Crazy for You: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Read online

  BY JULIET ROSETTI

  Crazy for You

  The Escape Diaries

  Crazy for You is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Loveswept eBook Original

  Copyright © 2013 by Patricia Kilday

  Excerpt from The Escape Diaries by Juliet Rosetti copyright © 2012 by Patricia Kilday

  Excerpt from After the Kiss by Lauren Layne copyright © 2013 by Lauren LeDonne

  Excerpt from Yours to Keep by Serena Bell copyright © 2013 by Serena Bell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-53432-3

  Cover design: Lynn Andreozzi

  Cover photograph: © Claudio Marinesco

  www.readloveswept.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  About the Author

  The Editor’s Corner

  Excerpt from The Escape Diaries

  Excerpt from After the Kiss

  Excerpt from Yours to Keep

  When I was twelve years old, I decided I needed to learn how to kiss in case an actual boy ever wanted to kiss me. This event seemed as far-fetched as my filling out a B-cup bra, but if a miracle occurred, I wanted to be ready. I worried that when the crucial moment came, I’d close my eyes, miss the boy’s lips, and end up slobbering in his ear. I’d heard stories about girls who got their braces locked with the boy’s braces, or bonked the boy’s forehead and knocked him out. Flubbing my first kiss would make me the laughingstock of my entire school and force me to spend the rest of my life as a nun.

  My best friend, Gloria Dinkmeier, and I decided to practice kissing. We started by kissing the insides of our elbows. But then Gloria would make these gross slurping noises that made me laugh so hard I snorted snot out my nose. So we switched to thumb kissing, which is where you jam your thumbs together and wiggle them to simulate puckering lips. Unfortunately this felt like kissing corpse lips, so we abandoned thumb kissing, too.

  Then Gloria hit on the idea of using her ten-year-old cousin Bobby as a guinea pig. He agreed to let us practice on him in exchange for Wacky Packs trading cards. We made Bobby stand on top of a hassock so he was our height, and took turns smooching him. Bobby was kind of cute, and if you disregarded the fact that he smelled like dirt, the kissing was pretty nice.

  Which all goes to prove that I have nothing against younger men as kissing partners. But you have to draw a line. I’m twenty-nine, and my line now starts at twenty-four.

  Some women never draw a line at all.

  Chapter One

  You know the job market is tough when you daydream about going back to prison.

  —Maguire’s Maxims

  Rhonda Cromwell was the kind of woman that gives cougars a bad name.

  She broke up marriages, seduced door-to-door missionaries, and sunbathed nude in her front yard, causing neighborhood guys to run their lawn mowers up trees, neighborhood mothers to lock their teenaged sons in their rooms, and the local camping-goods store to stock more binoculars. Botoxed, liposuctioned, and siliconed to whatever bodily perfection is possible at age forty-five, she trolled campuses for fraternity boys, hung out at singles bars, and hooked up with hot, young hunks she met on Internet dating sites.

  She carried on her predations at the office, too, slinking around in bustiers under blazers, screw-me heels, and miniskirts so mini that when she put her feet up on her desk, you could read the brand label on her thong. Young, male employees were afraid to bend over the water fountain. Female employees fantasized about strangling Rhonda with her own Spanx fanny-lifting leggings.

  Rhonda was smart, hardworking, and ambitious.

  She was also vain, greedy, and malicious.

  She was my boss.

  She was the owner and CEO of Cromwell Research Services, which sounds like the kind of business that crunches numbers, runs rats through mazes, or test-markets new brands of cheese spread. But its name is misleading. CRS is a spying operation. It sends mystery shoppers out into America’s malls and mini-marts to rat out rude employees, crummy food, and toilet paper stacked in towering piles ready to fall on your head when you squeeze the Charmin.

  I’m one of those spies. My name is Mazie Maguire. I’m still pretty much the same insecure twelve-year-old who worried about kissing, except now my acne has cleared up, I’ve achieved a B-cup bra size, and I’ve kissed quite a few males. My real name is Margarita, a legacy from my Italian grandmother, who also handed down her dark-brown hair and ability to sing on key. My blue eyes, freckles, and small frame are from the Maguires, an Irish clan rumored to be descended from leprechauns.

  I spent the last four years of my life in prison, convicted of murdering my husband.

  I didn’t do it.

  Of course, all felons claim they’re innocent, but in my case it’s true. When a tornado tossed me over the prison fence, I ran for my life, pursued by a federal marshal, a couple of nasty hit men, and squads of gun-toting citizens salivating over the reward on my head. Along the way I managed to solve my husband’s murder, expose a dirty senator, and royally piss off my loony-tunes ex-mother-in-law. A judge looked at the new evidence, declared me not guilty, and ordered me set free.

  But people believe what they want to believe, and in their eyes I’ll always be the woman who got away with murder. When I tried to return to my old job teaching high school music, the school board refused to hire me back. Nobody wanted an ex-convict teaching their kids. Guilty or innocent, it made no difference. I still wore an invisible barbed-wire tattoo.

  It’s now been seven weeks since I walked out of prison, and there are days I want to go back. In the can, you don’t have to worry about making your rent, filling your gas tank, or buying groceries. I’d been released at the exact moment the American economy was tanking. I was fighting for burger-flipping jobs with PhD
s in physics.

  So I was grateful to have found the job with CRS. True, I despised my boss, the salary was laughable, and I had to taste-test tons of greasy, calorie-laden fast food—but at least I was earning a paycheck. If Rhonda ever got around to paying me, that is.

  I live in Milwaukee, a terrific city with not-so-terrific weather. Our unofficial motto is “Yeah, but have you ever felt a witch’s tit?” I rent a two-room flat at the rear of Magenta’s, a boutique that caters to drag queens. It’s the first time I’ve been on my own in years, and the freedom is dizzying. I can take a shower without Mona the Monobrow sidling over and offering to lather up my back. I can read in bed without someone yelling at me to turn off the damn lights. I can eat Pop-Tarts for breakfast and popcorn for supper. After you’ve lived cheek by jowl with twelve hundred people for four years, solitude is the sweetest thing in the world.

  Except when it isn’t. Except when you’re missing someone so much it’s an actual physical ache and you want to clamp a giant Band-Aid over your heart.

  Tough it out, my horrible brothers would have said.

  Plenty of fish in the sea, my dad would have said.

  Stop moping and get on with things, my mom would have said.

  Getting on with things on this Friday morning meant heaving myself out of bed and going to work. I had mystery-shopping to do, restaurants to rate, salons to scrutinize. The consumers of the greater Milwaukee area were depending on me.

  I skipped breakfast. Sack time wins out over cereal every time. I snapped a leash on Muffin, my shih tzu, and took him out for a walk, both of us exhaling frosty puffs of breath like speech balloons. It was sunny and chilly, typical mid-November weather for Wisconsin. The trees were bare, the ground was frozen, and Thanksgiving decorations were fighting a losing battle against the oncoming steamroller of Christmas.

  I dropped Muffin off at doggie day care and hiked the five blocks to where I’d parked my car. I live on Milwaukee’s east side, close to the megalithic University of Wisconsin campus, which means that every day I have to compete with thirty thousand students for about sixteen available parking spaces.

  My car is a twelve year old Ford Escort in an end-of-season clearance-sale color—sort of kidney bean red. It has a jones for oil, its tires are bald enough to require a comb-over, its glove compartment harbors a family of mice, and its engine makes odd grunting noises, as though a pig is curled around the carburetor. Still, it was as much car as I could expect for what I’d paid.

  I’d sold my wedding ring for this car. I’d been wearing the ring the day I was processed into prison and was forced to turn it over to the prison staff, who locked it away in the property safe. Since I’d been sentenced to life, I’d never expected to see the ring again.

  But what the penal system taketh, the penal system sometimes giveth back. When it spat me out, it handed back my ring. The man who’d set this ring on my finger had cheated on me, announced he wanted a divorce by sticking the papers on our refrigerator with a Scooby-Doo magnet, and tried to kick me out of my own home. As a symbol of faithfulness, this ring ranked with purple plastic secret-decoder rings that came free inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch.

  When I slid the wedding ring back on my finger, I waited to see if it would set off sentimental vibes. Nope. Not a single vibe. The thing was just a shiny chunk of metal.

  A shiny chunk of metal worth a goodly chunk of change, as it turned out when I took it to a jewelry dealer. I walked out of the shop with naked fingers, but with enough cash to pay my first month’s rent and buy the Escort.

  I scraped the glacier off the windshield and got in. Crossing my fingers, I turned the ignition and the engine grumbled sullenly to life. I aimed the pig out into traffic and we sputtered and oinked our way toward downtown. My first secret-shopper call of the day was to a brand-new business rumored to be way too over-the-top for Milwaukee’s conservative sensibilities. A talk show host had called it smutty, risqué, and indecent. A church group was picketing it. Nearby high schools were forbidding their students to enter the premises.

  I could hardly wait to review it.

  Chapter Two

  The road to hell is paved with five-inch heels.

  —Maguire’s Maxims

  Hottie Latte was a block off Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee’s main drag, a narrow brick storefront sandwiched between a manicure parlor and an optometrist. The sign above the door displayed a pink coffee cup with a curvy, cleft bottom. Just in case you didn’t get the picture, the mug’s handle was a female arm, hand resting on hip.

  Hottie Latte was Milwaukee’s first lingerie café, and might well be its last, judging by the protesters marching out front, brandishing signs with hand-scrawled slogans:

  This Shop Serves Porn!

  Send the Strippers Packing!

  Close this den of iniquity!

  Most of the demonstrators were women, but a few were men slinking around, hunch-shouldered, with my-wife-made-me-do-this looks on their faces. They appeared to have been bussed in en masse from the suburbs, and they wore plastic badges on their coats proclaiming themselves The Doyennes of Decency.

  Hottie Latte’s windows were draped with café curtains sheer enough to let in light but opaque enough to prevent peeping. One of the male demonstrators was kneeling on the pavement next to the window, pretending to tie his shoes while sneaking peeks into the café through gaps in the curtains. A woman probably his wife came up to him and whacked him over the head with her protest sign. Creaking to his feet, the man sheepishly resumed marching, but you just knew that if his wife let him off the leash for a single second, he was going to be dashing straight through the front door.

  The demonstration wasn’t my concern, however; I simply needed to get inside and do my job. “Excuse me,” I said politely, weaving my way toward the door.

  One of the Doyennes stepped in front of me, blocking my path. She was tall, with feathery white hair, black eyebrows drawn into a scowl, and a beaky nose. Paste a goatee to her chin and she could have played Uncle Sam in the Fourth of July parade.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she barked at me. “One of the jezebels.”

  “Jezebels?” I repeated, wondering whether she was off her meds. I checked myself over to make sure I hadn’t accidentally worn my hot pants and thigh-high vinyl boots, maybe with a sign advertising “Hourly Rates Available” plastered to my rear. But I was dressed as usual. Black turtleneck, jeans, and navy pea coat. No makeup except for a brush of mascara and a light smear of lip gloss.

  “Scarlet women. You’re not fooling anyone, calling yourselves waitresses.”

  I didn’t have time for this. I had four more write-ups to do today. “Would you mind moving?” I asked.

  The other demonstrators were gathering around, eager to harangue an actual harlot.

  “Strumpet,” hissed a Doyenne.

  “Floozy,” another sniped.

  “Tart.”

  “Tramp!”

  “Slut!”

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

  “What would your mother say?”

  Unfortunately for the Doyennes, their demonstration seemed to be having the opposite effect from what they’d intended. It was midmorning—time for a java, a jelly doughnut, and a jolt to the gonads. Men were streaming toward Hottie Latte in salivating clusters of twos and threes, some looking a trifle embarrassed, some hiding their faces behind sales reports, and some grinning broadly and sassing the protestors right back.

  “Go back to the ’burbs.”

  “Listening to the voices in your heads again?”

  “You stay out of my coffeehouse, I’ll stay out of your church.”

  I broke through the Doyennes and scuttled into the shop alongside a trio of construction workers. The place was jammed. The counter stools, prime viewing spots, were all occupied. Most of the tables were taken, too. All the customers were male. Businessmen, college students, gray-haired gaffers who looked as though they were here to have their pacemaker
s juiced, grungy guys in hip waders who appeared to have just climbed out of the sewers all of them were willing to pay seven bucks a cup to have waitresses in teddies and thongs froth their cream.

  I found a place near the rear of the café at a table the size of a checkerboard. The place was loud. Silverware clattered, crockery banged, blenders roared, and male laughter boomed, nearly drowning out the chants of the anti-slut crowd outside. A delicious incense of coffee-cinnamon-cocoa-yeast swirled through the room, reminding me that I hadn’t had breakfast yet.

  Six waitresses bustled about, three about college age, the others pleasant but unremarkable middle-aged women who might serve you at IHOP, except that IHOP waitresses didn’t wear bustiers that pushed their boobs up to their chins.

  Being a female, I’d probably be ignored, I thought, fishing my company iPad out of my purse and bringing up the evaluation form. The café’s rating would be based on the friendliness and efficiency of the servers, as well as the quality of the product. Later I’d do a detailed write-up and email it to the office.

  I lost my bet with myself. A waitress materialized at my elbow.

  “Hey, girl—you here to apply for a job?”

  “Job?” I was caught off guard. “Umm, no. I just want a coffee.”

  “Oh, too bad.” Her eyes swept swiftly over me, not missing a thing. She was small and Asian, with glossy black hair piled atop her head, dark, tilted eyes, a wide mouth outlined in fuchsia lipstick, and freckles like a nutmeg sprinkle across her nose. She wore five-inch heels and a magenta teddy with ruffles cascading down the backside like a bustle. I would have robbed Victoria’s Secret at gunpoint for that teddy.

  “I like how you stood up to those hags out there,” she said.

  “They seem to think you’re running a strip joint here.”

  She laughed. “Nothing that exciting. We really do serve coffee. I’m Juju, the manager.”

  “Mazie. Nice to meet you.”

  We shook hands.

  “You like chocolate, right?” Juju said.

  My mouth went into salivary overdrive at the mere word. I nodded.