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“No, you stay right there,” Victoria said. “She can hold it for another minute or so.”
“Evil!” Avril cried.
Victoria didn’t so much as blink, and Anna turned her head away as a smile broke across her lips.
“It really seems like you know how to unite everyone against you,” Liam pointed out to the struggling troublemaker. “At the card night, now here.”
“Let this be a lesson. They might all act nice and polite, but they’re the real villains around here.”
“You reap what you sow,” Victoria cut in. “And you sow quite often.”
“Yeah, so you can all have a bit of vibrancy in your drab lives every once in a while. You’rewelcome.”
The buxom professor raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t say thank you.”
“Nor did I,” Anna said, still appearing to hold a minor grudge toward Avril’s earlier trickery.
Sighing theatrically, Tess’s return saved Avril from her somewhat fitting physical penance, at least in Victoria and Anna’s eyes. Throwing a beach towel across the rug a foot in front of Liam, Tess needlessly motioned Avril toward it. She was already on her way, hauling the heavy block toward its center, where her arms quavered like cobwebs hit by a leaf blower as she gently placed it down.
Wincing and weakly rubbing her arms afterward, Avril meekly nodded at him.
“I was going to be more theatrical about all this, but the three villainesses here have exhausted me. You know what to do.”
Hiding his smile before it joined Anna’s, Liam scooped up his hammer, shifted himself to a kneeling position beside the cinder block, and stared down at it.
“Try and show off a little and get to it in as few hits as possible,” Avril added.
“I’ll do my best,” he promised.
Scanning the fissured cinder block, its sealing probably wouldn’t stand up to more than a mild strike. He was thankful to Avril for at least sparing his arm the rebounding soreness of needing to batter away at a cinder block with nothing more than a handheld hammer. Otherwise, they might have all been here a while as he pounded the thing into debris and dust, whichwouldcause those two things to end up everywhere, towel or not.
The real question wasn’t how hard he should hit the thing, butwhere.Knowing Avril, it was just as likely that she’d hidden whatever he was supposed to uncover inside near one of the ends as the center. Chewing on his tongue, he mulled over his first strike.
While doing so, one of the onlookers decided to give him a bit of illegal—or so he knew Avril would have called it—advice. His attention flicked up toward Anna, of all people, who was subtly miming a very specific motion with one of her hands. For a few seconds, his comprehension fumbled the ball. During her fourth gesture, however, her guidance finally sunk in.
Smarter than I am,he thought, smiling as his attention returned to the cinder block.
The first time he contacted it, he didn’t use the hammer. Instead, he grabbed ahold of its rough, tactile surface with his free hand and, with mild exertion, changed its position from flat on its side to standing like a tower.
All the credit should have gone to Anna, but as he swapped its position, he saw all three other women respond. Tess and Victoria wore approving looks, or at least what he assumed was an approving look from the latter woman. Avril, on the other hand, frowned as she realized that he’dliterallyupended her challenge.
The hammer went up. Solidifying his grip, surging energy into the muscles in his arm, he brought the hammer down.
Fat shards of cement burst away in all directions, scattering across the towel, bouncing off his shin, and colliding with Tess’s coffee table. The clang of the hammer meeting sand and cement pealed through the room as the cinder block detonated from the force delivered to its structurally unstable body. While its outer chunks sprayed across and beyond the towel’s edges, the inside pieces mostly collapsed inward, tumbling onto the towel. And throughout the brief but spectacular demolition job, Liam’s eyes scanned for an oddity—something that wasn’t gray cement.
Barring a sudden onset of complete colorblindness, it would have been impossible to miss. Even then, the shape would have led his eyes to it.
Avril had buried a rubber band ball inside of the cinder block. Fortunately for her, he’d turned the cinder block onto the side where it was far from where his hammer had struck. On the other hand, his blow had done away with enough of its protection that almost half of it jutted out of the sand and cement around it.
Reaching toward it, he brushed aside some debris resting on it. Grabbing hold of the sphere of at least a few hundred brightly colored rubber bands, wanting only to have needed a single blow to get at it, he began trying to wriggle it out of the third of a cinder block that still maintained its form.
What remained clung greedily to its charge, attempting to force him to at least double the number of blows he’d needed to vanquish it, but to no avail. Within a few more seconds, he’d gotten a good enough grip on the ball to gradually yank it free of its cement prison.
“There we are,” he announced happily, palming it from beneath as he extended it toward one unhappy-looking maverick.
“I made that way too easy for you,” she groused as she stared at the obliterated remains of sand and cement.
“I think it went perfectly,” Anna said.
