“Plusplusher other uncle is the fire invest—”
“You guys being randomly connected to a bunch of cops doesn’t change the fact that…a sleepover with people I don’t know at a place I don’t know might not be in the cards for next weekend.”
“Yeah, but you can ask all those trustworthy adults ifI’mtrustworthy.” Sarabeth smiled winningly at him. “Izzy’s dad issuperoverprotective, and he lets her spend the night sometimes. And my parents are always there, plus my aunt and uncle and…”
Gard looked over at Lia while Sarabeth chattered on about her living arrangements. Lia didn’t like how she felt when he did that. Like she was somehow part of this, when shewasn’t. It reminded her of that day when Sammy had cried about his nose, and he’d looked so helpless.
Sure, Lia had oncebeena teenage girl, but she’d never been a parent. Maybe Gard wasn’t Sammy’sparent, but he’d certainly been helping to take care of her for a long time.
“Okay,” Gard finally said, cutting off Sarabeth. “I’ll…call your mom tonight and we’ll go from there.”
“Great!” Sarabeth immediately turned back to the other girls. They leaned their heads together around the table in hushedtones, while Gard stared at them a bit like he’d been flattened by a steamroller.
The Sarabeth Thompson experience.
He shook his head, then turned toward her. Lia had to brace herself, because she was learning it was way too easy to get lost in conversation with Gard Fairhurst.
Before he could say anything to her, the girls were getting up from their table.
“I’ll be outside,” Sammy called, stepping out with her friends.
“I know they’re good kids. But a party? Asleepover?” he grumbled.
Lia sighed wistfully, maybe laying it on a little thick, but while she understood Gard’s concerns, she was 100 percent on Sammy’s side for this one. “I would have killed to be in the kind of place at fifteen where I could have even been invited to a sleepover, let alone go.”
He eyed her. “And what kind of place were you in that you couldn’t?”
He didn’t very often ask direct questions. Sometimes he hinted around, but nothing like this. She wasn’t really supposed toanswerdirect questions about thebefore.
But maybe if he understood therewasworse out there, he could understand that Sammy deserved to be as normal as he could give her. Which, no, that wasn’t fair. She knew he wanted her to feel normal. He just worried, which was sweet.
But he didn’t always realize when it got in the way of Sammy’s happiness. So she held his gaze, and said as matter-of-factly as she could, “I ran away from home when I was fifteen.”
His gaze stayed steady. There was no surprise in his expression, though surely it surprised him a little. “Fifteen, huh?”
She held that steady gaze. “I never went back.”
“That bad?”
Lia considered, not sure why she was being so damn honest. He just seemed to bring it out in her. “Looking back? Probably not. But it felt that bad at the time.”
Gard let out a long breath.
“How about you? Was it all that bad?” She meant for his sister, but maybe for him too. Because Lia was an only child, so she didn’t understand how the same situation could create a police officer like Gard—all good and noble, and someone who would abandon their daughter.
Maybe that should just be chalked up to drugs. Addiction. She’d been around enough of both to know addiction didn’t discriminate.
Gard glanced out the window at Sammy and her friends standing on the sidewalk. “Looking back? I wonder if I’d realized how bad it was earlier, if things would be different for them.”
“Like what?”
He turned to her then, slight smile on his face, but those blue eyes intense. “For that information, Lia Blair, I think you’re going to have to come out to dinner with us.”
Before she could fully analyze that sentence, and the way her heart jittered in her chest in ways she didn’t remembereverfeeling, he continued.
“Every Saturday night, if Sammy did all her homework for the week and didn’t commit any crimes, we go for pizza. Thedidn’t commit any crimesstipulation is new this year. I thought it went without saying, but it apparently had to be said. You should come with us tonight.”
Oh, she absolutely should not. Especially since she was sharing secrets she shouldn’t.
