Puppy Love and Peanut Butter (paperback)

Some love is ageless.. Bo and Spencer’s feud had always caused chaos and destruction when in close quarters. What their friends didn’t know was the secret and bizarre joy both of them got from pushing the other to the brink of insanity. She was the one person in the world who had ever been able to stand up to him and he adored her for it. Even though she insisted that she didn’t have those kinds of feelings for him in return. But there’s more going on in Spencer’s life than she can handle. And when Bo walks in on it one night, he decides to insert himself in her life without her permission. Suddenly their lifelong “feud” has more sparks than ever. Will Bo sway Spencer into seeing him as more than a friend? Or will he lose everything that’s ever mattered to him?

Chapter 1


SPENCER


S
pencer didn’t believe in karma.
But as the water sprayed out of the floor drain like a geyser, she understood why so many people did.
Almost as soon as the fountain began, it stopped. But she knew it would continue in a second.
If she had known this was how her night was going to go, she would have sold tickets ahead of time. She could use the money.
“Come see the amazing floor drain geyser! It’ll knock your socks off!”
She blew raspberries with her lips and ran a hand through her hair.
“Holy crap!” Andrew said, just joining her. “Where did all this water come from?”
Spencer cleared her throat and jerked her chin at the drain as it made a threatening gurgle. He took a precautionary step back.
Honestly, she kind of thought she deserved worse than this. Though this was pretty bad.
The gurgle grew to a growl and the geyser shot off again.
“Ah!” Andrew jumped back with a surprised shout.
This was exactly the kind of thing that would never happen at Solstice.
It didn’t happen often, but there were moments when Spencer missed working at the luxury fitness gym. Moments like this one to be exact.
But she had made her choices.
Living with the consequences of her choices wasn’t new to her. It was how she’d been raised and it’s how she would continue to operate until the day she died.
Which was why she was usually proud to work at Heavenly Health. Despite the meme hate it generated on the internet. It was a place she could work at and feel good about. The members were real people with real lives and real issues. It kept her grounded and humble.
And way less distracted.
But it also had its fair share of hiccups.
Which brought Spencer’s thoughts full circle.
Not that she believed in karma. But if she did…
She was looking at it.
This was what she got for making her friends worry about her.
“What do we do?” Andrew, her trainer colleague asked, interrupting her self-commiserating stare at the drain that was a fabulous metaphor for her life at the moment.
“We have to call the city,” she said flatly.
“Uh, shouldn’t we call a plumber?”
She turned to face him and blinked a few times. “Why would you ask?” She shrugged and shook her head like she couldn’t believe it. Because she almost didn’t. “If you already had an idea, why ask? Really.”
Andrew’s eyebrows rose and he made bug eyes at the floor. “It’s black.”
“Yeah.” Spencer pulled her shoulders back and pushed Andrew out the door. Behind her, the drain gurgled.
The floor drain in the men’s bathroom had begun oozing clear water thirty minutes ago. A member had told Spencer but she’d been busy with a client at the time. Not that ten minutes would have made that much of a difference anyway.
“Ew, it’s all over you.” Andrew’s mouth curled in disgust. He backed up faster to get away from her.
“Relax, it’s just mud.” Spencer rolled her eyes.
“It looks like sewage,” Andrew argued.
Spencer stopped him in the hall before they entered the main space. She grabbed his arm and shook it.
“No. It’s not sewage and you can’t say that where members can hear. We’ll get sued, idiot.”
Andrew eyed her suspiciously. “How do you know it’s not sewage?” he asked, quieter this time.
Spencer ground her back teeth together.
It’s not his fault he doesn’t know. My life is weird and I get to know weird things. Like this.
“Because,” she explained calmly. “It’s not a sewage line. It connects to the storm drain. It’s the same stuff that you would see in a wet parking lot.”
“So why is it in the bathroom?” he asked, crossing his arms.
She didn’t know. But she had a hunch.
“I’ll call the city, you make sure no one uses the bathroom.”
“So we’re supposed to have everyone use the women’s room?” he asked.
Spencer sighed. “No.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and closed her eyes. “They can use the family restroom for now. Put an ‘out of order’ sign on the door. I’ll…” She craned her neck back and forth, the tension already starting. “Fix it.”
When she made it back to the main floor, she had eye contact with Anika before going behind the tall half-moon desk to use the phone.
Anika was the one client who’d come with Spencer when she’d left Solstice.
A Hollywood stunt woman and all around badass, Anika would have been Spencer’s biggest regret.
Except that she’d come with her, so no regrets.
Okay, no regrets with the way she’d ended her employment with Solstice. She had other regrets for other things obviously. She was human after all.
But Anika had been there on the Day of Reckoning (as Spencer fondly referred to it) and texted her the next day asking where they were training at now.
It had been the exact encouragement Spencer had needed.
Now, Spencer had been working at the smaller fitness chain for six months.
And she knew she’d never work at a luxury gym again.
Anika’s forearms rested on the ledge of the desk and she pulled herself up to peek over at Spencer. The brunette snapped her gum and grinned.
Spencer ran her finger down the list of Important Numbers to find the one she needed.
Then she dialed the phone.
“Remember the days when the hardest thing I had to do for my job was get my ass kicked by you?” Spencer asked Anika. It stopped ringing. “Oh good. A recording.”
She waited through the normal business hours explanation and jotted down the after-hours emergency number. Which she called next.
“And it’s busy.” She hung up the phone.
“What’s going on?” Anika asked.
“The floor drain to the storm sewer is backing up in the men’s bathroom. And occasionally it does a remarkable impression of Old Faithful.”
“Is that why you’ve got gunk on you?”
Spencer smiled and tilted her head to the side. “You don’t like my natural mud mask? It promises to give me younger looking skin and increase my chances of contracting a rare fungus.” She lifted a shoulder and fluttered her eyelashes, making Anika laugh. “I think it’s the road repairs they’re doing next door. They probably got air in the line and we’re the weak spot. They need to relieve the pressure on their end.”
Anika nodded in understanding. “You want me to go down there and yell at them?”
Spencer slanted her eyebrows. That might not be a bad idea. Especially since the phone line was busy.
She’d done it herself before. Sure, she’d only been seventeen and her dad had been barking orders in her ear the entire time. But it couldn’t be too hard to remember.
“SPENCER!” Andrew came rushing onto the main floor with wide eyes, pointing down the hall. “It’s coming!”
She left the half-moon desk, half-expecting to see a B-movie monster chasing him out of the hallway.
The reality wasn’t quite so dramatic.
Though it was concerning.
Black water had begun slowly infiltrating the hallway from beneath the bathroom door. The good news was that the hall floor was tiled. But if it reached the main workout floor which was covered in carpet, they’d have bigger problems.
“I wish I had a floor squeegee. I wonder if there’s one in the maintenance room.”
They had a contract with a cleaning crew. They came by every other day and sanitized everything, scrubbed the toilets, bathrooms, washed the mirrors, all the necessary tasks that the hired trainers wouldn’t know when or how to accomplish within their shifts.
But that meant they didn’t have a lot of cleaning supplies on hand. They had towels and sanitizer, but no way would that be enough to clean this up.
“I have one,” Anika volunteered, heading for the front door. “In my truck. Gimme a second.”
Anyone else and Spencer would have been confused. But one time, she had seen Anika pull a full-size gumball machine out of her truck. And another time she’d produced a crowbar from her backpack.
If there was ever an apocalypse, Spencer would be with Anika.