Hope Entangles: A New Adult Romantic Comedy (Book 2 of 3) by Alice Bello Read Free Book Online Page A

I’d say I’m only the second
funniest thing standing out on this lawn this morning.”
    That jackass…
    I turned on him, my hand rising to
point a finger accusingly at him, and took a breath to yell at him
with… when it dawned on me what he’d been looking at.
    My hair…
    Now, I’m not a vain person… really, but
I’d fallen to sleep on my couch after a late night pizza/movie
bender. And I had taken my hair out of its usual ponytail when
Bette had come over.
    I could only imagine what my hair
looked like.
    Shit…
    “ Stop by for coffee,”
Raphael said as he sauntered over to his house, still smiling,
“anytime.”
    I clenched my hands into fists,
clenched my teeth until they were grinding, I even closed my eyes
hard enough to start seeing green clouds form in the
darkness.
    That bastard!
    I shook my fist in his direction in
impotent rage, but he was already back inside his house.
    I stood there, wanting to start
screaming obscenities at him—I mean, I’d never had anyone tick me
off so badly so quickly—but then I remembered there were about a
dozen workmen only a few yards away. If I started yelling, then
they’d stop what they were doing to look my way…
    And then they’d see what my hair looked
like too. Since I didn’t even know how bad it looked, I turned on
my heel and haughtily stalked back to my house, up the porch steps
and back in the front door.
    I stopped by an old mirror in the foyer
that an even older aunt had given me when I graduated high school.
It had no frame, and had beveled edges that swooped into antique
looking, pretty lines… and it was so old the silver backing had
started to peel off in places, making dark shadows here and
there.
    I loved it because of all these
things.
    But even with the extra shadows it
still reflected the horrid state of my frizzed out curls just
fine.
    I was a hot mess… like
a steaming divot on
a polo field.
    Know how I said I wasn’t vain? Well, I
might have found the breaking point for that.
    I had eye boogies, dried drool on my
chin, a whitehead ringed in red forming on the tip of my nose,
and…
    I reached up and pulled something soft
and a little wet out of my hair. I looked down at it in my palm. It
was the severed head of one of Clive’s little stuffed, catnip laced
play toys: a little orange mouse head with green thread
whiskers.
    I bowed my head and closed my eyes. I
wanted to just dig a hole, jump in it and pull it in after me. I’d
handed that swaggering jerk the perfect ammunition to hassle me
with for the next eternity. I could just hear him calling me
affectionately by some nickname like “little mouse” or “Bead Head
Girl.”
    I was never going to hear the end of
it.
     

Chapter 7
     
    After I took a long, hot shower, pulled
my hair back into an meticulously tight bun—not a hair sticking out
anywhere—and got dressed, I grabbed my laptop and headed down
stairs to start my coffee and check my emails.
    I needed to work on the Big Bad Wolf
cover. I only had the shots of Billy by himself, but those pics had
turned out to have a burning intensity that made them practically
pop with sex appeal.
    Clicking those images into my Gimp
program, I found that all the images I’d taken of Billy, the AAA
tow truck driver, would make wonderful romance novel
covers.
    But there was one, where he had his
arms crossed over his rather well muscled chest, his eyes glowing
with mischief, and a wry, sexy as hell half-smile quirking his
pretty lips, that just screamed Big Bad Wolf.
    I could almost hear women around the
world gasping when they got an eyeful of this cover.
    Oh Wolfy…
    I smiled as I tried out colorizing the
image a nice, erotic blood red.
    My phone rang and I absently reached
for it.
    “ Hello…”
    “ Why haven’t you emailed me
back?” Janine demanded in a harassed voice.
    I stiffened. What now?
    I went to click on my Gmail account. “I
was just about to—”
    “ You’ve got to come,” Janine
interrupted me. “Everyone’s