The Grumpiest Billionaire Next Door

1. Chapter 1

Maya

The morning I block Sawyer Ransome's gated driveway on Linden Rise, I have seventeen tulip centerpieces sliding in the back of my van and exactly four minutes before my delivery window closes.

I don't mean to clip the iron gate.

The fog is thick at seven a.m., the kind that turns Willow Creek into a watercolor painting. Soft edges. Muted colors. Beautiful, unless you're navigating a flower van with seventeen centerpieces in the back and four minutes left on the clock.

The gate is open. The road isn't marked private. And my bumper kisses the iron with a faint, unfortunate sound that I feel in my back teeth.

I sit for exactly one second, both hands on the wheel, and then I do what I always do when something goes sideways before eight a.m.

I take a breath. I straighten my shoulders. And I step out smiling.

The man appears in the gap before I've even closed my door.

Tall. Grey-suited. Dark hair, perfectly groomed despite the hour, like the fog doesn't dare touch him. He stands at the gate with the particular stillness of someone who has never once been inconvenienced without making sure the inconveniencing party knew exactly what they had done.

His eyes find me immediately.

Ice-blue. Precise. The kind of gaze that doesn't scan, it lands. And it lands on me the way a court summons lands on a doorstep. Final. Certain. Utterly without warmth.

I keep smiling. I always do. The alternative is letting a man in a three-thousand dollar suit ruin what was, up until thirty seconds ago, a perfectly manageable morning.

"You're blocking a private access road," he says.

His voice is exactly what I expected. Clipped. Deliberate. Each word placed with the care of someone who has never once needed to raise his volume to be heard.

"The road isn't marked," I say pleasantly. "And the gate was open."

"The gate is automated."

"Then perhaps a sign would help."

Something moves behind his eyes. Not anger exactly. Something cooler and more controlled than anger, the way deep water is more dangerous than a wave.

He checks his watch instead of answering me. A slow, unhurried gesture, theatrical in the way that only truly powerful people can manage without looking ridiculous. It says, without a single word: your time is borrowed from mine, and I'd like it back.

"I'll be gone in three minutes," I tell him. "If you'll let me turn around."

He stays exactly where he is.

I take that as permission to keep talking. It was almost certainly not how he intended it.

"I have seventeen tulip centerpieces in the back of this van," I say, in the same tone I use when I'm explaining to Lily why we absolutely cannot close early on a Thursday.

"They're for the Hargrove anniversary luncheon at the Willow Creek Inn, which starts at eight, and if I don't deliver them in the next three minutes and forty seconds, Mrs. Hargrove will call the shop, and my assistant Lily will answer, and Lily will feel terrible, and she already had a difficult week because the wholesale peony delivery was late and... "

"Three minutes," he says.

Not a question. A timer.

I stop talking. I give him my most efficient smile, the one I reserve for difficult customers and parking enforcement, and I climb back into the van.

He doesn't step aside so much as become still in a different way.

A way that technically creates enough space for me to execute a nine-point turn on a private lane in a van that was not designed for nine-point turns.

He watches from the gate with his hands clasped behind his back like a man reviewing a particularly disappointing quarterly report.

I don't hurry. Hurrying would mean he'd won something, and I haven't decided yet what we're competing for.

What unsettles me is the moment just before I straighten the wheel and pull away. I refuse to let it show. Some things deserve to be examined in private before they become public.

His gaze drops.

Just once. Just briefly. Down to the tulips visible through my rear window, their coral and cream heads nodding gently with the movement of the van.

A full arrangement, loose and imperfect and alive with color, the kind of thing that has no business existing in the controlled grey palette of his morning.

He looks at them the way people sometimes look at things they've forgotten they're allowed to want.

And then he looks away.

The gate closes behind me with an automated click, and I pull onto the main road and press the accelerator and tell myself it doesn't matter. The look, the tulips, the way something in his expression went briefly and involuntarily human before he locked it back behind those ice-blue eyes.

I file it away like a torn receipt. The kind you shove into the bottom of your bag, convinced it doesn't matter, until one day it does.

In my mirror, he's still standing at the gate.

Not watching the van.

Watching the space where the flower van had been.

***

I make the delivery with forty seconds to spare.

Mrs. Hargrove tells me the tulips are the most beautiful she's ever seen, which she says every year, and which I believe every year, because that is the particular magic of flowers. They are always the most beautiful you've ever seen, right now, in this moment, before they're gone.

I drive back through Willow Creek with the van windows down, the morning finally warming around me, and Lily's voice in my earpiece telling me the ten o'clock bride has moved her consultation to eleven, which means I have time for a proper coffee before the day swallows me whole.

I don't think about the man at the gate.

I don't think about ice-blue eyes or three-thousand dollar suit or the way a single unguarded glance at a bunch of tulips can make a person seem suddenly, startlingly human.

I definitely don't think about the address on Linden Rise, or the auction listing I saw on the Willow Creek municipal board last week, or the name printed at the top of the highest registered bid.

Some things are better left in the bottom of the bag with the torn receipts.

At least until you can't ignore them anymore.