Page 1 of Oops I Fell For The Billionaire Next Door

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.