Going for Broke: Oakland Hills Friends to Lovers Romantic Comedy (Friends with Benefits) Read Online Free Page A

in human beings instead of finance. And when that happened, he was better than the most empathetic, fuzzy-brained psychotherapist.
    But when he smiled…
    It was worse. Much worse. He was much too good-looking for his own good. Or hers, anyway.
    “She was a hoarder,” Billie said. She suddenly wanted to scare him away. “The house is filled with garbage. God knows what needs to be fixed—the roof, the foundation, the electrical. We should just sell it and—”
    “I’ll take a look,” he said. He took out his phone and tapped his screen. “I was flying to New York tomorrow, but I can change that. I can be at the house first thing in the morning, eight or nine. We can—”
    “Hold on, you don’t have to cancel anything.” She’d forgotten how intense he could be when he set his mind on something.
    “It’s not a big deal. I’m glad to have a reason not to go.” He went back to his phone. “Is eight too early for you?”
    “In the morning?” Just thinking about getting up that early on a Saturday made her yawn.
    But if he was willing to do a walk-through, she could hardly turn him down. Even if it was at an ungodly hour. “Sure, of course,” she said. “That would be fantastic.”
    His hawk-like features warmed into a grin. “Fantastic,” he said, turning and opening the door. “I can’t wait.”

    * * *
    C an’t wait , he’d said.
    Thinking about Ian’s words, Billie pulled her car into her grandmother’s driveway at eight the next morning. Her driveway. What an oddly powerful feeling. She’d never owned property before and discovered the sensation was surprisingly awesome. Even if she had to get up before noon on a Saturday.
    She’d been to the house on the day of the funeral, but this was different. Her plethora of relatives weren’t here to distract her.
    Her family was enormous and complicated; the term “blended” didn’t do it justice. Both of her parents had been married twice, with each marriage producing two children, and she’d given up trying to explain it to people without drawing a diagram.
    Grammy had been her father’s mother, but most of the blended clan, even Billie’s mother and Billie’s younger half sisters, had come to the funeral pay their respects. Clara Garcia, her grandmother, had been eccentric but sweet, lavishing love on her family, even her ex-daughter-in-law, whenever she wasn’t too absorbed with her cats.
    Oh, the cats. This morning, studying the house from her car, Billie worried about how Ian would react to the mess her grandmother’s animals had left behind. Aunt Trixie, her dad’s cousin, had taken one of them and found a home for two more. A neighbor, apparently, had taken a fourth. A fifth, sadly, had been put down just a week before Grammy had gone into hospice care.
    Five was a lot of cats for anyone, but especially for an eightysomething woman who had never, even in youth, been an organized, tidy person. The walker and oxygen tank made daily animal maintenance almost impossible.
    If only she hadn’t been so adamant about refusing help.
    Billie climbed out of her secondhand Hyundai and gazed at the house. It was from what they now called “midcentury,” but her mother affectionately called “ fifties fugly .”
    “Hello there,” a man’s voice called out from her right. “Are you Jane?”
    She turned to see a man about her age in a sweatshirt and jeans, approaching from the yard next door, holding a cat. Both he and the cat were sandy-haired.
    “No,” she said warily, because this wasn’t the middle of Kansas, it was Oakland. “Who are you?”
    “Then you must be Belinda,” he said, shifting the cat to the other arm, stepping over the hedge, and walking to her side. He had vivid blue eyes, a pierced ear, and a body that was either genetically gifted or carefully constructed in a gym.
    “Who are you?” she repeated. She didn’t like strange men, even the hot-bodied ones, to get so close when she was alone in a strange place. At