“No. I mean, what would I have told them? Nothing was missing. Nothing had been moved. I just—I thought maybe my underpants weren’t stacked the way I always stack them.”
Lissa thought of teasing her sister about stacking her underpants, but there was a tone in Jaimie’s voice that was upsetting. The whole thing was upsetting, especially since Jaimie wasn’t given to flights of fancy.
“Maybe you should rethink calling the police,” she said quietly. “Let them talk to this guy, put a little legal scare into him—”
“Really, it doesn’t work that way. I have no grounds for any kind of accusation, and the police would have no grounds for confronting him.” Jaimie took a long, deep breath. “T
ell the truth,” she said briskly. “You’ve been out in Hollywood so long, you’re not interested in being a chef anymore, you want to be a screenwriter. And the story you just got from me is perfect for—what do they call it? A treatment.”
The sisters laughed. Then Lissa slung an arm around Jaimie’s shoulders.
“I love you, Jaimie Celeste Wilde.”
“Don’t!”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t call me that. He calls me that. Celeste. He says it suits me better than my real name.”
“And what’s his name,” Lissa said, trying to sound casual. “A real winner, I bet.”
“Steven. Steven Young.”
“Uh huh. Well, what does Mr. Steven Young know?” she said, still aiming for casual even though the fact that her sister’s admirer called her by a name that really wasn’t hers was what convinced her that he wasn’t an admirer at all.
He was a stalker.
* * * *
That was how she described Steven Young to Caleb, much later that night.
Lissa had paced her room, trying to come up with a way to help her sister. No cops. Valid enough. There was nothing for cops to use as grounds for an arrest.
For one crazy second, she considered flying east and confronting the man herself, but all that might do was make him even angrier and an angry stalker would surely not be a good thing.
She considered going to her brothers and asking them to help.
It took less than a second to discard that as a very bad idea.
Her brothers would get that lockjawed look she’d seen on their handsome faces before.
“We’ll take care of it,” they’d say, and they would.
Steven Shitass Young would find himself in an alley missing a few teeth and, in this instance, possibly with a couple of other body parts in plaster casts.
Uh uh. Getting her brothers involved was not a good plan. Jake and Travis and Caleb were intelligent and successful, but they were not men to rely on words when fists were called for.
Well, Caleb might. Not rely on words, necessarily, but he’d done all kinds of secret stuff at that Agency, whatever its real name.
Surely, he’d know ways to work behind the scenes.
A little after midnight, Lissa crept quietly along the upstairs hall. Caleb, Sage and their baby were staying in his old room. She figured Sage and the baby were asleep by now, but Caleb had always been a night owl.
She stood outside the door, listening. Then, she took a breath and tapped lightly on it.
“Caleb?” she whispered.
The door opened almost immediately. Her big brother, shirtless and barefoot, wearing only gray sweatpants, peered at her.