Poppy cocked her head though inside she was flooded with relief. “Got a friend here? Girlfriend, maybe?”
Now he smiled, and when he did, it was as though the heavens had opened and rained down their special magic perfectness upon his gorgeous head. “No, again.”
God, this was like pulling teeth. “No, you don’t have a friend who lives here? Or no, you don’t have a girlfriend who lives here—or both?”
As she asked the question, she found she rather wanted to know if he had a girlfriend. How did that work if he was part of a couple? How did she stay out of his personal affairs if she was supposed to advise on his personal affairs?
And something else Poppy discovered. She didn’t want him to have a girlfriend
The wrought iron gate separating the sidewalk from the front entry of her building opened just then, and Mr. and Mrs. Paxton and their toothless Chinese Crested dog, Titan, strolled out, arm-in-arm.
They were going for their mid-morning walk together, something they did without fail every day but Sunday, when Mrs. Paxton made a pot roast and Mr. Paxton watched The History Channel.
She quickly turned her back to them, pulling Rick farther under the oak tree. As their bodies briefly brushed together when she stumbled over a tree stump, her heart began to throb. When he righted her, his hand at the small of her back elicited a small gasp of a confused thrill.
Taking a step back to clear her head, Poppy looked up at him. “Okay, enough subterfuge. Why are you here at this specific location today?”
“To check on everyone and make sure they’ve all received their relocation packages. Despite the fact that you and your friends have dubbed me The Asshole, I’m actually quite good with people.”
“Relocation packages?” she repeated woodenly. She hadn’t received any relocation package. Of course, she probably wouldn’t because she was three months behind in her rent. No one was going to relocate her unless it was to renter’s jail. Also, she hadn’t opened her mail in at least two months because there was never any good news contained within. Just bills.
“Yep. We offer relocations packages to everyone when we purchase a building. I wouldn’t do it any other way.”
Poppy thumbed over her shoulder. “You bought this building? This one right behind me with the cute wrought iron fence, awesome spiral thingamajig on the rooftop, and continuing theme of spiral bonsai trees in that little garden to the left?” She’d helped plant those trees…
Now Rick cocked his head, running a hand through his chin-length hair. “Am I speaking another language, Poppy McGuillicuddy? Yes, this building.”
Alarm bells went off in her head. “And what are you doing with all the people in the building?”
If he wasn’t annoyed before, he sure was now. On a grating sigh, his chest heaving with an exaggerated rise and fall of impatience, Rick nodded. “I just told you. Relocating them. Well, except for one. We can’t seem to find her. A Lennox Griffith has apparently left this plane, because I sure can’t locate her. Unless she’s the soap opera star I found on Google, which is ridiculous.”
Hah! Not so ridiculous.
Shit. Lennox, who’s real name was Ethel Leeman, was the friend she’d rented the apartment from. Mr. Rush had probably never changed the name on the apartment because she’d never signed anything official. He’d taken her on her word when she’d said she’d pay her rent.
Shitshitshit!
But wait. How had he gotten the Paxtons to agree to relocate? They’d been here as far back as the fifties, when they’d married. Not even their son, Jeremy, with talk of sunshine, palm trees, and oceanfront retirement homes, had been able to convince them to leave their beloved home.
And Mrs. Bernbaum? No way Mrs. Bernbaum and her latest sixty-five-year-old boy-toy, Rockland—the youngest boy-toy she’d ever had, and at the ripe old age of seventy-four—were agreeing to relocate without a fight.
Rockland had tried to talk Mitzi Bernbaum into looking at something on the Upper East Side, and she’d staunchly refused to budge. This was her home. It was where she’d birthed her children. It was where her beloved Abraham had lived and died.
This was insanity.
Squeezing her temples, she asked one more time, “Are you sure this is the place you’re buying? Like a million percent sure?”
“I’m a million and two percent sure. This building is scheduled for demolition on the thirty-first of October.”
Chapter 7
Whoa, whoa and whoa. This wasn’t happening.
As she followed Rick into her beloved building, trying to not only decide when the best time was to tell him she lived here, but to ask him what God he’d sacrificed an organ to in order to get her neighbors to agree to relocate, she inhaled with shallow breaths. The checkered black and white floor in the entryway threatened to swallow her up as he crossed it in swift strides and she tried to reorient herself.