Page 129 of Fire Fight

So fucking stubborn, my girl.

“Answer me, Aspen,” I demanded when she remained quiet. “Is that really how you feel? Do you really think this is just a fling?”

“No,” she squeaked out at last, crying in earnest now. “But I can’t see how this will work. I don’t…” She trailed off, as though unsure how to finish that.

“You can run your business from anywhere.”

“Yes, but?—”

I pressed a finger to her lips, silencing her. “So don’t use that as an excuse. Don’t make that the reason you leave. Please, baby. Let me be the reason you stay. Letusbe the reason you stay.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she said, though she sagged against me, letting me wrap my arms tightly around her.

“You can,” I assured her. “Be brave for us, Aspen.”

“I want to be,” she murmured into my chest.

“Now is a good time to start.”

Her shoulders rose and fell with a deep inhale and exhale, and then she said, so quiet I almost didn’t hear her, “I love you too.”

Wrapping my arms tighter around her, I pressed my lips to her hair. “I know, baby.”

“I don’t know how this works or where we go from here.”

She lifted her head to look up at me, and I bent to kiss her. Her mouth was salty and sweet, the kiss soft but claiming. When I pulled away, I said, “One day at a time, okay? That was the agreement.”

Aspen nodded, then backed out of my arms. “I’m going to shower and freshen up before Trey gets here. I’ll be out in a bit.”

With a final kiss and a pat on her ass, I let her go. “I’m going to get Lane over here too.”

She murmured her agreement, and the moment the bathroom door closed behind her, I sent Lane a text, then hightailed it to the guest room.

Aspen spent every night in my bed—even the ones when Iwasn’t here. Now that I knew she loved me, that meant my room was now officiallyourroom.

My girl liked to take long showers, and after the morning we’d had, I knew she’d been in there for a while, allowing the hot water to soak into her limbs and ease any lingering tension, so I had plenty of time to complete my task.

Surprisingly, Aspen had taken the time to unpack her things, even going so far as to hang clothes up in the small closet. That made it easy to lift them all right off the rod and move them into the walk-in attached to my bedroom. Her tees and jeans looked perfect next to my work pants and shirts. Next I cleaned out the drawers of the hutch I used as a guest dresser, unceremoniously taking piles of my own clothes out of my dresser to replace with hers.

Lastly, I went to the bedside table, knowing from my previous foray into the drawer to get her vibrator that there were a few more personal things she’d stuffed in there. Medication she liked to have close by, lotion and lip balm, a dog-eared paperback by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. A spiral bound notebook.

I took it all out and laid it in a pile in the center of the bed, then stood hands on hips to survey the room, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

Not that it mattered. She was only moving down the hall, not across the country. If there was something I’d missed, she could come grab it.

Satisfied with a job well done, I turned back to the bed to gather her things. The notebook I’d taken from the drawer had flopped to the side off the stack, its pages spread open.

I tried like hell not to look, but ultimately curiosity got the better of me, and before I could stop myself, I was lifting it to read what Aspen had written.

At first, I thought it was a diary of sorts, but as my eyes scanned the pages, it read like more of a logbook, detailing the ins and outs of Aspen’s work on the Prom Night Arsonist case.

I ate up her words like they were my new favorite story, but the more I read, the angrier I got. She’d poured so much onto those pages that my eyes swam with the words, barely making sense of it all, but still, some managed to permeate my brain.

Threatening email.

Note on my car.

Someone was watching me.