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.
“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 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?
Did I hit too close to home?” she pushed on.
“Nope,” Remi murmured quietly. “I was just wondering how someone could lay fourteen consecutive pieces of tile upside down without noticing.” Jules felt her cheeks flush red. Why did she always make the silliest mistakes when Remi was around? “Do you need some help?” Remi offered.
“No, thanks,” she replied tartly. “I’ve got it under control. I just need a little more space—you’re making me feel claustrophobic, and it’s hard for me to concen-trate like this.”
Remi pushed himself up from the floor and moved back about fifteen feet. “Okay, well that’s something. So now that you’ve given your brilliant analysis of my reasons for taking this job, care to share yours?”
Julianne shrugged. She was hesitant to tell Remi anything even remotely personal. She’d been spying on him, trying to figure out what his motives were, for the past three weeks. Who was to say he wasn’t trying the same tactic on her?
“I’m just going to sit here until you talk to me,” Remi said. “So the sooner you spill, the sooner you can re-focus on your tiles. How’s that for motivation?”
Begrudgingly, Jules started talking. “If you must know …” She took a deep breath and then continued.
“There are a few things that I really like. First, I get to spend my entire summer outside in the sunshine, instead of bagging groceries or folding jeans. Plus, for me, at least, a house is like a work of art. But on a grand scale. This bathroom is like a mosaic—only bigger. The whole frame of the house is one giant sculpture. It’s beautiful, functional, oversize art. It’s creative and it’s fun. And I can’t say I mind being the only girl on a crew of hot college guys, either.” She looked up to see Remi staring right at her, his mouth open slightly, as if there were something he was trying to bring himself to articulate but couldn’t. “Never mind.” Julianne looked down at the tile again. “I certainly don’t expect you to understand.”
After a few seconds, Remi answered. “Why wouldn’t I understand? That’s exactly how I feel about it, too. I mean, except for the part about the college guys. I want to make beautiful things. That’s why I went into architecture.”
Julianne stared across the tiles, avoiding looking up and seeing Remi’s face. “You’ve got a strange way of doing it, you know?” She looked down at her hands.
“Just following your dad’s lead all the time …”
“There are a lot of different interpretations of beauty, Julianne,” Remi said quietly.
Julianne’s mind was tumbling over itself. Remi sounded sincere—more than that, he sounded like he got it. Like he knew about having a passion for something bigger than you. It wasn’t the first time that he seemed to totally get it, either. She could feel his eyes fixed on her, and the back of her neck began to prick and blush.
She shifted her weight so that she was sitting cross-legged on the half-tiled floor, and picked at stray threads poking out from the bottom of her shredding, knee-length cutoffs. She thought for a long minute before she spoke. “Okay, so tell me about it.”
“About what? About
