Page 108 of Liberating Lily

He simply smiled at her.

Actually, she was probably better off not knowing the truth about that.

“You still haven’t told me about your house and the break-in. Were things really bad?”

“Well, they weren’t good. Although according to my family, now at least I’ll be able to furnish my house with decent-looking furniture. Apparently, what was there before looked terrible.”

“Oh no. Did everything get trashed?” she asked. “Who would do that? Was anything taken?”

“Not that I could tell,” he said. “Which makes it even more interesting. They broke into my front door. They were dressed all in black. Forced the door open. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my alarm on because my sister had been coming in to water my plants and feed my worms.”

“Feed your worms?” she asked. “You have pet worms?”

“I have a worm farm. My sister, Bea, loves animals, and she thought I needed company so she gave me a worm farm for my birthday. Luckily, it doesn’t require much work because I’m not too big on worms myself.”

“Oh, right,” she said, feeling slightly baffled by that.

“I know. It’s as strange as it sounds. Anyway, Bea’s really upset because whoever broke in tipped over the worm farm, and they’ve all gone. Well, we couldn’t find them anyway.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” she said. “Those poor worms.”

“Yeah, weirdly, even though I didn’t think I was attached to them, I do feel bad that they’re gone.”

“It sounds like she’d get on great with Clem. She’s always loved animals.”

“My other sister, Fiadh, loves plants. She’s given me a number of house plants over the years that I’m expected to take care of. Bea was also watering the plants for me. The worms don’t need much. They get fed every five to seven days.”

“So, you didn’t have your alarm on because of Bea?” she asked. “Why didn’t you just give her the code?”

“I would if Bea could remember a code to save herself. I can’t tell you how many times she set off my alarm from getting the code wrong. I thought it was better just to leave it off. Nothing ever happens in my neighborhood. Turns out that was a stupid decision. Ronan is not happy that Bea was anywhere near my house when it was being trashed.”

“But you didn’t know that would happen,” she said. “And the burglar wasn’t still there, right?”

“No, but he still could have been, and Bea could have gotten hurt, especially as she took a look at my broken door and decided to walk into the house rather than walking away."

Lily winced. “Wow, that seems like a really silly decision.”

“Just so you know, if you did something like that your ass would be hot for hours.”

And there he went, making threats that sent her body into a tailspin. She tried hard to keep her face from showing any reaction, though.

“I’m also fairly certain you wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?”

Lily thought it prudent to nod. She was pretty certain she wouldn’t walk into a house that had just been burgled.

“Unfortunately, Ronan is incredibly protective of my sisters, but at the same time, he also spoils them to death. So they think that nothing bad is ever going to happen because he will take care of everything, which he will, but they still have to take a certain amount of responsibility for keeping themselves safe. He also won’t hear of them being scolded.”

Wow.

She wondered what it would be like to have an older brother like that.

“Did you call the police? What did they say?”

He shook his head. “No cops. There is nothing that they could do that Ronan’s guys can’t.”

Who were Ronan’s guys? And what were they going to do?

“I can see the questions swirling in your head.” He grinned. “I will tell you, just not now. Because we have a mess to clean up and you need to have a shower.”