“So you just let yourself in?”

“Still own half of the house. Got my own set of keys.” Those damned eyes skewered her, challenging her to argue with him. Kristen decided not to rise to the bait. She didn’t have the time or energy to argue.

“Where is she?”

“I thought you’d know.” He stretched, his shoulders and arms tugging at the seams of his shirt, the black hair at his nape a little too long and ruffling over his shirt collar.

Uneasiness crawled through Kristen’s blood. “Lissa was supposed to come home straight after school.”

“You told her that?”

“Oh, yes.” The ugly scene this morning was fresh in her mind. They’d argued, the gist of it being that Lissa was furious with her mother for finding the progress reports from the school. Even though the envelope had been addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Ross Delmonico, Lissa had considered the contents about her failing grades to be no one’s business but her own. She’d thrown a fit and refused breakfast. Her eyes, so like her father’s, had snapped gray fire and she’d half run out of the house to catch a ride with her boyfriend. “I grounded her because of the progress reports from her school,” Kristen explained.

Ross waited, eyebrows raised, for Kristen to continue.

“She’s flunking chemistry and German.” Kristen picked up the progress reports from the dining room table and handed them to him.

“Flunking?” he said, eyeing the page with the teacher comments.

“She claims it’s all a big mistake, that the teachers haven’t entered a couple of grades, so I told her to get everything fixed and have Mrs. Hanson and Mr. Childers call me, send me notes, or e-mail me. So far, I haven’t heard from either teacher, so I figure until the grades are up, she’s going nowhere.”

“Isn’t that a little Dickensian?”

“You got a better idea?” She didn’t need a lesson in parenting from a man who for years was a ghost in the marriage, spending all of his waking hours working. When Ross didn’t reply, she said, “I didn’t think so.”