“Dad, getting you out of the house every now and then would make my life easier, and if you could find someone who could take this crappy part-time job, I would be even happier. I could be a freeloader. How awesome would that be?”

His daughter was a pistol. She was also a teenage girl who had lost her mother and been forced to change her whole lifestyle in the course of one terrible afternoon. “You’re not freeloading, child. LaVignes work.”

She made a gagging sound. “Yeah, that’s what I hear. I guess I’m not getting that coffeemaker, huh?”

The ticket printed out and he glanced down to double check the information. “Why not?”

“Because you’re not going to give her the ticket, right?”

He kind of had to now. There wasn’t a way to take that back now that it had printed out. “I’ll see you in a couple of hours, sweetheart. You start looking for that coffeemaker.”

The microwave could wait. He had a very hard time denying his daughter anything. He knew he should limit her caffeine, but every time he tried to be the blustery, hard-nosed father he should be, he remembered she was in a wheelchair and caved in immediately.

He gripped the ticket and flipped off the radio even as Noelle was saying something about needing a female under the age of eighty to talk about her cramps and bloating with. Yep. He didn’t need to know that.

This was the right path. She was the only woman in two years who’d sparked his interest, and she couldn’t possibly be that bad. After all, she was Lisa Guidry’s sister, and that woman was a sweetheart.

Not that he didn’t like some sass. A lot of sass. All right, he kind of liked them bitchy, and he definitely liked them funny and smart, and the woman who’d accused him of using Otis to aid in his speed trap was definitely amusing.

It wasn’t his fault Otis tended to freak out the tourists and they tried to speed away and didn’t notice that the speed limit had gone down. Way down.

It wasn’t really his fault Otis liked that stretch of highway and that it had been a perfect place to change the speed limit.

“You took your time,” Lila said, those bee-stung lips frowning his way. “Did you find out about my criminal past?”

He gave her his best smile, the one he used at election time. He’d been told his vote-for-me smile worked on young and old, people of all political inclinations. “You’re perfectly clean, Miss Daley. Can I call you Lila?”

A single brow rose over her pretty eyes. “Why would you do that, Officer?”