Hailey Abbott_Forbidden Boy by Hailey Abbott

Author:Hailey Abbott [Hailey Abbott]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-07-29T05:00:00+00:00

! ! !

Julianne was enjoying the silence. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t have a song, or a dashing spy scenario, 118

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or the remnants of a painful spat with Remi in her head. In what would be the master bathroom of Cullen Construction’s very first eco-friendly home, it was just Julianne and the tile. Tiling, Julianne conceded to herself, was sort of like the paint-by-numbers version of mosaic. Sure, she was sitting in the middle of a big empty space with lots and lots of ceramic and a big bucket of cement, but focusing on the tile patterns was calming her down. Anything that could keep her mind off of Remi was all right by her.

Whenever she was alone in a huge room, Julianne liked to imagine herself transforming the entire space into art, just like Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of her favorite artists. Julianne caught her mind wandering and giggled to herself as she got back into the groove of her tiling. Apparently she couldn’t turn her mind off after all. Julianne was tiling diamond patterns into the floor, according to a diagram that Bill had based on Julianne’s own design, when she heard a knock on the door frame.

“C’mon in.” She laughed absently. “The door’s open!”

In fact, the entire room was open—the walls had been framed but not yet filled in. She turned toward the door and felt her serenity evaporate as Remi approached, decked out in one of his weekday shirt-and-tie combos. Whatever, she chided herself. At the end of the day, an attractive jerk is still a jerk.

“Hey,” Remi started.

“Hey,” Julianne replied, utterly deadpan. 119

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“Do you mind if I come in?” Remi hesitated before taking a step further into the doorway. She wasn’t in the mood for any sort of discussion right now. She just wanted to get back to her tiling. She tried to wave him away. “What, are you a vampire or something? You can’t come in unless you’re explicitly invited?”

Remi smiled faintly. “Buffy fan?”

Julianne looked him square in the eye. “Is there something you need?” She refused to get into a discussion about brilliant-but-cancelled TV shows with her former crush/current nemesis/boss.

“Can I talk to you about the other day?” Remi asked earnestly.

Julianne looked down at the flecks of cement covering her hands. “If you don’t mind, I’d really rather not. I’m sort of in the middle of something. I’m sure your firm isn’t contracting Bill to pay me fifteen dollars an hour to sit around and chat,” she shot back brightly.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” Remi said, employing the same brand of persistence Chloe had used to rope Julianne into going to that fateful party in Malibu. “How about we talk about this job? If I’m not mistaken, Bill is paying you fifteen dollars an hour to consult with the project manager about the status of the project.”

Julianne grimaced. “You know, Mr. Moore,” she said sweetly, “I’m not sure how constructive that chat would 120

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be. I think you and I have very different goals for this project.

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