“Well, I can’t let Mimi have all the fun.” She winked at Cole to show that she was joking and grabbed the handle, just to see if she could get it open. It wasn’t budging, though she wasn’t worried. If she worked on prying it open long enough, Cole would help her. “If Mimican handle it, so can I.”
Strangely, Cole wasn’t even trying to lend his assistance.
With another yank, she wrenched the trapdoor open herself.
She gulped and turned to Cole. “Please?”
“After what I said? Why would you even want to…?”
“Porter and Nash aren’t here now.” Unless they’d dropped their honeymoons in the Caribbean just to play a gag on their youngest brother, they were safe. She brought her hands up in pleading. “It’ll be fine.”
Grumbling out his complaints, Cole dragged off his slicker and wedged it over the latch where she guessed that it had locked in Hudson and Mimi before. “That had better do it,” he muttered.
She clapped in her sudden excitement and hugged him then scrambled back. “Oh, sorry.” She wiped at her hair, hoping she only looked like she’d stumbled over him.
Luckily, he let her usual recklessness go. He bit his lip, teetering near the black hole where the ladder led down below. He glanced over at her, his jaw tightening. “You trust me enough to be alone with you in the dankest depths of the haunted barn?”
“Of course I do.” What a silly question. They were almost sister and brother. “You’re like the most trustworthy guy I’ve ever met.”
His mouth twisted, like that was an insult. “Evermet?”
She nodded.
A slow smile took over his lips, and she realized that she’d probably challenged him into giving her the scare of her life.
Exploring down below was so worth it.
Chapter Ten
“It’s absolutely perfect!” Eva flashed the light from her phone over the feeding troughs. “It’s as creepy as I hoped it would be.”
Eva worried Cole sometimes… when he wasn’t busy hiding his amusement.
She was mesmerized by the goat cellar, and she edged past the sunken stalls. Tiny slanted windows let in slits of fading light from the rainstorm outside. Somehow it smelled mustier down here in this bad weather. Nothing could ever get rid of the stink of goats.
The barn was built on a hillside, so that one side of the cellar was underground, but the other end led to a sliding door that had been used to haul in their equipment. It had long since been boarded up, along with the bigger windows to keep out the critters.
After Hudson and Mimi had gotten stuck down here, they should’ve taken crowbars to the barred windows and ripped off all the boards from the escape exits.
But once again they were too low on hands to get anything done around here.
“That is incredible!” Eva pointed at the hay chute. It was an industrial tube wedged through the ceiling that turned into a slide at the bottom. In theory, the opening through the floors was meant for throwing down the hay and feed from above. “What’s that?” she asked.
“A disaster,” he muttered. The twins hadn’t measured the tube before installing it, so none of the hay bales actually fit through. By the time they’d bought a replacement piece, their old man had sold off their goats… much to everyone’s relief. The hay chute was a total trash heap.
Eva admired it like it was a masterpiece. “You probably had a blast sliding through that when you were younger.”
He snickered at the thought of joyfully pushing his brothers aside to be the first to go down the slide. “Why would we do that when we have stairs?”
“Oh, well, I was thinking about Hudson and Mimi getting locked down here. That could’ve been a way to get out.” She ran her hand over the hard plastic slide. “I bet I could fit.”
His eyes traveled over her. Eva was small, but notthatsmall. Her hips would stop her from getting through, if anything. She was curvy. She’d been in his arms long enough for him to know that. He flushed. Pushing all thoughts of those times from his mind, he cleared his throat, instantly thinking of a way to distract her from getting stuck. “Yeah, but the spiders.”
“Ew!” She stepped back, almost running into him. He jumped to the side to stop that from happening. The last thing he needed was an armful of Eva again. She aimed the beam of her light up the tunnel, her movements jerky. Her blonde hair whipped over her shoulder, so she could peer at him. “You think?”
“Definitely, big fat juicy spiders,” he said.
“Stop!” She grabbed his hand to squeeze it as punishment.