Page 160 of Tormented Billionaire Romance Series

“Megyn!”

“Maggie!” I gasped again, and clutched my heart. “What the hell were you doing? How did you get in?”

Maggie smiled sheepishly and rubbed the back of her neck, rustling the short bristly hairs at the base of her skull. “I’m sorry, Megyn. It’s just that I hadn’t heard from you in a bit and you usually text so much. I saw you were home, but then you didn’t answer my texts. I panicked.”

“So you broke down my front door?”

Another sheepish grin. Maggie grabbed the door handle and gave it a bit of a jostling, showing me how it was still locked. “I must have knocked it out of the frame from pounding on it so hard. It’s not like this house of yours is the best ever.”

I shook my head and brushed past her. I unlocked the door and pushed it shut. The latch clicked into place and held just fine, and the lock still worked despite the literal beating it had just endured. “Seems fine.”

“What’s not so fine is that your door pops right open with enough incentive,” Maggie scolded. “You need to get a deadbolt installed.”

I snorted. “Okay. Like I have enough money to not only buy a good deadbolt, but pay someone to install it for me.”

“I could get my brother to do it,” she suggested.

“Maggie, you know I’m not going to—”

Maggie put her hand on my shoulder and looked into my face, her bright green eyes flashing with a mixture of pity and firmness and annoyance. A single glimpse of that brew and I knew not to mess with her. She turned me around and propelled me forward by the shoulders, guiding me to the crappy little couch my parents had left me with when they jumped ship. A firm press down made my legs buckle. I sat down, since that was clearly what my friend wanted from me.

Maggie didn’t sit. She stood over me with her arms folded, gazing down her nose at me. Though I knew her very well, having been friends since our first day of high school, I couldn’t help but to be intimidated. She had always been the more physically-inclined of the two of us, while I was the type to sit around reading nonfiction books on random subjects and doing arts and crafts. Adulthood had transformed her from a rugged tomboy to a rough beauty, with a lean stature and very short blonde hair.

Aside from being tough, she was taller than me, taller than many men even without high heels, and had womanly curves that were to die for. She had perfected a makeup look that was at once alluring and severe.

“I’m not offering you charity. You’d be doing me a favor, getting the kid brother out of the house. All you’d have to do is buy the deadbolt and buy him some pizza afterwards as payment. Way cheaper than getting a company guy to do it.”

“It wouldn’t be fair to your brother not to pay him,” I pointed out.

“And?” she smirked.

I laughed a little. The Ross siblings couldn’t have been more different. Maggie was driven. Her brother, Deacon, had an above-average intelligence that had earned him a free ride through his college of choice; after speeding easily through four years of school in only two, he had reverted to the state of laziness known only by people who were too smart for their own good. He was bored, mostly because he could do anything.

Maybe it would be doing him a favor, to have him come out here and work.

“Fine,” I sighed. “Next paycheck, I’ll put some money aside for a deadbolt.”

“You sure you can wait that long? What if I was that criminal guy?”

“Slamming on my door like that? I thought you were,” I retorted.

Maggie flopped down on the floor, her incredibly long legs stretching out before her. “So, what’s been going on? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“I’ve been looking for something I can do,” I said. I pointed at some loose newspaper pages on the far end of the couch. “There’s some stuff that kind of gets my interest, but none of it would help me out much, and none of it is a replacement for my job at the coffee shop. It’s just more of the same, Maggie. I’m stuck and I know it and it’s been hard to deal with lately.”

“If you’re really struggling, you can come stay with me,” she offered, voice soft.

“What about your brother?”

“It’d be incentive for me to kick him out.” Maggie laughed.

I detected something in her laugh. A reluctance. Hearing that, I would have refused to move in with her even if that wasn’t what I already planned on saying. Deacon needed her more than I did.

“Thank you, Mags.” I touched her hand. “But I don’t want anyone helping me out like that. And I don’t want to give up this house.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Can you blame me?”

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