Page 102 of Forced Proximity
But my girl did care, and I wouldn’t have them fucking with her happiness.
It took me all of five minutes to get into Worth’s phone and through his phone into the HOA’s bylaws.
I went ahead and changed everything in there that I could to “free to decorate as desired” and deleted everything else off the server that I could find.
Once I was done, I sent the new bylaws on decorating to everyone in the neighborhood, being sure to highlight the new changes and backdate it to three days ago, and shoved the phone into my pocket.
“Now, it’s all very cute, but it’s going to have to go,” Worth continued talking, as if I hadn’t been ignoring him for the last five minutes.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said as I pulled out my phone and toggled to my email. “But this email went out a few days ago about decorations, and it was stated that we could decorate how we want at Christmas.”
He frowned. “It most certainly did not!”
I pulled up my email and showed it to him.
He reached for my phone, but I shook my head. “Sorry, Mr. Worth, but I don’t like people touching my phone. Germs are pretty bad right now, and I’d like to keep the flu away as long as possible.”
Worth dropped his hand, but reached for his own phone once he realized he needed to check out what I was saying.
He frowned so hard that the divots in between his eyes started to tremble with the strain.
“What on earth?” he asked. “That’s…that’s not…I didn’t send that!”
“It says it came from you.” I smiled. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, my family is in there eating all the cookies without me.”
He grumbled and started to hurry toward his golf cart.
I went inside while chuckling to myself.
Maybe I should’ve done this years ago.
Tavi would’ve loved having more decorations than simple, boring lights.
Hell, I’d already bucked tradition and put up colored ones because he loved them.
I came to a stop in the living room when I saw the massive tree that was taking up most of the room.
“Dru,” I called out.
She appeared with a powdered sugar cookie in her hand and said, “Do you not like it?”
“I love it.” I shook my head. “But you better not have paid for this.”
She smiled. “I got a screamin’ good deal.”
“She really did.” Jasper came out with a cookie decorated like a tree, with so much icing that it was as thick as the cookie itself. “They knocked over a thousand dollars off of it because they price match. And Costco had the same thing on sale.”
“That doesn’t mean that you didn’t still spend too much,” I muttered.
“It wasn’t too bad,” she lied.
I’d be checking that later.
“What’s for dinner?” Jasper asked.
I sighed.
I guess I wouldn’t be getting Dru all to myself tonight.
