Page 10 of Safe With Me

“I guess she’s staying with Claudia and Jude.”

Dad clicked the pen he was writing with, squinting at me as he tossed it into the#1 Dadmug I’d made him in Cub Scouts.

“You seem very interested. Is there a reason you’re so invested in why she came here and where she’s staying, Officer Russo?”

“No, I’m not. I’m just curious, that’s all,” I stammered, clearing my throat as I straightened in the chair. I didn’t want to be pushy like everyone else she’d encounter here, but even if I couldn’t figure out the root of it, the curiosity was gnawing at me.

“She’s actually your new neighbor. She just moved in to the downstairs apartment the Franco sisters rent out of their house.”

“Really?” I said, leaning back in the chair.

“What’s thereallyfor?”

“Their downstairs apartment only became available very recently, like two weeks ago. How did Claudia set her up so fast?”

Dad shrugged. “You know how all the information in this town runs through the bar. Claudia is usually the first to know anything and talks to more people here than Keith does. He told me the other day he should start paying her a consultant’s fee for what she passes along to him.” Dad laughed, turning around to pick up his empty mug.

Keith was also my stepmother’s uncle. He’d fallen out with my father for a while when Dad and Peyton first got together, but they had grown close again in the years since. And that was just another example of how the circles overlapped here.

The very attractive new girl in town lived not even a block away from me, but that wasn’t the reason I was so intrigued. Well, not the only reason.

“Any more questions?” Dad raised a brow at me over his shoulder as he took his mug over to the small sink in the back of his office.

“No, but you have to admit it’s weird that somebody would just pick up and move here. We’re a little dot on a map that you have to zoom in about a million times to see.”

“True.” My father nodded and lifted a shoulder. “But people still move here, like Peyton and Claudia.”

“Peyton is Keith’s niece. She knew about Kelly Lakes from him, and Claudia knew Peyton.”

“And Lila knew Claudia. So, there’s your connection.”

My father drew an imaginary line in the air.

“If you want to ask her any other questions, she should be back in a few minutes.”

He headed to the back room. Maybe I was overthinking all this. If she was single and didn’t need to stay in her town and Claudia found a job and apartment for her, why wouldn’t she move here?

And why did I have to know?

Keith and Jude, my sergeant and Claudia’s husband, had always advised all of us to never ignore our instincts, even if they weren’t based on actual facts. Legally, there was only so much we could do with those instincts if we didn’t have anything concrete to back it up, but we could watch from a distance.

But in this instance, I couldn’t tell if my instincts were cop-related or just an instant attraction to a stranger who now seemed to have been thrown into my orbit, working for my father and living in my neighborhood.

Along with the spark I couldn’t shake off from when her body had leaned into mine, there was something in those beautiful eyes besides the flecks of green when the sunlight hit them just right.

I’d sensed trepidation, or maybe it had just been exhaustion from driving for a long time without a break.

As if she couldn’t get out of Philly fast enough.

Moving to a new town so different from where she was from probably had her flustered along with feeling weak from not having eaten anything for all those hours.

Maybe she was just afraid of falling over, even though my hold on her had been strong enough for her to remind me I’d taken too long to let go.

If this weird feeling was right and there was more to it, as my father had said, it was none of my business, and she was his employee.

Wherever my motivation to find out more about her was coming from, I needed to step back before I made things messy right from the start.

“Speak of the devil,” my father whispered to me after he came back to his desk. “Hey, I told you to take a longer break than that.”

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