Hot for the Ranger (Hot for Heroes #8) - Ember Flint

Prologue Part 1

KENNA

August 9, 2015

I should have known this would be a bad idea.

‘You need a little break’, she said, ‘some quality time spent sunbathing on the beach’, she said, ‘no boys allowed’, she said, and now… the ugly truth comes to light.

I sigh. I honestly don’t know why am I even surprised in the first place: I shouldn’t put anything past Veronica at this point.

The fact that she was all sweet and caring when she brought it up should have been my first warning: she’s never particularly nice to me if she can help it.

We have been roommates for the last three years or so, it was luck of the draw really: we were randomly paired to share a room in the dorms at UNF.

We were pretty much strangers sharing living quarters, then I decided to move out and live off-campus. Rents are pretty steep in Jacksonville if you’re a student working a low-pay part-time job while you try to get your degree and all I could have afforded was a ratty hole-in-the-wall shoebox too far from school, so when Veronica suggested we should pool our resources together and get a bigger place in a nicer neighborhood, I was all for it.

For a while there, I even hoped we could really become friends despite our differences, I’m a bookworm, she’s a party animal, I don’t date, she flits from guy to guy, and she was –and still is– always so critical of everything I say and do that my hope soured pretty fast.

I’ve never once seen her actually studying and she’s forever jumping from job to job because she gets fired all the time, not that she cares since her father covers all of her expenses.

In fact, I’m pretty sure that if she wasn’t such a fashionista, she could probably afford to rent a bigger place and keep it all to herself, but she has too many ‘weaknesses’ as she calls them and that’s why she’s stuck with me, again her words.

I’ve always kept my mouth shut no matter the way she saw fit to lead her life, I don’t like to pry and if she’s content who am I to judge, though sometimes it’s difficult to keep a cool head when she brings guys over and I hear them try my doorknob in the middle of the night, but I got wise pretty fast and now when she comes home with some frat boy, I just leave the apartment and go to the library on campus to spend the night power-studying.

And really, with the passing of years, these incidents have lessened and she rarely spends the night in, alone or otherwise. She’s still a mess to live with and doesn’t know the meaning of the words ‘house chores’, but our cute apartment is only a stone-throw away from campus and I’m not prepared to leave so I make it work.

My only problem with her is how she plays the concerned friend only to be snarky and critical of my lifestyle, my chubbiness, my choice of clothes, and pretty much everything I say and do.

I’ve told her countless times to keep her opinions to herself, but it has yet to get through her thick skull, she has no freaking filter whatsoever and can’t seem to understand how hurtful she is when she stares at me with every cookie I eat and asks me if I really think it’s a good idea to have another bite.

She actually thinks she’s helpful when she’s being a bitch to me, like if you call me ‘sweetie’ while you’re telling me that I look like a whale in my favorite blue sundress, somewhat that makes it okay to take digs at me.

I really tried to be friends with her, especially over that first year, but it soon became clear she had her social circle and no intention of introducing her nerdy roommate into it anytime soon.

I’m shy and it isn’t super easy for me to be social and when I do, I have the worst luck and only end up meeting people that want something from me and couldn’t care less about being my friends.

My dad’s girlfriend, Melania, whenever she bothers speaking with me, says I’m too trusting which is her ‘nice-but—not-really-’ way of telling me she thinks I’m too-stupid-to-live and that people take advantage of my goodness, which again, in her book is code-speech for ‘you’re a gullible idiot’.

I guess Veronica also agrees with Melania’s definition of me since she lied her ass off