Despite the Gentleman's Riches: Sweet Billionaire Romance (For Richer or Poorer Book 1) Read Free

and Florabelle seemed worth the sacrifice.
    What I didn't realize then is that I'd still have to scrape together a regularly scheduled lot fee even though I owned my trailer free and clear. My current landlord was slimy and a bit scary, but the grand required to move off his property always hovered far beyond my reach. So I was stuck with what amounted to a monthly rental payment even though I technically owned my own home...and that money was going to be hard to come by this time around.
    "Whose bright idea was it to pay ahead on my car insurance?" I groused, rubbing savagely at a stain on my stove-top in an effort to purge my troubled emotions. "If I hadn't changed over to the six-month policy, I'd be able to afford my lot fee right now!" I was always trying to cut corners and save money, so a ten percent annual savings over the monthly plan had looked like a good deal...until I lost my job and realized I was skint.
    I should have noticed that Florabelle had gone silent during my most recent tirade, but I was too engrossed in my own travails to pay attention to the cockatiel. With the hubris of youth, I'd thought that I was unbelievably clever in buying the trailer, figuring I was investing in my future every time I patched the roof or fixed the floor. And yet: "Who knew that the adjective 'mobile' in front of 'home' was more dream than reality?" I continued my thoughts aloud, supposedly putting clean dishes back into the cabinet but really just taking out my aggressions on the particle-board doors.
    Squaawk!
    "Yikes!" I threw my hands up around my head to protect them from Florabelle's beating wings as she launched herself into the air. The cockatiel had finally grown sick of my anguish (or of the loud noises) and had proven once again that clipping the feathers of a determined bird only made her flight ungainly and erratic, not impossible. I'd shortened my cockatiel's wing feathers to nubbins in order to prevent escapes out of accidentally opened doors and windows, having gained my pet through the species' improper sense of direction and not wanting to lose her in the same manner. But clipped wings didn't ground my intrepid Florabelle; they just made her infrequent flights a hazard to herself and to those around her.
    "Here, Florabelle!" I called, calming my voice with an effort so my pet would come in for a landing before she battered herself to death against a window. "How about you go back in your cage and I'll take my grumpiness outside?"
    Suiting actions to words, I soon found myself continuing to pour out my soul to a companion, but this time to a less animated one. Yet, what my apple tree lacked in talkativeness, she made up for in the listening department. I could feel my blood pressure ratcheting down the instant I pulled out scissors and twine and began gently tying down new branches to prompt my tree to focus on early fruiting rather than on reaching for the sky.
    "It's a conundrum, isn't it, Pippin?" I said, calling the tree by one of the three varieties that had been grafted together to make up her dwarf form—Pound Pippin, Arkansas Black, and Virginia Beauty, the names themselves good enough to eat. Unlike Florabelle, Pippin didn't deign to answer, but I still felt the tense muscles in my neck slowly loosening as I worked. My landlord always made fun of the strange appearance of my yarn-clad tree during his far-too-frequent visits, but Pippin didn't seem to mind her own lack of style, and the yarn training really did work. Even though she'd only been in the ground for a year, the five-foot-tall tree had set one tiny fruit this past spring, an orb that grew a little larger each day and promised to turn into a ripe, homegrown apple this fall.
    "How could I possibly move out now that I have you in my life?" I asked, and Pippin clearly understood that the question was rhetorical since she remained silent. "But I don't see how I can find another job in time to keep this place going either."
    My hand jerked