Page 17 of Rescued by the Single Dad

Bennett tipped his gaze up toward Clint and smirked. “Heard you have a mermaid in your house.”

“Did Talia run next door and spill the beans?”

“Sure did,” Talia said, beaming with pride. “But she’s not a mermaid. She’s a lady who washed up on shore like Ariel after she got her legs. And she can talk, too. So it’s not totally like the Little Mermaid.”

Aya, seven, gasped. Then her brown eyes went wide, and she gaped at Clint. “Do you have to kiss her so she can keep her legs?”

Emme, nine, snorted and reached for a freshly washed strawberry from a bowl on the island. “You know that’s just a fairy tale, right?”

Aya glared at her sister. “Fairy tales have some truths in them. Daddy says so.” She glanced up at Bennett. “Right, Dad?”

“Sprinkles of truth, maybe. But I don’t think the lady upstairs is a mermaid who was granted legs and now needs to kiss Uncle Clint in order to remain human.” Then Bennett shot a look at Clint. “Right?”

Clint sucked in a deep breath through his nose before he went to fill up his coffee mug from the carafe. “It’s too early for this.”

Bennett dolloped pancake batter onto the griddle, four in a line, two lines deep. “So is it really Brooke Barker?”

“Jag is such a blabbermouth,” Clint grumbled, then added a splash of cream to his coffee.

“To be fair, I texted him, asking if he knew about the mermaid after Talia came next door. That’s when he said that it was Brooke Barker.”

Well, that was a little better.

Clint nodded. “Yeah, it is. And the worst part of all of it is that she’s convinced she was pushed off a yacht. So someone out there tried to kill her.”

All three little girls gasped.

Shit.

Bennett rolled his blue eyes.

“Someone is trying to kill the mermaid?” Aya asked.

“She’s not a mermaid,” Emme said impatiently. “At least probably not.”

“Someone is trying to kill the nice lady who is not a mermaid?” Talia asked. “Who would do that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Clint said.

“We?” Bennett asked. “I know you’re big into the detective shows lately, but there’s a difference between watching Sherlock and playing Sherlock.”

“She said she doesn’t know who she can trust.”

“Uh, maybe the cops?” Bennett gave him a look like Clint just said he was going to pull out his magnifying glass and go sleuthing around dark alleyways.

“But will going to the cops alert the media and others in her life to her whereabouts? To her lack of being dead? Maybe this is the safest place for her until we can come up with a better way to figure out who her unsub is.”

“Oh God, now you’re using Criminal Minds lingo?” Bennett rolled his eyes. “Enough with the detective shows, bro.”

Clint met his brother’s eye roll with one of his own. “I like them. It’s made me a far more—”

“Suspicious person,” Bennett finished. “You were born suspicious.”

“I’m two years older than you. You don’t know how I was born.”

“Mom said you were born suspicious.”

Clint shot him a glare. “I was going to say observant. But yes, I am highly suspicious, too. Someone tried to kill Brooke, and she just so happened to wash up on shore right by the brewery. That has to mean something.”

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