Size Matters (Handcuffs and Happily Ever Afters)

“Are you the one who wants to look around?” a deep voice asked from behind me.

“Yes, I . . .” I was speechless. In front of me stood the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Taller than Jack, he had dark brown, messy, sexy hair and the most unusual ice blue eyes. Built like Adonis . . . he was perfect. Even his voice was hot. I could feel my heart pounding in my ears and I thought I might pass out. Was he a movie star? Was he gay? His jeans, black T-shirt, and tennis shoes were nothing special, but on him they looked like foreplay. First I would peel his shirt off with my teeth and then I would . . .

“Are you okay?” he asked, watching me with concern. “Maybe you should sit down.” He took my arm to help me to a chair and I could swear a shot of electricity blasted up my arm and straight to my panties. It was like those vampire romances . . . Maybe he was a vampire. Or maybe I was insane.

A
LSO BY
R
OBYN
P
ETERMAN

R
OBYN
P
ETERMAN

eKENSINGTON

Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

 

A book doesn’t come to life with only the author’s imagination. There are many people involved, and without them I would simply have a story without the polish. I am grateful and blessed to have so many wonderful people in my life.

First and foremost, my editor, Alicia Condon, who continues to delight me with her expertise as I continue to make her wet her pants! I am a better writer because of you.

My Pimpettes. You ladies are nuts and I adore you. Thank you for continuing to spread the word!

My beta readers. I love you more than you will ever know: Jennifer, Kris, Kim, Jim, Jowanna, and Candace. You spur me to write faster and keep me afloat when I’ve jumped off the deep end. It wouldn’t be half as much fun to write if you guys weren’t reading!

My critique partner, J. M. Madden. You are a brilliant writer and have a way with words that can make my biggest and most horrific mistakes seem like simple fixes. I am honored to call you my friend.

And last but not least, my family. Hot Hubby, I wouldn’t trade you for all the lottery tickets in the world. You and our kids are the best things that ever happened to me. Thanks for eating peanut butter and having no clean underpants when I’m on a deadline. You guys make it all worth it.

“Y
ou’re kidding me,” I said, shaking my head in shock.

“I’m absofuckinglutely not.” My best friend and roommate grinned, gently stroking her six-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Brett Favre. “Did you think I would take a bet where I might lose my cardboard quarterback boyfriend?”

“B-but you have a real boyfriend,” I stammered, realizing the magnitude of my stupidity. I knew there was no way out. I couldn’t plead brain damage or lack of sex. Actually I could plead lack of sex, but I didn’t really want Rena to know that little tidbit right at the moment. Having a kind-of boyfriend who traveled more than he was in town had put a crimp in any activity south of my belly button.

“I do have a real boyfriend,” Rena agreed, “but no one can replace my life-size cardboard cutout of Brett Favre.”

“Does it have to be Bigfoot?” I whispered, praying to Lutheran Jesus for a reprieve. “What if I do your laundry for a month? Or babysit the little people that live in your aunt Phyllis’s TV?”

“Tempting.” My best friend, who I hated at the moment, grinned evilly. “But, no.”

“How does this always happen to me?” I moaned, running my hands through the bane of my existence. The wild blond curls all over my head and halfway down my back were the envy of every woman I met, but drove me to drink occasionally. “I’m cutting the hair off,” I muttered, trying to extract my hand.

“No, you’re not. I will personally kill you if you do,” Rena informed me. “I want your hair worse than I want Angelina Jolie’s lips. And to answer your question, you said, David Hasselhoff is a big star in France and I said, no, he’s not. Then you said, Do you want to bet? and I said yes. I then proved, via some scary Internet footage, that he’s a rock star in Germany and they don’t give a shit about him in France. The end result is that I’m keeping Cardboard Brett Favre and you’re going to accompany my aunt Phyllis to her Bigfoot meetings for the next two months.”

“Oh my God,” I said. The reality of what I’d done was almost too much to bear.

“What if I pretend I’m you and go for your Pap smear?” I was desperate.

That stopped her cold. Rena had an unnatural phobia of Bryant Gumbel and gynecologists. “How many years?” she asked, eyeing me narrowly.

“Um . . . two?”

“If you had said twelve, I might have considered it,” she informed me as she lovingly dusted Cardboard Brett Favre’s abs.

“Twelve?” I shouted. “How does twelve years of double Pap smears equate to two months of Bigfoot meetings?”

“Just wait and see, Kristy.” She grinned and handed me the Sasquatch get-together schedule.

“You suck.”

“You suck more,” she laughed.

My eyes darted around Rena’s office as I tried to come up with a reasonable way out of this, or at least an alternate exit. I had an office down the hall, where I did fund-raising work for the women’s shelter I’d started. The rest of the space was filled with
New York Times
best-selling authors. Long story.

“Oh, I almost forgot, Louise called from the shelter. She’s a little concerned,” Rena said.

“Why?” I racked my brain trying to remember if there was anything complicated scheduled at the women’s shelter today. I had turned the day-to-day running of the shelter over to Louise, one of the most levelheaded and calm people I’d ever met. Hell, it had to be something bad for her to be rattled.

“Apparently Edith and Mrs. C showed up to give knitting lessons.”

“Oh, hell no,” I screeched as I ran from Rena’s office and continued to run all twelve city blocks to the shelter.

 

“Are they here?” I huffed, trying desperately to catch my breath. My lungs were burning and sweat dripped from my face. I hadn’t sprinted like that in . . . ever. I’d never sprinted in my twenty-eight years on earth, but the thought of Edith and Mrs. C alone with women who were trying to get their lives together was comparable to hosting an AA meeting at George’s Liquor Emporium.

“They just waddled out,” a pale-faced Louise informed me. “It was bad, but most of the women here today don’t speak much English.”

“Thank Jesus,” I gasped, plopping down on the couch in Louise’s office. “Did they use the phrase ‘Bless your heart’?”

“Yep”—she shook her head ruefully—“right before or after they said something emotionally crippling about someone’s hair, shoes, face, clothes, or accent.”

Edith and Mrs. C were seventy-year-old evil twins and they scared the hell out of me. I had inherited them from my recently deceased not-evil grandmother along with said grandmother’s knitting shop, A Stitch in Time, where the two devil incarnates worked.

“What did they want?” I asked as I covered my eyes and tried to block out the disaster that was my life.

“You,” Louise deadpanned. “As I recall, it went something like this . . . Tell that no-good lazy large-bottomed cow she better show her huge ass up at the store or we’ll burn it down, bless her heart.”

“Oh my God, my ass isn’t big,” I hissed.

“No,” Louise laughed, “actually, it belongs on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. So, hot ass, great boobs, and amazing hair aside, I think they were serious about burning the store down.”

“Motherhumpin’ cowballs,” I muttered. “I don’t want the knitting store and I certainly don’t want the two hags that come with it. I already have a job that I love. God, I don’t have time for this.”

“You’re going to have to make time,” she informed me in her no-nonsense way. “Mariah Carey almost beat the living daylights out of them.”

“What is Mariah Carey doing in this building? I banned her from coming here for three weeks until she completes an anger management course.”

“Apparently she did it online in two days and is cured.” Louise grinned.

Mariah Carey (no relation) was a 97-pound ball of fury with the voice of a 275-pound Minnesota Vikings linebacker. I had helped her get her GED and six jobs, all of which she’d been promptly fired from. The reasons varied, but a similar theme kept popping up. Someone looked at her funny, so she broke his nose . . . someone tried to return something without a receipt, so she broke his nose . . . someone said their fries were cold, so she broke his nose. Always men, never women. Her past was rough, but she’d never have a future if she kept getting arrested for aggravated assault.

“Mariah Carey,” I shouted, “get in here.”

All five foot nothing of the unfortunately named pain in my ass entered the office with a sheepish grin on her face. “Sorry, dude,” she muttered in a voice that had me wondering for the umpteenth time if she were actually a tiny man with boobs.

“Sorry’s not going to cut it, little missy. Why’d you try to smack down on the old ladies?” I asked.

“Well, um.” She pulled on her stringy hair, which was dyed blue this week. Possibly to match her fingernails. “They said nasty things to Consuela and Rosita and they called me a man.”

Hmm, interesting. “So what happened?”

“Nothing, dude,” Mariah Carey mumbled. “I just got up in their faces and threatened them.”

“For God’s sake, Mariah, last week you put a metal chair through the TV set and the week before that you set the rug in my office on fire and the week before that you painted swear words all over the lobby . . . why in the hell didn’t you deck the old bitches?” I yelled.

“Kristy,” Louise gasped with disapproval, “you did not just tell her she should have taken out the old ladies.”

“I would never tell her to take out old ladies, but they’re not ladies . . . they’re mean old hags who are making my life a living hell and said I had a big butt. If Mariah had taken them down, maybe they would have . . .”

“Died?” Louise spat.

“Oh crap,” I moaned, and dropped my head into my hands. “What is wrong with me?”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Louise said, sitting down next to me and gently rubbing my back. Mariah Carey wedged herself in on my other side and played with my hair. A little odd, but strangely comforting. “You started this shelter all by yourself three years ago and have worked 24/7 until you hired me six months ago. You have raised enough money, in a shitty economy, through grants and donations so we can keep our doors open the rest of the year. Your grandma died a month ago and your boyfriend seems like a douche. A very attractive douche, but a douche. You now own a store run by Satan’s twin spawns and you need a break. But you can’t tell Mariah she can bust down on old ladies, no matter how vile they are.”

“I’m so sorry,” I told Mariah and Louise between the splayed fingers that covered my face. “I think I need a little vacation.”

“When’s the next major fund-raiser?” Louise asked, pulling my face out of my hands.

“October,” I muttered, yanking on a curl and putting it in my mouth.

“That’s four months away,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you have savings?” I nodded mutely. “You are going to take the summer off. I have it under control at the shelter and you need to figure out what you’re going to do with the knitting shop.”

I shuddered inwardly at the thought of facing the Beelzebub twins, but I knew I had no choice. I’d deal with them and take the rest of the summer off. For the first time in a while I felt lighter.

“Thank you,” I whispered, giving Louise a hug.

“Can I make a suggestion?” Mariah Carey offered.

“Does it involve killing old women with blunt objects or folding chairs?” I asked, giving her the disapproving eyebrow.

“Um, no,” she chuckled, “but that sounds like a good time.”

“So what’s your advice, Mariah?” I grinned, waiting for something appalling or illegal to come out of her mouth.

She yanked on her hair and punched me in the arm. “You need to get laid.”

“Don’t I know it,” I laughed, flopping back on the couch. “Don’t I know it.”