Page 16 of Small Towns, Wild Hearts

“Sounds like you’re not playing a lot of ‘all stars,’ so you’ll be good without your usual beauty rest, champ,” Drea said, and I had the urge to tackle her and tickle her until she gave in to my extreme charm. And also stopped making fun of my pickle ball problem. But this was an issue. I needed her out of my house.

“You’re family,” Drea pointed out. “Can’t Rock stay here for a week?”

“If we had a spare room, definitely,” Aunt Nattie said. “But we might have gone a bit overboard with the demolition.”

“I have a tent,” Noah said, looking at me.

“No way in hell,” I told him. The mosquitos in Maryland were bigger than my head.

“Can’t you guys just share for a few days until I get Mr. Mulligan’s lawyer on the phone?”

“Or you could offer to put Drea up in a hotel until then,” I suggested.

“All my stuff is at your house!” she protested.

“At least you admit it’s my house.”

“Oh my god, you’re a child. And you’re the superstar pickle ball player, why don’t you get a hotel? I work at a bakery. I can barely afford rent as it is!”

“Oh honey, you should have told me,” Aunt Nattie said, looking worried.

Noah stood. “I’ll make sure Mom gets in touch with the vampire next door, okay? In the meantime, can you guys share without anyone getting maimed?”

Drea stood too. “Can’t promise anything.” She’d stopped arguing, I noticed. Maybe my charm was beginning to have an effect on her.

“I can if she can,” I said magnanimously. “Temporarily.”

“Good!” Aunt Nattie clapped her hands together and stood too, and something about the way she was looking at me made me think she’d picked up on my attraction for my new roommate. “Maybe it’ll be better than you think.” She had the audacity to wink.

“It won’t,” Drea said drily.

“Thanks for the muffins, darlings!” Aunt Nattie said, walking us back to the front door.

“Good luck,” my cousin said, chuckling.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to need luck or restraint to make it through a week with Drea as my roommate. Either way, I was going to make sure that she liked me by the end of our time together.

CHAPTER7

Drea

Well, the visit to Nattie’s solved absolutely nothing. And now I had a tall, muscly, arrogant roommate I didn’t want for the foreseeable future. And all the way back to “our” house, he was giving me a weird smile.

“What?” I asked him as he guided his dumb shiny car down the winding two-lane road.

“I haven’t had a roommate since college,” he said, sounding weirdly gleeful.

“We are not roommates. You’ll be on the couch. And you’d better not eat any more of my yogurts.”

“We can get some tape and put a line down the middle of the fridge if you want. And set up a bathroom and television schedule.” He said this as if he was serious, but I wasn’t going to get my happy little organizationally obsessed hopes up. He was kidding.

I sniffed and looked out the window in response.

The real issue here? Besides the complete invasion of my space and my life, it was that Rock was so stupidly attractive that I found myself wishing things were different. Why couldn’t he have stayed somewhere else and then we could have bumped into each other at Straddlers or he could have wandered into the Muffin Tin?

Of course then, with my track record with stupidly attractive men, he’d never notice me at all.

Not that he’d exactly noticed me now.

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