“Keep your shorts on. If you’re lucky, I might let you help replace a battery by the end of the week. For now, I need the tools along the back wall organized.”

She gasped as if I’d insulted her ancestry. “Seriously?”

I cocked an eyebrow at her and said nothing, and after a minute or two she harrumphed like she was a Mrs. Echols clone and wheeled to the back wall. Good freaking Christ. Between waiting for Samantha Adams to vamoose and waiting for Pearl to show, six hours felt like a hundred.

Pearl

Boyce’s place was so close to campus that it took me less than three minutes to get there. If I hadn’t gotten stuck behind a golf cart, the trip would have been even quicker.

I parked at the curb but remained in the car. A pickup truck sat in the driveway of the garage, where a man lifted a girl into the passenger side. As he went to buckle her in, she swiped the seat belt from his hands and fastened it herself, then leaned out to pull the door shut. He shook his head, folded a wheelchair into the truck bed and strapped it down. Boyce exited the right-side bay wearing the same resigned expression Thomas got when Tux tore through the house like a dust devil for no conceivable reason, knocking things askew as he went. Thinking about my stepfather and cat made my chest ache right down the center.

One eye squeezed shut against the afternoon glare, Boyce lifted his hand in farewell to the people in the truck as he scanned the street and then spotted my car. His mouth, halfway to a smile from the squint, lifted into his familiar grin as he sauntered toward me. “Right on time,” he drawled as I opened the door and popped the trunk.

“I’m nothing if not prompt. That’s one of my distinguishing characteristics.” I slung my backpack over my shoulder and we lifted three suitcases from the trunk.

He grabbed the two largest and led the way to the trailer I would call home for the next ten weeks. “I hadn’t noticed that one.”

I faked a gasp. “Really? I’m appalled at your inattention, Boyce Wynn! I’m known everywhere for my punctuality.”

He turned at the bottom step, his eyes sweeping over me, and I shivered despite a heat index that topped a hundred. “Guess I’ve always been distracted by your more… visible features.”

Oh God. I had no chance of remaining sane for seventy days if he was going to toy with me like that the whole time. Nothing turned me on like his flirtatious banter, no matter how preposterous it got, even if I knew full well he’d never restricted it to just me. I pinned my lips together and stared down at my pink Sperrys—which probably made me look like a prude who was disconcerted by a little flirting. I had to let him think it. If he knew how the sound of his voice made my mouth water and those teasing remarks melted my insides, I’d be in so much trouble.

I raised my eyes to his when he said, “Hey.” He stood just inside the open doorway, watching me closely. His grin was gone and his tone was cautious, as if he thought I might turn and run back to my car. “I’ve been handing you those harebrained lines forever just to provoke that little smirk of yours, but I’m just playing. You have nothing to fret over with me. I hope you know that.”

I nodded, unintentionally giving him the smirk he’d summoned, and walked up the steps and through the door.

He led the way across the living room, past a small bathroom that emitted the aroma of at least a gallon’s worth of bleach, and into a stark bedroom containing an old dresser and a bed frame.

“Had to ditch the mattress,” he said, turning to me. “Got a new one ordered this morning. It’ll be here in a week.”

I swallowed. “Okay.” Of all the possible scenarios I’d imagined for this summer, living in a trailer with Boyce Wynn hadn’t been one of them. A trailer that at the moment contained one bed. “I guess I’ll just sleep—”

“In my bed.”

My hand, gesturing toward the living room, froze midair. I’ve heard people say My heart stopped—which of course isn’t possible unless you’ve just died—but I now understood where the perception might originate. “Uh.”

“I’ll take the sofa,” he said.

Embarrassment washed over me. He wasn’t propositioning me. He was being courteous. I lowered my hand, half-convinced I’d fallen into an alternate universe where my mother kicked me out of the house and Boyce Wynn was proper. “You don’t have to do that.”

He arched a brow, his eyes glowing with mischief. “You want me to sleep with you?”

Or not.

“I… I meant I’ll take the sofa.”

He shook his head once. “That wouldn’t be very gentlemanly of me, Pearl.”

“I’m moving into your home and not even able to pay you rent. Or repay you for buying a mattress. Also I’m shorter than you, so I’ll fit better. On the sofa, I mean. And it’s only for a week. I’m not forcing you out of your own bed—”

“All right, all right.” He held up a hand. “But if you get uncomfortable, or lonely…” He winked. “My offer stands.”

With that proposition, the world righted itself.

• • • • • • • • • •

The cowardly side of me wished Mama would be out when I got home. I could leave a note and my car keys on the kitchen counter, park my car in its garage spot, and climb into Boyce’s car, avoiding the confrontation altogether.

But it was Monday afternoon—she’d be home planning the week’s meals and supervising the weekly housekeeping service, and Thomas would be at the surgery center seeing new and prospective patients. If I’d wanted to avoid them both, I’d have waited until Friday, when she did volunteer work and he took the boat out all day. And I couldn’t leave without a face-to-face explanation, as much as I dreaded it.

I’d focused on how she would respond to my failure to fall in line with her stipulations for continuing to receive their financial support. I hadn’t given much thought to what her reaction might be to where and to whom I was turning—to Boyce. She had no more idea of our relationship than anyone else did. But seeing his Trans Am in the driveway—watching me leave with him after I let her know I couldn’t yield to her ultimatum? It wasn’t hard to imagine exactly what she would think.

Freshman year of college, she’d been none too thrilled when I told her I needed an appointment to get birth control. Thomas talked her off the ledge by pointing out the maturity and responsibility it had taken to make that request. Even so, when Mitchell visited last summer, she’d put him in a guest bedroom downstairs, though we’d been exclusive since the beginning of junior year. Mama and I didn’t really discuss sex. I knew she’d rather I wasn’t sexually active, though I think she was glad I was sensible about it. She’d known me all my life, though—what else would I be?