I give her a quick smile, about to make some passing small talk such as “Hot day, eh?” when she says, “They’re buying a place on Juniper.”
I stop in my tracks. “Sorry, what?”
She looks at me idly. “The duke and duchess. They’re buying a place up on Juniper. That big house behind the gates. Used to belong to Randy Bachman. The Guess Who. ‘Femme Américaine.’ ‘Pas de sucre ce soir.’ You know.”
“Really? Where did you hear that?”
She gives a light shrug with one of her shoulders. “A student told me. She lives in the neighborhood. Don’t worry, I made her tell me in French.”
I just nod at that and walk inside. I hate to admit it, but there’s a flutter of disappointment in my chest. It’s almost as if I secretly wanted them to move next door to me, even though I just spent my lunch hour chastising the idea. I guess having them as neighbors would have made me feel . . . special. Sounds silly and so stupid, but it probably would have been the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.
I shake it off. I have to. It’s dumb, and earlier today the whole thing seemed like a distant memory anyway.
Before I know it, it’s time to go home. I never regained control of my kids after lunch, so I pretty much just let them run wild in the classroom, so long as no one got hurt and no one puked in my bag again. Cynthia never even came to get her latte, so I ended up drinking both of them, and when I get inside the Garbage Pail, my hands are shaking from the four shots of espresso.
That doesn’t prevent me from munching away on my cinnamon bun on the drive home, one hand on the wheel, one hand in the delicious gooey mess.
I’m almost at my house when I see him.
A black Range Rover physically blocking the driveway and Harrison Cole standing outside it, leaning against the door and facing me, arms folded, aviators on. Another sharp-looking suit that fits him like a glove.
My heart does something strange, like skips a beat, and I blame it on the caffeine.
I roll to a stop and then stick my head out the window.
“Excuse me, I’d like to get by now,” I say in my best Wayne’s World Garth Algar impression.
Harrison, naturally, doesn’t get the reference.
“I’m going to need to see some identification, miss,” he says to me in his raspy British accent as he walks toward my car.
I stare at him, openmouthed, until I realize I have sticky cinnamon bun all over my face. I can’t believe his nerve, and yet I’m also trying to subtly clean my face at the same time.
“ID? You know who I am,” I tell him.
“I’m afraid I need to see your driver’s license,” he says, stopping right outside the car, his Hulk-ish frame extra imposing from this angle. “Or is it still missing?”
“So you do remember me.”
“I wish I could forget,” he replies dryly.
I frown.
Dick.
“Then you know I live right there and you’re blocking my own driveway.”
“I can’t let you pass until I see some ID.”
I’m still staring at him. Is he serious? I mean, he looks serious and I think he’s always serious, but how dare he ask for ID when he knows who I am? What gives him the fucking right to prevent me from going home?
He cocks a brow expectantly, staring down at me. I wish I could rip those aviators off and run them over with my car.
I let out a huff of anger and try to get my driver’s license out of my purse. I’m lucky that it came in the mail two days ago. I’m not so lucky that I had the photo taken during my lunch hour, right after gym class, when Eunice dumped Gatorade over another kid’s head after a game of basketball and I got most of the blowback. A partially drowned rat with smudgy mascara is forever immortalized in black and white.
“Here,” I tell him, trying to hand over the ID, but of course it’s a sticky cinnamon bun–smeared mess.
Harrison scrunches up his nose distastefully as he takes the card from me. He raises it to his nose and sniffs the substance. “What is this?”
“It’s the remains of a baked good, what do you think it is?”
He sniffs again, seems to think about it, and then peers at the photo and then back at me. “These photos are never very flattering, are they?”
“Are you done?”
“Not quite, Ms. Evans,” he says, pronouncing my name like it’s some sort of alias before giving me the license back. “The duke and duchess have decided to rent the house.”
“I was told they were buying Randy Bachman’s house. You know, the Guess Who?”
“That was a decoy house to throw people off, at least at the beginning. They’ve decided that this is the place for them after all.”
“Are you serious?”
He nods. Dumb question, really.
“I expressed my concern over you, but they didn’t seem to be that bothered by it.”
“Excuse me?”
He goes on as if he didn’t just say that he told the royals that I was a security concern. “The gate will be going up as soon as possible. We’re installing cameras, and there will be a passcode that only you and your mother will be given access to. Until then, I’ll be parked here blocking the way, and my men will be in the trees.”
“Men will be in the what?”
Suddenly I hear a sharp whirring sound on either side of me, and I look up in time to see a man in camouflage gear rappel from the top of a hemlock straight down to the ground.
“Holy shit!” I swear just as another man comes down a tree on the right side of me. Tree men! Secret agent tree men!
Harrison just lifts his hand up, as if to tell them to stay back. “This is Isaac and Giles. They’ll be here temporarily. And if not, you’ll get used to them. But until the gate goes up, we have to ensure the couple’s privacy. I also have someone patrolling the water from a boat, just in case you see them.” He pauses, studies me.
His gaze is unnerving, even covered by his sunglasses.
“What?” I ask.
“You have pastry in your hair.”
My hand shoots up, trying to figure out where, when suddenly it becomes stuck and I know that I must have a huge blob of sugary goo in my hair.
Meanwhile, I swear I see a smirk on Harrison’s mouth, the corner of his lips turning up a millimeter. If he wasn’t so fucking aggravating I might actually find his lips quite lush and sexy, but that would only make things worse.
“At any rate, Ms. Evans,” he says briskly, “I’m going to need you to sign a nondisclosure agreement.”