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CLAUDIA

The meal was Italian — an entire, beautiful spread of steaming hot food. There was spaghetti with meatballs, garlic bread, salad, and some kind of sauteed pork that fell apart on the tines of my fork. Everything was absolutely delicious. I inhaled the meal rather than ate it, finishing almost my entire plate before wondering what I must look like.

“She wasn’t kidding,” laughed Brandon. The giant football player had already eaten about twice what I had. “Look at her go!”

Hunter frowned at him, probably more familiar with the etiquette of pointing out when a girl was chowing down hard in front of her hosts. But in truth that’s exactly what I was doing. There was really no hiding it.

“So you looked for a place?” Hunter asked, as more of a statement than a question.

I noticed he’d barely touched his food. And that he’d only taken a tiny portion of everything on his plate.

“I did the preliminaries mostly,” I replied. “Gathered some numbers. But the real search for a new home starts tomorrow.”

Hunter cleared his throat. He put down his silverware before folding his hands in front of him. “It doesn’t have to.”

I looked up. All three of them had stopped eating. They were staring at me now. I dropped my fork.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s simple,” said Hunter. “You live here.”

My eyebrows knitted together. I let out a tiny laugh of disbelief. “Yeah, right.”

“We’re serious,” Colin added. “You need a place, and we have a spare bedroom.”

I tiled my head in confusion. “The master?”

“Yup. All cleaned up. All cleared out.”

Brandon leaned forward. “We even threw in together and got you a bed,” he said with a grin. “Although the linens look like they were picked out by three fraternity brothers with the least amount of money possible.”

I gasped. Literally gasped. This was too much.

“I— I couldn’t…”

“Why not?” Hunter countered. “This is your project. The University wouldn’t care one bit that you stayed here while finishing it up.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s—”

“Us?”

I grabbed for my wine and missed the glass. It almost tumbled over… but Brandon’s hand shot out and caught it just in time. His reflexes were amazing.

“Easy,” he smiled.

“You were gracious enough to let us stay here when you really didn’t have to,” Hunter continued. “The least we can do is return the favor. That is, if you wouldn’t mind living with three guys.”

Mind living with three guys? My stomach dropped into my feet just thinking about it. I looked from Hunter to Brandon to Colin. Holy shit.

“We can get a little messy at times, and Brandon stinks like hell when he gets back from practice…”

“He stinks like hell before practice,” Colin jumped in.

“But for the most part—”

“It’s not any of that,” I said quickly. “Not at all. It’s just…”

“What? Spit it out, then.”