Page 44 of Violent Little Thing

I was bleary-eyed as I walked into my kitchen the next morning.

I eyed the mess from dinner last night—dinner that Court had actually eaten—and thought about cleaning it up.

Then the knock sounded at the door, and I abandoned the idea almost before it’d formed.

I smiled when I saw my landlord, Jessa, on the other side of the door.

“Knock-knock,” Peter sounded from his covered cage.

I yanked the blanket off of his cage as I went past it, and he fluffed his feathers in response.

“Morning, Peter,” I called to him.

“Good morning, pet.”

I rolled my eyes.

He’d started calling me pet after watching a movie one day. The main character hero had called his girlfriend “pet” the entire movie instead of using her name, and Peter had really locked in on the name.

I hadn’t been called anything other than “pet” since.

I opened the door wide and smiled at Jessa. “Hey, Jessa. How are you?”

Jessa owned the front half of the house, and I stayed in the mother-in-law suite in the back.

Her eyes were red-rimmed as she said, “I’m so, so, so, so sorry, Charleigh. But I have to cancel your lease.”

I blinked, surprised.

I’d been living in the back of her house for as long as I’d been out of my parents’ place.

“Oh.” I had no clue what to say.

“My mother-in-law was kicked out of that facility we got her in last night. No rhyme or reason to it at all. Just poof. She’s no longer welcome here. So we’re scrambling, trying to find her a place, but…there’s nothing. So, as a family, we decided that the best bet at this point would be to put her in this place. And hire a nurse.”

My heart sank, both for her impossible situation and my impossible situation.

“That’s okay, Jessa. I promise. I can be out in like a week…is that too long?”

I hoped not.

It’d take me at least a week to move my stuff back into my parents’ place momentarily while I looked for a new place.

God, the thought of moving back in with my parents…

This was about to suck. It was about to suck really bad.

“What’s going on?”

The angry-sounding male voice had me shifting to the side to see Court standing there looking impeccable in his perfectly fitted suit. His black hair that flowed in the wind was blowing into his gray eyes, but that was the only thing out of place on his otherwise perfect self.

“Oh!” Jessa jumped. “Who are you?”

Sensing danger, and not realizing who Jessa was to me, he went with the fake girlfriend thing, just in case.

He wouldn’t know that this fifty-nine-year-old mother of four, grandmother of three, was the closest thing I had to a best friend.

“I’m her man.” Court lied so smoothly that even I was halfway convinced.