Tangled Up in Love (3 page)

The sounds of the newsroom buzzed around him, but he blocked them out. The ringing phones, raised voices, clicking keys of computers and ancient typewriters alike.

He’d been hoping for his own office by now, but instead he was stuck inside this ugly blue cubicle the size of a postage stamp, with enough noise to drive the sanest man stark raving mad. It was a wonder any of them could think straight, let alone manage to get any writing done.

Now, at a game—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, it didn’t matter—the noise and chaos were exhilarating. If he were writing about sports and reporting
about the play-offs or the latest team trades, he’d be in his element. But instead he was stuck here, hiding out inside four five-foot-high, paper-thin walls just to read one lousy column in a rival paper.

Though the art of knitting has been around for hundreds of years,
he read, finally getting down to Ronnie’s article,
it seems to have made a comeback recently.

Huh? Her column this week was about
knitting
? What happened to daring him to eat glass or stand on his head while eating a bowl of soup?

Brows crossed, he continued to read. She talked about the number of books, fiction and nonfiction alike, cropping up lately about knitting. About the celebrities who seemed to be taking it up as the hobby
du jour
. About Julia Roberts’s role in turning one of the aforementioned books into a major motion picture.

Jeez, this was a complete snooze, Dylan thought, his eyes moving faster and faster over the tiny print as his patience wore thin. Ronnie must have run out of ideas for challenges and decided to ignore the topic entirely, hoping their little competition would simply fade away.

Not that he’d let her get away with it. If she wanted the dares to stop, then she’d have to come out with a public admission via her column that women just weren’t cut out to do all the things men could.

He didn’t actually believe that; as far as he was concerned, men and women were equals, and if women had the balls to fly jumbo jets or charge into battle in the armed forces, more power to them. There were some things even he, being a guy, had no interest in experiencing. And yeah, maybe not the balls for, either.

But Ronnie had started this, putting him on the men-are-better-than-women
side of the debate, and truth be told he enjoyed baiting her. So in order to put this whole game to rest,
she
would have to be the one to admit defeat.

And that’s why,
he read on, near the bottom of the article,
women make better knitters than men. Men don’t have the . . .
needles
for such intricate work, and I challenge one of them—one of them in particular—to prove me wrong.

Oh, shit. It
was
her challenge column. His eyes had been so glazed over with the history of knitting by paragraph three that he’d failed to spot the trap and she’d gotten the drop on him.

He went back to the top and read the article again. Every word, every punctuation mark, every stylistic point and personal nuance.

Sneaky, very sneaky. Like the perfect bowling score, Ronnie had set him up and knocked him down. And now he had just one month to not only learn to knit, but do it well enough to produce some knitted item that would prove his skills.

He thought he’d rather do the upside-down-soup-eating thing. At least then he wouldn’t end up with egg on his face . . . maybe just a little split pea.

With a thumb and index finger digging roughly into his eye sockets, he took a breath and started to consider his options. There was no backing out or wiggling his way around it, so he’d have to approach Ronnie’s latest challenge the same as he had all the rest—figure out where to start and how to follow through.

Kicking his feet off the desk, he swung his chair around and began tapping his keyboard to log on to the Internet and do a search for all things knitting. The
number of results at the bottom of the first Google page made him groan, and he quickly realized he was going to have to narrow his scope.

He typed in “knitting for beginners” and “learning to knit,” then went to Amazon and did the same. It didn’t exactly raise his spirits to find a book called
Knitting for Dummies
and realize his weekend was going to be spent reading the stupid thing, but if that’s what it took to make Ronnie eat her words, then so be it.

Grabbing a phone book out of a bottom drawer, he looked up the number of a bookstore that was on his way home and dialed with the receiver pressed between his ear and shoulder while he continued to surf the ’Net for knitting information. When a woman answered, he asked if they had a copy of the
Dummies
title in stock, then waited for her to check. When she assured him they did, he asked her to hold it until he could pick it up.

He shut down his computer, shrugged into his jacket, and grabbed up a few things to work on at home. Heading out of the
Herald
office building and toward the parking lot, he decided he had this competition in the bag.

He’d pick up the how-to book on the way home, as well as some yarn and a couple of needles, and spend the weekend reading up and practicing. Millions of people knew how to knit. He even thought he remembered his own grandmother sitting around, needles clacking together as she made something or other. And if his little old arthritic grandmother could do it, how hard could this knitting business be?

Dylan scowled, wishing his friends into the deepest, darkest bowels of Hell. They were seated at their usual
table at the Box, tossing back a couple of brewskis, but Zack and Gage were more interested in howling like monkeys than keeping track of whose turn it was to buy.

So much for support in the face of adversity. So much for a little freaking loyalty.

Zack swiped a thumb under one eye. “Oh, man, that’s priceless. She’s really got you by the short hairs this time, doesn’t she?”

Narrowing his eyes to slits, Dylan took a drink and refused to answer.

His friends might find this situation amusing, but he sure didn’t. He’d spent the weekend reading that stupid-ass knitting book that hadn’t made a lick of sense or helped him one whit toward figuring out how to use the bloody needles and yarn he’d also picked up.

Cast on, bind off, knit, purl, yarn over, slip stitch . . .
Jesus, it was like a whole other language. Some alien dialect you couldn’t understand unless you’d undergone an anal probe.

He was a guy. He had a zillion sports statistics swimming around in his head and could rattle them off at the drop of a hat, but damned if he could figure out how to make a flipping slipknot without wanting to blow his brains out.

And the illustrations were even worse. They were like those Magic Eye 3D pictures that he’d never been able to figure out. After staring at the knitting diagrams for hours on end, he’d gone cross-eyed and seriously considered blinding himself with one of the needles. They seemed sharp enough to do the job.

The book had made a satisfying thud as it hit the wall the first three or four times, though.

Then he’d decided to just dive in and figure it out the
old-fashioned way. What he’d ended up with was a knot of yarn as big as his fist that he didn’t think he’d ever get untangled. And worse, he couldn’t seem to get it loose from the needles to start over.

So now he was back at square one, with no clue what he was doing or how he’d figure it out, and though only a few days had passed since Ronnie had issued her challenge, time was ticking away.

“This might be the one that sends you down in flames,” Gage added. Though he’d gotten a good chuckle out of Dylan’s predicament, he didn’t seem to be quite as amused as Zack, who was still snorting.

“Over my dead body,” Dylan grumbled. “I don’t care if I have to hire an army of little old ladies to teach me how to use those damn sticks, Ronnie is not going to beat me on this one.”

Zack leaned his long, solid, six-six frame back in his chair, taking his bottle of beer with him. “I still say the only sticks a guy can be expected to know anything about are a hockey stick and the one between his legs.”

“Brave words coming from a professional hockey player and a guy who’s getting laid on a regular basis.”

His friend shot him a shit-eating grin before lifting the bottle to his lips.

“You could try finding a knitting group.” This from the more stoic Gage. His thick bicep twitched as he raised his own drink, causing the tribal vine tattoo visible below the arm of his tight black T-shirt to bunch and release.

The noise in the bar around them seemed to fade away as Dylan perked up, leaning his elbows on the table to study his friend. “What’s a knitting group?”

“You know, a group of women who get together once
a week or once a month to knit and talk about whatever.” He shrugged. “I’m guessing new patterns, new yarns, and eventually men.”

“And just how do you know so much about these groups?” Zack asked, waggling his brows suggestively.

Gage shrugged, avoiding both his friends’ gazes to stare at the flat tabletop instead. “I heard Jenna mention it.”

His ex-wife was never a pleasant topic for Gage, and a stoniness came over his face the minute Jenna’s name passed his lips. They’d been divorced for almost a year now, and Dylan still wasn’t sure exactly what had caused the breakup. All his friend would say was that Jenna couldn’t handle him being a cop and they’d decided it would be better to go their separate ways.

Dylan suspected there was more to the story than that, but didn’t press. As close as they were, they each had their own secrets and valued their privacy. And when he was ready, Gage would tell them what he wanted them to know.

“That’s right,” Zack said, sitting up as he warmed to the subject. “I’ve heard Grace talk about it, too. I think she might even belong to one of those things. God knows she’s got enough yarn and shit lying around her apartment.”

“You don’t know whether your girlfriend is in a knitting group or not?” Dylan asked.

Zack rolled his eyes. “That woman has more going on than six normal girlfriends. Book clubs, craft groups, cooking classes . . . I have to sit down sometimes just to catch my breath from
watching
her work.”

“So when do you find time to have all this hot sex you keep bragging about?” Gage wanted to know.

Zack took a swig of beer before smiling slyly. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, brother. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

While Dylan’s mind would normally be more than willing to follow the string of the conversation straight into the gutter, at this point he was much more interested in getting back to the knitting thing.

“How do I find one of these groups?” he asked of no one in particular.

“I don’t know,” Gage said. “Phone book, Internet, maybe call around to local craft stores.”

“I could ask Grace about hers,” Zack offered. “Maybe she’d even take you along with her.”

“No way!” Dylan slammed his bottle down on the table, making the rest of the empties jump and rattle. “Are you kidding me? I don’t want Grace or any of Chasen’s other friends knowing anything about this, got it? Christ, it’s bad enough all of Cleveland is going to be witness to my humiliation if I can’t pull this off. I sure as hell don’t need anybody who can report back to Ronnie knowing I don’t already have this in the bag.”

“Okay, okay.” Zack held up both hands, warding off another outburst. “Take it easy, I won’t say a word.” He held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

Since Zack had never been a Boy Scout, and Dylan was only too familiar with his friend’s so-called honor, he didn’t put much stock in the vow. But he also had more important things on his mind . . . like getting the show on the road with Ronnie’s latest dare.

“Good.” Dylan pushed his empty Coors bottle into the center of the table and said, “Now order another round while I find a phone book, then get out your cell phones. You bozos are going to help me track down a
knitting group where I can pay somebody’s granny for some private tutoring.”

Wind whipped through Ronnie’s hair and tugged at her leopard-print raincoat as she sprinted across the parking lot of the small strip mall and into The Yarn Barn. Like most of the other items in her wardrobe, she’d bought the coat at a secondhand shop, but she knew no one would ever guess it was used. She was very careful about that sort of thing, and never purchased anything that looked faded or worn unless she thought she could fix it herself and make it look brand new.

Her heels clicked on the hard tiled floor as she shook off tiny droplets of rain and brushed the hair out of her face, loosening the belt of her jacket as she headed for the back of the store. She was running late, but not too late.

The Yarn Barn had set up a lovely, homey alcove for groups just like this one, with soft brick-colored carpeting and big, comfortable chairs arranged in a circle. Off to the side was a small refreshment area where they could make coffee or cocoa or tea, and in the center of the chairs was a low cherrywood table with a few assorted craft magazines spread out, where group members could set their drinks.

Everyone else was already seated, drinks poured and needles out. She greeted them all with a wide smile, shedding her jacket and carrying her small tote with her to one of the empty chairs.

“Looks like you’re in a good mood tonight,” Grace commented from the other side of the circle. She was working with a pair of tiny needles and thin, delicate white thread, determined to knit her own gown for her
upcoming wedding to Cleveland Rockets goalie Zack “Hot Legs” Hoolihan.

“I’m in an excellent mood,” Ronnie replied.

“Would this have anything to do with last week’s column, in which you challenged Mr. Stone to something you’re sure he’ll never pull off?”

Ronnie couldn’t restrain the grin that spread across her face. “I haven’t stopped smiling since I turned the article in,” she admitted. “I keep picturing Dylan’s reaction when he read it, and it makes me feel all warm and tingly inside.”

“A few more columns like that and you can get rid of your vibrator,” Grace quipped. “I suggest you give it to Jenna. It’s been entirely too long since that girl had an orgasm.”