Tangled Sheets, Tangled Lies. Julie Hogan

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СКАЧАТЬ smiling again, but he saw her eyes burning with the same fire that continued to rage inside him.

      With a Herculean effort, he turned away from her, opened the door—and saw a nervous, pimpled teenager, his baseball cap turned backward, his baggy jeans hanging low on his hips.

      Cole smiled widely. “Good afternoon,” he said, relief filling him at the certainty that he was one step closer to the job. He turned to Lauren. “I believe your next applicant is here.” Then he leaned toward her and said in a whisper, “And I think it’s going to be okay to leave you alone with this one.”

      By the time the sun had begun to hang low in the mottled-orange western sky, Lauren was at the end of her rope. And it had been a surprisingly short trip.

      She stood up and showed her final applicant to the door. “Thank you for coming by,” she said as she shook yet another teenage boy’s slim, soft hand.

      “Thank you, Miz Simpson,” and his voice was so uneven she thought it must’ve changed just last week.

      As the eminently unqualified boy walked down the driveway, she saw Cole working on shoring up the ram-shackle barn doors in the dim light of dusk. Her pulse sped up as he turned around, and gave her a half smile that had “why on earth are you making this so hard?” written all over it.

      Why, indeed, she thought to herself as she watched Cole turn and lift one of the huge doors off its hinges and carry it inside the barn. The references he’d slipped under her door before he’d left the previous night had checked out beautifully. The four people she’d called had been so rhapsodic in their praise, she’d thought perhaps he’d written their scripts himself. But even if that were so, she’d already seen what he could do. He was a good worker, and he was fast. At the rate he was going, he could have the barn and the house fixed up in plenty of time for her grand opening, then he’d fire up his beater of a truck, scoot out of town and her life would return to normal.

      Or at least what she imagined was normal, she thought as she turned to go back into the house. After all, she was only just starting to get her life back together after her highly publicized breakup with Miles Landon, the man who’d finally broken her Jerk-O-Meter—not to mention her heart—with his betrayal.

      Lauren sat down on the antique sofa she’d bought for a song at a tag sale in Maine and pulled her legs up beneath her. The broken heart was her own fault, of course. Growing up as she had, she’d always been wary of close relationships, but when she’d met Miles, the lure of his personality and magnetism had been undeniable. Like an idiot, she’d let her guard down and taken the chance. And then, predictably, it had all gone to hell.

      Miles was a Rock Star—with a capital R and a capital S—and even though he’d been on the road or in the studio much of the time, she’d thought they’d loved each other. Then, two hundred and twenty-two days ago, while standing in line at the grocery store, Lauren had read all about Miles’s infidelity in People. She’d found out in a glossy, two-page spread that Miles, who was supposed to be recording in London, was living right there in Hollywood with a wispy, redheaded A-list actress.

      That was Day One of Lauren’s yearlong sabbatical from men. Three hundred and sixty-five days of no distractions, of peace and quiet to spend with her son, building a new life and a thriving business.

      Lauren straightened and gazed out at her front yard that lay beyond the living room’s ancient leaded glass windows. Where in heaven’s name had her control gone? Where was that familiar, dependable control that had practically been her shadow since she was about Jem’s age, living a chaotic life in home number five with that hardhearted alcoholic couple? Her experience with them had been awful, but it had taught her to be pleasant, even-tempered and totally in control, no matter what life threw at her.

      Don’t get too close and don’t rely on anyone. Those were her rules. Unfortunately, she’d broken them not only for Miles, but also for a few other handpicked jokers—and she’d lived to regret it. Oh, they’d all seemed normal at first but each and every one had turned out to be jerks or philanderers, and one had been struggling with his sexual identity. When she was twenty, it was a photographer; at twenty-one, she’d taken a chance on a much older magazine editor; at twenty-three, it’d been a fashion designer and a professional baseball player; then, at twenty-five, the coup de grâce, Miles.

      And now there was Cole Travis. She had to hire him, even though when he smiled at her, or argued with her, or basically stood within ten feet of her, she felt so damned powerless she wanted to run into the streets screaming. He was a man who threatened everything she’d worked so hard to reconstruct—and he was a man who was leaving in six weeks, she reminded herself sternly, and she’d best remember that every time she got her priorities mixed up.

      It was time to get some real advice, she thought as she grabbed her car keys, got in her enormous, brand-new SUV and drove to pick Jem up from his playgroup at the Bouchard’s house a few blocks away.

      As she strapped the seat belt over him, she asked, “You want to go check the sign with me before we go home, honey?”

      “Yeah!” he said, clapping his hands.

      She smiled and tousled his unruly mop of hair. Never in her life had anyone supported her eccentricities the way her son did. And this quirk of hers, in particular, was a pretty hard one to swallow.

      Lauren looked for signs. Not the mystical, “Ooh, I think that’s a sign!” kind of sign, but actual, real signs that bore messages for the masses. In the course of her life, she’d found them at shopping malls, car dealerships, churches, restaurants, high schools and civic centers. Sometimes they were old-fashioned signs that were changed manually by a human being and sometimes they were electronic signs that were changed every day—which made things so much easier because some of the most important decisions in her life had been resolved by signs.

      In fact, the reason she’d known that they had to settle in Valle Verde was that the local ice-cream shop, the Frosty King, had a nice, old-style sign. And the first day they’d driven into town, it had had a message that read, Put Down UR Baggage. Home Is Just Where U R. Underneath it had said, Double Dips, 99 Cents, and she and Jem had taken advantage of both pieces of advice. And when they were done with their ice cream, they’d driven straight to the real estate office.

      “Can I have a Rainbow Bar, Mom?”

      Lauren signaled and made a left turn onto the main street. “You haven’t even eaten dinner yet, mister.” She looked over at his crestfallen expression and chuckled. What an actor.

      As they approached the Frosty King, the familiar fluttering in her stomach revved up. When she went to look for a sign, she usually knew what she wanted it to say. But today, she had no idea. She told herself she wanted it to say, Don’t Give Up, but deep down in her bones she knew it was more like, The Answer Is Right Under UR Nose.

      Suddenly the sign came into view and her heart sank and soared simultaneously at its advice. Don’t Waste UR Energy, it read. Take The Path Of Least Resistance.

      She stopped the car on the road’s graveled shoulder and gripped the steering wheel so tightly she thought it would snap in two. Was Cole Travis the path of least resistance?

      Jem peered out the windshield, then looked over at her for an explanation. “What’s it say, Mommy?”

      “It says,” she answered, her eyes still fixed on the huge red-and-white sign, “that we have found our handyman.”

      As she prepared dinner that night, Lauren sighed and sliced the three-inch СКАЧАТЬ