Beware of Doug

Chapter One

"Someone's moving in."

Nathan made the statement as if he and Lily were parked in a dark alley, wearing night-vision goggles and staking out someone's house, instead of standing by the fence in their respective front yards on a sunny spring afternoon. They were watching several large moving men unload a leather couch from a truck into the right side of Lily's Victorian "twin house," the nineteenth century's version of a duplex.

From inside her half, Lily's French bulldog, Doug, could be heard barking as if the four horse-men of the apocalypse were galloping up the driveway. Through the closed window he sounded like a cartoon character underwater. Bwoop-bwoop. Bwoop-bwoop.

"My father's really happy with this tenant," Lily said, watching two of the movers bend an enormous mattress through the front door. It looked even bigger than a king size. Who in the world needed such a big bed? "That's why he wanted me to be here when the guy moved in, in case he had any questions. The guy's being bankrolled by a billionaire, as my father put it, so he won't be a deadbeat like Hugh was."