Daddy Next Door - The Complete Series Box Set (A Single Dad Navy SEAL Romance)

by Claire Adams

  “Yeah!” I felt a little nervous—after all, I was going to be spending a lot of time with this girl. “Just… getting moved in.” I gestured to my parents.

  “I’m Georgia—ugh; please don’t call me that, though. It’s such a gross, old-fashioned name. Everyone I actually like calls me Gigi.” I laughed.

  “Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of ‘Rebecca’ myself.” My mom came out of my bedroom and looked my new roommate up and down. I felt myself starting to dread what she might say.

  “Pleased to meet you, Georgia,” she said, and I gave my new roommate a look, rolling my eyes slightly. “Tell us all about yourself; what are you thinking you’re going to major in? How does your family like your choice of college?” I threw myself onto the couch and watched as Gigi responded to my mom’s questions, filing away the information, but getting more and more uncomfortable as the questions got more personal and less appropriate. Georgia’s parents were divorced, but both of them were comfortable in their incomes, she had chosen the college because she didn’t want to be too far from home, she ate a healthy diet.

  “Mom, come on—we’re college kids, we’re going to eat plenty of junk food,” I said, cutting in when I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I mean, that’s the whole deal, right? College kids eat ramen and mac and cheese…” Dad popped out of my room, grinning at how irritated I was at Mom’s snobby ways. I could tell that if she had had a choice in the matter, I would have probably gotten a different roommate—someone from some country club somewhere.

  “What sororities are you thinking of joining?” Mom asked, totally ignoring me. Georgia shrugged.

  “I’m not really looking. I think most of them are pretty dumb—just people looking to party and dress up.” I had to laugh—the looks on my parents’ faces were pretty great. Both had been in the Greek system. They had met that way.

  “There’s a lot of networking to be done in college, and you want to be with the right people,” Dad started to say. Mom started going on about sisterhood and lifelong friends, until I had to distract her with a few last decorative touches that she had missed to get her out of the room.

  “I think it’s really cool you’re studying Biology,” I told Gigi as soon as my parents were going over the bedroom for the last time. She grinned.

  “What are you majoring in?” I shrugged.

  “I’m thinking I’ll do English. I know it’s kind of lame, but I want to be a teacher—I had a few really great ones at my last school, and I’d love to be that kind of inspiring person.” I glanced in the direction of my bedroom, where my parents were arguing half-heartedly about something or another. “Actually, I was thinking I’d join Greenpeace right after college—get the hell out of dodge while my parents can’t do anything about it!” Georgia laughed.

  “Oh God, that would be so cool! We should join Greenpeace together!” We started talking about how we should rearrange the furniture in the common area while my parents finished up whatever they were doing in my room. We decided we were going to see if we could find some cheap fabric from the craft store to cover the ugly chairs and that we were going to get some wallpaper samples and make a mosaic out of it for the walls. My parents finally came out of my room, and Mom announced that it was time for them to head out; they had to get back to town, and they didn’t want to hit bad traffic on the way.

  Mom and Dad both gave me a hug and a kiss, and as Mom turned to leave, I could see she was crying a little—but whether that was because she would miss me or because she was still so doubtful about whether I could possibly be happy in such a small, un-prestigious school, I didn’t know. I told her I would call her after my first day of classes to check in, and then they were gone. All I could feel was relief that Mom hadn’t made too much of a scene, and that my new roommate wasn’t a total jerk or a snob, and that she was definitely just as smart as I was, if not smarter. It seemed at least like my first year of college was off to the best possible start.

  Chapter Two

  Georgia and I were part of a huge group of freshmen walking across campus to get to the admissions building; I had to admit—to myself, at least—that even though the school was small, it seemed like it was jammed with people already. I couldn’t imagine how much more anxious I would be at a bigger school. “Did you know the school had a hockey team?” Gigi asked as we passed by a slew of banners and posters promoting the first game. I laughed.

  “I had absolutely no idea. Do you know anything about hockey at all?” Georgia shook her head and we both laughed. “Me, either. Wow. I mean—I knew it existed, and I’ve seen some old sports movies about it, but I don’t have the faintest.” We were waiting in line to get our IDs made, both of us looking around at all the other students who were waiting for the same thing.

  “It always looked interesting to me,” Georgia said, eyeing the poster directly in front of us. “We should go to a game—could be fun.”

  “I know there’s a lot of fighting, that’s about it.” I shrugged. “At least it has to be more exciting than football.” One of the guys I’d been friends with in high school had been on the football team and had expected me to show up to every game; I hadn’t been able to even keep the positions straight in my head and it was so boring that I invented excuses for not turning out.

  We finally got our IDs printed with our pictures on them and joined the other line for the class schedule assignments. For the first semester, the courses we could take were more or less set in stone; we’d have to meet with our assigned advisors for the spring semester in order to discuss what we wanted to take and what classes would meet the requirements, but there were so many basic and introductory classes that had to come before anything else that it was just easier for the school to shuffle us all into the three “introduction” classes at random and let us choose the other two over the summer before we started. We signed into the lab and completed our check-in forms before going to one of the computers with the log-in information the desk gave us. There were plenty of signs all around the room—more temporary ones like the ones directing everyone around campus—that said that we were expected to be in and out of the computer lab with our schedules in no more than fifteen minutes.

  There was a huge line of other freshmen behind us and Gigi and I both took the first desks available, logging on with no problem and pulling up our schedules. We printed them out and grabbed them before they had even cooled off and were on our way out of the tiny, crowded room in less than ten minutes, heading out to the courtyard on the other side of the admissions building to compare notes. “Which Introduction to Academic Life class did you get?” Gigi asked me.

  “Five-thirty,” I said, making a little face. We both had that class, College Writing, and Freshman Seminar, that we had to take—it was such a drag that we couldn’t even touch most of the classes that we really wanted to take. We had College Writing together, and I promised Georgia that I’d help her with it; I had decided to take the first of the classes I would need for my major, and we also had a math class together. Georgia had the same strategy I did, and her one elective class for her first semester was the introductory Biology course, which covered two semesters and came with a lab. All told, our schedules were both chock-full, and we laughed about how ridiculous some of the requirements were.

  “Maybe next semester with all of this out of the way, we can finally get into something meaty,” Georgia said. I could only hope so.

  “I don’t even know why they wouldn’t let me CLEP out of College Writing—I scored tops in AP Composition and Literature. All that did was take out the requirement for the other two writing classes.” I made a face at my printed schedule.

  “It’s probably going to be an easy class for everyone—I mean, it’s not like they’re high-credit classes. Intro to Academic Life is one hour out of the week and it’s probably going to be all that stuff about not getting an STD and how you should really manage to fit in some sleep.” I laughed as we started heading back to the dorms.

  “I think I
read that the Freshman Seminar class is just, like, a bunch of presenters every week droning on about their research—it’s mostly for the kids who have no idea what they want to study.” It was also only an hour long. College Writing brought the tally to four credits, the math class that we were both in—Precalculus, Algebra, and Trigonometry—was six credits, and my English class was another four. So I was at fourteen credits and Gigi was at fifteen for the semester. Our math class met three times a week, my English class met twice a week. We were in three of our classes together, which at least would be a little bit nice.

  We got back to the dorm, working our way through the crowds of students heading to the admissions office or just around the campus, looking around themselves, obviously every bit as excited as we were, and I saw the posted notice on our floor that there was an RA meeting going on—that it had started while we were still getting back to the dorm from the orientation.

  “Alright, everyone—as you know, the freshmen dorms have a lot of rules; you’re not allowed to have boys stay the night in your rooms. They are allowed to be in the dorms during the day, but after 10 pm, they’re forbidden.” Someone in the throng of teenaged girls hanging around the common area as Gigi and I came in piped up to ask how they were supposed to get laid. “That’s not really any of my business, but you’ll have to work it out. If I find out there’s been a guy spending the night in your room, it’s a demerit on your residential account. I don’t care how cute he is, I don’t care how sweet he is, I don’t care if you’re ‘not doing anything,’” and I grinned at the way she used finger-quotes and dripping sarcasm. “I don’t even care if it’s Johnny Steel,” a few of the girls giggled.

  “Who’s Johnny Steel?” I asked Georgia as quietly as I could. She shrugged; obviously neither of us knew, even if some of the other freshman girls did. “Is that clear, ladies?” Everyone replied that it was, and the RA—a woman whose name we found out was Alice—went through the rest of the rules, like quiet hours and the rules for signing guests in, keeping doors locked whenever we weren’t in our rooms, all of those things. She told us her schedule for hours at the downstairs lobby office, when she’d have “open hours” in her dorm room, and asked for volunteers to help her with the next month’s bulletin board decorations for the floor.

  Finally, the meeting ended and Georgia and I headed back to our room, laughing at the emphasis on not having any male guests after 10 pm. “What is this, the ’50s?” Gigi asked, shaking her head.

  “I guess they probably have problems…” I gave Georgia a look and she nodded. “Easier just to tell us not to have anyone over, instead of telling them to behave themselves.” We thought about it as we got into our dorm and I posted my schedule on my door, taping it up underneath the big, colorful name tag that Alice had put up for me.

  “Hey!” Gigi called from her side of the dorm room. “I’m starving—let’s go grab some dinner!” My stomach was rumbling, so I was only too willing to head out with her.

  Chapter Three

  I had always thought that the cafeteria at my high school was pretty big, but as Georgia and I stepped into the dining hall, I was blown away not only by how huge it was, but how many people were packed into it. Gigi and I both swiped our cards, chattering excitedly to each other as we moved into the line heading into the food service area. It was impossible to tell how many people were in there—how much of the complement of the student population had all decided to grab dinner at the same time. The line moved slowly but steadily, and we could smell the good, the bad, and the weird of the different smells coming out of the food area.

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, looking around me constantly. There didn’t seem to be any end to the students who milled around, standing in line, calling out to people they already knew or making conversation with people they didn’t. I wondered how it was even possible for the school to feed so many people at one time. I was definitely hungry; and I was more than a little interested to find out what all was available on the menu. As we got closer to the service area, Gigi pointed out a big, broad bulletin board announcing the different soups and the theme with little placards underneath advertising the different options.

  It was both like and unlike my high school cafeteria. There were people lined up behind the food—some of them students, a few of them older people—and there was the unquestionable similarity in the smells that came rolling on the air. My school had had a pretty decent cafeteria program, but the different stations here were a big change. Georgia and I looked over the menu and decided that while we were hungry, none of the “international fare” of the theme really appealed to us. Fortunately, there was a grill station with burgers and chicken breasts—even a secondary grill with vegetarian and vegan options. There was also a big salad bar with more stuff than I could name off the top of my head, so we split off with the other people who were headed to the grill and waited our turn.

  I got two chicken breasts, and Georgia ordered herself a grilled cheese. With that on our plates, we went over to the salad bar and chatted while we compared the different things that we wanted from what was available. At least there was a good selection; I made myself a big, complicated salad with lots of different vegetables and dipped some of the bread sticks into the different salad dressings to figure out which one I wanted.

  While we were playing around, I noticed a group of girls walking into the food service area, all dressed in purple and gold, their coordinated look screaming that they were members of one of the sororities. I nudged Georgia and pointed to the chattering group and both of us rolled our eyes, grinning at how ridiculous they all looked together. “If I ever think that’s a good idea,” I said to Gigi lowly, “smack me upside the head as many times as you possibly can until I’ve come back to my senses.” Georgia laughed.

  “Ditto,” Georgia said, glancing at the girls one more time and shaking her head. We headed out of the service area and out into the seating portion of the dining hall.

  If I had been impressed when I first walked in by just how many students were piled into the building, the loud shouting, talking, laughing, moving crowd of students at the tables blew my mind a second time. Gigi and I looked around for a quiet table somewhere; neither of us particularly wanted to jump into a crowded one with a bunch of screaming people, even if we weren’t anti-social. There was only so much of a crowd that either of us could take at any given time. I scanned the tables, trying to find somewhere we could both sit and eventually just shook my head.

  We stood off to the side, watching as more and more students trickled through the archway leading from the service area to the dining room, and finally Georgia found a relatively clear area close to the door. I shrugged when she pointed it out to me and we both headed that way, setting our trays down with our food and drink and quickly claiming the end of the table before anyone else could get in our way. “Oh my God, there are so many people,” I said to Georgia.

  My high school had been kind of small; Georgia told me that she’d gone to a magnet public school—it wasn’t huge, but her graduating class had been much bigger than mine. We compared notes on our different salads and the other things we had gotten, and I thought to myself that I fully planned to try all of the various juices the cafeteria dispenser boasted; after all, I knew what the different sodas tasted like already. Georgia and I were talking about what we were most looking forward to in our classes, some of the different clubs that we might be interested in, and I finally started to relax.

  “Hey look,” Georgia said, pointing towards the entrance. “Hockey players.” She grinned at me, and I rolled my eyes, looking obediently in the direction she gestured to. The guys who were coming into the dining area were all in matching jackets bearing the school colors, and they were somehow louder even than the people around us, shouting and laughing, shoving each other playfully as they made their way out of the service area. It was obvious that they felt like they owned the school. I laughed at them, shaking my head at Gigi again; i
t seemed like jocks were the same thing in college that they had always seemed to be in high school. I started looking again and picked off the names from the backs of the jackets, curious in spite of myself. There was a Smith, a Locke, a Havers, and finally, my eyes lit on one pair of broad shoulders bearing the name Steel.

  There couldn’t be more than one or two people with that particular last name—not at a school this small. From behind, he didn’t look that exceptional: broad shoulders, sure, and some obvious muscle under the jacket he wore, but that was every guy in sports. He turned to head towards the tables, and at the sight of him from the front, I was mesmerized. Johnny—if it was him and not his brother or someone who happened to share the same last name—was gorgeous. He had short, dark blond, curling hair and a smiling face. His eyebrows were a little darker, over a pair of bright eyes, and his whole face looked surprisingly gentle in the instant before he laughed at something someone else on the team said. He was definitely the most gorgeous guy I had seen in my first hours on campus, and I couldn’t help but stare. “Look,” I hissed to Georgia. “That’s got to be him, I mean there can’t be two guys who are that gorgeous with the same last name, could there?” Georgia looked over at the group again and laughed.

  “Yeah, I think that has to be Johnny.” She stared with me for a moment and grinned. “Man, if he wanted to come up to our room and spend the night, I’d let him—RAs and rules be damned!” I laughed and tried to look away, even though I knew that I was watching him way more intently than I wanted anyone to know. I was a little star-struck, to tell the truth; he was a gorgeous guy who I would have noticed no matter what, and it didn’t hurt at all that he apparently had some reputation on campus not only for the sport he played, but for being a hottie.

  Georgia and I finished up our salads and grabbed some fruit, swiping a few cookies to take with us back to the dorm, which we slipped into a wad of napkins and tucked into our bags. We didn’t really feel like lingering in the dining hall—it was too crowded and way too noisy. “Let’s head back,” Georgia suggested; I was only too ready to agree—there were more and more students pouring through the archway from the service area into the dining room, and pretty soon all of the tables would be fuller than full.