Falling Hard for the Billionaire Next Door

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

DESI

DESIREEN

My morning starts the way every morning has started since I moved to this mountain. Coffee in the cactus mug on the porch railing. Bare feet on cold wood. The sound of absolutely nothing except wind through the pines and a Steller's jay screaming at something in the cedar tree by the property line.

Five forty-five a.m. The sun hasn't cleared the ridge yet but the sky is turning pink at the edges.

My garden beds stretch below the porch in neat rows, each one built by hand over six weekends with stone I hauled from the creek bed in my truck.

Lavender in the south border because the drainage is best there.

Native sedges along the east slope for erosion control.

A test plot of alpine wildflower seed I'm trialing for a client proposal, tiny green shoots just starting to push through the amended soil.

This is what I do first every morning. Stand on the porch and look at what I built. Two acres on a mountain ridge forty minutes outside Crimson Hollow, BC. Mine.

The cabin needs work. The hot water heater is twenty years old, undersized, quits at eleven minutes.

The stove pilot clicks three times before it catches, sometimes four.

The south slope of the roof has damaged shingles I've patched with tar sealant, and there are at least two more leaks I haven't located yet that announce themselves when the rain comes sideways.

The bathroom grout is crumbling in the corner by the window.

The bedroom door sticks unless you lift the handle while you turn it.

I know every flaw and I chose to love them.

Six weeks ago I signed the papers at a title office in Nelson with hands that shook, not from fear but from the weight of what I was doing.

Every dollar from my savings. Every dollar from the emergency fund my mother told me never to touch.

Every dollar from the severance Greenline Landscape Design gave me when I quit because watching Marcus Chen get promoted over me for the third time in five years had finally burned through the last of my patience.

Laurent Landscape Design now operates from this kitchen table.

Three clients. The Nelson rain garden project, a residential terracing consult in Castlegar, and a preliminary assessment for a property near Crimson Hollow that my cousin Margot connected me with.

Not enough to live on yet. Enough to start.

My father would understand this. He stood in an empty restaurant space on East Hastings when he was twenty-six with nothing but a lease, a recipe for griot, and my mother beside him telling him the kitchen layout was wrong.

Twenty-two years they built that place. Best Haitian food in Vancouver.

Every wall, every menu change, every twelve-hour Saturday shift standing over the stove together.

Gone when the landlord sold the building six months after my father died in its kitchen.

Nobody sells this building out from under me. My name is on the deed. My hands are in the soil. My money, every last dollar of it, bought these two acres and this leaky roof and this stove that clicks.

I take a sip of coffee. Set the mug back on the railing. Kneel in the garden bed I spent all weekend prepping, hands deep in the compost I amended myself from the hardware store in Nelson.

Five fifty-two a.m. Quiet. Perfect.

The helicopter lands at seven forty-three.

I know the exact time because the noise rattles my teeth so hard I bite my own tongue.

My coffee, balanced on the porch railing because I haven't built the side table yet, vibrates itself right off the edge.

The mug shatters on the rocks below. That was my only mug.

I drove an hour to the thrift store in Castlegar for that mug because it had a cactus on it that said Stuck On You and it made me laugh alone in the aisle like a lunatic.

Gone. Because somebody decided to land a helicopter next door.

The property to my east has been empty since I moved in six weeks ago.

Old logging road access, overgrown driveway, a cabin that looked like it was built in the eighties by someone who gave up halfway through.

I liked it that way. Empty lots don't play music at midnight.

Empty lots don't complain about my compost bins. Empty lots mind their business.

The helicopter settles behind the tree line. The engine cuts. And then comes the quiet again, except now it feels different. Occupied.

I wipe soil on my jeans, stand, look at what's left of my mug, and decide the universe owes me one.

Two hours later, a convoy of trucks rolls up the gravel road.

Not one truck. Not two. I stop counting because counting trucks when I have sixty linear feet of terracing to finish is a waste of my morning.

But I notice the logo on the side of the last one.

A design firm from Vancouver. One word in their name, all lowercase, probably charges more per hour than my entire cabin cost.

My cabin. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with a stove that clicks, a roof that leaks, and hot water that quits at the eleven minute mark. I bought it with every dollar I had.

My name is Desireen Laurent. Desi to everyone who earns it. I'm thirty-one years old, I own this cabin and the two acres it sits on, and I'm building a landscape design business that doesn't require me to answer to a single man in a boardroom who takes credit for my planting layouts.

The hot water quits at eleven minutes. I love every warped inch of this place.

So when the construction noise starts at six the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, I handle it.

When the trucks block half the logging road and I have to reverse my pickup three hundred feet to let one pass, I handle it.

When my water pressure drops to a trickle on Thursday because someone on the adjacent property apparently rerouted the shared access line without a conversation or a permit, I put on my boots and walk next door.

The driveway is freshly graded. Gravel, the expensive kind, pale grey and perfectly even.

The old cabin is gone. In its place is a framed structure that already has the bones of something obscene.

Floor to ceiling windows on the south face.

Cantilevered deck extending over the slope.

A man in a hard hat studying blueprints on a folding table turns when he hears my boots on the gravel.

"Can I help you?"

"I live next door. Somebody rerouted my water line."

He looks at me like I just spoke Creole, which I also do when my cousin Margot calls, but that's beside the point.

"You'll want to talk to the owner about that."

"Great. Where's the owner?"

He jerks his chin toward the north side of the build. "Around back. Fair warning, he's on a call."

I'm already walking. My boots crunch the perfect gravel. The noise of a circular saw screams from inside the framing. I round the corner and stop.

The man standing with his back to me is tall.

Six two at least. Broad shoulders that stretch a grey T-shirt like the fabric is working overtime.

Dark blond hair pushed back from his face, catching morning sun.

He's got a phone pressed to his ear, one hand on his hip, and he's talking to someone about server architecture with the easy confidence of a person who understands it and knows he does.

He turns. The face matches the shoulders. Strong jaw. Straight nose. Eyes the color of good whiskey that land on me like I'm a line item on an agenda he didn't approve.

"Let me call you back." He lowers the phone. Looks at me. Looks at my mud-caked boots. Looks at the soil under my fingernails. Looks at my face. "Hi."

"You rerouted my water."

His eyebrows go up. "Excuse me?"

"The shared water access line that runs along the east boundary. Your crew moved it Wednesday. My pressure dropped to nothing Thursday morning. I can't run my irrigation system. I can't shower past seven minutes."

"I didn't realize there was a shared line." He says it calmly. Genuinely. A man who's used to problems being solvable. "I'll have my contractor look into it."

"Your contractor is the one who rerouted it."

"Then I'll have him reroute it back."

Simple. Reasonable. So why does it irritate me?

Because he's standing on a hundred thousand dollars of grading and framing, wearing a watch that costs more than my truck, and he didn't know about a water line that's been serving this ridge since before his construction crew showed up with their imported gravel and their cantilevered deck.

"Your crew also starts at six a.m."

"Permits allow construction noise starting at seven."

"They were running the saw at six twelve yesterday. I checked."

Something shifts in his expression. Not anger. Not annoyance. Amusement.

"I'll talk to them."

"And you sent me a gift basket."

Now he definitely looks confused. "A welcome basket. Yeah. With the local preserves and the coffee from that place in town. I thought it was a nice gesture."

"The note said 'Welcome to the neighbourhood.'"

"Because... welcome to the neighbourhood."

"I moved in six weeks before you did."

He stares at me. Processes. And then he does something I'm not prepared for. He laughs. Not a polite chuckle. A real laugh, short and bright, and it changes his entire face from expensive to warm and the difference annoys me more than the water.

"You're right. That's backwards. I should've said welcome to my neighbourhood." He pauses. "I'm Beck. Beckett Rhodes."

I know the name. Everyone with an internet connection knows the name.

Rhodes Security Systems. Cybersecurity. Sold a division last year for some absurd number that I only remember because Margot texted me the headline and said girl this man has more money than God and worse hair.

The hair, for the record, is not bad. It's the kind of hair you want to pull, which is a thought I bury immediately under six feet of professionalism.

"Desireen Laurent."

"The landscape designer." He says it like he already looked me up. "I saw your site. The terracing work you did for that property in North Van was impressive."

Nobody compliments my terracing and gets a pass on rerouting my water. "Fix my water line, talk to your crew about the six a.m. starts, and we'll be fine."

"Done." He puts his hands in his pockets. Rocks back on his heels slightly. "Can I at least offer you a coffee? I have an espresso machine that probably cost too much, and I feel bad about the water."

"I don't want your espresso."

"It's really good espresso."

"I want my water pressure."

"You'll have it by end of day. The espresso is a peace offering in the meantime."

"I don't need a peace offering. I need you to stop disrupting things that were working fine before you showed up."

That lands. The amusement dims just slightly. Good. He nods once, more to himself than to me.

"Fair enough. Water line by end of day. Crew noise addressed. Anything else?"

"Your helicopter shattered my only coffee mug."

His mouth opens. Closes. "I'll replace it."

"You can't. It was a thrift store cactus mug that said Stuck On You and it was one of a kind."

Beck Rhodes, billionaire, founder, owner of a jawline that should require a warning label, looks at me like he's recalibrating every assumption he walked into this conversation with.

"I'll find you a cactus mug."

I turn around and walk back down his obscenely perfect driveway.

My hands are shaking. Not from anger. Something worse. Something lower and hotter and completely unacceptable.

He's a problem. Six foot two, whiskey eyed, just moved in next door with his architect, his helicopter, and his absurd confidence, and he is a problem I do not need.

I have a business to build. I have terracing to finish. I have a roof that leaks and a stove that clicks and a hot water heater that gives up at eleven minutes. Well, seven now if they don't fix that water reroute.

The last thing I need is a billionaire neighbour who laughs like that and looks at me like I'm the most interesting thing on his entire mountain.