Page 25 of Receiving His Mercy
“Yeah, that’s not happening. Also, you need to leave her alone. No following her.”
“I wasn’t following her!” he snapped. “I was there on a date.”
Silence came from down the other end of the phone. “A date?”
“Yes, a date. That thing people do when they are looking for someone to . . . settle down with.”
“Settle down with?” Lacey repeated.
“Are you all right? Why do you keep repeating me?”
“Am I all right?”
“Lacey,” he grumbled. “As nice as it is to talk to you, you’re going to need to stop repeating everything I say.”
“Right, um, right. I thought Clay was joking when he said that you’d started dating.”
“Is the idea so funny?” he asked in a silken voice.
“Not at all,” she said hastily. “It’s just hard to imagine you dating, settling down, getting married.”
“Happens to most people eventually.”
“Right, yes, of course. I’m glad you’re dating. So it was really a coincidence that you were there?”
“Yes, I’m not a stalker!” Although he had contemplated sitting outside Caren’s apartment waiting for her to leave so he could talk to her.
But that didn’t make him a stalker. He was just . . . concerned about her.
It was a welfare check.
He should be praised for his level of care.
“Right, that’s good. You still shouldn’t have gone over there and insisted that she let you take her home.”
“She was going to take the subway!” he said. “At night! In New York! She has no idea how dangerous that is.”
“Caren is used to taking care of herself,” Lacey told him.
“Just because she’s used to it doesn’t mean that she’s good at it.”
“She’s still alive, isn’t she?”
He grunted. “That doesn’t mean that something couldn’t happen. She’s small. If a man tried to overpower her, she could be badly hurt. She shouldn’t be meeting with strange men. And she definitely shouldn’t have taken public transit. What if he’d followed her home and attacked her?”
“That wasn’t going to happen.”
“You don’t know that, Lacey.” His cousin was surprisingly naive for someone who had worked for the FBI. “There is danger everywhere.”
“I know there is. And it was nice of you to take her home. But you can’t force her to move in with you. Or for her to let you vet her dates.”
He wouldn’t be so sure of that. “She would be safer here with me.”
“Travis, you can’t. She’s her own person. That sounds like kidnapping.”
Yeah, he couldn’t deny that that had entered his mind. He could just steal her away into his apartment and lock her up until she agreed with him.
“Travis! No kidnapping her!”
