Page 7 of Rent a Bad Boy

Today, I’m hovering by the salad bar with a tray I haven’t yet used, watching a table of enormous guys in matching green-and-gold shirts laugh at something I can’t hear. Exactly how am I supposed to work up the nerve to walk over there and ask a table full of strangers if any of them know where I can find Everett Stone?

This is, hands down, the least Isla Pickel thing I’ve ever attempted to do.

I am not the girl who approaches tables. I’m the girl who emails professors instead of going to office hours. I’ll wait until the line is completely empty before asking the barista a follow-up question. I once spent four days too anxious to return a library book a single day late because I was convinced the librarian would remember my face forever and silently judge me every time I passed the circulation desk for the rest of my college career. And yes, I was completely aware every passing day only made things worse.

So approaching a table full of football players is, on my personal scale of social difficulty, somewhere between public speaking and calling customer service. Just the thought makes me shiver like I accidentally touched a snake.

But Christine sent an email this morning to Grandma and me. It wasn’t even a formal notice this time. Just a casual reminder about how the board “looks forward to seeing compliance soon.” She even italicized the word soon. I don’t know why that detail bothers me so much, but it does.

Maybe I shouldn’t do this. There has to be another way, right? One that doesn’t involve me humiliating myself in front of strangers?

Then again, my babies are home right now, blissfully unaware their fate is up in the air. Nobody in my whole life has ever fought for me the way I’m trying to fight for them. Something about that thought is what finally gets my feet moving toward the table.

I make it about six steps before my nerve mostly evaporates, but six steps is still six steps more than I expected, so I keep going on momentum alone.

Finally, when I’m standing at the head of the table, I clear my throat. “Hi.” My voice comes out smaller than I wanted it to. The noise of the cafeteria almost swallows it. Still, a few of them look up, because apparently a girl in taped-together glasses hovering at the edge of the table is a novelty. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I’m looking for somebody. Everett Stone?”

Please, dear God, let me die here and now. I almost wish I didn’t have my glasses on, because then I couldn’t see the looks of judgment on their faces as clearly as I do. Like I’m some new and exotic species they’ve only heard about until this afternoon but have never seen in person.

There’s a beat of silence before one of them—blond and broad-shouldered, stupidly handsome—leans back in his chair and looks me up and down with an expression I recognize immediately. I’ve been on the receiving end of it my entire life, after all. It’s the look people give you right before they decide you’re funny in a way you didn’t mean to be.

“Nice glasses,” he quips. Of course, the table laughs, because that’s what people do in a situation like this. They laugh at the stranger who pulled together every ounce of her courage just to approach them. My face goes hot enough that I’m pretty sure I could fry an egg on it, and there’s a second or two where I consider turning around and walking straight into traffic rather than attempting to finish this conversation.

That is, until the guy sitting next to the blond punches him so hard he goes sideways out of his chair and onto the floor. I mean, he literally levels the guy with a single punch and doesn’t even say a word.

Everything around me goes dead silent for a full second before there’s an explosion of noise. Gasps, stunned laughter. Chairs scrape back from tables. “Is this a fight? Do we have a fight?” somebody calls out, because apparently that’s something to be excited about. I swear, I will never understand people.

Meanwhile, here I am, frozen in horror and holding my tray like a shield while I watch a guy I’ve never met casually shake out his hand like he just swatted a fly instead of decking his own teammate in front of the entire team.

I don’t wait around to see what happens next. I turn on my heel and walk fast for the exit, because every cell in my body is screaming that I have just witnessed something I was never meant to witness. The safest possible move is to disappear before anyone remembers my face was the reason it started.

I don’t get far.

“Hey.” It’s a low voice, right behind me, so close I feel it more than hear it over the noise still rolling through the room. There are footsteps matching mine, too, closing in. “Where are you running off to?”

I don’t turn around because I can’t. I’m too horrified. “I don’t want any trouble.” My voice comes out too high and too shaky, and I clutch the tray tighter, even though I’m pretty sure a lunch tray has never once been an effective weapon in the history of self-defense. “I really, genuinely don’t. I’ll just go. I won’t tell anyone what just happened, I promise, ’cause I don’t even know what just happened, technically⁠—”

“Dimples. Relax.”

I freeze.

I’ve heard that exact word, in that exact same voice, exactly once before. Last night. I couldn’t make heads or tails of anything I was looking at, but I could hear just as clear as anything, thank you very much.

Slowly, I turn around.

Now that I can actually see him in my pathetic backup glasses, my mouth goes dry, and my insides get all fluttery, because holy shit. This is the guy I was in the truck with? My gaze darts over his face, taking inventory. Dark, heavy brows. Eyes almost black. Sharp jaw. Unruly hair that doesn’t look styled so much as it looks like it gave up trying to behave.

And underneath all of that, there’s an expression that sits somewhere between amused and unreadable as he watches me put the pieces together in real time.

Son of a bitch.

“You,” I whisper. Right now, that’s the pinnacle of what my brain can put together. “You...”

“Everett Stone.” The way he says it makes it sound like he’s bored of his own name. He shoves his fists into the pockets of his hoodie and rocks back slightly on his heels. “Looks like you found a backup pair of glasses.”

“You... drove me home.” Because my brain is still three steps behind the rest of the conversation, stuck somewhere back at the point where he just punched his own teammate without blinking. “You knew the whole time. You knew it was you I was looking for, and you didn’t say anything.”

“I wanted to hear your pitch first.” He glances back toward his table—there’s still soft laughter here and there, and someone loudly offering to grab some ice. “I figured it would be more honest that way.”