Page 63 of A Little Too Late
“How big?” he asks after lowering me to my feet.
“Like,fivehotel towers. It would look ridiculous and destroy the whole town’s view of the mountains.”
“Shit.” Reed looks around, as if a stepstool might suddenly appear. He braces his shoe against the stone foundation. “I’m going to grab the window frame. Will you steady me?”
“Um…”
Before I can finish that thought, he pushes up, grabbing the window frame like a monkey on a climbing wall. I hurry to brace him, but there’s no good place to hold onto, and I end up clamping my hands to his muscular ass.
I’ve had worse jobs, honestly.
Reed holds the position long enough to let out a curse before dropping back down again. “Quick—back up there. Take a photo.”
“Great idea,” I say, fumbling for my phone.
After he lifts me to the window again, I spend a tense moment focusing the camera on the projection screen. I take several shots, praying that one of them will be crisp enough to read when we enlarge it.
When I’m down again and busy straightening out my skirt, Reed picks through the photos I took. “Block must be selling them land—the foothills acreage on this side of Madigan Mountain. The Sharpes will connect to it with ski trails over thepeak. And they’ll build a monstrosity of a resort on this side, too.”
My mind reels. “Would that even pass the planning board?”
“Hard to say. But if you owned the land, you could devote a lot of time to tweaking your plan and wearing them down.”
“Why would the Sharpes reveal their plan to Block but not to us?”
Reed looks up. “Maybe Block doesn’t want an outright sale. Maybe he wants in on the profits. The Sharpes would have to show him where the money is coming from. The bigger they build, the bigger the potential profit.”
“Oh,” I say again.
He continues to flip through the photos, but then stops suddenly, taking a sharp breath.
“What is it?”
“My mother made these.” He hands me the phone.
“Wait, what?” The screen is zoomed in on the first photo I’d taken.
“These bookends on the shelf. My mother made them. I’m sure of it.”
They’re bronze statuettes of female figures. Each one is seated on a block of granite.
I’m about to tell Reed how cool they are, when I hear a nearby door open. I give his arm a hard tug.
We both drop down quickly, against the house, and behind a cedar shrub.
Someone dumps a cooler of melted ice into the snow.
Oh shit, Reed mouths. Then he grins.
I clap a hand over my mouth to hold back laughter. Our little escapade is possibly illegal, definitely ridiculous, and potentially embarrassing. And yet I’m more amused than rattled.
Who am I anymore?
Reed holds a finger to his lips. Then he parts the shrubbery so we can get a better look. A guy wearing a white chef’s smock is standing by the backdoor. He pulls a vape out of his pocket and lights up.
So now we’re stuck here.
Beside me, Reed eases down until he’s seated on the snow.
