The Forever Girl (Wildstone, #6)(102)

Oh, but it was. Deathly necessary. And not her death, but his. And possibly Cindy’s too. “Hog only has gas issues because you make him anxious.”

Ned looked at Cindy. “Tell her. Tell her she shouldn’t leave.”

“She shouldn’t leave.” Cindy gave Emma another smile, this one tinged with guilt and remorse. “Roomies forever, remember?”

Emma looked her old best friend right in the eyes. The truth was, Emma understood how guilt and remorse could screw up a person. Thanks to her own, she was just about as screwed up as one could get.

But Cindy had been Emma’s best friend for twenty years, right up until Emma had been hit by a car, punted fifty feet and straight into a coma. At one point during one of those late nights her BFF and fiancé had spent in the hospital waiting room, they’d somehow decided that it’d be a good idea to sleep together. Granted, they’d been told Emma’s chances of survival weren’t good, but she’d proven the doctors wrong. Her mom said it was because she was too stubborn to die. Probably a true story.

In either case, all these months later Ned and Cindy were still at it. In fact, Ned had moved into Cindy’s bed—in the apartment Emma and Cindy had shared for years. The two of them planned to get married. Romantic, right?

“And we have an elevator,” Cindy said.

Like Emma didn’t know that. She might be foggy on a lot of things—a common side effect of being in a coma, apparently. But she remembered the basics of her life. Well, mostly. And yeah, right about now an elevator would be even better than the nap she desperately wanted. But she’d live in hell before going back to her old apartment. And anyway, after losing her fiancé, her best friend, and all her jobs, she was already in hell. “Our place is no longer ‘our’ place,” she said.

“But it could still be.” Ned looked to Cindy for confirmation.

Cindy nodded. “Yes, it could totally still be.”

Ned opened his mouth to say more, but Emma cut him off. “Let me save you some time, okay? I appreciate the help after I was finally sprung from the rehab facility. But there’s no way I’m going to keep staying where my ex-fiancé and ex-BFF are sleeping together. Loudly, by the way. You guys do realize how thin the walls are in that place, right?”

Cindy smacked Ned in the gut and turned into him to whisper-hiss clearly for his ears alone, “I told you we should’ve done it in the car last night before we went inside.”

“Yeah, but we got a ticket for indecent exposure.”

“Oh my God,” Emma said. Tired of the bullshit attempts to hide their relationship out of some misguided sense of protecting her, and also tired of the hovering, the attempts to help when really they were just hindering, Emma tackled steps thirteen and fourteen, Hog with her, panting hotly on the backs of her legs. “I don’t want to be involved in your sex lives. I don’t want to know that Cindy howls like a banshee, or that you do her up against a wall.” She whipped around and glared at Ned. “Especially since you once told me you couldn’t do it that way because it would hurt your back.”

He opened his mouth, but she turned away, staggering up the last step, breathing like a lunatic. The good news was that she’d done it. The bad news was that she’d just come face-to-face with a man leaning against the wall, a set of keys in his hand.

She might’ve yelped in surprise, but frankly, she was too tired. Besides, she knew him. He was over six feet tall, broad shoulders, and nicely muscled. His unruly hair was the color of a doe’s fur, which was to say every color under the sun; all shades of brown, mahogany, even some red and blond, cut short and clearly only finger tousled, like he didn’t have time to be bothered. He had a poker face she’d kill for, not to mention dark lashes over eyes that were as hard to name the color of his hair. Greens and browns swirled together in what was technically hazel, but that seemed too tame of a word. Those see-all eyes of his could express a wide gamut of emotions, from banked anger to an intensity that burned. At the moment though, he seemed amused as he stood there, clearly waiting for her. He was her hard-ass PT, aka Simon Armstrong.

“Sounds like you need a moment,” he said.

Oh perfect. He’d heard everything. The old Emma would’ve died of embarrassment. But Emma 2.0 didn’t do embarrassment. She no longer gave a shit what people thought. Or so she reminded herself as she lifted her chin. Pride before the fall and all that.

Her exes squared came up behind her with their faux worry. Or maybe it was real worry. That was the beauty of her new attitude—she didn’t care.

“How did you find this place anyway?” Ned asked, not yet seeing Simon. “Thought you couldn’t find an apartment anywhere in Sunrise Cove that would take you with your lapse in income for the past year.”

“This is a nice building,” Cindy said, bringing up the rear. “Nicer than ours even. Maybe there’s another available apartment.”

“There’s not,” Emma said flatly, her eyes still locked on the man watching her. “The building’s all filled up.” She had no idea if this was true. All she knew was that he’d told her about the available apartment and that he could get her approval.

She’d gratefully jumped on it.

Maybe he wasn’t all hard-ass . . .

The building had once been a single Victorian home, but somewhere in the 1950s it’d been separated into four apartments: two up, two down. She was moving into apartment 2A, because unfortunately, nothing had been available on the bottom floor. It was actually lovely and she was beyond grateful for it, because as it turned out, Ned was right—nobody wanted to rent to a woman with no current source of income other than a few part-time hours at Paw Pals, the local doggy daycare. And she only had that job because she’d worked there once a week before her accident.