Page 292 of Forbidden Billionaires: Vol. 11
I held the jacket a little tighter. “I don’t really know. We’re going to homecoming together.”
Mr. Tanner looked very excited about that news.
Uncle Rob smiled. “You’re dating then.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Kid, he gave you his jacket and asked you to homecoming. Yes. You’re dating.”
I smiled. But then my smile immediately fell when Uncle Rob tossed his power drill into a toolkit. “I still don’t understand what’s happening.”
“You couldn’t have picked a better lad than my grandson,” Mr. Tanner said. “I knew this was going to happen. I predicted it when you were just kids.”
Had he? I smiled. Mr. Tanner wasn’t Jacob’s actual grandfather. But when Jacob had moved to New York City when he was little, he’d called Mr. Tanner Abuelo and it kind of just stuck. The two of them knew each other well. Mr. Tanner must have known about Jacob’s crush on me this whole time.
Wait.“That’s not what I was talking about when I said I didn’t understand what was happening though. I’m talking about...this.” I gestured around the room.
“Sophie has a vision for the place,” Uncle Rob said. “We need to order a few more things, but it’ll be all decked out soon.”
“She circled a lot of things in this magazine,” Mr. Tanner said and tossed it aside. He stood up and stretched. He was in a full suit even though it was the middle of the night. “I’ll handle it from here.”
“You...I...”Ah!“But...this...” Did they not know we were standing in someone else’s apartment right now? They had to. Because we literally were. “My parents are going to kill me.”
“Don’t worry,” Mr. Tanner said. “We’re not going to tell your parents about your secret lair. Or Matt.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this. RJ was supposed to fix the hole, not get you to turn this into a...what?”
“Secret lair,” Mr. Tanner said. “It’s going to be pretty epic.”
“So epic,” Uncle Rob said. “I always wished I’d had a secret lair growing up. As soon as RJ told me about the hole, I knew what I needed to do. It’s going to be fantastic. It’ll be the perfect place for you kids to hang out. A little better than a treehouse, I think.”
“A tree what?” asked Mr. Tanner.
“A treehouse.” He stared at Mr. Tanner. “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of a treehouse, weirdo.”
Mr. Tanner laughed. “Sounds like a pauper thing.”
Uncle Rob shook his head and chuckled. “Anyway, it’ll be done soon. In the meantime, you better get up that ladder. It’s almost one. Isn’t that your curfew?”
I just stared at them. “You’re seriously not telling my parents that we put a hole in the floor?”
“The hole is fixed.” Uncle Rob pointed to the trapdoor. It reminded me a lot of how you got in and out of the treehouse actually. “So there’s nothing really to tell.”
There’d be a lot to tell if they actually turned this into some kind of secret lair. “If my dad finds out about this...”
Uncle Rob laughed. “We both know he had this coming. He’s too strict if you ask me. And stalking you at school? Not cool, man. It’s the least we can do to help.”
Sometimes I had a hard time remembering that Uncle Rob and my dad were brothers. “Thank you.”
Mr. Tanner glanced at his watch. “You best hurry, Scarlett. You don’t want to be late.”
I nodded. It weirdly felt like the two of them were my fairy godmothers, warning me to hurry so I wouldn’t turn into a pumpkin when the clock struck the hour. I hurried up the ladder and pushed open the trapdoor in the ceiling. “Goodnight,” I whispered down to them.
“Congrats on your first boyfriend, Scarlett,” Uncle Rob said.
I smiled, closed the door behind me, and replaced the rug. I tentatively put a little of my weight down on the carpet.Huh.It was actually secure.
Uncle Rob’s words spun around in my head. I had my first boyfriend. And I made it up to my room without being seen. I sighed and fell backward onto my bed. Jacob Miller was my boyfriend. I just need him to officially ask me.
