Fire & Brimstone (Neighbor from Hell #8) - R.L. Mathewson Page 0,71

loved more than anything, he would pull out that damn piece of paper, read the whole thing over even though he already had it memorized, and glare at her until she promised that she wouldn’t do it again. Not that he believed her, but at least he would let the matter drop.

“Because you’re going to be my guinea pig,” he said, shooting her a wink as though that was going to somehow stop her from panicking.

He wanted to use her as a guinea pig to test recipes? Because spending a week curled up in her bed praying for death was so much fun that she would jump at the chance to make that dream a reality? Yeah, no she was good.

“Umm, you do remember that slight problem of me not being able to digest gluten without becoming violently ill, right?” she reminded him as she gave up on watching him work and returned to scrolling through horror movie selections on Netflix, thoroughly disappointed with this month’s selection.

“It’s all gluten free,” he said, sounding excited, which was actually kind of cute coming from a large man packed with muscle and a serial killer glare.

“Really?” she asked, unable to help but smile at his excitement, because he was definitely cute.

Not that she would actually tell him that since it would just result in one of those glares and probably some bitching since men like Lucifer didn’t like to be called cute. God, he really was a lot of work, she thought with a sigh as she settled on Dexter, deciding that it was close enough.

Maybe she should go back to her place and screw with Melanie’s head some more? she thought, because the idea of being anyone’s gluten-free guinea pig wasn’t exactly how she wanted to spend her incredibly boring night. After living the past few weeks gluten-free, she could honestly say that she was now prepared to live on a diet of chocolate and carrot sticks.

At first she’d been really excited to discover that there was a gluten free version for pretty much everything that she liked to eat. Thanks to her visit to Dixon’s Gluten Free Bakery, she’d been pretty optimistic about her gluten-free prospects. Then she tried to cook gluten free pasta…

That had been the beginning of the end.

Gluten free muffins, pancakes, toaster pastries, and so on and so forth all ended up being huge disappointments and incredibly expensive. Everything came in smaller packages for at least four times the cost of the normal stuff. Flour, pasta, cereal, it was all too expensive, bland and in some cases, terrifying.

Some of the food was crunchy, some, like the Oreo knockoffs, fizzed in her mouth as they dissolved. The taste, god, the taste was…

Well, she really didn’t want to think about the taste or the after taste for that matter.

Since she’d ended up blowing her entire paycheck on food that she couldn’t stomach, she’d decided to keep it simple, meat, veggies, fruit, Hershey’s chocolate and gallons upon gallons of Coke. The only time she made an exception to this rule was when she went to Dixon’s Bakery and that wasn’t often since she usually found herself spending too much money there.

“It’s ready,” Lucifer announced, right around the time that she decided that pretending to be asleep was the best for everyone concerned.

Chapter 35

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Zoe said hollowly as she sat in the middle of their bed staring blindly at all the paperwork and pamphlets laid out in front of her.

“It’s going to be okay,” Trevor found himself saying even as he wondered what they were going to do, because there was no way in hell that they were ever going to be able to afford the sixty thousand dollars a year that Radcliffe Academy was asking for to send the boys there next year.

“We’ll apply for scholarships,” Zoe said as though that was going to somehow make a difference.

It wouldn’t, not with the boys’ school records. Jonny and Sebastian were smart, too smart, were gifted athletes and unbelievably kind, but they were also a handful. They caused havoc everywhere they went, had already been kicked out of two schools and had a file two inches thick at the police department. Getting them into this school was going to be hard enough, but paying for it was going to be impossible.

Even if they got partial scholarships for the boys they were still going to have to find a way to come up with forty thousand dollars every