Flipping Love You (Boys of the Bayou Gone Wild #3) - Erin Nicholas Page 0,32

trip was spent doing something that resulted in the paycheck, it was considered work and not play. Any time she got to interact with animals, learn something new, and immerse herself in an experience, she considered that fun.

She shut off her car and got out of the car, checking the address in her emails from the contractor. She squinted at the gorgeous house with the maybe-I-do-like-sunrises front porch. Nope, the numbers on the front didn’t match. Figured. She looked at the house next to it. The one with the peeling white paint, the green shutters—half of which were hanging crookedly, and the three missing front porch steps. Yep, that was hers.

“Of course it is”. At least it had a front porch too. “It just doesn’t have steps to get to the porch.”

She made her way up the front walk.

“This is what you get for buying the place without photos,” Jill told herself. “Location, location, location.”

From the realtor’s description, it had been close to the penguin’s new home. That was really all she’d considered.

“That was really stupid, girl.”

Price had been no object, considering she’d just come into a few million dollars overnight, but she hadn’t wanted to build a new house. That was silly. She was a single woman and she didn’t have time to sit around waiting for a new house to be built anyway.

She also didn’t need marble countertops and twenty-foot ceilings and chandeliers and expensive furniture. She needed a place to sleep.

“And shower,” she said out loud, as she looked down at her soaked clothes and shoes. She bypassed the missing steps and jumped up onto the porch from the ground.

She’d already taken off before it occurred to her to hope the porch floor was sturdy and she wouldn’t go crashing through rotting wood. But it held up as she landed. She approached the front door and realized she didn’t have a key to this place either. Obviously, showing up early with no appointments to see any of these building projects was becoming an issue. Still, she tried the front door. Sure enough, the knob turned, and the door swung in.

“Okay, in Autre we don’t lock up houses. Or goats. But empty penguin enclosures are like Fort Knox.”

But it only took her six steps inside the house to realize she had nothing to worry about. There was nothing here to steal, for one thing. And while a family of raccoons might find it a fine place to bunk down overnight, there wasn’t much here that anyone would find appealing.

The house was old, and the best word that came to mind was shabby. And as far she could tell, her contractor hadn’t done a damn thing.

The rooms were all empty. There was dust all over everything. The wood floor in the entryway was dirty and scarred. There was carpet in the main room off to her left that looked to be older than her grandmother. The huge front windows were dirty, two of them were cracked, and one was completely missing and was boarded up with plywood. And that wasn’t new plywood as if they were in the process of replacing the window. Even the plywood was old.

She went to the wall and flipped the light switch. Nothing happened. Then again, looking around, there were no light fixtures even if the electricity did work.

“Perfect.”

She was wet, dirty, cold, and homeless.

With sixteen million dollars, give or take, in the bank.

Awesome.

Yep, she was going to have to talk to the house contractor today as well. She pulled her phone out again and went into her email. She had been emailing back and forth with this guy, rather than texting.

Fine, he’d been emailing her.

She hadn’t given him her phone number. It was much easier for her to keep the two projects separate. Her phone was for work almost entirely. The only people she texted were her mother, Evan, and his wife Cori. Everything else that happened with her phone was related to work.

She found the guy’s email and typed out a quick message. It was similar to the one she sent about penguins.

I got into town early, stopped over at the house. Have lots of questions. When can we meet up?

It wasn’t even a minute before she had a message back. At least this guy was more on the ball first thing in the morning than the penguin guy.

Have some stuff this morning. Can meet you at the house around noon.

She blew out a breath and realized she couldn’t be frustrated. It