Rachel Gibson: Tangled Up In You

No, Maddie had no interest in a man’s love. His body was a different matter, and she did want an occasional boyfriend. A man to come over several times a week to have sex. He didn’t have to be a great conversationalist. Hell, he didn’t even have to take her to dinner. Her ideal man would just take her to bed, then leave. But there were two problems with finding her ideal man. First, any man who just wanted sex from a woman was most likely a jerk. Second, it was difficult to find a willing man who was good in bed rather than who just thought he was good. The chore of sorting through men to find what she wanted had become such a hassle, she’d given up four years ago.

She hooked the top of the Coke bottle between two fingers and moved from the kitchen. Her flip-flops slapped the bottoms of her feet as she walked through the living room and passed the fireplace to her office. Her laptop sat on an L-shaped desk shoved up against the wall and she flipped on the lamp clamped to the hutch of her desk. Two sixty-watt bulbs lit up a stack of diaries, her laptop, and her “Taking Names and Kicking Ass” sticky notes. Altogether there were ten diaries in various shapes and colors. Red. Blue. Pink. Two of the diaries had locks, while one of the others was nothing more than a yellow spiral notebook with the word “Diary” written in black marker. All of them had belonged to her mother.

Maddie tapped the Diet Coke bottle against her thigh as she gazed at the top white book. She hadn’t known they’d even existed until her great-aunt Martha’s death a few months ago. She didn’t believe Martha had purposely kept the diaries from her. More than likely she’d intended to give them to Maddie someday but had completely forgotten. Alice hadn’t been the only flighty female on the Jones family tree.

As Martha’s only living relative, it had been up to Maddie to settle her affairs, see to her funeral, and clean out her house. She’d managed to find homes for her aunt’s cats and had planned to donate most everything else to Goodwill. In one of the last cartons she’d sorted through, she’d come across old shoes, outdated purses, and a battered boot box. She’d almost tossed the battered box without lifting the top. A part of her almost wished that she had. Wished she’d spared herself the pain of staring down into the box and feeling her heart shoved into her throat. As a child she’d longed for a connection with her mother. Some little something that she could have and hold. She’d dreamed of having something she could take out from time to time that tied her to the woman who’d given her life. She’d spent her childhood longing for something…something that had been a few feet away in the top of a closet the whole time. Waiting for her in a Tony Lama box.

The box had contained the diaries, her mother’s obituary, and newspaper articles about her death. It had also held a satin bag filled with jewelry. Cheep stuff, mostly. A Foxy Lady necklace, several turquoise rings, a pair of silver hoop earrings, and a tiny pink band from St. Luke’s Hospital with the words “Baby Jones” printed on it.

Standing in her old bedroom that day, unable to breathe as her chest imploded, she’d felt like a kid again. Scared and alone. Afraid to reach out and make the connection, but at the same time excited to finally have something tangible that had belonged to a mother she hardly remembered.

Maddie set her Coke on the top of her desk and spun her office chair around. That day, she’d taken the boot box home and placed the silk bag in her jewelry box. Then she’d sat down and read the diaries. She’d read every word, devouring them in one day. The diaries had started on her mother’s twelfth birthday. Some of them had been bigger and taken her mother longer to fill. Through them she’d gotten to know Alice Jones.

She’d gotten to know her as a child of twelve who’d longed to grow up and be an actress like Anne Francis. A teen who longed to find true love on The Dating Game , and a woman who looked for love in all the wrong places.

Maddie had found something to connect her to her mother, but the more she’d read, the more she’d felt at loose ends. She’d gotten her childhood wish and she’d never felt so alone.

Mick Hennessy slipped a rubber band about a stack of cash and set it next to a pile of credit card and debit receipts. The sound of the electric coin sorter sitting on his desk filled the small office in the back of Mort’s. Everyone but Mick had gone home for the evening and he was just balancing the tills before he headed that way himself.

Owning and running bars was in Mick’s blood. Mick’s great-grandfather had made and sold cheap grain alcohol during Prohibition and opened Hennessy’s two months after the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed and the spigots once again flowed in the United States. The bar had been in his family ever since.

Mick didn’t particularly care for belligerent drunks, but he did like the flexible hours that came with being his own boss. He didn’t have to take orders or answer to anyone, and when he walked into one of his bars, he had a feeling of possession that he’d never felt with anything else in his life. His bars were loud and raucous and chaotic, but it was a chaos he controlled.

More than the hours and feeling of possession, Mick liked making money. During the summer months, he made tons of money from tourists and from the people who lived in Boise but owned cabins on the lake in Truly.

The coin sorter stopped and Mick slid stacks of coins into paper sleeves. An image of a dark-haired, red-lipped woman entered his head. He wasn’t surprised that he’d noticed Maddie Dupree within seconds of stepping behind the bar. It only would have surprised him if he hadn’t noticed her. With her beautiful smooth skin and seductive brown eyes, she was just the sort of woman who drew his attention. That small mole at the corner of her full lips had reminded him just how long it had been since he’d kissed a mouth like hers and worked his way south. Down her chin and the arch of her throat to all the soft places and sweet parts.

Since his move back to Truly two years ago, his sex life had suffered more than he liked. Which sucked. Truly was a small town where people went to church on Sundays and married young. They tended to stay married and if not, looked to remarry real quick. Mick never messed with married women or women with marriage on their minds. Never even thought twice about it.

Not that there weren’t plenty of unmarried women in Truly. Owning two bars in town, he came in contact with a lot of available women. A good share of them let him know they were interested in more than his cocktail list. Some of them he’d known all of his life. They knew the stories and gossip and thought they knew him too. They didn’t, or they would know he preferred to spend time with women who didn’t know him or the past. Who didn’t know the sordid details of his parents’ lives.

Mick shoved the money and receipts into deposit bags and zipped them closed. The clock on the wall above his desk read 2:05. Travis’s latest school photograph sat on a polished oak desk; a sprinkling of brown freckles scattered across the boy’s cheeks and nose. Mick’s nephew was seven going on fourteen and had too much Hennessy in him for his own good. The innocent smile didn’t fool Mick one bit. Travis had his ancestors’ dark hair and blue eyes and wild ways. If left unchecked, he’d inherit their fondness for fighting, booze, and women. Any one of those traits by themselves wasn’t necessarily bad in moderation, but generations of Hennessys had never cared squat about moderation, and the combination had sometimes proved lethal.

He moved across the office and set the money on the top shelf of the safe, next to the printout of that night’s transactions. He swung the heavy door shut, pushed down the steel handle, and spun the combination lock. The tick-tick of the lock filled the silence of the small office in the back of Mort’s.