Page 107 of All Signs Point to Malibu

He eyes the height and shakes his head. “Thought you hated this chick.”

“She’s grown on me.” Understatement.

“Enough to climb up there and risk breaking your neck?” Marcus scans the dark, empty street nervously, looking for signs of authority.

Enough for that and so much more.

“Hold the ladder and then toss me the supplies.”

“Can’t believe you dragged my ass into this. What happened to ‘head down, nose clean, guilty by association’?” he asks, throwing my own words back at me with a hint of sarcasm.

I see the irony now—calling Hailey out for meddling in people’s lives when I’d constantly interfered in Marcus’s, even though it was from a place of genuine caring.

“Just hold the ladder, smartass.” I climb the rungs, then catch the supplies as Marcus chucks them up to me. Then I climb the scaffolding to the top of the billboard. It’s a hell of a lot higher than it looks and the wind is fierce at this height. I glance toward the ground and feel slightly nauseated.

Don’t look down.

Instead, I stare at Hailey’s face, larger than life, and my heart races as I start to clean away the graffiti.

Whether or not she’s telling the truth about her gift, her impact on the lives of so many people means she deserves more respect than the public is giving her right now. And whether or not this gift of hers saved my life...or helped me see a way through to giving Marcus a second chance, she ultimately did both and how can I not love her for that?

Love?

The thought literally throws me off balance and I slip over the wet edge of the platform. “Whoa.” My body starts to freefall and I grip the metal of the scaffolding in the nick of time, then I’m left dangling a hundred feet off the ground.

“Coach! You good?” Marcus calls from below.

No I’m not good. I’m falling in love and it nearly cost me my life.

Flashing police lights and a siren cut through the night air and I close my eyes as the squad car puts its headlights on me.

Fantastic.

“Hey! What are you doing up there?” the officer calls up to me.

“We were just cleaning the graffiti from the billboard,” I hear Marcus explain.

I pull myself up and over the platform and then work my way carefully down the scaffolding and the ladder to the officer. “What the kid said,” I say holding up the cleaning supplies.

The stern-looking thirtysomething officer whose nametag reads: “Perkins” glances up at the partially clean billboard and nods. “Get back to work then.”

I must look surprised because his face breaks into a grin as he leans on the hood of his squad car. “Hailey Harris helped my brother start his own IT consultancy firm a year ago when he was struggling to find work with a new wife and baby on the way.”

Ah.

“Didn’t charge him a dime.”

Another one of her private success stories. I’m willing to bet there’s many more.

“She doesn’t deserve the bad press she’s getting. Anyone who studies body language for a living could see it was the groom’s fault on that viral video.”

I frown, intrigued. “Yeah? How?”

“The way he leaned in and there’s a hesitancy in her that indicates she was surprised and if you watch real closely, she never actually returns the kiss.”

Maybe I need to take a closer look at that video.

“You know her?” Officer Perkins asks.

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