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“Holy crap,” Amelia says with wide eyes. “How did you score a place like this?” She drops her luggage in the foyer. Her frantic gaze swings left and then right.

The home’s wide-open floor plan boasts views of the azure ocean from every single location in the house, including the showers. The showers! Outside is a private pool, Jacuzzi, hammock, grills, and whatever else I haven’t discovered yet. It’s a real-life centerfold for an interior design coffee-table book, and it’s spectacular.

I press my lips tight, trying not to gloat. Even though I stayed here last night, I still can’t believe what I did.

Amelia returns after she’s scoured every corner of the first floor. “Can we afford this? And by we, I mean you. Can you afford this?”

“Someone hooked us up.” I play it cool.

I consider the house the spoils of war.

“Did you see the fridge? The wine cabinet?” Amelia is so jittery, she doesn’t know where to look next.

“You mean the ones that look like there’s a Michelin-star chef in residence?” I grin.

With our fingertips touching, feet jogging in place, we squeal.

Then she takes off running again, but this time with more energy than a five-year-old sucking on pure sugarcane. Watching her act out reminds me of how utterly insane this is, because I outright stole this reservation from Gio.

Stole. It! Ha!

Because I can’t help it, the nice-girl guilt immediately takes up residence in my mind, but I shove it out. Hard. He deserved this level of warfare, and I deserve this level of awesomeness.

Game over. I win.

I lodge my hands on my hips and inhale the bad-bitch vibes. They smell utterly delicious and a little like . . . malasadas?

Sniffing further, I find a complimentary plate of the sugar-coated, doughnut-like fried dough. How did I miss these? I snatch one and take a bite. Macadamia-nut custard oozes from the center.

Yum. I should go to war more often. I grab one for Amelia.

We won’t get into the fact that I paid Jaz a whopper of a bribe to make this happen, which I happily support now that I have the upper hand on Gio.

With the reservation number I gleaned from Gio’s colleague’s phone call, Jaz was able to revise the details in the computer system, erasing him from the database completely. She’s scary good at what she does. Like, terrifying. But I’m not complaining. Not complaining one bit.

“Sophia! Get out here. Look at this.”

I follow Amelia’s voice to the pool deck.

Outside, the clouds have parted and the storm has pushed out to sea. A sunshiny beam warms us. Across the coastline, three rainbows appear.

Triple rainbows! It’s a sign. This house-stealing Gio beatdown was meant to be.

Amelia strips down to her bikini. Her snowy white skin is a sharp contrast against her long black hair. She steps into the pool, reaches for a purple inner tube, and hops on. The float takes her to the infinity-edge side, where an optical illusion makes it appear the water’s surface continues into the ocean.

“That would make the perfect pic.” I pull out my phone and snap a photo of her well-practiced pose. She twirls around in the inner tube, which sprouts a mermaid tail at the back.

“It even has the same coloring of my favorite mermaid costume.” She admires the fin on the floatie.

Amelia is a real-life mermaid. I mean, as real as you can get with human legs. She travels to fancy resorts to run mermaid classes for poor little rich kids. At least, that’s the slow-moving business plan. Right now, she’s mostly on birthday-party duty.

“God, Soph, I can’t believe this is our place for four weeks. Who hooked us up? They must be loaded.” She spins on the water’s surface.

It was a me, actually. I’d like to thank me.

I settle at the pool’s edge, my legs dipping beneath the warm water. I wave a malasada at Amelia and she forgets her question, opting to paddle closer and snatch it. With her piranha-like bites, it’s gone in three seconds.

“Still no sign of Adam?” she asks with a full mouth.