Charlotte had decided to have the barns rebuilt and turn what used to be a small horse-and-cattle spread into an alpaca farm.

The little critters could spit and kick like the dickens when they got their dander up, but the rest of the time they were downright adorable. They had also provided her with enough fiber to maintain a tidy income.

Most of the time, she cared for the small herd herself.
It was nothing she couldn’t handle, and when she did need help with heavy lifting or more difficult aspects of the job—especially once a year at shearing time—she simply hired a few extra folks to come in.

The annual shearing left her with enough fleece to keep her busy, that was for sure. She cleaned, dyed, and spun the fiber herself into soft, wonderful yarns. From there, she both sold a good portion of the yarn and kept some of it for herself. What she kept, she used to knit any number of beautiful items to sell at the booth she kept at the local, year-round craft and antiques mall.

Most people didn’t realize that alpaca fur was five times warmer than wool and five times finer than cashmere . . . but once they discovered those facts for themselves, they often became addicted to the feel of alpaca sweaters and scarves against their skin.

Stepping inside the house, she flipped off the porch light and locked the door behind her. It probably wasn’t necessary, living out here on the rural outskirts of the city with her nearest neighbor a mile away, but being an elderly woman who lived alone, she was taking no chances.

She hung her purse on a hook beside the door and covered it with her jacket before strolling into the kitchen. Filling her chicken-shaped teapot with water, she set it on the stove to heat, then made her way upstairs to change into a long floral nightgown.

Padding back downstairs in her robe and slippers, she poured hot water over an orange spice tea bag and let it steep, unconsciously tugging up and down on the thin string while she gazed out the window above the sink. Everything was dark, only a thin sliver of moon making the outbuildings beyond visible. The alpacas were fed,
watered, and taken care of for the night, and all Charlotte had to occupy her mind was Miss Prickly Pear and Mr. Cute as a Bug in a Rug.

She hoped Dylan would attend their knitting group again. Maybe then she could find a way to force the two of them to spend even more time together. But the next meeting was a week away, and that seemed somehow too long to wait.

Her drawn-on dark brown brows crossed as she removed the tea bag from the cup and set it aside. Carrying the steaming mug into the living room, she took a seat in her favorite armchair and propped her feet on the matching ottoman.

She’d never played at matchmaking before, and had to admit she was at a loss. If only there was some way to throw Ronnie and Dylan together, some situation that could be created to force them to recognize the attraction zinging between them.

Sipping her tea, she stared at the spinning wheel off to one side of the room and considered working a bit before going to bed. She was tired, and normally turned in after a nice, relaxing cup of herbal tea, but spinning often helped her to think, and that’s exactly what she needed to do tonight.

Though she enjoyed each part of the process of raising alpacas and preparing their fur, including selling her wares, the actual spinning was one of her greatest pleasures. It was an art, really—not to mention extremely soothing—and she was very good at it.

She supposed one could even say spinning was in her blood, a skill passed down from generation to generation in her family. Her mother had taught Charlotte
to both spin and knit, as her mother had taught her, and so on and so on through the years.

There was even—

Charlotte sat up straighter, knuckles going white on the handle of her mug as tea sloshed dangerously close to spilling over.

There was even an old spinning wheel that had been passed down through the family, said to be enchanted and to bring true love to those who used the yarn it created.

Good Lord, how could she have forgotten? It was perfect!

Abandoning her cup on the small table beside the chair, she pushed to her feet and hurried up the stairs to the second floor. The door to the attic was located in one of the guest rooms, and she hurried inside and up the steep, unfinished steps. A single bare lightbulb hung in the center of the attic, not terribly bright, but illuminating enough that Charlotte could make out the shapes of boxes and trunks littering the floor.

In the far corner, beneath a white sheet turned gray with age and covered in a fine layer of dust, was exactly what she was looking for. Slippers shuffling as she crossed the coarse plank floor, she carefully pulled back the sheet.

Charlotte stared in awe at the beautiful, carved wood spinning wheel. It was probably hundreds of years old and needed a good polishing, but otherwise looked to be in perfect condition. She ran her hand over the top of the wheel and was delighted to feel it move smoothly, see the foot pedal bob slowly up and down. Not a single squeak, and if that wasn’t enchantment
after being stored away for so many years, she didn’t know what was.

She hadn’t seen the wheel in ages, had never used it. She’d almost completely forgotten that it was in the attic at all.

Her only clear memories of the wheel were seeing her grandmother use it once, seeing it a time or two in this very house as she was growing up, and hearing the stories of its powers to create luxurious yarns that brought true love.

It took some doing, but Charlotte managed to pick up the ancient spinning wheel and carry it down the narrow attic steps. Rather than taking it downstairs to join her other wheel in the living room, where she normally did her spinning, she put this one in her bedroom.

She didn’t get many visitors, but just in case, she didn’t want this wheel to be out in the open, where someone might see it. And since what she was planning to do was a bit odd, perhaps a bit fanciful, she preferred to keep the activity a secret.

Once the wheel was situated where she wanted it, Charlotte stood back and wiped the back of one hand across her damp brow. There was no guarantee this would actually work, but according to her mother and grandmother both . . . and probably her great-grandmother and great-great grandmother before them . . . the yarn created by this spinning wheel had never failed to bring two lovers together, star-crossed or otherwise.

Of course, the wheel had probably never come up against two people as mulish, pigheaded, and determined to avoid emotional entanglement as Ronnie
Chasen and Dylan Stone, but she had faith. She believed in the power and enchantment of the spinning wheel.

And if all else failed, at least they’d have a nice knitted something-or-other to show for her efforts.

A thousand dollars.

A thousand dollars.

A thousand dollars.

Maybe if she kept saying it to herself, over and over, she would eventually stop feeling like a pathetic, weak-willed sellout.