J. Rosetti The Cougar Chronicles 1
Crazy for You The Escape Diaries Two
Juliet Rosetti
J. Rosetti The Cougar Chronicles 2
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 All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, 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: www.readloveswept.com
J. Rosetti The Cougar Chronicles 3
Crazy for You
J. Rosetti The Cougar Chronicles 4
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 twentyfour. Some women never draw a line at all.
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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 campinggoods 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.
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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
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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 PhDs 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.
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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
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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.
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About the Author JULIET ROSETTI grew up on a Wisconsin farm with four brothers and a dozen cats. She has managed a bookstore, taught school, and coached an Australian cricket team. Currently she lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with her husband and son, eats way too much dark chocolate, and is plotting new escapades for Mazie Maguire.
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