Spy Thy Neighbor

by Shandi Boyes

  My pulse is pounding in my ears so loud, I don't hear Patricia's agreeance to Hunter's command. I'm beyond ropeable that he has invaded my privacy like this. He had no right to do this, no matter how angry he was. The fevered heat slicking my skin with a fine misting of sweat intensifies when image after image of the news of my engagement to Riley fills the projector screen. Small snippets of magazine articles, the occasional random picture from attendees who came to our small and highly unrated engagement party, and even the obligatory newspaper announcement Riley's mom placed in the local paper of her hometown has been included.

  "I find it interesting I could locate hundreds of articles on your engagement to Riley Smith, but I failed to find one mention of it ever ending," Hunter snarls, the slur of his tone not affecting the maliciousness of his words. "So what was I, Paige? The cold feet before the wedding fuck? Or the shmuck you used to get back at your daddy for spending too many hours in the office playing sergeant to his little minions?"

  “Neither,” I say with a shake of my head, my voice relaying the shattering of my heart.

  The quickest spark of relief brightens Hunter’s eyes. It's short-lived.

  “You were the stupid fuck I used to fill my scrapbook with storylines,” I retaliate, my tone matching his earlier maliciousness. “You were the one who said I had to write from experience. And boy did I experience it. I felt it, tasted it, devoured it. I took every inch you were willing to give me all just to fill the blank pages of a book.”

  Hunter balks as if my words physically slapped him. I smirk a grin I've only ever been on the receiving end of before strutting to his front door. I keep my eyes planted straight ahead, ensuring he won't see the hot, salty tears threatening to spill down my cheeks. I've never been a confrontational type of person, but after what I've endured the past twenty-four hours, my claws are bared, and my inner bitch has been unleashed.

  Inhaling a large gasp of air to riddle my voice of nerves, I say, “Let me out so I can go and share my newly-discovered mommy porn stories with my rich country club friends.”

  The cracks in my heart enlarge when Hunter snarls, “Patricia, disarm all security locks.”

  The heat of the midday sun does nothing to lessen the dampness of my cheeks as I race down the stairs of Hunter’s residence and hotfoot it to the taxi still idling at the front of the cabin.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Five days later…

  “Wow. Swanky view.” Pepper peers out of the supersized double windows of my hotel suite at Oceana Beach Club Resort in Santa Monica.

  The dull hum of tourists chatting filters into the room when she opens the large bi-folding doors and steps onto the patio. The sun setting in the distance bounces off her dark chocolate hair, haloing her in a luminous glow.

  “Have you spent any time out here?” She cranks her neck back to peer at me, her eyes rolling when I shake my head. "Miles of beautiful beaches and even more pristine men and you've gone and cooped yourself up in a hotel room. If you wanted to spend your days looking at ugly, bland walls, you could have just stayed at my apartment."

  I shrug and turn my eyes to the makeshift writing cave I created in the living area of my suite. I’ve rarely ventured from sitting in front of my laptop the past five days, only leaving to shower and have the occasional bite to eat.

  “I came here to write, not look at the scenery,” I blubber, blurting out the same excuse I gave her when I shut myself off from any form of communication.

  I've spent the last five days doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing at the cabin. I finished penning a steamy romance novel. I switched off all electronic devices, completely hiding away from social media, and kept my focus solely on finishing my manuscript. I'm not saying my mind didn't stray to Hunter numerous times the past five days, but I vied to keep it as irregularly as possible, deciding nothing but my work would be my primary focus.

  When Pepper paces back into my room, leaving the large door open, I push off my chair and close it. Normally too much quiet is my archenemy, but for the past five days, I've discovered the enjoyment you can achieve from little bouts of solitude. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is nothing at all.

  Pepper snags a stone cold French fry off the room service tray before padding to my makeshift writing cave. “Did you get your manuscript in on time?”

  I nod. “Yep. I emailed it to my editor this morning. The hero is no Archer Boyd, but I think the intriguing storyline will keep my readers enthralled.”

  “I told you you’ve never missed a deadline,” Pepper replies, her brow arching high.

  I narrow my eyes at her. “I only made it by the skin of my teeth. I’ve hardly slept a wink the past five days.”

  Pepper tugs on a strand of my hair that hasn't been washed in nearly a week. "Even without your deadline looming, you wouldn't have been getting any sleep. You know it, and so do I."

  I plop into the hard office chair the hotel chain supplies, hating the way my backside doesn't mold into the deep crevices of the padded chair as did my old writing chair. At my request, the transport company shipped my favorite chair back to my father's residence. Until I can decide on what my next move will be, I'm technically homeless.

  “Now I just have to try to think of a title,” I say, returning my focus to my employment, wanting to ensure I don’t end up homeless and jobless.

  Spinning around, I face the blank white page I’ve been staring at the past two hours. Pepper’s bare feet move soundlessly across the plush carpet. With a huff, she props her hip onto the side of my desk and purses her lips. “Do you have any idea what you want to call it, or are you just going to send me into this bad boy blindfolded?”

  I smile, loving that Pepper can drag my mind away from any negativity attempting to surface in it.

  I lock my eyes with hers. "I've been tossing around a few ideas, but nothing has stuck. I want the title to be mysterious and intriguing."

  “Mystery Man!” Pepper pipes up, scaring the living daylights out of me.

  I shake my head. “Already done by Kristen Ashley.”

  “Oh yeah, I love that book,” she replies, smiling.

  “Me too.” I waggle my brows.

  Pepper taps her index finger on her red painted lips. “Mad… man?”

  I cock my brow and glare at her.

  “No?” she asks with a shake of her head and a cheeky grin. She snags my iPhone off the table and switches it on.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, my words husky.

  This is the first time I've switched on my phone in the past five days. I cut off all communication after receiving a three-word text message from Hunter the night I left the cabin. It simply said: I’m sorry, Paige. I try to pretend my lack of electronic communication is to spite Hunter, but in reality, I know he's capable of reaching me, switched off phone or not. So the reality is I turned off my phone to stop myself from messaging him.

  I’ve undertaken numerous personal battles the past few days about whether I should contact him to negate the false statement I gave him the last time we talked. The only thing that has stopped me is my pride… and a little bit of bitchiness.

  When my phone fails to ding, indicating it has any new voicemails or text messages, I slump deeper into my chair, rejection maiming my already disfigured heart. Half of me tries to pretend I don’t give two hoots about Hunter, where the other half – mainly the writing half – is dying to know if he read the manuscript for Spy Thy Neighbor.

  I poured every ounce of my soul into that book. The promise I made to my mom to live the life I want to live, not the one I felt compelled to live because of my family name, Riley's betrayal, and the most important of all – how I fell in love with the bearded man who lived in the glass house next door.

  If I did my job as a writer, Hunter would no longer have any doubts about my real intentions. he'd realize his assumptions were wrong and that I was with him because I wanted to be with him. He should have manned up to apologize in person
. Obviously, my writing isn’t quite the caliber I thought it was.

  "Oh, here we go," Pepper says, drawing me back into the present.

  Her eyes widen not even two seconds later. "Okay, Dr. Google has supplied us with a broad range of words matching mystery. We have puzzle, conundrum, riddle, enigma, problem—"

  For the first time in days, my heart beats faster. “Enigma,” I say, testing the word out for size. “I like that. It's mysterious, dark, and alluring, just like my main character.”

  A broad grin etches onto Pepper’s mouth. “It has a sexy feel to it too. Like you're expecting to meet Mr. Dark and Handsome between the pages.”

  I smile. That's the exact response I want to initiate from my readers.

  “Enigma it is,” I say, excitement in my voice.

  "And who says Google is hopeless?" Pepper’s loud voice bounces off the walls and shrills into my ears.

  She places my phone back onto my desk as a knock taps on the door. Her face brightens as a glint of excitement sparks her eyes.

  “Don’t get excited. Cabana boys don’t do house calls. It's probably just room service coming to collect their trolley.”

  Pepper pouts before she pushes off the desk and moseys to the entranceway. I gather a few small bills from my purse in the desk drawer before heading after her. My steps falter, closely followed by my breathing when my eyes lock in on a pair of murky blue eyes I'll never forget. Hunter.

  His eyes are plagued with dark circles and crammed with remorse and pain, and his beard is scruffy and unkempt. Even heartbroken and still harboring anger at him, I hate seeing him hurt.

  Pepper’s eyes bounce between Hunter and me like she's watching a tennis match between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. When she catches Hunter’s curious glare, she mumbles. “I’ll be… downstairs.” She snags her purse off the entranceway table, glides past Hunter, and slips out the door.

  My lips twitch, struggling to hold in a smile when Pepper silently mouths, “He’s so hot,” behind Hunter’s shoulder, hooking her thumb at him.

  After doing an impromptu grind up behind a completely oblivious Hunter, she disappears down the hall. I shake my head. Only Pepper would find time for playful banter in a heart-strangling confrontation.

  Once Pepper is no longer in eyesight, I turn my gaze to Hunter. Spotting the glint of amusement in his eyes, I realize he's aware of Pepper’s spontaneous dance off. When he spins on his heels to close the door, his intoxicating smell quickly swamps the vast suite.

  I roll my shoulders, reinforcing my pose as I remember the pledge I made to myself five days ago. Quirky. Eccentric. A little nutty. I’ll happily accept any of those names, but doormat is one name I'll no longer tolerate. Not from Riley and most definitely not from Hunter – the man who taught me I'm more than enough.

  A cross of silence stretches between us, neither willing to show their hand first. It's thick and heavy, weighing down my already crippled heart. Hunter isn’t a communicator, but this time is different. Why come all the way here to continue with the same tactic that divided us to start with? If Hunter had just given me the chance to explain that afternoon, things wouldn't have gone as far as they did.

  No longer able to handle the quiet, I mutter, "What do you want, Hunter?"

  He digs his hand into the front pocket of his beloved jeans as he paces closer to me. “I wanted to give this back to its rightful owner.” He pulls out the USB I left on his kitchen counter.

  I lick my parched lips before lowering my eyes to the stick that holds the only digital version of Spy Thy Neighbor.

  “Did you read it?” I hate that my voice comes out with a quiver.

  “Every word, Paige,” he replies, nodding. “It's really good. Although your readers may kill you if you blindside them with that cliffhanger.” His tone is aiming for cheeky, but it still sounds pained.

  A huff of air escapes my nostrils. “Well, I didn’t know how it would end,” I answer truthfully. “I hadn’t planned on an ex-fiancé crashing back into the picture.”

  He tries to tuck it away, but I don’t miss the quick flash of anger crossing his face.

  I inhale a large breath. “Riley isn’t my fian—”

  “I know. I read that,” Hunter interjects, his remorseful eyes bouncing between mine as he closes the distance between us. “I’m so sorry, Paige. For not giving you time to explain. For the hurtful things I said.”

  When he cups my jaw in his hands, I beg for my body to pull away, to reject his touch, but I can’t. My body doesn’t care how angry he makes me; it will never deny his touch. As his sorrow-filled eyes silently beg for forgiveness, he quietly murmurs, “I fucked up, Paige.”

  “Yeah, you did.” I wipe away a tear streaming down my face. “You hurt me, Hunter. Even if you didn’t betray me like Riley, you still purposely set out to hurt me… That’s something I don’t know if I can forget.” My words come out rough, hampered by the sob sitting in the back of my throat, dying to break free. “Then you went and invaded my privacy. You didn’t need to do that. I would have answered any questions you had, all you had to do was ask.”

  “I know, Paige. I made a mistake. But I’m here trying to make it right.” His beseeching eyes strengthen his words.

  "Hunter, don't," I say when he leans in and presses a kiss on the side of my mouth.

  “Don’t,” I beg again when he places one on the opposite side of my lips, loathing that I leaned into his touch.

  “You hurt me,” I strangle out, the pained sob of my words exposing the truth of my statement. “You're still hurting me.”

  An unexpected whimper seeps from my lips when the softness of his beard inches away from my cheek. He keeps his hands curved around my shaking jaw as his remorseful eyes bounce between mine. “Tell me how to fix this. I want to fix the mistakes I made,” he requests.

  I shake my head, causing more tears to spill from my eyes. “I can’t tell you how to do that, Hunter. Only you can work out how to fix the wrongs you made.”

  Softly cursing under his breath, he removes his cold hands from my face. His chest puffs out as he inhales a deep, ragged breath. After running his hand over the edge of his beard, infusing the air with his unique scent, he locks his truth-bearing eyes with mine.

  A breath of pained air escapes his lips before he begins to speak. “I thought you had made me my father. That you had forced me into a twisted love triangle I would have never chosen to be a part of.”

  I try to shake my head to deny his claims, but he keeps speaking before I have the chance. "For the first four weeks of my sister's life, I thought she was my daughter."

  The wind is sucker-punched out of my lungs.

  “Turns out the girl I had been dating since junior high was more interested in the refined Mr. Kane than me.”

  Instinctively, one of my hands fists his shirt while the other flattens against the area of his chest just above his heart.

  "They had been having an affair for a year prior to my sister's birth. The confusion about April's paternity was only discovered when she required a blood transfusion shortly after birth. Her blood type was A negative, just like my dad. That was the beginning of a bitter paternity battle."

  He stops talking, and his throat works hard to swallow. "When the results came back exposing my father as April's biological parent, my mom sought the aid of a divorce attorney. I supported her all the way, more concerned about the pain she was experiencing than my own." His words are hurried like they are spilling from his mouth before he has the chance to stop them.

  "When my mom's lawyer filed the official divorce documentation, she discovered my dad had taken everything my parents had accumulated in their twenty-year marriage and signed it all into his mistress’s name months earlier. He was not only planning on leaving my mom heartbroken but broke as well." The thick beard covering a majority of his face is unable to hide the tick of his jaw.

  He stares straight at me with haunted, dark eyes. "It was the night I arrived home to my mom c
rying over an eviction notice that my true hacking abilities became unearthed. I'd dabbled in hacking in my early teen years, but nothing more than issuing free cinema tickets for my friends and me, or changing the grades of some college friends’ papers."

  A smile tugs on his lips as he continues to talk, "Within three hours, the house my parents purchased a year after marrying was returned to my mother's name, and my dad's bank accounts were wiped clean. I took every penny he had."

  His wild smile enlarges. “The look on his face when I told him I was the one who cleaned him out was priceless. The sweetest revenge.”

  He inhales a large breath before relocking his eyes with mine. “But the downfall of youth is being too cocky. I was sloppy, leaving a paper trail a mile long. I paid for the consequences of my actions. Two years in a county jail.”

  I try to speak, to say something, but for once in my life, I'm truly at a loss for words.

  After a small stint of silence, the smile Hunter was wearing earlier returns. “But even with me leaving a massive paper trail behind, they still couldn’t find where I hid his money. That's when my dad got desperate. He gave me two options: either tell him where the money was or he would have me prosecuted.”

  “You chose option B,” I whisper, my mouth finally cooperating with my brain.

  Hunter nods. “I hated him so much, to me, there was only one option.”

  His chest expands when he inhales a large gulp of air. "I got served a four-year sentence. I was out in two for good behavior."

  “Did they ever find the money?” I query when my curiosity gets the better of me.

  “No,” he replies with a shake of his head. “It’s been hiding in plain sight for over ten years, but since my dad was so blinded with rage, he couldn’t see the signs flashing before his eyes.”

  I stare at him, shocked and confused.

  "It's in a trust fund in my sister's name," he elaborates. "The interest from her sizeable bank balance gets deposited into my mom's account every month. If my dad had any concerns for the welfare of his youngest child, he might have realized an unemployed divorcee left penniless after her husband fleeced her for every dime couldn’t raise a small child without some assistance. But since his gaze has been rapt on the wrong child the entire time, he's none the wiser to the substantial trust fund his daughter now has."