Free Once Around by Barbara Bretton Page B

course I told Spencer. I tell him everything."
    " So what did Spencer say?"
    She hesitated. "He said I shouldn't worry."
    Rafe grunted. She wasn 't sure if it was a commentary or he'd bumped himself.
    " There isn't much he can do for me right now," she explained, eager to keep Spencer in a good light. "He's asked Robert's attorneys to take care of my bills, but they're dragging their feet."
    " Hand me a screwdriver, would you?"
    She reached for one in the huge metal tool chest on the ground next to her and tossed it to him.
    "I need a Phillips."
    " Why didn't you say so?"
    " I figured you knew."
    " I didn't," she said, plucking a Phillips from the jumble of tools. He caught it in his left hand.
    " How bad are your finances?" he asked.
    She decided not to pull her punches. "Terrible," she said. "I can last another month and then I'm out of luck."
    He rocked back on his heels and met her eyes. "And you're willing to wait for your lawyer to make things better."
    " I don't see where I have a choice."
    " If you don't see that you have a choice, you've got a bigger problem than not being able to pay your bills."
    He turned back to what he was doing , leaving her standing there with a firestorm of snotty responses burning up her brain. Better to keep her mouth closed until he fixed the deck,
    She stalked back into the house and prowled around the kitchen. Soup sounded terrible. She was sick to death of peanut butter sandwiches, and if she ate another egg she'd turn into a chicken herself. Nothing appealed to her. She couldn't settle down. For a second, she considered picking up the telephone to call Spencer, then decided against it.
    She hated to admit it , but Rafe was right. This was her choice, not Spencer's. Taking in a boarder wasn't a perfect solution, but right now it was the only one.
     
     
     

Chapter Five
     
     
    By the time she was halfway through her first week of residency , Jessy Wyatt knew she'd made the biggest mistake of her life by coming to Princeton. Most of her colleagues were Ivy League—educated children of privilege whose lineages could be traced all the way back to Plymouth Rock. She could hold her own in the hospital, where medicine was the common tongue, but once she stepped outside, she was lost. She didn't understand their references or their jokes. And she could tell they didn't understand what she was doing there, which made them even because, at this point, neither did she.
    There were times when she felt she 'd be more comfortable on Neptune than she was there in the heart of central New Jersey. Not even her internship in Dallas had prepared her for this, and Dallas had been a major culture shock for her at the. time.
    At least in Dallas she'd had someone to talk to.
    " We're going over to. Marita's Cantina," one of the other residents said, poking her head into the doctors' lounge, where Jessy was slumped over a cup of coffee. "Why don't you join us, Jessy?"
    Jessy pretended to stifle a yawn. "I'm going to nap," she said, trying to look tired. "But y'all have fun."
    The resident , a light-skinned black woman, grinned. "Y'all? This is New Jersey, girl. Better work on that."
    That and everything else , Jessy thought as the woman went off to join the others. She didn't dress right, talk right, fix her hair right. Everything about her was as wrong as it could possibly be. Her exhaustion wasn't helping matters either. She'd been sleeping in the doctors' lounge, using their bathroom and shower when nobody was around. Nobody had prepared her for the prices in Princeton. The used car she'd bought at a lot near Trenton had almost depleted her savings. Rents were outrageously expensive. It would take months until she could afford a place of her own, but she had the feeling that no longer mattered. If anyone found out she was living at the hospital because she was too poor to live anywhere else, her fate would be sealed.
    Two silver-haired male doctors strode into the lounge. They wore standard-issue white