The Summer Deal (Wildstone #5)(13)

“I can make do with ten.”

God, his gravelly voice. It never failed to make her forget all her problems. He was the best “friends with benefits minus the friends part” that she’d ever had, and he knew it too. “What if I need more than ten?” she asked.

“You won’t.”

And then he went on to prove it.

Hours later, she was at her desk at the local school district office playing catch-up. She was a school psychologist for each of the schools in the district. Her job was what they called a three-quarter position, meaning she worked thirty flex hours a week but was allowed to pay in for benefits, like her insurance and a 401(k) plan.

It was a whole lot less generous than it sounded, but the freedom of setting her own hours was vital, since she spent four hours three times a week in dialysis, and a whole lot more hours feeling like she had the flu, when what she really had was transplant rejection.

Today had been a long day. As the district counselor, she had a lot of ground to cover each week. Today she’d been at the high school dealing with a situation where several teachers had thought a female student was being taken advantage of by some male athletes. After talking to the girl, it’d come out that she wasn’t being taken advantage of at all. She’d been running a homework ring for cash. She was doing the homework of ten different athletes and charging them big bucks for it too. Kinsey hated to be the one to squash such entrepreneurial brilliance in one so young; maybe it was the fact that her own job paid like shit, but she felt pride that the girl had figured a way around a cash shortage. If only Kinsey could find such a way, she’d be less stressed.

In any case, the day had been full and long even without the homework scandal. She’d seen her doctor to check on her immunosuppressive therapy, had gone to a district-wide board meeting that had lasted an hour and a half when it could’ve been a single email, and though she had a stack of files on her desk, all she wanted to do was go home and be alone. When she heard her phone buzzing with an incoming text, she dug it out of her purse.

ELI: How are you?

KINSEY: I feel like my body’s “check engine” light’s on but I’m still driving it anyway.

ELI: Did you take your meds? Drink water?

KINSEY: Yes, Mom.

ELI: New roommate coming in tonight.

Resisting the urge to thunk her head on her desk repeatedly, she shoved her phone back into the bag rather than respond.

A new roommate. Just what she didn’t want: another person in her life to look at her like she was broken or needed to be felt sorry for.

When she’d been little, she’d actually dreamed of living alone in a mansion. She’d dreamed of being a billionaire CEO of some really great corporation, wearing fancy designer duds and to-die-for shoes, and driving fast cars. She’d dreamed of being able to travel on a whim, and having wild, fun adventures. She’d dreamed of having tons of good people in her life. She’d dreamed of being beloved.

Instead, she was up to her eyeballs in medical debt, unable to travel to exotic lands because of her weakened immune system, and drove a POS. She did have great shoes because . . . well, a girl needed one vice, didn’t she? But she lived in her best friend’s house, which was admittedly huge, but not hers, and had . . . sigh . . . roommates. She didn’t have a ton of people in her life, and she was definitely not widely beloved.

And yeah, that last part was her own doing, because she didn’t like people all that much, but, hey, she couldn’t help it. People sucked.

And now she was going to have to go home and meet a new roommate, which would require smiling and playing nice. Hell, who was she kidding? She didn’t play nice. She’d just give the canned greeting Eli had taught her long ago—“Nice to meet you”—and then head to her own room and go to bed. She loved her room. Loved the whole house, actually. It was big and old, and had lots of character and quirks. It didn’t hurt that it was directly across the street from the beach. Eli had bought it as a dump five years ago when he’d gotten hired out of grad school straight into his dream job as a marine biologist. He’d been slowly fixing the place up with help from his brother, Max.

“Slowly” being the key word. Because six months after Eli had signed the deed, his grandma, the woman who’d raised him from the age of ten, had gotten pancreatic cancer. It’d been a brutal five-year fight, and Eli had taken on the bulk of her medical costs. Months after her death, he was still paying them off and would be for a very long time.

So he filled the house with roommates to offset some of the house expenses. Kinsey had been there since the beginning because of her perpetual money problems. Same for Max. Max wasn’t sick like Kinsey. He just put surfing above all else, including a decent paying job.

It was a good thing Eli liked to gather the losers he loved ridiculously and keep them close.

There were two additional bedrooms that Eli rented out as well. One was a long-term lease to a guy who worked six months out of the year in Paris, and that’s where he was now. The other room was currently open. The last roommate had been Max’s lover. Until she’d wanted more and he hadn’t. Mostly because Max wasn’t capable of loving anything as much as his surfboard.

Kinsey had known it’d be only a matter of time before Eli filled the room. She didn’t bother to speculate on who it might be. Whoever it was, they wouldn’t last long. Max would seduce them, then eventually piss them off, and onward they’d move.