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“He’s my dad, Jules. And he’s worked his entire life for this,” Remi said quietly, seeming to ignore Julianne’s slipup.
“Well, did it ever occur to you that other people have worked their entire lives to afford the tiny slices of space that they live on? To sit at their windows and take in the view that you guys just bulldozed? The beach you’re wiping out to make your gigantic glass jungle gym belongs to this entire neighborhood!” The words were tumbling out of Julianne’s mouth, rolling over and over each other like marbles. Her mouth was thick with emotion and she was choking back tears. “Some people barely have any thing left, Remi,” she wailed. “Do you really need to take the beach away from them for some house?” It was all Julianne could do to keep from sob-bing. Her throat was burning from the screaming and from swallowing angry tears. She knew she probably wasn’t making any sense, but she just needed him to hear her now.
“Maybe this is bigger than just ‘some house’!” Remi shouted back at her. “My dad has been working for this for so long. I can’t even tell you what it means to him—
this is his artistic vision . . .” As he babbled on about his father’s dream, his voice was so earnest that Julianne knew he meant every word. All he wanted was to make her understand.
But she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to cut 115
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him off. If anyone needed to understand the real importance of this beach, it was the Moores. “Name one life that’s being made more beautiful by what is happening here, Remi!” Her feet dug into the sand as she tore off down the beach to grab her easel. “Want to talk about artistic vision?” she cried, spinning back to Remi. “You know who had it? My mom! And her vision was all about this beach. The one your family is destroying! I can barely see her beach anymore. Soon it will be impossible to remember what she must have seen. But if you think I’m going to give up her beach without a fight, Remi Moore, you have another thing coming. This beach is more than just sand to my family—it’s all we have left of my mother. It’s the only place where she still feels alive. And I’m sorry if my family’s past is getting in the way of your dad’s bright, shiny future, but that’s too damn bad!”
Out of the corner of her eye, Julianne saw Remi’s mouth open to speak, his eyes wide. But there was nothing she wanted to hear from him right now. The sand flew up behind her as she raced to her easel.
Julianne’s afternoon of perfect blue was perfectly ruined.
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Chapter Eleven
!
“ Yo, Jules! Toss me those blueprints!” Beau called up to Julianne.
“No problem. Coming right down,” she called back, tossing the rolled-up specs down from her perch in the rafters.
“Hey, J-dog, have you seen my tape measure?” asked Mitch from a ladder ten feet away.
“Have you tried checking your toolbox?” Julianne offered teasingly, flashing him her brightest smile.
“Nine times out of ten, when you ask me for something, you already have it in there.”
“That’s our girl. Voice of practicality—what would we do without you?” asked Tom, covering for Mitch, who had turned crimson as he hurried down the ladder 117
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toward his toolbox. He’d been a little bit awkward all summer; ever since Julianne had appeared in her cute
“first day of work” outfit. The other guys seemed evenly divided between ribbing him for his possible crush and hoping Jules would let him down easy. Everyone murmured in agreement, and Julianne thought for the mil-lionth time how lucky she was to have this cool summer gig as den mother, little sister, and one of the guys. She felt like she was learning something new about the male mind every day.
Jules’s typical morning banter with the boys was in full swing when Remi walked by, clipboard in hand. He made it almost past the group before calling back over his shoulder, “Julianne, if you have a second later, can you drop by the trailer? I have a question for you.” The question was accompanied by low whistles from the other guys, but Remi never skipped a beat.
“Yeah, sure,” Julianne called back to him, trying to sound equally nonchalant. “I’ll come by as soon as I finish tiling upstairs.” With that, she swung down from the beams and ran off to lose herself in tiling. She planned to throw herself into work in a blatant attempt to forget about her one-on-one with Remi.
! ! !
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, anattractive jerk is still a jerk.
“Hey,” Remi started.
“Hey,” Julianne replied, utterly deadpan.
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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.”
“Which are?” Remi’s brow furrowed.
“Well, as I see it, your goals are more bottom-line related.” Julianne continued to absentmindedly lay tile as she went on. “You ace this internship; you get a leg up on your architectural career. You get a leg up on your architectural career; you stand a chance of being the next big developer. You become the next big developer; you get to follow in your father’s footsteps and, one day, you can make a big glass house of your very own, just like him.” Julianne waited for Remi’s rebuttal, but he was silent. His big brown eyes were trained on her hands as she continued to plunk down tile. “What’s the matter?