The Spare

Thea Whitlock did not cry when Grant Kincaid cheated on her.

She cried when she told him she would find someone better, and he laughed.

She lost more than a boyfriend that week. She lost the one research place she had earned, to the girl he had been seeing, and nobody in that department knows why she came apart on the morning that mattered.

So she picks the one name on campus Grant cannot stand to hear.

Luca Kincaid. Star of the hockey team. Charming enough that nobody has ever asked him a hard question. And Grant's estranged half brother.

She tutors him. He holds her hand where people can see it. She writes nine rules on one side of a page and they both sign the bottom of it.

It works inside a day. That is the problem.

Then she finds the photograph. The two of them, in public, taken by somebody else, in an envelope addressed in his handwriting to his father.

He never wanted a passing grade. He has spent his whole life waiting for one man to look at him, and she is the first thing that has ever worked.

She agreed to be a weapon. She did not agree to be his.

And she does not walk out.

She sits down with a clean sheet of paper and offers him a worse deal, with both of them knowing exactly what the other one is for.

Three rules instead of nine.

Nobody pretends to anybody. Ever. About anything.