Read Hope Entangles: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (Book 2 of 3) for Free Online

Not
when I worked with my dad, not when I owned and ran the shop after
he’d passed, and I’d be damned if I’d start doing that kind of
thing now. After all, I wasn’t sick, and my transportation worked
just fine.
    It felt like a hunk of my chest had
been ripped out with a hole digger, but besides that I was
fine.
    Of course my fellow co-workers would
beg to argue. I’d snapped each of their heads off that first day
after I’d…
    Hell, could I even say I’d broken it
off with her—with Hope? Had we even been together? Wasn’t there
some sort of time frame for these things?
    Where had we been: past the one-night
stand, the first and second and third dates?
    Insanity, pure and simple insanity. It
had to be.
    There hadn’t been time for something to
really happen between us, and yet, there we’d been, close, so
freaking close. And she’d smelled so good. And I’d had a crush on
her since high school.
    The fact that she still didn’t remember
me, her own brother’s best friend, was a pretty big blow. I mean,
it wasn’t like I was the quarterback like her brother, but I was a
senior starter when she was a freshman.
    And she hadn’t even noticed me. Even
though I’d been to her house, eaten with her family and even (just
once) made fun of her lack of a chest.
    Yeah, it had been stupid, and I was
only following her brother’s lead, but I had it on good authority
that girls liked being teased.
    Obviously I had never made even a blip
on her radar, because there had not once been a hint of recognition
in her eyes. I was just a new guy she seemed to really
like.
    Hell, she’d seemed to like me just as much as
I liked her.
    Shiiit! It had gone way past the “like” stage.
    I knew it the moment she got beaned in
the noggin with that enormous beach ball. The way she’d hit the
dirt... and then gotten back up and shook it off with such good
humor.
    Of course, her t-shirt had been wet…
maybe that had helped kick my infatuation into the next gear. Or
had we skipped a few gears?
    Whatever it was, she was all I could
think about—all I wanted to think about.
    And then that business with the picture
happened.
    I didn’t even know she’d taken it. I
guess, neither had she, but between when I left and when I came
back after work, she’d found it and sent it in as… as a freaking
romance novel cover?
    I knew that’s what she did for a
living. Sure. And I knew that she was under pressure to get
something “spectacular” to her boss to save her job. But it had
never, not once, occurred to me that she would…
    Betray me?
    Yeah, that’s what it had been, a
betrayal.
    Someone I’d known since she was
fifteen, had crushed on since she was old enough to ignore me,
someone I’d let my guard down for and had…
    It had been so much more than sex… it
had been…
    We’d made love.
    I think I lost a few ounces from my
ball-sack just having that thought cross my mind.
    But it had been so much more
than sex. I had never felt so much with any other woman,
even— especially —my
ex-wife.
    Whatever it had been, it was over now,
shot down and tilled into fertilizer before it had a chance to
grown into something that could endure.
    So… why was I driving down her street
one week later, trying not to feel like a stalker, but unable to
stay away one moment longer?
    It had been one crazy day at work. More
oil changes and tire rotations than you could shake as stick at,
and I’d had to fix three of my fellow “mechanics’” mistakes. One
had crammed the wrong oil filter into a Miata. Another had
accidentally cut a brake line when he was trying to pry the oil pan
off a Saturn. And then Benny had somehow “unplugged” a Silverado’s
entire electrical system.
    So I’d been stressed, harassed, and
over-worked—and I still couldn’t get Hope out of my
head.
    So there I was, rolling down her street
at a quarter to four in the afternoon. Talk about fucking
pathetic.
    But then I’d seen people out on Hope’s
lawn. Hope was