Tangled Up in Love by Heidi Betts

matchmaking before, and had to admit she was at a loss. If only there was some way to throw Ronnie and Dylan together, some situation that could be created to force them to recognize the attraction zinging between them.
    Sipping her tea, she stared at the spinning wheel off to one side of the room and considered working a bit before going to bed. She was tired, and normally turned in after a nice, relaxing cup of herbal tea, but spinning often helped her to think, and that’s exactly what she needed to do tonight.
    Though she enjoyed each part of the process of raising alpacas and preparing their fur, including selling her wares, the actual spinning was one of her greatest pleasures. It was an art, really—not to mention extremely soothing—and she was very good at it.
    She supposed one could even say spinning was in her blood, a skill passed down from generation to generation in her family. Her mother had taught Charlotteto both spin and knit, as her mother had taught her, and so on and so on through the years.
    There was even—
    Charlotte sat up straighter, knuckles going white on the handle of her mug as tea sloshed dangerously close to spilling over.
    There was even an old spinning wheel that had been passed down through the family, said to be enchanted and to bring true love to those who used the yarn it created.
    Good Lord, how could she have forgotten? It was perfect!
    Abandoning her cup on the small table beside the chair, she pushed to her feet and hurried up the stairs to the second floor. The door to the attic was located in one of the guest rooms, and she hurried inside and up the steep, unfinished steps. A single bare lightbulb hung in the center of the attic, not terribly bright, but illuminating enough that Charlotte could make out the shapes of boxes and trunks littering the floor.
    In the far corner, beneath a white sheet turned gray with age and covered in a fine layer of dust, was exactly what she was looking for. Slippers shuffling as she crossed the coarse plank floor, she carefully pulled back the sheet.
    Charlotte stared in awe at the beautiful, carved wood spinning wheel. It was probably hundreds of years old and needed a good polishing, but otherwise looked to be in perfect condition. She ran her hand over the top of the wheel and was delighted to feel it move smoothly, see the foot pedal bob slowly up and down. Not a single squeak, and if that wasn’t enchantmentafter being stored away for so many years, she didn’t know what was.
    She hadn’t seen the wheel in ages, had never used it. She’d almost completely forgotten that it was in the attic at all.
    Her only clear memories of the wheel were seeing her grandmother use it once, seeing it a time or two in this very house as she was growing up, and hearing the stories of its powers to create luxurious yarns that brought true love.
    It took some doing, but Charlotte managed to pick up the ancient spinning wheel and carry it down the narrow attic steps. Rather than taking it downstairs to join her other wheel in the living room, where she normally did her spinning, she put this one in her bedroom.
    She didn’t get many visitors, but just in case, she didn’t want this wheel to be out in the open, where someone might see it. And since what she was planning to do was a bit odd, perhaps a bit fanciful, she preferred to keep the activity a secret.
    Once the wheel was situated where she wanted it, Charlotte stood back and wiped the back of one hand across her damp brow. There was no guarantee this would actually work, but according to her mother and grandmother both . . . and probably her great-grandmother and great-great grandmother before them . . . the yarn created by this spinning wheel had never failed to bring two lovers together, star-crossed or otherwise.
    Of course, the wheel had probably never come up against two people as mulish, pigheaded, and determined to avoid emotional entanglement as RonnieChasen and Dylan Stone, but she had