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.