Page 14 of Rent a Bad Boy

I’m alone. In my bedroom. With Everett Stone.

My very small bedroom, for that matter. My small bedroom, where the bed is still unmade because I didn’t expect a linebacker to show up at my house while I was feeding chickens. There are textbooks on the floor. A Taylor Swift poster on the wall, which I am suddenly very aware of. My desk is covered in sticky notes and highlighters and a half-empty bag of gummy bears I’ve been stress-eating my way through for the past few days.

He looks around the room the way he looked around the yard. Processing everything. His gaze lands on the poster, then the gummy bears, and lastly the bed.

Then he turns to me.

The way he’s looking at me... Nobody has ever looked at me that way in my whole life. Like he’s trying to figure something out, and the look in his dark eyes is something I can’t identify. It’s something I can absolutely feel, though, from the top of my head down to the soles of my feet.

It’s the kind of look that makes my breath do something stupid.

“I...” I start. My voice sounds wrong. Too high. “I panicked.”

“I noticed.”

“Her robe was open.”

His lips twitch. “I noticed that, too.”

“I’m sorry. I just... she does that sometimes. She doesn’t think about it. She just doesn’t have a filter. I didn’t want you to be subjected to...” I gesture vaguely at the closed door. “That.”

“It’s fine.” He hasn’t moved. He barely even moves his lips when he speaks. Like most of his concentration is being used up by staring at me. Studying me. Making me feel the way I’m guessing Goldilocks felt when the Big Bad Wolf crossed her path and looked down at her like she was his next meal.

Only right now, we aren’t in the middle of the woods. We are very much in my bedroom.

And I don’t have the first clue what I’m supposed to do next.

6

EVERETT

She’s standing between me and the door with her back against it, breathing like she just ran a mile. Meanwhile, here I am in the middle of her bedroom, trying to remember why I came here in the first place.

Right. The chickens, the HOA, all of that. Right now, none of that is what I’m thinking about. What I’m thinking about is how small this room is, and how she smells like chicken feed with something sweeter underneath it. How her cheeks are flushed because she’s embarrassed. I mean, she pulled me in here like the house was on fire.

“So,” I mutter, because somebody has to do something to break through the tension. “About the HOA.”

“You said you would think about it,” she reminds me. “That means you either have an answer, because you showed up at my house, or you’re here because you like chickens. I’m choosing to believe it’s the first one, because the second one would be weird.”

Says the girl who would sacrifice everything for poultry. “Marjorie is all right.”

“Everett...”

It’s almost enough to make me smile. She’s nervous and rambling, and there’s still a little feather in her hair she doesn’t know about. She’s a mess. The kind I’m finding it harder and harder to look away from.

“I’ll do it,” I tell her.

Her eyes bulge. “You will?”

“That’s what I said.”

“For free?”

“About that.” I lean against her desk, which puts me close enough that she has to tilt her head back to look at me. The height difference is almost stupid. “This might be a bigger job than I signed up for when all I knew was chickens and an HOA. The price just went up.”

She stares at me. I watch her throat move when she swallows. “I told you, I don’t have much money, but you can have it.”

“I didn’t say I wanted money.”