Текст книги "Forbidden Boy"
Автор книги: Hailey Abbott
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Julianne fumed. How dare he act like the problem here was that she was a girl? Maybe there were bigger losers than Remi on this site, after all.
“Sorry, Jeremy. Remi wasn’t able to find a real man, so you’re going to have to help me instead,” she shot back.
“But if a real man comes by, feel free to take notes.” Undeterred, Jeremy tossed his arm around Julianne’s shoulders to guide her, barely avoiding wiping out on the laces of his untied Nikes. They made it almost all the way back to the circular saw before Julianne whipped around and mouthed, “I’m going to get you!” at Remi’s receding back. She couldn’t help but notice that he’d finally started wearing better pants—they hung loosely over his long legs—but she tried her best to ignore the improvement and focused on her anger.
“Damn it,” Julianne muttered to herself, her ocean blue eyes brimming with hot tears. Between kicking herself for not being more cautious about her hair and feeling the weight of Jeremy’s toned, chauvinistic arm around her, she didn’t know what to be humiliated about first.
From that point on, it seemed like everything that 94
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could go wrong did. Julianne spent three miserable days filing and photocopying invoices in the site trailer. The inside of the trailer was covered in fourteen distinct shades of beige and one very distinct odor of mildew.
She spent every cooped-up moment in there dreaming of the murals she’d paint on its crumbling rent-a-walls if only she had access to the crew’s paints. Even on the days that she was in the trailer choosing colors, design-ing lighting, or planning the landscaping for the owners, she resented the trailer just for being there.
Even worse, Remi was everywhere Julianne turned.
She felt like he was looking over her shoulder, just waiting for her to mess up. Of course, she found herself making stupid mistakes when he was around. She could almost forgive him for keeping such a close watch on her, but she wasn’t sure she could forgive herself for letting him psych her out so much. If she started to drill a board into place without sanding the rough patches down first, she’d turn around and, sure enough, Remi would be standing right there. Accidentally attach a solar panel upside down? Remi suddenly appeared two feet away, and Julianne could swear his eyebrows were arched.
The more Julianne stressed out about Remi’s suffo-cating proximity, the closer he seemed to get. She felt paranoid, anticipating that he would find fault even with her best work.
“Hey, Julianne—that panel could be a little bit 95
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straighter, okay?” she muttered to herself, mocking his helpful suggestions.
Not even five minutes later, his imagined voice popped back into her head with “Hey, Julianne—that tile could be set a little bit closer to the others, okay?”
“Definitely. I’m on it,” she responded to herself, even managing a jaunty salute. She was totally losing it.
Half an hour later, when she saw Beau’s broad figure lumbering across the site, she tensed up immediately:
“Hey, Julianne—you might want to think about using a different bit on that drill, okay?”
“Anything you say, chief.” Julianne sighed. She was getting exhausted just thinking about it.
“Hey, no need to get snippy with me,” Beau said, raising his hands in faux surrender. “I just don’t want to see you get showered with splinters is all.”
“You don’t want to see me get all splinter-y—or you were sent over here to tell me I’m doing something wrong?” Julianne asked suspiciously, fiddling with the Velcro on her work gloves.
“Whoa . . .” Beau said, laughing, arms still up in mock defensiveness. “I’m here with only the purest of intentions.
No nefarious plotting whatsoever. And every time I’ve talked to you in the past week—if you don’t mind my saying, Jules—you’ve asked me if Remi sent me over. A few too many unnecessary protests, if you know what I mean.”
“Hey now, Mr. Big Imagination,” Julianne protested, 96
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half-laughing. “I think you’re spending too many of your lunch breaks reading romance novels—don’t think I haven’t seen you huddled back by the trailer—it’s starting to go to your head!”
“Maybe,” Beau replied slyly. “Or maybe not all the sparks flying on this site are from your drill bit . . .”
“Oh, shut up!” Julianne said, laughing as she rolled her eyes. Beau shrugged and headed back over to his workbench. “Drama queens,” she muttered to herself.
“Guys are such drama queens.”
By the end of the third week, Julianne had resorted to singing to herself—or rather, to every song on her iPod playlist—to keep herself calm and focused on work rather than on Remi. When that lost its charm, she moved on to imagining elaborate spy scenarios. Her favorite one involved her and Chloe—decked out in matching James Bond spygirl outfits—rappelling into the Moores’ mansion under cover of darkness only to find out that the whole thing was an elaborate cover for an international drug cartel. They called in the FBI and not only were the Moores sent to a remote island to grow bananas and repay their debt to society, but the girls were both rewarded with presidential medals and the deed to the entire beach. Which they, of course, designated as a free public space and artists’ colony. Julianne played this fan-tasy over and over in her head until she began to feel a little bit creepy for wishing it were actually true.
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When she wasn’t imagining new and creative ways for the universe to karma-smack Remi and his family, Julianne waited with her ears perked for any mention of Remi’s name around the site. Whenever one of the other guys mentioned Remi, Julianne would hang back pretending to tie her shoe, or take additional measurements on something she’d just measured twice a few minutes earlier. Unfortunately, they never seemed to say anything, except what a great guy and good manager he was.
She was becoming a pro at looking casually disinterested or distracted while secretly absorbing every last syllable being uttered around her. In short, she was well on her way to being the best spy in Southern California.
Okay, maybe not. But definitely the best spy in the Palisades.
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Chapter Nine
!
Julianne crept around the corner, trying to stay crouched down low to escape notice. She was holding a small, electronic stud-finder in her hand, working her way around the perimeter of the wall. If anyone walked by, it would look like she was checking to see where to attach the moldings at the bottom of each wall.
She kept her head down, waiting to make her move.
Only a fellow spy would have recognized that Julianne was honing her skills—waiting for Remi to come around the corner after his 10 a.m. meeting. James Bond had nothing on her.
After three weeks of progressively more intense surveillance—of what she and Chloe were now jokingly calling “the subject”—Julianne had come up with 99
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precious little that was of any help to her cause. She had, however, developed a whole arsenal of easily deployed spy tricks. The stud-finder was her latest innovation. As Julianne knelt on the floor, she was torn between feeling incredibly clever and beyond sketchy. On one hand, she was undercover—complete with techno-props. On the other hand, she was sort of curled into a ball as an elaborate excuse to try to overhear a few seconds of Remi’s morning plans.
She heard footsteps coming and snapped back into her position—her face shielded, the stud-finder level with the floor and beeping softly. The click-click-thump of shoes was getting closer, and Julianne strained to hear what was being said. After a few more moments, she began to get worried. Nonetheless, she kept her head down and the stud-finder level. Five minutes passed, then five more. Julianne’s hands were beginning to cramp up around the stud-finder, and she couldn’t feel her right knee after sitting on it for so long. Finally, her patience was rewarded with a snippet of conversation.
“Dad, I know it’s important . . . of course I do. Yeah, Dad, I know. I understand I have a responsibility. Yes, for the fourteenth time, I promise I will not forget.” Remi’s tone was a blend of stress and annoyance, and Julianne could picture him pulling at the tie around his neck as he walked. “Yes, Dad, I know I’m too old for you 100
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to be keeping tabs on these sorts of things for me. I promise you, I can handle it myself.” Julianne’s ears were burning from the strain of listening in on the conversation. As Remi walked past her along the other side of the wall, she inched slowly in his direction. What could Remi and Mr. Moore be discussing? What was so crucial that only Remi could attend to it? Maybe his dad had him gathering land value information from Bill or from Dawson and Dawson. Or maybe they were going to be expanding the perimeter of their property again and Remi was going to set up the gates. Julianne practically fell over herself to hear Remi’s last words before he turned the next corner into the space beyond her earshot.
“Look, Dad, I have something I need to get to in my office. I know there are other things you want to discuss, but can we just do it later? Yeah, I’ll be around.” Julianne heard Remi’s cell phone click shut before he’d even spat out “Goodbye.” As his footsteps faded in the distance, Julianne refused to be deterred. After waiting a few minutes to be sure he’d left the house, she popped her head up to see whether the coast was clear. No one on the left; no one on the right. Julianne crouched like a sprinter waiting at the starting block and, after a second’s hesita-tion, dashed out toward the trailer, stud-finder still in hand.
She tiptoed around the back of the site trailer, being 101
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careful not to step in any of the patches of dry, brown summer grass around the perimeter, just in case they made a crunching sound and gave away her where-abouts. She knelt down in the space under the trailer’s back window, steadying herself with one hand on the grass and one on the plastic siding of the trailer. It was like waiting with the stud-finder all over again, only now her spy prop just looked silly. She waited and waited to overhear even a hint of conversation coming from Remi’s desk, but he wasn’t talking and her calves were screaming from her awkward crouch.
Patience frayed, Julianne hopped up onto her tiptoes and peered in the back window of the trailer, careful to keep her head down and her mane of curly hair—always a dead giveaway if someone was trying to spot her from a distance—out of sight. From her new vantage point, Julianne found she was able to hear much more clearly than when she had been hunched behind the trailer. She could hear the drip stop of the coffee pot by the desk and the whir of the photocopier in its power-save mode.
Then she heard a squealing sound from inside the trailer.
Squealing tires are secret-agent pay dirt, she thought.
Shifting to get a better view, Jules was just able to make out the trailer’s bathroom door opening. Her mind worked hurriedly to figure out what sneaky, no-good things Remi was up to in the trailer bathroom, but before she was able to formulate any sort of convincing 102
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hypothesis, the door slid all the way open and Remi appeared in her line of vision. Wearing nothing but a towel.
Jules felt her eyes grow wide as her gaze followed Remi’s body across the trailer. Hanging around the construction site had been kind to him; his muscles were smooth and well defined. Even the farmer tan from his rolled-up work shirt sleeves showcased how strong and tight his arms were. Julianne had always thought that
“rippling muscles” was just a figure of speech, but as Remi made his way across the room she had to admit that his muscles were, in fact, rippling. A few stray drops of water from the shower lingered on his chest, clinging stubbornly, until one by one they slid way down to six-pack abs, tracing a trail down his stomach, then finally disappearing into the towel.
As Julianne peeped through the window, trying to control her breathing, she heard a series of mechanical knocks on the door of the trailer. It sounded like someone was banging a cookie sheet with a baseball bat, and the noise was just enough to startle Jules into ducking her head out of view. Huddling against the back of the trailer, she heard the clomping of business shoes on the front steps. Julianne pressed her ear against the wall.
“Remington, I presume this isn’t what passes for business casual on a site these days.” Julianne heard a sharp baritone scolding Remi. She couldn’t imagine anything 103
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more humiliating than one of his bosses from Dawson and Dawson popping by to check on the project site and, instead, finding him half-naked. She felt a pang of sympathy for him.
“Dad?” Remi gulped. “What are you doing here?” Julianne felt as shocked as Remi sounded—she never would have guessed that the voice belonged to Remi’s father. He sounded so cold and businesslike.
“I think a better question, young man, might be what are you doing? Last time I checked, pants were still required at work,” Barton Moore countered. Ouch, thought Jules. He clearly just took a shower. His hair’s still wet!
“Would you believe an unfortunate drywall accident?” Remi asked gamely.
“Not particularly,” his father barked back.
“Well, that’s a shame. Because that’s exactly what happened. I was completely covered with powder and I figured it was better to clean up and change now, rather than walk around all day looking like I’d been caught in a freak snowstorm.” Julianne heard Remi trying to be his casual self, but she also heard the tension in his explanation.
“Remington, that’s a pathetic excuse,” Mr. Moore responded icily. Julianne held her breath, waiting for Remi’s response. She couldn’t help but feel that Mr.
Moore was being unduly harsh—it wasn’t like he’d 104
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walked in and found Remi playing Wii on the job. He was cleaning up after a work accident and heading back to his crew. Clearly there was some precedent for this sort of thing; why else would these trailers include showers in their bathrooms?
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” Remi replied.
Julianne felt herself soften, detecting the tiny tremble in his voice.
“Listen, Remington,” Mr. Moore continued. “It’s about time you grew up and learned to handle responsibility. How am I going to trust you to take over my business when you can’t stay on top of one project crew?”
“But—” Remi began to protest.
“But nothing.” His father charged on. “Are you on the site supervising your crew, or are you hiding in this trailer like some spoiled celebrity?” Julianne gasped at Mr. Moore’s nastiness and clapped her hand over her open mouth. She hoped that the sound was muffled by the wall of the trailer. She felt the sting of recognition as Mr. Moore continued to lay into Remi—after all of her faux pas on the site over the past few weeks, she knew all too well what it felt like to get called out for an innocent mistake.
“You can’t expect your crew to respect you,” Mr.
Moore concluded solemnly, “until you give them a reason. I challenge you to earn their respect, Remington.
And mine.”
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“Yes, sir,” Remi answered. Julianne was shocked that Remi wasn’t fighting back—anyone could see how well-respected he was around the site. Guys two and three times his age, who had been in this business longer than Julianne had been alive, asked Remi’s opinion on pretty much everything. The newbies looked up to him as an authority. Hell, she’d hoped against hope that he would just disappear into thin air, but even Julianne had to respect the job Remi did. He was that good. And, what’s more, Julianne noted in spite of herself, he did it all without ever tearing any of the other guys down or trying to make them feel small—which was more than she could say for his father.
Julianne felt the little hairs on the back of her neck prickle and stand up as an uncomfortable thought worked its way into her brain. Maybe Remi really didn’t have anything to do with the construction of his parents’ McMansion. Mr. Moore seemed sort of . . .
tyrannical. It was impossible for Julianne to imagine him asking anyone’s input, especially someone he treated the way she’d just heard him treat Remi. Clearly, she had some more detective work to do.
! ! !
When Julianne got home from work that evening, the house was empty. Dad was at his monthly meeting of 106
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local children’s book authors, and Chloe had left a note saying that she’d be home from the hospital around ten o’clock.
Julianne tossed her things onto the living room sofa and headed upstairs to her room. When she logged on to her Gmail account, she saw one new message. She hoped it would be a long, newsy update from Kat in Spain, but instead the message was from Chloe, reading simply, “How did it go?” Julianne moved the message into her trash folder and turned on her Internet browser.
After a few minutes of distracting herself with home-made bags, prints, and jewelry at etsy.com, Julianne logged on to MySpace. Before she knew it, she was back at Remi’s profile, combing it for clues.
As Julianne embarked upon her first solo MySpace
“recon” of “the subject,” she got a little twisting feeling in her stomach. Was she taking this too far? The guy on this MySpace page wasn’t some sort of teenage Donald Trump. MySpace Remi listened to good music, and read good books, and had lots of funny friends who wrote clever comments about the time he’d been in an ostrich race or the time he’d built an exact replica of someone out of toothpicks.
Consciously, Julianne knew that she needed to do whatever she could to take the fuel out of the Moores’
assault against her family and their beach. But the tiniest of tiny pangs at the bottom of her gut kept complicating 107
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things. Julianne was so surprised by her own inkling of a thought that she swatted at her head to chase it away.
She knew what side she was on. She needed to do what was right for her family, and nothing was going to get in her way. She logged out of MySpace quickly. But, before she could clear her head, she clicked into Google and entered the search term “Barton Moore.” 108
Chapter Ten
!
Julianne was close to discovering the perfect color of blue. She was covered from head to toe in various shades of blue oill paint—battle scars from struggling to finish her mom’s painting. As she swirled her brush on the palette, she felt the tension and frustration of the past few weeks begin to melt away. She traced circles in the sand at her feet with her big toe while she mixed her paint and hummed to herself. Her oversize sunglasses were perched on top of her head, and her hair was pulled back into two braids, all of her speckled with at least three different colors of blue.
She tried to shrug off the last few weeks of confusion.
It was all she could do to keep focused at work with Remi around every corner. And, as every super spy 109
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knows, being undercover is exhausting. The hardest part for Julianne, though, was coming home and feeling like she wasn’t able to snap out of her Remi-induced work-day funk. Every time she took out her mother’s painting, something didn’t feel quite right. The light was off, or her oils were too thick, or her brush strokes were too uneven. It was always something.
But today the light was perfect, and it was like Julianne had been given brand-new eyes to appreciate it with. She was mixing blue that was almost too vibrant to be real but was the exact color of the afternoon ocean.
She cranked up her iPod and laughed at the absolute perfection of it all. Keeping her eyes on her canvas she stood up and stretched her arms out to soak in the glorious day.
Then a deafening noise erupted, making her wheel around, terrified that it might have been a car crash.
But the real cause of the ruckus was even worse.
Julianne stared down the beach toward the Moores’
house. The confrontational-looking fencing erected around their sprawling property had multiplied and was now nearly blocking off all access to the beach. Behind them, a parade of huge shiny bulldozers and backhoes were lined up like enormous, angry hornets. One by one they rolled out and started leveling the entire area.
Julianne felt like she was being punched in the stomach.
Leaving her things on the ground, she crept closer to the action, trying to put her newly acquired spy skills to 110
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good use. She turned off her iPod, leaving the earphones in, so that anyone who saw her would think she was just enjoying an afternoon on the beach—or what was left of the beach—with a sound track. Ducking down near the fencing behind one of the many towering dunes created by the bulldozers, Julianne was basically invisible to anyone in the area. She shivered as she curled up into herself, waiting to see what would happen next. She didn’t have to wait long.
“Hey, guys! Coffee break?” A voice bellowed from the top of the dune. Julianne heard the echo of four keys turning off four ignitions, and then the clomping of eight individual work boots scampering down the beach toward whichever grunt had been sent on a Dunkin’
Donuts run. (Okay, maybe she was projecting a little bit on the last part . . .)
“So, what’s the game plan for the afternoon, Tom?” she heard a deep voice call out across the dune.
“More demolition. We need to clear this entire area.
No brush left. It needs to be buildable ground,” Deep Voice Number Two, presumably Tom, called back.
“How much ground are we talking here?” asked a third guy.
“The whole thing. We’re taking out this entire pen.” Tom didn’t hesitate for a moment.
“What are they building?” Deep Voice Number One asked. “Pretty big demo order for a house.” 111
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“A gym, I think,” Tom said offhandedly.
Julianne scanned the dunes around her and let her eyes rest on the ocean. It shimmered another new shade of turquoise in the afternoon light. She shuddered. How could anyone think that a gym, or a sauna, or any other extravagant convenience was more important than this beach? There were gyms all over. Already built and good enough for everyone else she knew.
“Like an LA/Sports Club?” joked another guy.
“Nah, not a franchise or anything.” Tom laughed.
“They’re building a gym addition onto the house. A waterfront gym.”
Julianne felt like she was going to burst out of her skin. A gym? The Moores were destroying this beautiful beach, taking land away from people who had loved it their entire lives, so that they could have a better view from their elliptical machine? Why couldn’t they just put a couple of machines in their basement like normal people? Or work out on the actual beach? Maybe they should hire a live-in spin instructor too! Just when she thought there couldn’t be a more stupid, ridiculous, petty reason for the Moores to keep building onto their monster mansion, they completely surprised her by raising the bar yet again. What could three people need so much space for? Two people, when Remi went back to school! Julianne was appalled.
She felt a burst of cold air as a new shadow fell over 112
