Inn & Out (A Romantic Comedy) (Five More Wishes Book 2) (4 page)

He falls for it and takes my hand, giving it a firm shake. His hand is rough and warm, and outfitted with some kind of electrical shock system, because it’s causing a zing to pass through my body and rev up my dormant, suppressed female motor parts. Yowza. Danger, Will Robinson. I need to pry my hand away from him, but my hand has a mind of its own and is clutching on for dear life.

“Let me go,” I say, forcefully. He drops his hand and rubs it with his other hand, as if it’s hurt. “Where am I staying? Where’s Aunt Eleanor’s room?”

“She closed the inn ten years ago and moved into the guest house in back.”

“I hope that’s in better shape,” I say, heading toward the door, but Thor grabs my arm.

“We’re staying in the main house. The contractor is going to stay out in the guest house during renovations.”

My ears perk up. “You have a contractor? I’m not paying for that.”

He rolls his eyes. “Come on. I’ll show you your room.” I follow Thor up the Gone with the Wind stairs, careful not to hang on to the broken banister, to the second floor. It’s worse up here. There’s a wide discolored swathe on the wood floor where the carpet used to be, and the whole floor needs to be redone. So do the walls.

“Walk along the left side. It’s more steady, there,” Thor says.

“Are you kidding? Are you saying the floor isn’t safe?” Without saying another word, he wraps his arm around my waist from behind and pulls me close so that his pelvis is pressing against my backside. Never letting me go, he walks me this way to the end of the hallway past walls covered in faded, peeling wallpaper and streaks of dark mold on the baseboards. Oh, boy. The house should probably be razed to the ground.

Finally safe, Thor lets me go and takes a deep breath, staring at his feet. He opens the door at the end of the hallway, and holds it for me, while I pass through. Inside, is a huge bedroom, like Jane Eyre’s when she gets to the castle. A massive four-poster bed is the main feature of the room. It’s made up with clean linens and a bunch of thick pillows. At the foot of the bed, there’s a large chest with a suitcase on it, which Thor picks up.

“Am I putting you out?” I ask.

“It’s okay. I’ll bunk somewhere else.”

“I can’t throw you out, even if this is my house. I’ll just take another room.”

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “No. This is your room until we get up and running.”

His expression is serious and will brook no argument. It’s probably the only room that’s actually habitable, even though it looks like the Panzer Division came through it. But the other rooms are probably worse, and I realize that Thor is being chivalrous. It’s another nice thing he’s done for me after feeding me, but I refuse to thank him since he’s blocking me from finding myself and starting a new life.

“The bathroom is over there, and out here is the balcony,” he says.

He opens double doors to the balcony. I gasp. Up here, the view is even more amazing. It’s like we’re on the top of the world, but not in a Mount Everest kind of way but in a better Tony Stark Iron Man kind of way. I could stay here forever, even though the house looks like it was the victim of a nuclear attack. I step toward the balcony, but Thor pulls me back.

“I wouldn’t go out there,” he says. “Not until we rebuild it.”

“Is anything safe around here?”

“I am.”

Our eyes lock, and I’m having trouble swallowing, as if I’m allergic to his bangable hotness, and I’m going into anaphylactic shock. Get it together, Beryl. Remember you’re a bum magnet.

“All righty then,” I manage, looking away.

***

After getting my duffel from his golf cart, I set up my new room and unpack. I hang up my three outfits in the room’s large armoire, which looks like the one in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
.  Finally, I go to the bathroom to take a shower. Thor has stocked the bathroom with clean towels and a fresh bathmat. That’s the only fresh thing in the room. Half of the tiles are missing, and there’s no mirror, only a spot on the wall above the sink where it once hung.

But the prison was worse, much worse. This will be my first private shower in two years. The realization hits me, and I feel a jolt of euphoria. I slip off my clothes and stock the shower with shampoo and soap and turn it on. The familiar screams from the pipes start. It’s like I’m living in a Transformers movie with a Lucas film sound system. The sound is blaring this close to the pipes. There’s a good chance the shower is going to blow up while I’m in it, but I really want a shower without a guard and twelve inmates watching me. Nothing will stop me from having my first private, naked wet moment in years.

“You’re not going to scare me,” I say, out loud and step in.

Even if the pipes are funky, the water feels wonderful. I let it run over my head, as the house groans and clanks and makes a terrible racket. I sort of get used to it after a while, like it’s serenading me. Finally, I put a dollop of shampoo in my palm and lather my hair. Paradise. I splurge and skip my normal ten second shampoo rub and do a high end salon massage. I feel so luxurious, like I’m rich and almost happy.

Sure, there’s been a hiccup in my plans. I was expecting to arrive on the island and leave soon after with a big check in my hands, but now I’m faced with the near impossible task of getting the inn up and running. I want to be spending my days making vision boards and trolling celebrities online, but now I have to roll up my sleeves and bring in the dough. Thor is going to be focusing on renovating this eyesore, but I have a better idea for fast income. While Thor thinks inside the box, I’m already planning and plotting way outside of the box. Way outside. Miles outside. Because of my plan, within weeks I’ll be leaving town and living off of my investment profits without touching the principal.

Filled with optimism, I rinse off, but just as the shampoo runs down the drain, two tiles pop off the wall and land on my foot, stabbing me just above my big toe. I yelp in pain and reach for my foot, almost slipping in the tub. I manage to catch my balance by grabbing onto the shower curtain. As I pull, the curtain rod rips out of the wall, and the curtain flies to the floor. It’s a horrible mess. I’ve wreaked havoc all over the already wreck of a bathroom.

The noise of the pipes is deafening, even worse than before. I need to finish my shower before something else breaks or the pipes blow up. I turn off the water, but for some reason, the pipes continue to make a horrible noise. Uh oh. It sounds like it’s going to blow, like a volcano or a Desperate Housewife. I double check the shower, but I’ve definitely turned off the water. I don’t know what’s going on.

I bend down and pick up the tiles. I try to stick them back on to the wall, but they won’t stick and there’s a big hole where they fell off. That’s when I see it.

With its beady eyes.

It’s sitting in the hole in the shower wall, watching me with its long whiskers moving, ready to pounce on my face and eat through my head to my juicy brain. Inches from the monster, I scream at the top of my lungs. In fact, I out-scream the noise of the pipes. Hell, I out-scream Janet Leigh in Psycho. Oh my God, this really is the Psycho house. Slipping and sliding, I hop out of the bath and run screaming out of the bathroom, but I don’t make it. By the time I get to the bathroom doorway, I run into an immoveable force.

My body slams into Thor’s. His naked body. He’s very naked. He got more naked going on than any other man I’ve ever seen. He holds me steady so that I don’t fall backward after I collide into him, and our lower halves and upper halves are glued together, as he holds me.

“Oh my God, you’re naked. Why are you naked?” I shriek and push him away.

“I thought you were being murdered. I didn’t stop for a towel.”

A towel.

My hands fly to cover my private bits, but not before Thor has gotten an eyeful. I’m naked, too. So much for my first private shower in two years. “Okay, okay, we’re grownups,” I say, trying to regain my composure. “So we saw each other naked. No big deal. Leave and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

I turn around and walk toward the towels, but I step on the shower curtain. The curtain rod is underneath, and it rolls under my foot, and I go flying. Like an Olympic diver, I do a leap and a spin in midair and land splat onto two-hundred-twenty pounds of pure muscle and a big giant penis.  I take Thor down with me onto the bathroom floor, better than any t-shirt MMA star. I’m sure about the big giant penis because I land with my face in his crotch, and mortifyingly, my crotch is in his face.

“Are we still grownups?” Thor asks, his voice muffled, and his breath blowing hot on my hoo-ha.

I struggle to get up, but my hand slips, and I push down on his most sensitive appendages, making Thor jump up in agony. “Get off me,” I complain.

He groans. “You’re on me. This is your fault. Why were you screaming like you were being murdered?”

“There was a monster-sized rat hiding in the shower. It tried to eat me.” I get up and finally wrap a towel around me. It feels good to be covered, more in control. “Get a towel,” I tell him, trying to avert my eyes, but I’ve seen everything, and there’s a whole lot of everything.

Thor stands and wraps a towel around his hips. His head is dipped down, but I can see the scowl on his face. “A monster-sized rat from a hole in the shower?” he asks.

“Monster-sized,” I say. “The Godzilla of rats. You need to call pest control.”

“That monster over there?” he asks, pointing at the bathtub. On the lip of the tub is a tiny mouse. It’s staring at me, and its little nose is wiggling, making its whiskers go up and down. It’s not a big rat or a rat at all. It’s only a tiny mouse.

A mouse.

I scream at the top of my lungs and bolt away, throwing my body at the door, away from the mouse. I side-swipe Thor on my way out, but this time, we don’t collide and don’t fall on the floor, and we’re not totally naked, which is a plus.

As I make it back into my room, the pipes stop screeching and banging. “That’s a relief,” I tell Thor, who’s standing in the bathroom doorway, still in his towel. He’s staring at me as if I’ve done something wrong.

“Why were you naked in the first place?” I ask.

He furrows his eyebrows. “I was taking a shower when I heard you scream.”

As if by magic or karma, there’s a loud scream coming from the hallway.  A bone-chilling scream. It starts off like a normal man’s scream but recedes into the distance, like he’s falling down a well. The scream quickly changes to a string of expletives—especially oh, fuck—in a loud voice.

Then, a boom.

Thor and I look at each other, I guess to see if the scream came from one of us. It didn’t. This time, I’m not the one doing the screaming. There’s another scream while we walk toward the door, but this time the scream is from a woman. I peek into the hallway. An old woman is standing with her back up against the wall. She’s wearing overalls and a plaid shirt. Her hair looks like it was transplanted from Einstein’s dead body, and the expression on her face is pure terror.

“You killed Bert!” she screams at me. “You killed Bert!”

“I didn’t kill Bert!” I yell back. “I didn’t touch him!” I have no idea who Bert is, but there’s a gaping wide hole in the hallway floor, and it’s even money that Bert fell through it. The old lumberjack Einstein lady doesn’t buy it.

“You killed Bert!” she yells again, pointing at the hole. A horrible noise comes from down below. It’s worse than the pipes. It sounds like Bert’s dying a slow, horrible death.

“He’s moaning. That’s a good sign,” I say, smiling and trying to put a positive light on killing Bert.

She stares back at me, then at Thor, and back at me, again. She’s angry as spitfire. “What’s going on here? Some kind of orgy?”

“No, Jean. Just taking a shower,” Thor says from behind me. He’s peeking into the hallway, too. He’s inches away from me, and I can feel his body heat and his breath on my neck. Thor is really making my abstinence oath hard to keep.

“A shower together?” Jean asks. “You’re fooling around while my Bert is dying?”

“Call an ambulance!” Bert yells from the first floor. “What are you doing up there? Playing Scrabble?”

“Keep your pants on!” Jean yells down through the hole in the floor. She throws Thor and me an icy stare. “It might be easier for him than you two,” she says.

“Old lady, call an ambulance!” Bert yells. For a dead man, he’s got amazing lungs.

“Thor, call an ambulance,” Jean orders.

Thor tiptoes around me and down the hallway into what I presume is his bedroom. “I’m Beryl,” I tell Jean.

“I know. Everyone knows. I didn’t know you were porking Thor, though.”

“I’m not porking,” I start, but Jean is focusing on Bert through the hole in the floor.

“Why did you fall through the floor?” she demands.

“’Cause I thought I could fly,” he yells from the floor below. “’Cause I wanted to die to get away from you.”

“Well you did a lousy job at it. You’re still breathing, and you didn’t fly a foot.”

“Where’s a gun when you need it?” he complains.

“The ambulance is on its way,” Thor says, stepping out of his room. He’s slipped on a pair of basketball shorts and work boots, but his perfect McConaughey six-pack is still on display. “I’ll go down and check on Bert.”

Thor carefully steps around Jean. “Are you going to stay naked?” Jean asks me. “Are you one of those naked people that I’ve seen on the news?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think I could handle that,” she continues. “I mean, I would be fine with you being naked, but Bert would swallow his tongue, and already it’s hard to get him to take out the trash.”

“I’m not really a naked person,” I say, but as to prove me wrong, my towel falls to the ground. Jean scowls and nods her head, as if she’s known I was a liar all the time. “I’ll go get dressed,” I say and pop back into my room.

I throw on shorts and a t-shirt and slip back into my flip-flops. By the time I’m dressed, the ambulance arrives, its siren blasting through the quiet.

“About time!” Bert yells from below as I walk back into the hallway. Jean is gone. I can hear her complaining downstairs. Carefully, I tiptoe along the edge of the hallway, trying not to fall through the hole on my way to the stairs.