Despite the Gentleman's Riches: Sweet Billionaire Romance (For Richer or Poorer Book 1) by Aimee Easterling

Florabelle has ever let scratch her neck," I told my charge honestly, and I could almost see the girl's self-esteem swelling at the words.
     
    ***
     
    Hours later, Florabelle had managed to take a bite out of every edible that Shirley had packed for our lunch, had charmed Lena into treating her to another bath, and had graced us both with several little green "presents" to stain our clothes. Lena seemed remarkably unbothered by the damp droppings, which raised the girl up a notch in my estimation—I couldn't quite imagine what Jack would do if Florabelle had sullied one of his perfect suits. But Lena just kept peppering me with questions. What did Florabelle eat? Was she lonely by herself while I was gone? How would a cockatiel live in the wild?
    Once the avian-biology lecture petered out, my charge seemed content to simply wander through my trailer, which made me cringe since I was well aware of the kind of living accommodations the girl was used to. But the snide remarks I expected failed to materialize...until, that is, Lena pulled a battered college guide off the end of the couch and brandished it in the air as if the text were a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.
    "Did Jack put you up to this?" she demanded, the teenager's earlier cynicism back in full force. Any interest Lena had felt in my cockatiel was now squashed in the face of her sudden anger, and I wished I'd had the forethought to put the book away this morning before getting in the car. Even worse, as the girl spoke, a paper fluttered out from between the pages, and I leapt forward, hoping to snag the incriminating evidence before Lena could read my scores.
    No such luck. "The SAT?" she asked, confused now. As her ire faded, so did my self-centered focus, and the puzzle pieces of my charge's anger started to fall into place. Of course Lena would think that her brother and I had cooked up some evil plan to get her enrolled in school once again, especially once she found my dream book, as I liked to call the sum-up of pros and cons of American colleges and universities. Ms. Cooper had gifted me with the text when I was her student, and I'd dog-eared dozens of pages, selecting the absolutely perfect opportunity for higher learning to match my unique personality. Too bad that, when push came to shove, I realized I couldn't really afford to leave home for college after all.
    But my SAT scores...those were truly embarrassing. "You made a perfect score," Lena said, awe filling her voice and making my cheeks turn red.
    "I missed a question in math," I replied, my words self-deprecating. "They were recentering that year, so it's not really a perfect score...." Okay, maybe my explanation made the test results seem even worse, especially after you considered the way I hugged them to me, keeping the paper within easy reach to pore over on my truly bad days. But sometimes I needed objective confirmation that I wasn't a complete loser, especially since the evidence of my housing and job suggested otherwise.
    "So, where did you go to school?" Lena asked at last. I could tell she was struggling with her own paranoia about my motives in keeping the book around, before eventually coming to the obvious (non-paranoid) conclusion. If Mr. Fish Sticks had put the text into my hands, he would have chosen a brand new, modern edition, not this decade-old college guide that was starting to lose pages in the back. And even Lena's brother probably wouldn't have thought to forge a sheet of SAT scores to enhance the charade.
    The compassionate understanding in her young eyes made my charge's question doubly hard to answer, though, and I looked away. "Community college," I said tersely...and was abruptly glad to be interrupted when the trailer shook from the force of an adamant knock on the door.
    As I said, I was glad to be interrupted...but I was less glad when I realized who the knocker had to be. "Be prepared to cover your ears," I said enigmatically as I headed over to let in my