Good Girl Complex(Avalon Bay #1)(68)

I gingerly make my way down to the ground, where the girls have untied the rope.

“How bad is it?” Steph asks, wiping in vain at the water pouring down her face. We’re standing in about four inches of mud at this point. The yard has pretty much turned to liquid and my feet squish inside Steph’s boots.

“It’s not big, but there’s definitely a hole,” I report.

We’re practically shouting through the deafening wind and rain beating down on the metal porch roof and pelting the trees.

I shove my wet hair off my forehead. “Best we can do is cover it up and hope the rain stops soon.”

“What do you need?” Alana eyes me anxiously from under the rim of a baseball cap. Her bright red hair is plastered to her neck.

“I’ll take the staple gun, hammer, and nails with me. Then you and Steph tie the tarp to the rope so I can pull it up once I’m up there.”

“Be careful,” Steph reminds me for the fifth time.

I appreciate the concern, but really, I want to get this done and get dry. My fingers are already turning pruney, I’ve got a water-logged wedgie riding up my ass, and the chill has soaked into my bones. After they raise the tarp to me and I cut a large-enough piece off with Alana’s pocketknife, I tack it down with the staple gun to hold it in place while I put in some sturdier nails. I’m shivering so violently, my teeth chattering, it takes forever to get the nails in.

“You okay?” Steph shouts from the ground.

I get a nail about halfway in, then miss it when the hammer slips, and bend the damn thing. Oh, to hell with it. Good enough.

“Coming down,” I shout back.

I scurry my ass down the ladder and we all bolt inside, leaving the rope and tarp in the yard, right as a massive crack of lighting seems to strike right on top of us.

In the laundry room, we strip down to our underwear and toss our wet, muddy clothes in the washing machine.

“That was close.” Alana gives me a wide, exhilarated smile that I wholeheartedly return, both of us seemingly aware that we escaped by the skin of our teeth.

“Too close,” Steph says with a frazzled look. “What would I tell Cooper if you got electrocuted up there?”

“Yeah, no.” From the linen closet, Alana pulls out three blankets for us to warm up in. “We would’ve had to hide the body and tell Cooper you skipped town.” When I raise an eyebrow at her, she shrugs, grinning blithely. “What? You haven’t seen Cooper’s temper. It’s self-preservation at that point.”

Alana and I go into the living room. Steph puts on a pot of coffee. I’m shivering, wrapped up in my blanket cocoon on the couch, when Alana gets a phone call.

“Hey,” she answers. “Yeah, we figured it out. She’s here, actually. Sure. See ya.” She sets the phone down and takes a seat beside me. “They’re on their way over.”

“Think I could borrow some clothes to go home in?” I ask. With my stuff in the wash, I’d rather not leave here in nothing but my underwear and Cooper’s rain jacket.

“No problem.”

Steph comes back with the coffee. I normally take cream and a mound of sugar, but I’m not picky at the moment, and scalding hot black coffee is exactly the thing to chase the frigid out of my blood.

“Okay, so that was legit badass,” Steph admits, squeezing on the couch between Alana and me. “I wouldn’t have taken you for the manual labor type.” She regards me with a regretful smile when it dawns on her that I might take it as an insult.

“Sophomore year of high school, I had this chemistry teacher whose fetish was dragging down his students’ GPAs with impossible pop quizzes. The only way to get extra credit was through volunteer hours, so I helped build sets and stuff for the school plays. It was fun, actually. Except for the time I almost lost a finger when Robbie Fenlowe ran a drill over it.” I show Steph the scar on my index finger. “Mangled flesh and everything.”

“Eww, that’s disgusting.”

“For real, though,” Alana says, her cheeks turning a shade of crimson not far off from her hair. “Thanks for coming over. We would have been shit out of luck.”

“Yeah,” Steph laughs, “Alana’s a total wuss. She’s terrified of heights.”

Alana glowers at Steph, flashing her middle finger. “Thanks, bitch.”

“What?” Steph shrugs. “It’s true.”

“I’m being nice, okay? Give me a break.”

I don’t know Alana well, but I’d call this a breakthrough. All it took was a death-defying act of heroism to break some ground with her. That’s two-thirds. Now if I can figure out how to crack Heidi, I’ll be golden.

For the next fifteen minutes, the girls and I keep chatting. When I tell them about the hotel I purchased, Steph offers a ton of details about the place, gathered from the three summers she worked there. Realizing her knowledge is invaluable, I make a mental note to invite her to the site once I take possession. Her familiarity with the hotel could be a real asset.

“Help has arrived, ladies!” Evan bursts through the door not long after, shirtless and dripping. “Where’s the fire?”

Somewhere, someone has fantasized about exactly this. Which is weird, because even as I’m sleeping with his identical twin, a half-naked Evan does nothing for me.