“And the hedges are very tall here. So I thought, maybe this summer will be the one where I’ll finally manage to avoid any tan lines?”
“You didn’t!”
“I was in my own garden!” I say. “Well, my is perhaps not the right word, but at the moment it is. So I took off my bikini top.”
Trina’s eyes are scanning the hedge, even as Wilma looks at me with wide eyes, like she can’t believe I’d do such a thing. “There are no holes in those bushes,” Trina says resolutely. “I’m guessing where this story will go, but he can’t have seen you.”
“He wasn’t looking through the hedge, Trina. He was in that tree.” I point to the large, curved oak that rises from the property on the other side. “I looked over and there he was, sitting on a bough. I could see the top of a ladder, too.”
Wilma’s eyes grow even rounder. “And he was watching you?”
“At that moment at least, yes, he was. Our eyes met.” A flush rises to my cheeks at the memory. Even across the distance, I’d seen the wide smile on his face. He looked older than me, but probably not by much. And he’d been… well. Attractive.
“On purpose?”
“I doubt it,” I say. “He had a yardstick and a saw in hand. Probably working on the tree.”
“Was he hot?”
“Did he wave?”
“Yes, and no. I covered up and hurried inside. He’d gone when I got back out.”
“Holy shit.” Wilma sits back, nodding to herself. “This is a golden opportunity, Bella. You have to see that.”
“Opportunity?”
“Hot neighbor, check. An interested hot neighbor, check. A single Bella, check check check!”
“There is no way anything will happen,” I say. “Besides, we don’t know if he lives there. He might have been the gardener.”
Even as I say it, it seems unlikely. There had been something familiar in the set of his features, something in the smile… where had I seen that before?
“Or not,” Trina says, pulling up her phone. “Now, I know pretty much everyone who lives in this area…”
“You mean you know of them,” Wilma corrects, shooting me a wide smile. I return it. Trina is the queen of gossip.
She rolls her eyes. “Yes, fine, of them. Greenwood Hills has all of Seattle’s tech royalty. You know they check the plates of our cars out here, right? There’s like twenty-four-hour security in this entire area. All the moguls and developers and the secretly rich live here. And the ostentatiously rich. They all have docks down on Lake Washington.”
I snap my fingers. “That’s it. Tech. He might work in tech. I recognized his face, but I couldn’t place it.”
“Tech?”
“Yes. God, he might have been a guest lecturer at the university. Is that where I remember him from?”
“Are you sure?”
“Not at all,” I say. “That’s just what he looked like, and only from a distance…” My mind searches through the countless hours of lectures I’d sat through. As a PhD student of systems engineering, there had been quite a few during my academic career. But there was one, while I’d been an undergraduate…
“Carter!” I say. “His last name is Carter.”
Trina’s fingers fly over her phone. “Carter…. Ethan Carter?”
“Yes!”
“This is him.” She holds up her phone. The picture is of a man in his mid-thirties, dressed in a suit, green eyes staring into the camera. He’s not smiling, but his mirth is there nonetheless, lurking in the corners of his mouth and at odds with the furrow between his brows.
“That is him.” I press my hands to my hot cheeks. “Dear God, he’s brilliant, and he saw me topless.”
“He’s your neighbor, Bella, holy shit!”
Rising from the chair, I shake my head at them. “That’s it. No more topless sunbathing out here.”
“No, even more topless sunbathing out here!” Wilma exclaims. “Lose the bottoms, too!”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Absolutely not. God, I might want to work at his company one day!”
Trina’s face is worse. It’s filled with speculation. “Remember two weeks ago, at my birthday party?”
I have no idea where she’s going. “Yes?”
“And we played that silly truth-or-dare game that Toby brought. It turned out quite fun.”
“It did,” I say, narrowing my eyes at her. Wilma is grinning.
“We dared you to—”
“I remember.”
“And you didn’t do it. Fair enough,” she says, palms up. “I totally get that. It was too much. But remember how you said rain check?”
Damn it.
Why do I have the friends I do?
“I remember.”
“Well then, this is it. We’re going to cash that in today,” she announces.