Sweetheart Secret (His College Harem #3)

1. Chapter One

Chapter One

"Debbie did WHAT!?”

On the other side of the kitchen table, Bailey and McKenna shared a worried look. The atmosphere in the room—tense already—thickened to almost unbearable levels. I don't think either of them had expected the emotion in my reaction to Bailey's confession. The sheer anger.

Not that I was angry at either of my daughter’s best friends. Far from it.

Just Debbie.

Bailey didn't sign herself up for the Sweetheart app. McKenna's words bounced around the inside of my skull, echoing but refusing to fade. Debbie made her.

Debbie made her?

What the hell?

McKenna bit down on her bottom lip. "I know it sounds bad," the auburn-haired coed said. "That's because it is bad. Really bad."

"Kenna," Bailey said in a warning tone.

"I'm not..." I trailed off, my brain trying and failing to process it. It was too much. Too big. Too awful. "Babygirl, what is she talking about?"

Poor Bailey looked like she was going to be sick.

Her nails—still chartreuse, that shade she’d stolen from my ex-wife the way she stole me—drummed the top of the kitchen table, twitching with worry.

I could tell she wanted to bolt from the room, which just made me want to pull her into my lap and hold her close and never let her go.

“It’s really complicated, Daddy,” she said, unable to meet my eye. “I should’ve told you before now. I just…”

I barely heard her. Possibilities unspooled in the back of my mind like a film reel, none of them good. What the hell had Debbie done to these girls?

I was about to learn the truth. It was worse than what I was thinking—although in a way, it was going to end up better than I’d hoped. Reality was funny like that sometimes.

But first, there was something I had to do.

“Babygirl.”

The way the word came out silenced both women sitting across from me.

“Hold that thought,” I grunted, reaching for my phone. Without having to look, I thumbed the familiar number for my department at CreditCore, the place I was due to show up for work in about twenty-five minutes. I obviously wasn’t going to make it—and McKenna had suggested I let them know.

She was right. I needed to move everything off of my plate right now that wasn’t this.

Bailey and McKenna exchanged another look as I held the cell phone to my ear. This time, their faces were tinged with disbelief. This was how I’d chosen to react to the news?

The call connected on the second ring. “Hello?”

It was Brenda, my supervisor. I figured she’d be at her desk this time of morning.

“Hi, Brenda,” I said, my voice eerily calm. It surprised me—I felt like shouting, raging, throwing things. “I’m going to be late to work today.”

No preamble. No fake cough, which was the kind of thing I would’ve done before BlueJay19 woke me out of my stupor. The people-pleasing Tom Cottrell who would’ve groveled in the service of his PTO wasn’t in the building right now.

In his place was a very different sort of man.

I could tell my bluntness surprised Brenda, too. “Um, alright, Tom. Is everything okay—?”

“It’s a family matter,” I said, not bothering with an elaborate cover story. What was the point? “I’ll be in by eleven, most likely.”

The old Tom would’ve peppered her with excuses. Fallen all over myself to apologize for taking up too much of my employer’s space. But right now, I just didn’t give a shit.

And honestly, I was starting to wonder why I ever had.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Sure, Tom,” Brenda said, sounding a little rattled. “That’s fine. I’ll put it in the system for eleven—”

“Great, thank you,” I said. “See you soon.”

And I hung up.

When I glanced up from putting the phone in my pocket, both coeds were staring at me. “Holy shit,” McKenna said, sounding like she wasn’t sure whether to be frightened or impressed. “That was low-key terrifying, Tom. I think your boss might have wet herself.”

“You didn’t lie,” Bailey whispered. “You just… laid down the law.”

I had. Twenty-one years of asking permission from everyone I knew, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember why I’d ever given them so much power. My boss. My church.

Debbie. Always Debbie.

“Okay,” I said, leaning forward. I took Bailey’s hand and squeezed it, which just about made the blonde coed start crying again. “We’ve got the morning.” I met her eye. “Babygirl.”

Now Bailey was crying. “Yes, Daddy?”

McKenna didn’t even flinch at the D-word, which would’ve told me something if I’d been paying more attention to anything that wasn’t my daughter’s best friend.

“Babygirl, nothing you say in the next thirty minutes is going to change what you are to me. I’m not going to love you any less, okay?

” It was father figure mode, running on overdrive, and with these two it completely unraveled their defenses in a single instant. “So just say it. I’m here.”

Bailey swallowed hard. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Her hand trembled in mine. “God, Daddy, I love you so freaking much.”

“You picked a good guy,” McKenna said with a snicker. “To be fair, it’s not like you had to go very far to find him.”

That brought the ghost of a smile to Bailey’s face. Mine, too.

“Okay,” Bailey said marshaling her courage. Her hand never left mine. “The Sweetheart app.”

I nodded. “You told me you heard me and Mark talking about it during the barbecue and decided to try and see if you could connect with me on it.”

“I did,” she admitted. “And I did hear you and Mark talking about it, but that’s not the whole truth. The truth is, I already had an account.”

It was impossible to keep the grimace off my face. I remembered my very first conversation with ‘BlueJay19’, the one where we’d both been feeling each other out right before we fell head-over-heels in love with each other.

I’m new to this site. I’ve never done this before…

“So you were meeting up with strange men?” I asked. “Before me?”

Bailey’s eyes widened like saucers, and I knew even before she opened her mouth that I was wrong. “What? No! Of course not, Daddy! I wasn’t lying about that—I didn’t go on any dates with anybody! I didn’t do anything with the app before I matched with you, I promise!”

“She’s telling the truth,” McKenna chimed in. “Trust me, she was not into it.” She elbowed her bestie in the ribs. “Not until she found the guy she really wanted to match with.”

I ignored that. “Then how did it happen? How did Debbie force you into it?”

Bailey hesitated. “There’s something you need to know about Debbie,” she said.

I was already nodding. “I know. She’s awful.” I put a hand on my forehead, sighing. “If I didn’t know that before the divorce, her behavior over the last eight months has absolutely convinced me I made the right decision in getting all of us away from her—”

But Bailey shook her head. “No, not that. Daddy, Debbie is broke.”

I heard the words. But they didn’t register.

“What? No, babygirl, that’s impossible.” I chuckled to myself, thinking about the absurd stack of paperwork we’d both had to fill out at the realtor’s office when ownership of the split-level was officially transferred to me.

“I paid Debbie half the value of this house when we got divorced. I’m not trying to startle anyone, but it was a lot of money.

Even if she got addicted to the Home Shopping Network or something, there’s no way she could burn through all that in eight months… ”

I trailed off. Both Bailey and McKenna were staring at me like I was the most naive, trusting man who’d ever lived.

“She did, didn’t she?” I asked in a small voice.

Bailey laid it all out for me. “She’s been spending money like she gets a prize for it,” my babygirl said, her voice crackling with bitterness.

Her waffles sat half-eaten on her plate, untouched and forgotten.

“The McMansion, the renovations, the whole “letting Pastor Kevin live there rent-free while his house is sitting in escrow” thing. There’s supposed to be an influx of cash when the sale of Kevin’s house finally goes through, but they’ve both been borrowing against it for months. ”

McKenna leaned in close, grinning like a fox. “The fancy food at Debbie’s dinner?” she said with relish. “Linda cooked most of it. The champagne was Costco, and they put it on a store card.”

I blinked. Spending a ton of money to look richer than they were at dinner was…

well, that was par for the course where Debbie was concerned.

Still, I had trouble accepting it. Unlike the girls, I knew exactly how much money I’d paid my ex-wife out in the divorce settlement.

Even losing all of that, I’d managed to keep my financial house in order.

Evidently, she hadn’t.

“Her cards have been declining for weeks,” Bailey whispered, her voice catching. “She’s been losing it, Daddy. Post-divorce life isn’t working out at all for her the way she hoped. I think she thought dating Pastor Kevin would solve all her money woes, but he’s just made them worse.”

“That nitro beer system or whatever the hell it was down in the basement,” I said, remembering. “The seventy-five-inch flatscreen for the man cave.”

The nursery.

Jesus, the nursery.

“She got desperate.” Bailey glanced to the side. “And that’s when I got involved.”

Something told me I wasn’t going to like this one bit. Not because of Bailey’s behavior—because of whatever it was Debbie did to get my babygirl to co-sign on this bullshit.

“Tell me more,” I grunted.

Bailey blinked. “You sound like Miki when you say that.”

“Don’t change the subject, Bailey.” Suddenly I was very, very glad my daughter Savannah had already left for her morning classes. I could only imagine how she would react to this news.

Bailey nodded. “I don’t know how Debbie found out about the Sweetheart App,” she explained, her hand gently squeezing mine.

“Probably the same way anybody finds out about it. I don’t know if she was using it herself before I got roped into it.

But she had the scam pretty much down pat, so it wouldn’t surprise me—”

My eyebrows shot skyward. “Scam?”

“Sweetheart is… God, Daddy, I don’t want to say this out loud.”