Tangled Thing Called Love (36 page)

Authors: Juliet Rosetti

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Romantic Comedy, #Suspense, #Humorous

Crazy for You

Tangled Thing Called Love

The Sexiest Man Alive*

*Coming soon

Photo: Dee Madden

A native of Wisconsin, J
ULIET
R
OSETTI
grew up on a dairy farm, where she neglected her weed-pulling and cow-milking duties in favor of reading every book she could get her hands on. At various times in her life, Rosetti has worked in an aluminum factory, coached cricket, competed in a beauty pageant, and sold encyclopedias door-to-door. Writing romances is her favorite job so far because it almost never involves wearing bathing suits or shin pads—although she sometimes dons her lucky tiara. She lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with her husband and son and is currently working on a new Escape Diaries novel.

Julietrosetti.net

The Editor’s Corner

May marks the halfway point between the first day of spring and the summer solstice—I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely ready for the warmth of spring and the heat of Loveswept romances! And you can always count on Loveswept to have the perfect gift for you and your mom this Mother’s Day.

Let’s see what’s on sale this month:

Small-town romance is first on the list with
Laugh
—Mary Ann Rivers continues her Burnside family series as two people try to share their hearts without losing their cool. Outlaws and daredevils are up next when the Justiss Alliance returns in Tina Wainscott’s
Wild Ways
, and the search for a missing woman forces two brave souls to tap into their wild sides. And in her Loveswept debut
Against the Cage
, Sidney Halston turns up the heat as a sexy cage fighter shows a former bookworm how delicious a few rounds between the sheets can be.

Moms everywhere will certainly enjoy Loveswept’s Classics, beginning with Bonnie Pega’s back-to-back releases:
Wild Thing, Then Comes Marriage, The Rebel and His Bride, Only You
, and
Animal Magnetism
. Then Jean Stone weaves together an emotionally charged story of friendship and betrayal, forgiveness and love, in
Places by the Sea
. And, in #1
New York Times
bestselling author Iris Johansen’s electrifying
Blue Skies and Shining Promises
, two hearts are thrown together by fate and united by irresistible desire—don’t miss it!

~Happy Romance!

Gina Wachtel
Associate Publisher

Read on for an excerpt from

Crazy for You

by Juliet Rosetti

Available from Loveswept

Chapter One

You know the job market is tough when you daydream about going back to prison.
—Maguire’s Maxims

Rhonda Cromwell was the kind of woman that gives cougars a bad name.

She broke up marriages, seduced door-to-door missionaries, and sunbathed nude in her front yard, causing neighborhood guys to run their lawn mowers up trees, neighborhood mothers to lock their teenaged sons in their rooms, and the local camping-goods store to stock more binoculars. Botoxed, liposuctioned, and siliconed to whatever bodily perfection is possible at age forty-five, she trolled campuses for fraternity boys, hung out at singles bars, and hooked up with hot, young hunks she met on Internet dating sites.

She carried on her predations at the office, too, slinking around in bustiers under blazers, screw-me heels, and miniskirts so mini that when she put her feet up on her desk, you could read the brand label on her thong. Young, male employees were afraid to bend over the water fountain. Female employees fantasized about strangling Rhonda with her own Spanx fanny-lifting leggings.

Rhonda was smart, hardworking, and ambitious.

She was also vain, greedy, and malicious.

She was my boss.

She was the owner and CEO of Cromwell Research Services, which sounds like the kind of business that crunches numbers, runs rats through mazes, or test-markets new brands of cheese spread. But its name is misleading. CRS is a spying operation. It sends mystery shoppers out into America’s malls and mini-marts to rat out rude employees, crummy food, and toilet paper stacked in towering piles ready to fall on your head when you squeeze the Charmin.

I’m one of those spies. My name is Mazie Maguire. I’m still pretty much the same insecure twelve-year-old who worried about kissing, except now my acne has cleared up, I’ve achieved a B-cup bra size, and I’ve kissed quite a few males. My real name is Margarita, a legacy from my Italian grandmother, who also handed down her dark-brown hair and ability to sing on key. My blue eyes, freckles, and small frame are from the Maguires, an Irish clan rumored to be descended from leprechauns.

I spent the last four years of my life in prison, convicted of murdering my husband.

I didn’t do it.

Of course, all felons claim they’re innocent, but in my case it’s true. When a tornado tossed me over the prison fence, I ran for my life, pursued by a federal marshal, a couple of nasty hit men, and squads of gun-toting citizens salivating over the reward on my head. Along the way I managed to solve my husband’s murder, expose a dirty senator, and royally piss off my loony-tunes ex-mother-in-law. A judge looked at the new evidence, declared me not guilty, and ordered me set free.

But people believe what they want to believe, and in their eyes I’ll always be the woman who got away with murder. When I tried to return to my old job teaching high school music, the school board refused to hire me back. Nobody wanted an ex-convict teaching their kids. Guilty or innocent, it made no difference. I still wore an invisible barbed-wire tattoo.

It’s now been seven weeks since I walked out of prison, and there are days I want to go back. In the can, you don’t have to worry about making your rent, filling your gas tank, or buying groceries. I’d been released at the exact moment the American economy was tanking. I was fighting for burger-flipping jobs with PhDs in physics.

So I was grateful to have found the job with CRS. True, I despised my boss, the salary was laughable, and I had to taste-test tons of greasy, calorie-laden fast food—but at least I was earning a paycheck. If Rhonda ever got around to paying me, that is.

I live in Milwaukee, a terrific city with not-so-terrific weather. Our unofficial motto is “Yeah, but have you ever
felt
a witch’s tit?” I rent a two-room flat at the rear of Magenta’s, a boutique that caters to drag queens. It’s the first time I’ve been on my own in years, and the freedom is dizzying. I can take a shower without Mona the Monobrow sidling over and offering to lather up my back. I can read in bed without someone yelling at me to turn off the damn lights. I can eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast and popcorn for supper. After you’ve lived cheek by jowl with twelve hundred people for four years, solitude is the sweetest thing in the world.

Except when it isn’t. Except when you’re missing someone so much it’s an actual physical ache and you want to clamp a giant band-aid over your heart.

Tough it out, my horrible brothers would have said.

Plenty of fish in the sea, my dad would have said.

Stop moping and get on with things, my mom would have said.

Getting on with things on this Friday morning meant heaving myself out of bed and going to work. I had mystery-shopping to do, restaurants to rate, salons to scrutinize. The consumers of the greater Milwaukee area were depending on me.

I skipped breakfast. Sack time wins out over cereal every time. I snapped a leash on Muffin, my shih tzu, and took him out for a walk, both of us exhaling frosty puffs of breath like speech balloons. It was sunny and chilly, typical mid-November weather for Wisconsin. The trees were bare, the ground was frozen, and Thanksgiving decorations were fighting a losing battle against the oncoming steamroller of Christmas.

I dropped Muffin off at doggie day care and hiked the five blocks to where I’d parked my car. I live on Milwaukee’s east side, close to the megalithic University of Wisconsin campus, which means that every day I have to compete with thirty thousand students for about sixteen available parking spaces.

My car is a twelve-year-old Ford Escort in an end-of-season clearance-sale color—sort of kidney bean red. It has a jones for oil, its tires are bald enough to require a comb-over, its glove compartment harbors a family of mice, and its engine makes odd grunting noises, as though a pig is curled around the carburetor. Still, it was as much car as I could expect for what I’d paid.

I’d sold my wedding ring for this car. I’d been wearing the ring the day I was processed into prison and was forced to turn it over to the prison staff, who locked it away in the property safe. Since I’d been sentenced to life, I’d never expected to see the ring again.

But what the penal system taketh, the penal system sometimes giveth back. When it spat me out, it handed back my ring. The man who’d set this ring on my finger had cheated on me, announced he wanted a divorce by sticking the papers on our refrigerator with a Scooby-Doo magnet, and tried to kick me out of my own home. As a symbol of faithfulness, this ring ranked with purple plastic secret-decoder rings that came free inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch.

When I slid the wedding ring back on my finger, I waited to see if it would set off sentimental vibes. Nope. Not a single vibe. The thing was just a shiny chunk of metal.

A shiny chunk of metal worth a goodly chunk of change, as it turned out when I took it to a jewelry dealer. I walked out of the shop with naked fingers, but with enough cash to pay my first month’s rent and buy the Escort.

I scraped the glacier off the windshield and got in. Crossing my fingers, I turned the ignition and the engine grumbled sullenly to life. I aimed the pig out into traffic and we sputtered and oinked our way toward downtown. My first secret-shopper call of the day was to a brand-new business rumored to be way too over-the-top for Milwaukee’s conservative sensibilities. A talk show host had called it smutty, risqué, and indecent. A church group was picketing it. Nearby high schools were forbidding their students to enter the premises.

I could hardly wait to review it.