Tangled: A Moreno Brothers novella Read Free Page A

adorable
quirks.
    “What did I say?” She laughed, nudging him away playfully.
    “You said, ‘No albondigas for you.’”
    Repeating it made him laugh again. Izzy nudged him again for
laughing at her, but she was smiling now too.
    “I don’t remember what exactly I was dreaming. I just remember I
was in the kitchen and the kids were running amuck.”
    Romero finally managed to pull himself away but not before
kissing her on the nose. He laughed some more. He’d figured as much because she
often disciplined the kids, especially Romeo, by threatening to hold their
favorite dishes or special treat she made for them hostage until they behaved.
    “You hadn’t done that in a while,” he said just as the kids ran
in the room and jumped in the bed with Izzy.
    “Well, with the kids back in school,” she said, squeezing Romeo
in her arms, “and me going back to work soon, you can expect it to happen more
often. I’ll probably go to bed completely spent more often now.”
    The mention of her going back to work squashed Romero’s good mood
a bit, but he didn’t want to be too obvious about it. He really did want to be
supportive of her decision to go back to work, but, like Manny, he secretly had
wished she’d waited longer before doing so.
    His security firm was highly successful and only becoming more
and more lucrative each year. Financially, they didn’t need her to go back to
work, but Romero understood that wasn’t why she was doing it. She’d worked hard
to earn her degrees. It had taken her longer than all her siblings to earn her master’s
because she’d done online classes and just a class on campus here and there in
the past five years. But she’d finally done it last year, and Romero was very
proud of her. At the time, he’d hoped it was just a goal she wanted to achieve
but that she wasn’t seriously going back to teaching this soon.
    Of course, Izzy’s sister Pat was the one doing most of the
encouraging that she should go back to work. Despite his relationship with Izzy’s
sister having improved enormously since he’d first met her, she was still Izzy’s
overbearing sister. The woman would always be annoying when it came to a lot of
things. Romero had just learned to deal with her ass. The good thing was, after
all these years, she knew better than to purposely get on his bad side. And
since Romero had been so convincing about being all for Izzy going back to work,
Pat couldn’t know hearing her constantly nag Izzy about using her degree and
getting back to teaching was annoying as shit.
    Still, it wasn’t just Pat. Izzy really did miss teaching, and she
deserved to get back to it. So regardless of how disconcerting it was that she’d
be working side by side with this recently divorced professor, Romero was going
to be as supportive as he said he’d be. He trusted Izzy completely. The only
consolation and hope he’d held onto was that she was already talking about how
tired she’d be once she went back to work. She’d already said if it got to be
too much she’d quit ASAP.
    Romero could only secretly hope now that it would be.
     

 
     
     
    Three
    Silly
     
    T
    hree weeks into her new job, Isabel was finally getting
the hang of her new routine. But it didn’t make it any less exhausting than
that first week. Before she figured out what the safest time was for her to
leave the university once she was done so she’d be on time to pick up the kids,
she’d been close to calling Manny or Max, who worked closest to their school,
to pick them up because she thought she might not make it. Luckily, both times she
had. It’d been close, but she’d made it. It took a few days, but she had it
down now—not just what was the latest she could leave but what route to take that
took the least amount of time.
    It was still tiresome, but at least it was less stressful. Not
that Romero would be a jerk about it, but she still didn’t want him to think
she couldn’t handle this. When she started