most people kept score.
How did Peyton?
How would Audrey?
He was sure it wasn’t a bank account with either one of them.
He endured another thirty-six mostly unproductive hours on the road and then said to hell with it and came home a day early.
Because he wasn’t getting anything done.
Not for any other reason.
He pulled into the driveway sometime after midnight and left the car outside on the far side of the garage, not wanting to wake Audrey or, more likely, the dog, who would then wake Audrey. He knew from Ms. Bee’s spying reports either that the dog got Audrey up at the crack of dawn or that Audrey got up then and the dog appreciated it, ready to run for a few miles with her.
Either way, they didn’t need to be awakened at this hour.
He slipped into the house, took a quick shower and crawled into bed, grateful that it was his own, thinking he might actually sleep in the next day. It wasn’t as if the world would come to an end if he did, and it would probably save him from biting someone’s head off from lack of sleep.
He punched his pillow a few times, getting it just right, closed his eyes and dropped off in seconds.
And woke to…
It sounded like a bomb dropped on top of his house!
Simon shot upright in bed, heart pounding.
Surely he’d imagined that.
Because the house was still standing.
Nothing was falling on his head. He didn’t hear anything, in fact.
Shaking his head to try to clear it, he eased back down and had nearly dropped back off to sleep when he heard a huge crash right outside his window.
“What the hell?” he muttered, grabbing the pajama bottoms he kept in his bedside table for those nights when Peyton was here.
He stepped into them as he ran for the stairs and then the front door.
Who in the world would bomb Highland Park?
Simon came roaring out of the house to find a bunch of guys in hard hats, a couple of huge, roaring machines and his yard certainly looking as if it had been bombed, with tree branches everywhere. Not quite six-thirty in the damned morning, and someone had bombed his yard!
He stalked toward the nearest guy in a hard hat, ready to raise hell, when he heard Audrey shouting his name, saw her coming at him at a dead-run. She grabbed him hard and tugged him back the way she’d come. He could see her lips moving but couldn’t quite tell what she was saying.
“What in holy hell is going on?” he roared. He’d have liked to say something much worse but was trying to clean up his language because of Peyton.
“Get over here!” Audrey screamed.
He heard it again, that bombing sound, as a huge limb crashed to the ground behind him, just missing him. He turned around and just looked at it, mouth hanging open. They’d nearly killed him in his own front yard!
“What the hell are they doing dropping limbs like that when there are people around?”
“They’re trimming your trees,” she yelled back. “What are you doing here?”
“I live here! It’s my house! I thought somebody had started bombing the neighborhood!”
“Bomb the neighborhood?” she repeated, making it sound absolutely ridiculous, which he knew it likely was. Still…
“That’s what it sounded like when it woke me up,” he said, still yelling. “They could have killed me!”
“I know. I saw. I’m the one who got you out of the way,” Audrey said.
One of the hard hat guys came running over to them then, looking as if someone had taken a few years off his life.
“What the hell is going on?” he yelled at Audrey.
Simon stepped in, intending to stop that right there. He might raise his voice every now and then, but he wasn’t going to stand by while anybody else talked to her that way and if that made him a hypocrite, well…fine!
Audrey must have known what was coming, because she stepped between them and put up a hand to stop Simon from getting any closer.
The next thing he knew, she had her palm pressed flat against his bare chest.
And that stopped him cold.
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