I resisted the urge to tell her that, essentially, we were boyfriend and girlfriend, whether she wanted to be or not. It was what it was.

Yet I chose to keep my mouth shut and start walking to the house.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m starving.”

She growled in frustration. “Don’t walk so fast.”

I slowed, and turned my head down to look at her.

“Tell me what happened today, and why you didn’t call me,” I ordered.

She grimaced. “Corrinne paid another visit to me. Well, she didn’t actually announce that it was her, but it couldn’t be anybody else. I really don’t understand how she finds me. It’s like she’s able to look up my information or something.”

I held out my hand to help her over a log, and she took it.

But she didn’t pull it away once she was over, and we’d made it all the way to the house before she said, “Wrote all over my car with shoe polish. Saying I was a ‘boyfriend stealer’ and that I ‘split up loving homes for a living.’”

I blinked. “That’s it?”

Her head dropped, and she looked down at her feet.

“It’s enough to tell me she knows where I live,” she growled. “Which is enough for me. It’s never ending. And she never gets caught!”

I yanked her arm, causing her to face plant into my chest. “Which officers have you spoken with?”

“Johnson and Howell. They’re detectives,” she said softly into my shirt.

I leaned my head down and kissed her forehead. “I’ll figure out something, baby. But you’ll be staying with me tonight. Okay?”

She leaned her head back. “I can’t. I have to work early in the morning, and you have a daughter here. That’s just not done.”

I furrowed my brows in confusion. “What’s not done?”

“You don’t have your girlfriend stay the night when you’ve only known her less than two weeks,” she explained.

I didn’t draw attention to the fact that she just called herself my girlfriend, and instead focused on what she was having a problem with.

“My daughter’s seven going on twenty two. She knows that daddy dates, and she’s old enough to not freak out when a woman stays over. I don’t make a habit of doing it; in fact, I haven’t had anyone stay over since she was three. If it makes you feel any better, you can sleep on the couch,” I told her.

She laughed. “You’d give me the couch and not your bed?”

I shook my head.

“Absolutely. You’re about five foot two, at best, and I’m six five. There’s no way on God’s green earth that I’d waste a night sleeping on the couch that is at least a foot and a half too short for me. You can handle it, I can’t.” Then I turned to toss a grin her way. “I’d offer for you to sleep in my bed with me, but I rather doubt that you’d take me up on that offer.”

“Whatever,” she muttered, reaching her car that was parked in front of my place. “Help me bring the food in.”

She opened the backdoor to her car, a newer model Camaro, and pulled out a large grocery bag, followed shortly by a zippered green polka dotted Tupperware container.

“This is the bread and chicken,” she said. “And this is the potatoes.”

I took all that she handed me, and she followed me inside with a bag of her own.

“I have to cook the potatoes a tad longer to melt the cheese on top, but should be good after that. I also brought some sweet tea,” she explained as she opened the front door.

I went inside, happy to see that Reagan was doing what I suspected was her homework, as she was supposed to do.

“Good job,” I said to her as I passed. “Whatcha working on today?”

“Compound sentences,” she muttered distractedly.

I winced.

I was never very good with English in school, and still wasn’t. I dreaded the day she asked me to help her.

Those were the days I’d probably be sending her to my mother or sister.

Was it a rule that all women were good at English?

“Compound sentences?” Lennox asked. “Aren’t those kind of advanced for her age?”

I nodded. “Probably. She’s in ACL, or accelerated curriculum learning. She reads at a tenth grade level, and she’s as smart as a whip. Something she’ll use against you, too, if you’re not careful.”

She smiled. “Those are good skills for a young girl to have. I graduated early. It sounds to me like she’s on the same track.”

I paled thinking about my baby girl being two grades ahead, which also meant she’d be in high school when she wasn’t even a teenager.

Fuck me.

A knock sounded at the front door, and I hastily dropped my bags onto the counter, happy to get out of this conversation and thinking about my little girl being around little douche bags two years older than her.

“Be right back,” I muttered.

She nodded as she started to pull things out of her bags. “That’s fine.”

Not surprisingly, I passed a ‘still engrossed in her studies’ Reagan on the way through the living room.

The fact that she didn’t get up to answer the door wasn’t surprising.

Opening the door, I was surprised to find James and his wife, Shiloh, at the door.

“What’s up?” I asked.

He nodded towards the living room, and Shiloh brushed past me with a smile and a pat on the shoulder while James stayed where he was.

His eyes moved down to Reagan and he smiled before he made a head gesture for me to follow him outside.

I did, closing the door behind me.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

He winced.

“Fuckin’ Detective Howell,” he muttered. “I overheard him talking to another detective today about your girl.”

I nodded. “Yeah, her car was vandalized again.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I heard that. I also heard that the car wasn’t the only thing vandalized. The neighboring car that was beside hers also had a lovely note pinned to the window, as well as about fifty cars in the surrounding neighbors. All of the cars had a vivid description of her life, her whereabouts, where she shops, what she eats. It also had her finances, her cell phone number, her parent’s cell phone numbers, and parent’s address. And a picture of her.”

My mouth dropped open.

“What the fuck?” I growled.

He shook his head. “That was all I got before Howell saw me standing there. I asked him more, but he refused to expound.”

I shook my head in confusion. “She didn’t say all of that. Does she know?”

James shrugged. “No fuckin’ clue. But I asked Luke to talk to Chief Rhodes, knowing you’d ask for the camera feed from her neighborhood. Except when he had it pulled, the tape was fried. They got nothin’ in the hour and a half time period.”

I clenched my teeth.

What was the point in living in the gated community if the residents couldn’t count on you to watch over their things while they couldn’t?

Wasn’t that the point of a camera?

“Of course,” I said. “I hate Howell. She told me earlier that he was on the case and I just cringed. Why does that man have to be so annoying all the time? It’s like he’s working against us. Doesn’t he see that we’re all on the same fucking team?”

James nodded. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you what I heard. I saw her walking up with you, and thought you’d be interested in hearing it now, instead of later.”

I nodded and opened the door to the house, making a mental note to talk to both Luke and Lennox after dinner.

The most heavenly smell in the world wafted up to my nose the moment I crossed over the threshold of my front door, and the smell carried me all the way to the kitchen to find Lennox and Shiloh talking animatedly about the merits of cooking the potato before it was fried.

“What’re you cooking?” I asked the kitchen as a whole.

“Scalloped potatoes, fried chicken, homemade rolls, and asparagus,” she answered quickly.

Asparagus wasn’t my favorite, but I could deal. I knew for certain that Reagan hadn’t tried it, so it could turn out to be a good thing for her to try new foods.

“Cool,” I said. “Lennox, you remember James.”