Tangled Web: A Small Town Romance (The Cortell Brothers Book 6) by Giulia Lagomarsino (an ebook reader txt) 📕

“Are you gonna do something about this?” I asked the kid, like he could actually do something.

He shrugged and pulled out his own little set of handcuffs. “Can I do it, Daddy?”

“You want to cuff him?” he asked his son.

Brody nodded excitedly. Jack waved him over with a grin. “Well, let me show you how it’s done.”

He looked at me and I just knew he was waiting for me to resist. The fucker wasn’t actually arresting me, but he wanted to have some fun with his kid, and he would no doubt walk me the four blocks to the police station, letting everyone see me handcuffed.

But I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction. I grinned and stood, folding the paper before setting it on the table. “Sure, kid. You want to do the cuffs yourself?”

“Can I?” he asked excitedly.

“Of course!” I grinned, much to Jack’s dismay. If he thought he was going to anger me, he was wrong. I could do this all day. Well, if I didn’t have to work. But I didn’t have another meeting until tomorrow, so I was good for an overnight stay, if that’s the way Jack wanted to play this.

I turned toward the diner window and nodded to the people around me as Jack explained to his kid how to put the handcuffs on. I winced when he closed them just a tad too tight.

“Yeah, you want to make sure they’re extra tight so the perp doesn’t get away,” Jack said, pulling on my shoulder to back me up. “What do you say we walk him back to the station?”

Brody nodded excitedly.

“Hey, Brody.” He turned and looked at me. “Now, when we get out there, you have to start telling the whole town how you took me down. Make it a good story, huh?”

He nodded excitedly, but then frowned. “What should I say?”

I shrugged. “Maybe I was robbing a bank when you caught me. Ooh, or I was stealing all the pies of the day out of the bakery cabinet!”

Jack shoved me forward, growling in my ear. “Don’t make friends with my kid.”

“Then don’t put me in the position to do it,” I retorted.

“You know, I think I liked it a lot better when I couldn’t understand what the fuck you said.”

“Ah, well, you’ll have to thank Eric. Yeah, he got me this great book—“

“A dictionary?”

I frowned. “No. Why does everyone always think that?”

“Because it doesn’t seem like you’ve ever seen one.”

“Hey, now. Let’s keep the low blows for the ring.”

He shoved me through the door and Brody immediately started spinning a tale of how I showed up at the diner to steal a pie, and when he approached, my fangs came out and he had to drive a stake through my chest to stop me from stealing the pies. Then his dad came and arrested me.

I nodded to the people as we passed, glad they were all getting some joy out of this. Yeah, it was a little humiliating, but if I kept thinking about how much fun Brody was having, it didn’t bother me so much. By the time we got down to the station, Brody’s story had manifested into me being an alien that had crash landed on top of the diner, and he had been the one to drag me from my spaceship. The kid had talent.

“Would you mind getting the door?” Jack said from behind me, then laughed. “That’s right. Where’s my head? You’re handcuffed.”

I looked over my shoulder and fake laughed. “You know, I think I like asshole Jack better than friendly Jack.”

“Well, be happy he’s sticking around then.”

I was shoved into a cell, still handcuffed, as Jack sat down at the desk. Sighing, I took a seat on the wooden bench. “Are you going to allow me a phone call?”

Jack looked up at me, and then down at the phone. “Sure.” He shoved the phone off the desk and it crashed to the floor, scattering in pieces as it broke apart. “Oops,” he said, grinning up at me.

“That’s okay. You can use Daddy’s phone,” Brody said, snatching the phone off the desk before Jack could grab it. He was already shoving it through the bars before Jack could get to me. Grinning, I stepped away from the cell doors and looked at the passcode screen over my shoulder. A guy like Jack, didn’t like technology and didn’t want to waste the energy on coming up with a password, that was easy to guess. I typed in one, two, three, four, five, six and watched as the screen popped up.

“Jack, seriously? Too lazy to come up with a good password?”

I angled my body awkwardly so I could dial Robert’s number. I screwed up twice before getting it right. Then I waited for him to pick up. I couldn’t actually hear him since I couldn’t get my hand back in position to put it on speakerphone, so I just started shouting.

“Hey! Jack hauled me down to the station. I need you to come bail me out.” He said something, but I couldn’t hear. “I can’t hear you! Just get your ass down here!” He kept shouting, which was just pointless, so I handed the phone back to Jack, watching as he practically growled at me.

I grinned up at him, pissing him off even further. He snatched it away from me and stalked back to his desk.

“Shouldn’t the kid be in school now?”

Something flashed in Jack’s eyes before he looked down at his paperwork again. “Day off of school.”

And normally he would be with his mother, but his mother was dead now, because of my family. I sat down on the bench and tried to figure out something to say, but I was a jokester. I had no clue what to say to him. At the funeral, sure, I could be sympathetic, but now? It had been months. What did you say to someone that hated you